The Moral Epistemology of Natural (Virtuous) Systems

For the last 40+ years the dominant paradigm in the field of moral psychology has been (Piagetian/Kohlbergian) rationalism: we attain moral knowledge through the rational application of general moral principles to particular situations. This paradigm has recently come under attack from intuition-sentimentalists (e.g., Haidt, 2001), whose research indicates that people do not form moral judgments about particular situations through any sort of reasoning process (much less, one that involves general principles). While an improvement upon rationalism, intuition-sentimentalism faces difficulties of its own. In particular, it faces the worry of normativity: e.g. how do people accurately track moral rightness/wrongness, and thus gain moral knowledge, if moral judgments are merely the results of “gut feelings” and error-prone heuristical processes, as intuition-sentimentalists claim? My proposed solution consists in a broadly reliabilist alternative to rationalism and intuition-sentimentalism: roughly, moral agents track moral truth in virtue of the development of certain reliable processes. More specifically, I will employ insights gained from our empirical models of expertise to discuss two such processes: trained perception and automated responsiveness.