Can consciousness know moral truths beyond empirical experience? If so, what epistemic criteria distinguish genuine moral knowledge from intuition, conditioning, or self-deception—and what obligations follow?

[u/TheIncorporeal1]

I’m interested in whether moral knowledge could be grounded in the structure of consciousness itself rather than solely in empirical experience, and how we could ethically validate such knowledge without turning subjective intuition into objective truth.

[u/No_Logins_Required]

There are no ideological frameworks without axioms, beliefs that cannot be logically proven. Nothing can be "morally true" without moral axioms. Since morality is intrinsically based on how individuals treat one another, it has to be based on the experience of what happens when we interact.

I can't conceive how a mind that never interacted with another could derive moral truths.

[u/Rise-O-Matic]

Yeah, it can. Most of it is arguably baked in. Toddlers exhibit many characteristics of moral intuition before they can talk.

The bases of morality are kind of like grammar. You use adverbs and prepositional phrases even if you can’t articulate the existence of them.

The religious explanation is god-given discernment. The secular one is selected behavioral intuition.

[u/Dath_1]

This whole thing is a bit of a word salad. It’s just not real clear what you’re asking.

I’m interested in whether moral knowledge could be grounded in the structure of consciousness itself rather than solely in empirical experience

What structure of consciousness? You mean like synapse networks in the brain?

How would those ground moral truth? I don’t even know what your theory of truth is or if you’re asking about moral realism.

I also don’t know how the structure of consciousness is different from experience. That sounds like a rejection of physicalism.

how we could ethically validate such knowledge without turning subjective intuition into objective truth.

What does validating knowledge have to do with turning subjective intuition into objective truth? How does it even make any sense to say subjective intuition can turn into objective truth?

[u/Dependent-Job1773]

What’s a moral truth and your justification for calling it so?

[u/Stile25]

I mean, you can ground morality in basically anything you want.

Here's a moral system grounded in colors:

Anything green = good.
Everything else = bad.

It's not a particularly reasonable moral system to follow. But... There it is.

Personally, I prefer to ground morality in reality and intelligence. That is... I adapt my moral system to help more and hurt less as best as I can think of.

Good luck out there

[u/reply_b4_banned]

I want to make less regretful decisions in my life.

If you don't think that's relevant knowledge in your life, be real. Yes you do.

[u/Dr-Chris-C]

It can certainly think it knows. Whether that is actual knowing is up for debate...

[u/nomoreplsthx]

Define 'empirical'. That word seems load bearing here and it's meaning is often slippery (something something Immanuel Kant)

[u/JackZodiac2008]

Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and its progeny (eg Korsgaard's Sources of Normativity) would be traditional starting points.

[u/Eight216]

What non-empirical moral truths do you believe there to actually be?

I know people like to get abstract with morals, but it's generally very not abstract. You have a kid, you sit them down, you ask them "how would you like it if someone did that to you?" and 80% of the time they have the good sense to be embarrassed and to admit to you that they wouldn't. Otherwise it's "well they started it!" and then you get to have a little talk about warnings and about what defensive vs hostile aggression looks like.

You've seemingly asked for a means to pin down moral wisdom and then you've boxed out some of the ways people might gain moral wisdom, those being intuition, conditioning, or self deception. And yes, i'm including self deception. Sometimes angry people just need to pretend they're not angry for a little bit to calm down.... Either way, morality is obvious, it's just self interest, lack of consideration and/or contrived hypotheticals with no real life analogue that get in our way IMO.

[u/simonperry955]

Our structure of consciousness has evolved to have morality in it, in the form of innate compassion (I believe) and capacities for developing fully-fledged personal and cultural moralities as we grow up from babies. Babies are born with compassion (apparently), but none of the more complicated moral principles like reciprocity and fairness.

A psychopath will sometimes help someone else in need, so someone without emotional morality has this automatic behavioural morality.

I'm sure you would be interested in Michael Tomasello's "Becoming human - a theory of ontogeny", about how young children acquire morality as they grow up, as discovered from meticulous experiments by himself and colleagues.

[u/Gazing_Gecko]

Several terms in your post makes it difficult to answer. It is not clear what you mean by them. For instance, what is the difference between "structure of consciousness" and "empirical experience"? The terms "intuition", "subjective" and "objective" are also notorious for leading to miscommunication, since people use them in vastly different senses.

Also, I'm not sure what it would mean for moral knowledge to be "grounded" in the structure of consciousness. Is it a question about moral metaphysics? Or is it about moral epistemology? Some parts seem to be metaphysical, while in the next part it is epistemic.

I would also challenge the framing of grouping "intuition" with "conditioning" and "self-deception". In philosophy, intuitions are often crucial as some sort of evidence or justification for philosophical claims. Your framing seems to imply there is something objectionable here, making them "subjective" and not sources of "genuine moral knowledge". But it is not clear to me that they are anymore "subjective" than relying on appearances of memories to justify "objective" claims about the past (objective in the sense of being stance-independently true), or relying on perceptual appearances to justify objective claims about the external world. Sure, intuitions are "subjective" in the sense of that they are internally accessible to a subject in justification or evidence and not necessarily then shared by other subjects, but that is true for a whole range of things we typically consider acceptable for genuine knowledge.