MORAL KNOWLEDGE AND MORAL FACTUALITY

For naturalistic and non-intuitionistic moral realists, moral knowledge is more problematic than ordinaryand scientific factual knowledge. For without special faculties of moral discernment, how could we everdetect moral facts and properties? Physical facts and properties may be accessible to perceptual recognition.But how could moral facts and properties ever be similarly accessible? To address this challenge, weneed a meta-ethical account that does two things. First, it must explain how the discernment of moralfacts and properties ultimately consists only of the detection of appropriate physical items. Second, itmust explain why, despite this fact, moral perception seems so very puzzling. In this paper I endeavor toprovide such an account. It is largely because of the relational nature of moral properties, and thecorresponding externalistically determined normative content of moral property terms, I argue, that ourepistemic access to moral knowledge appears mysterious. The metaphysics of moral factuality does a lotto explain the seeming elusiveness of moral knowledge, and in ways that are surprisingly mundane.