Realism about Moral Deference

Even when your informant is a trustworthy and reliable friend—rather than, say, a stranger on the bus—it doesn’t seem like you should take your moral marching orders from others. And yet, when the subject is baseball scores or directions to the train, deference to others’ testimony is taken to be uncontroversially appropriate. Thus, there is an (apparent) asymmetry between the epistemic appropriateness of deference to non-moral testimony and deference to moral testimony. The latter is widely taken to be inappropriate, the former is taken to be obviously appropriate.