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

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.