People believe there are experts in nonmoral matters and that you can gain knowledge from listening to them.
The case isn’t so clear when it comes to moral matters. Firstly, one can doubt that there are experts in moral matters. Secondly, it might be difficult to identify who is a moral expert and who is not. Thirdly, intelligent philosophers who have given a lot of serious thought about morality might come to opposite conclusions.
Pessimists believe that we can’t get understanding about how to act from testimony. Even if it’s true that kicking kittens is wrong, and this information is transmitted from speaker to hearer, the hearer will not understand why it is so by the testimony.
Understanding is a personal achievement, so if you understand, you must be able to understand what makes x wrong, (y) treat y as the reason for x, and be able to elaborate on it in your own words, and so forth.
But, nonetheless, we can believe that children get an opportunity to get understanding from testimony. At least a child can know that lying is wrong from the testimony from her parents, even when she can’t fully explain or account for why lying is wrong.
Moral understanding is essential to good character and to morally worthy action, so essential to simply doing right for the right reasons.
Imagine an adult person who would ask his friend whether he should kick a puppy or not, and the person responds (perhaps a bit shocked) that he should not. Something seems off; even if he perhaps gained knowledge that it’s not right to kick the puppy, if he doesn’t understand why.
So, that’s one reason to believe that testimony will not suffice for having understanding.
Are there experts in moral matters or knowledge about moral facts? It would be strange to say that we understand why x is, but x is actually not the case.
Also, it would be (at least considered) strange to assume the existance of non-natural facts. “Wrong” doesn’t exist in the material world, you can’t experience it, alike you could a stone or a puppy.
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Your whole post is rather confusing to follow. You seem to be saying at the same time that “moral understanding” requires that you know why something is wrong, not just that it is wrong. And yet later you say that someone can have “moral understanding” just for knowing that something is wrong. Clearly these both cannot be true at the same time.
So the answer to whether someone can have “moral understanding” based on testimony is going to depend on what you believe about morals and also how you OP are going to define “moral understanding”.
If you believe that morals are objective and externally dictated as is the case for some religions then you cannot have “moral understanding” (under your first definition) because the reasoning behind why certain things have been declared “wrong” is not provided. But you can have “moral understanding” under your second definition because you have a list of things that have been declared wrong.
If you believe that morals are objective and discernable from the universe, then pure testimony (I found that these are the correct morals) would not be enough for “moral understanding” under your first definition, nor would it be enough for your second definition as it would not provide the objective source of those morals.
If you believe that morals are subjective and externally dictated then the moral understanding is achieved on receiving those morals because the reason is just “because they said so”.
If you believe that morals can be objectively reasoned from a subjective goal then you can only have moral understanding (under your first definition) if you are able to understand that reasoning.
This is not an exhaustive list of moral position. But just from these few it should be evident that your question does not contain enough information.