Making Moral Judgments on Adequate Grounds: From Transparent Evidence to Justified Moral Belief

ABSTRACT While walking to work, I saw a man in a coffee shop snapping at his server. Assuming that it was wrong of him to treat the server as he did, it seems non‐controversial to say that evidence that he caused the server distress provides at least some evidence that he acted wrongly. What I argue in this paper is that, under certain conditions, such evidence is also sufficient to justify the belief that the man acted wrongly. More generally, I argue that moral beliefs can be justified non‐inferentially by evidence for their non‐moral grounds. If my suggestion works, it circumvents two significant skeptical challenges for moral knowledge by offering a moral epistemology that does not require obscure or queer faculties of rational intuition, and according to which objective moral facts are not explanatorily cut off from moral observations.