I tried to speak to them, give them moral comfort, knowing there might not be another chance, but their lawyer intervened.
Imagine a President addressing a joint session of Congress on an issue of such moment and framing it in such starkly moral terms, knowing that he could count on some solid support from the opposition leadership.
It would also invite harassment of gay soldiers by comrades who might feel empowered by Congress to verbalize their antipathy to them under the cover of supposed moral principles, knowing there would be no consequences.
Choice two: invest your money in the stock market with a whole lot of moral hazard, knowing that if you screw the pooch and lose your life savings, you are getting a government bailout.
But if it is not a myth, then does this mean that we have some way of knowing moral truths that morality somehow escapes the problems raised for other areas of purported metaphysical knowledge?
Second, how do we come to know anything about moral properties apart from knowing they are moral?
Some act consequentialists claim that morality does not have as an essential feature that being subject to moral judgment requires knowing all of the general kinds of actions morality prohibits, etc.
The objections labeled sociological, psychological, ontological, evolutionary, and methodological are not aimed against knowing moral facts in some non-literal sense of fact, but against knowing moral facts in the same sense that we appear to know other facts about the world.
"I am interested in the moral satisfaction of knowing the truth, one way or the other, so that I can put my ghosts to rest".
In "The Phantom Tollbooth," the real moral sin is knowing too much about one thing: the Mathemagician who obsesses over quantities; the unabridged Azaz who lives off his own words.
