Social Inferentialism And Moral Bridge

3. Moral Inferentialism: Minimal Moral Inferentialism and Moral Bridge Inferentialism

We’ve seen what McGrath’s perceptual account of moral knowledge consists of. At this point, I want to introduce both general moral inferentialism and the specific moral inferentialist view McGrath targets with her dilemma, moral bridge inferentialism. Broadly speaking, moral inferentialists deny the truth of P3. Most moral inferentialists argue that all of our moral knowledge of particular cases comes from legitimate inferences from known non-moral facts and potentially knowledge of other things to knowledge of a moral fact.

We can divide the family of moral inferentialism, as I’ve described it, into different, distinct moral inferentialist views. Two prominent

I will not and do not contest moral supervenience. Rather, I am merely making a remark on the crucial role it plays for moral inferentialism. If moral supervenience were false, it’s hard to make sense of moral inferentialism. Inferring from the non-moral facts to the moral facts requires that the non-moral facts are relevant to the moral facts. If we can change the non-moral facts without changing the moral facts, that is if moral supervenience were false, it becomes difficult to see why and how one could infer from the non-moral facts to the moral facts. An example: if a contemporary statesman acts like Hitler in all relevant non-moral aspects, by committing a second Final Solution and so on, most people agree that, like Hitler, the contemporary statesman is morally wrong. To deny these sort of claims, which is something few would do, is to deny moral

By moral bridge inferentialism, I mean the view which states that we infer from known non-moral facts and known moral bridge principles to knowing the corresponding moral fact. In terms of justification, we infer from justified non-moral beliefs and justified beliefs about certain moral bridge principles to justified moral beliefs. To summarize, Minimal moral inferentialism argues that moral inferences are of the form 1. NM (non-moral facts), so 2. M (moral fact). Moral bridge inferentialism argues that moral inferences are of the form 1. NM, 2. If NM, then M (Moral bridge principle from the non-moral facts to the moral fact), so 3. M. Moral bridge inferentialism, as the more plausible of the two moral inferentialist views I’ve surveyed, is the view which McGrath aims her negative argument, what I’ve been calling her dilemma,