Ethics: How Hard Can It Be?

Is there an epistemic access asymmetry between, on the one hand, facts about how we ought to live, and, on the other, facts in non-moral domains such as mathematics, history, and science? There is nothing paradoxical about the thought that, say, the continuum hypothesis might lie beyond our cognitive grasp. But many find it strange to think that true moral principles would be inaccessible to minds like ours. On anti-realist and subjectivist metaethical views, such an access asymmetry would be relatively easy to explain. But according to realists, moral facts are objective and mind-independent. This paper asks: if realism is true, then should we expect our epistemic access to moral reality to be any more secure than our access to, say, mathematical reality, and if so, why? If there is an access asymmetry, then the realist needs an explanation for the asymmetry that preserves the realist's commitment to a substantive gap between thought and reality, given that it is a hallmark of antirealism to attempt to narrow this gap. If there is no access asymmetry, then we need an explanation for why it has seemed to so many that morality is, in some sense, manifest.