Abstract

In the recent literatures in which moral understanding has played a starring role, it is assumed that moral understanding is a species of explanatory understanding. That is, it is assumed that instances of moral understanding are of the form ‘S understands why p,’ where p is some explicitly moral proposition, paradigmatically about an action being morally right or wrong. This paper highlights some shortcomings of this explanatory picture of moral understanding and articulates a different, complementary account on which the object of moral understanding is the relation of normative support between a proposition and an action.