  There are two ways to go if one wishes to defend the possibility of moral knowledge against the argument from moral objectivism. One is to reject the concept of stance-independent objectivity as a necessary condition on moral truth. Studies show that even young children after a certain age make an intuitive distinction between conventional demands and moral demands (Nichols 2004). Basic moral demands unlike conventional ones are taken to be independent of authority (for example, that of a teacher in a classroom) and to be independent of time and place (to apply universally to all persons). These features appear to capture at least part of what it is for a moral demand to be objective. Note, however, that these features are not enough to guarantee stance-independence. For example, physical pain, considered just in itself, is plausibly considered to be universally bad for the person experiencing it, apart from what any authority might decree, yet this moral truth is arguably not stance-independent. Why? An essential part of what constitutes the experience of physical pain is to have a sensation towards which one has a negative evaluative response. This last part of the experience is what makes it bad for the person suffering pain. But then, its being intrinsically bad is a truth that is stance-dependent. If this argument is sound, we must accept moral skepticism about the objective badness of pain for the person suffering it or else understand the intrinsic badness of pain for the person who has it not to be objective in this strong sense. (Street offers a more complex argument to the same conclusion: Street 2006, pp. 144–52.) Given this dilemma a possible line of defense is to argue that in light of such examples the objectivity of moral truth does not entail stance-independence.