The Basis for Moral Experience: A Follow Up to My Previous Article Possibility of a Metaphysics of Morality

From my previous piece on the Probability of a Metaphysics of Morality, I posited the limits in respect to human cognition of universal morality and thus the very basis for moral rationalism. This move from moral rationalism to moral skepticism lends itself important consequences for our further inquiry into morality. What I aim to do now is construct a definition of what serves as the basis for morality, if not our faculty of reason.

The basis for any moral experience, judgment, or claim may have in its origins our own experience of what it means to be moral. In other words, what we hold to be moral is imparted upon us by our experiences with the world we may know. The limits of knowledge extend to the empirical world as given to us by our sense impressions. In order to step aside messy and unfounded assumptions of metaphysics, it is necessary we move towards a direction that we base our morality in something concrete, something relevant in order for it to make any sense at all.

By experience I mean all our interpretations of the given physical world in which we can thoroughly cognize and know. The basis for our moral assumptions, moral principles, and morality in general are in accordance not with any universal truth, but rather subjective truths given to us from our surroundings (that make our particular experiences possible). It is only logically necessary that empiricism could never possibly serve as the grounding for a universal truth, since all of our experiences are hence subjective. The question must be asked then, how does this happen? How does experience shape morality, if my position is at all valid?