Are Mystical Experiences the Source of Moral Knowledge?

(Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash)

Is morality objective? I think so. Slavery, for example, is objectively wrong. What determines what’s objectively good and bad, right and wrong? My view on morality is similar to my view on consciousness. I think moral facts, i.e. facts about what makes things good/bad/right/wrong, etc., are fundamental; they can’t be explained or reduced to any other kinds of facts. Just as there are fundamental laws of physics, so there are fundamental laws of value, e.g. all things being equal, pleasure is good and pain is bad.

You might be surprised to hear that this view – known as “meta-ethical non-naturalism” – is fairly popular among English-speaking philosophers. A 2020 survey, found that 26.56% of philosophers are non-naturalists, making it the second most popular view on these foundational questions about the nature of morality (“meta-ethics”, as we call it). The most popular position (at 31.64%) is “meta-ethical naturalism” – the view that there are objective moral facts but that they’re somehow explicable in terms of observable facts about the natural world.

So in a sense there are a lot of other philosophers who have the same view as me on the foundations of morality. Having said that, I have a big complaint against almost all of my fellow non-naturalists: they have no explanation of how we know about these fundamental moral facts. We couldn’t know about the empirical world if it didn’t impact on us via our senses. Likewise, if there are objective moral facts and we know about them, then those facts must somehow impact on us, in such a way as to shape our moral beliefs. Otherwise, it’d be a wild fluke if our moral beliefs happen to be tracking the moral facts.

Strange as it may sound, most non-naturalists try to get away with holding that we know moral facts without them impacting on us in any way. Here’s a short of video (on Miles Donahue’s excellent channel) of leading non-naturalist David Enoch explaining his “third factor” approach for avoiding this challenge. Roughly the idea is: natural selection made us value survival; survival happens to be good; hence we end up valuing what is good. Here’s a paper I like arguing against third factor views, and I have an idea for a paper of my own arguing against them in a different way. I’d love to interview Enoch here at some point in 2026, if he’d be up for it.

Assuming third factor approaches are no good, how can we make sense of moral facts impacting on us? Some theists explain our moral knowledge in terms of God’s actions (see this excellent paper, for example). The basic idea here is that God knows the moral facts and has intervened in evolution to ensure that we end up with the correct ethical beliefs. This is at least an answer: it explains how, via a divine middleman, the moral facts impact on us and shape our moral beliefs. However, I’m not myself a fan of this kind of micromanaging deity.

Tim Mulgan, in his wonderful book Purpose in the Universe (I have a 2022 review of Tim’s book on my website), is one of the few people who takes this problem seriously but doesn’t turn to God (at least not God in the tradition sense). Tim’s suggestion is that our knowledge of moral facts may rooted in mystical experiences. When somebody is having a mystical experience, it seems to them as if they are in direct contact with Ultimate Reality – with the ground or source of all existence. If Ultimate Reality is the source of not just of the physical universe but also of moral truth, then perhaps it is this direct contact with Ultimate Reality that reveals to human beings what the moral truths are. (I’d also love to interview Tim here in 2026.)

Many philosophers are uncomfortable with taking mystical experiences as genuine insights into the ultimate nature of reality, and prefer to think of them as merely hallucinations of some kind. I suspect meta-ethical non-naturalists, most of whom are atheists, would share this preference. But, in my view, non-naturalists are committed, whether they like or not, to thinking we’re somehow in touch with fundamental reality (as otherwise we couldn’t account for our knowledge of fundamental moral facts). Why not take seriously a common experience that purports to involve this?

Much more to be said: How could the Ultimate Reality encountered in mystical experiences ground moral truths? How exactly do mystical experiences play a justificatory role in our moral psychology? What about the morality of someone who’s never had a mystical experience? Answering these questions is a project for 2026. Let me know if you have any thoughts on this that I could reflect on over the Christmas period.

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