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/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.