Ethical Non-naturalism - A Difficult Question

A Difficult Question

Moore did not consider goodness and rightness to be natural properties, i.e., they cannot be defined in terms of any natural properties. How, then, can we know that anything is good and how can we distinguish good from bad?

Moral epistemology, the part of epistemology (and/or ethics) that studies how we know moral facts and how moral beliefs are justified, has proposed an answer. British epistemologists, following Moore, suggested that humans have a special faculty, a faculty of moral intuition, which tells us what is good and bad, right and wrong.

Ethical intuitionists assert that, if we see a good person or a right action, and our faculty of moral intuition is sufficiently developed and unimpaired, we simply intuit that the person is good or that the action is right. Moral intuition is supposed to be a mental process different from other, more familiar faculties like sense-perception, and that moral judgments are its outputs. When someone judges something to be good, or some action to be right, then the person is using the faculty of moral intuition. The faculty is attuned to those non-natural properties. Perhaps the best ordinary notion that approximates moral intuition would be the idea of a conscience.