Moral Knowledge and Experience

This chapter explores how one might attempt to reconcile two widely held ideas about morality that stand in prima facie tension with one another. The first idea is that moral knowledge - whatever else is true of it and even whether it exists at all - is not empirical knowledge. If there are moral truths, then the most fundamental of those truths are, like the truths of pure mathematics, available from the armchair. The second idea is that lack of experience can be a handicap in the acquisition of moral knowledge, and that experience of the world often proves crucial in its attainment.