Parsimony and Burden of Proof

As I reread my thesis in preparation for my oral exam tomorrow, I'm particularly struck by a poorly thought out argument in the second chapter.

In short, the argument was that the burden of proof could be shifted away from the moral realist by noting there is an unavoidable arbitrariness in epistemology. The problem with this argument is that it doesn't really respond to the parsimony requirement, as provide a route for avoiding it. That wasn't the clearest sentence I've written in my life, so let me try again.

The problem for the Moral Realist is that parsimony requires that we don't believe that which we have no good reason to believe. And the response I offer, essentially, says that there are some cases in which parsimony isn't required. There's actually no parsimony requirement for our most basic beliefs.

Here are a couple concerns with this argument:

1) Does this mean that ANYTHING can avoid the parsimony requirement? Why only things like moral realism, treating our moral intuitions as ways of getting at moral facts?

Well, not anything. It's just that some epistemic beliefs/principles are prior to the parsimony requirement. They just happen to avoid it.

2) That's not going to cut it as a response. What if we took the parsimony requirement to be our first, most basic epistemic principle?

Then there's no room for epistemology, and you can't get going. You need to take some things on without having epistemic reason to if you're going to get anything at all.

3) What happens once we have the parsimony requirement? Don't we reflect on our prior principles and conclude that they turn out, in retrospect, to be problematic since we ought not believe them due to parsimony?

This is a pretty tough challenge, I think. One way to respond to it is to tweak the parsimony requirement so that it doesn't kill epistemology, and I actually think that this is pretty reasonable. It's overly simple to say that the parsimony requirement is that we simply never believe anything without having an epistemic reason. A fine way of putting it is that we don't believe extra things, and "extra" is glossed in the following way: non-elemental beliefs that we have no epistemic reason to believe.