Man, should've read Shafer-Landau a while ago

"We can be helped to see this by comparing ethics not to philosophy as a whole but to one of its close philosphical cousins. In my opinion, moral facts are sui generis, but they are most similar to another kind of normative fact--epistemic facts. Epistemic facts concern what we ought to believe, provided that our beliefs are aimed at the truth. Once one understands the concept of logical validity, then if confronted with a modus ponens argument one ought to blieve that it is logically valid. This is a true epistemic principle."

Also, "The epistemic principle [the causal test] is problematic because it invokes an entity--a good reason--whose existence is not itself scientifically confirmable. It's like saying that God sustains a universe that contains no supernatural beings. There's a kind of internal incoherence here: the claim discounts the existence of the kind of thing that is presupposed by the claim itself."

I think that my line of argument from the first chapter is starting to become even more focused. It goes like this: realists realize that epistemology offers some sort of help, but investigation into epistemology reveals much about why certain arguments don't apply to it. If moral truths are going to gain help from epistemology it's only because they can escape in this way, by being taken as basic.