Epistemology

On November 8th, 2018 a mash shooting occurred in Nashville, Tennessee. Twelve people were killed and somewhere between eight and fifthteen others were injured. As of yet, the local police department have yet to ascribe a motive to the shooter. In times like this, it is important to that morality matters, and that humanity needs a way to judge situations like these.

When people construct arguments or use rhetoric, they usually invoke some type of scientific empirical evidence. They do this for a multitude of reasons, but mainly because logical systems are very useful tools for arriving at desired conclusions that most people agree to be true.

Moreover, I want to address the question of whether or not logical systems are the complete extent of all possible truth. Over half of philosophers believe that that they are not. In fact, they argue that there are more fundamental truths than what humans can observe. Beyond these lower-level truths, there are also moral truths that must be assumed before any other assertions, beliefs, and thoughts can be formed. This line of thinking is called moral realism in the field of epistemology.

Moral realism is simply the view that moral values and moral facts exists. In layman’s terms, this means that people can make  meaningful statements about morality that are not meaningless. The academic agreement within the field of epistemology is that moral realism is more worth exploring than its opposite: moral anti-realism, which states that people cannot make claims about moral values. The most reasonable explanation for this consensus is that other fields of philosophy cannot be argued without first creating sometime of moral foundation, which moral anti-realists lack. Furthermore, epistemology, being the study of knowledge, comes before every other type of philosophy. This means that most philosophers have to believe that some type of moral truth exist in order to make worthwhile claims in other fields of philosophy

“Moral realism makes more sense to me,” said Martin McConnell, 12.

Some moral realists even go on to state that moral truths are the only real type of truth, and that other claims about science and math are only a reflection or continuation of moral truths.

Overall, it is reasonable to assume that that logic is not the extent to which truth can be found and in fact, moral-realism takes place above all other forms of knowledge.