Empiricism is key to avoid regress

Richards ’86 (Robert, “A Defense of Evolutionary Ethics,” Biology and Philosophy)

bracketed for offensive language
"To justify" means "to demonstrate
This brief discussion of justification of ethical principles indicates how the concept of justification must, I believe, be employed.

that a proposition or system of propositions conforms to a set of acceptable rules ,

The order of justification is from rules to empirical

a set of acceptable factual propositions, or a set of acceptable practices.

propositions about beliefs and practices rules . That is, if serving as inference principles or the rules serving as premises (e.g., the Golden Rule) of a

must be shown to conform either to still more general rules

justifying argument are themselves put to the test, then they

or to empirical propositions Barring an infinite regress, this about common beliefs and practices.

procedure must end in what are regarded as acceptable beliefs or practices . Aristotle, for

Kant justified the categorical

instance, justified the forms of syllogistic reasoning by showing that they made explicit the patterns employed in argument by rational men.

imperative and the postulates of practical reason by demonstrating, to his

satisfaction, that they were the necessary conditions of common moral
experience : that is, he justified normative principles by showing that their application to particular cases reproduced the common moral conclusions of 18th century German burgers and Pietists. If this is an

the justification of first moral principles and inference rules

accurate rendering of the concept of justification, then

must ultimately lead to an appeal to the beliefs and practices of [people], which
of course is an empirical appeal. So moral principles ultimately can be justified
only by facts .

Phenomenal introspection reliably informs us of pain’s badness and pleasure’s

goodness as an empirical basis for ethics
Sinhababu ’13 (Neil, National University of Singapore, “The epistemic argument for
hedonism,” 2013)
The parallel between yellow’s brightness and pleasure’s goodness demonstrates the objectivity of the value detected in phenomenal introspection. Just as

anyone's yellow experiences objectively are bright experiences, anyone's pleasure objectively
is a good experience.28 While one's phenomenology is often called one's “subjective experience”, e facts about it are still objective. “Subjective”
in “subjective experience” means “internal to the mind”, not “ ontologically dependent on attitudes towards it.” My yellow-experiences

are objectively bright, so that anyone who thought my yellow-experiences were not bright

would be mistaken. Pleasure similarly is objectively good – it is true that anyone's pleasure is good, and anyone who denies this is mistaken. As
Mendola writes, “In the phenomenal value of phenomenal experience, we have a plausible candidate for objective value” (712). Even though phenomenal

introspection only tells me about my own phenomenal states , I can know that others' pleasure is good . Of course, I cannot
phenomenally introspect their pleasures any more than I can phenomenally introspect pleasures that I will experience next year. But if I consider my experiences of

if in a pleasant
lemon yellow and ask what it would be like if others had the same experiences, I must think that they would be having bright experiences. Similarly,

moment I consider what it is like when others have exactly the experience I am having,

I must think that they are having good experiences. If they have exactly the same experiences I am having, their
experiences will have exactly the same intrinsic properties as mine. This is also how I know that if I
have the same experience in the future, it will have the same intrinsic properties. Even though the only pleasure I can introspect is mine now I should ,

believe that pleasures experienced by others and myself at other times are good, just as I
should believe that yellow experienced by others and myself at other times is bright. My
argument thus favors the kind of universal hedonism that supports utilitarianism, not egoistic hedonism.