Four Faces of Moral Realism

This article explains for a general philosophical audience the central issues and strategies in the contemporary moral realism debate. It critically surveys the contribution of some recent scholarship, representing expressivist and pragmatist nondescriptivism (Mark Timmons, Hilary Putnam), subjectivist and nonsubjectivist naturalism (Michael Smith, Paul Bloomfield, Philippa Foot), nonnaturalism (Russ Shafer-Landau, T. M. Scanlon) and error theory (Richard Joyce). Four different faces of ‘moral realism’ are distinguished: semantic, ontological, metaphysical and normative. The debate is presented as taking shape under dialectical pressure from the demands of (i) capturing the moral appearances; and (ii) reconciling morality with our understanding of the mind and world. The contemporary debate over ‘moral realism’, a century after it was launched by G. E. Moore’s Principa Ethica, is a tangled and bewildering web. This is largely due to dramatic differences in what philosophers assume it is about. This article distinguishes and explains the central issues and strategies for a general philosophical audience, through a critical survey of some recent contributions to the literature. A pivotal problem is the lack of consensus over what ‘realism’ should mean in the context of ethics; we shall see that the variety of metaethical claims labeled ‘realist’ cannot be collectively characterized any less vaguely than as holding that ‘morality’, in some form, has some kind or other of independence from people’s attitudes or practices. We look in vain for a reference for ‘morality’ and a kind of attitude-independence common throughout the debate. Furthermore, there is no uniform separation between a concern for morality proper and for the evaluative or normative more generally. Much of what is said here about ‘moral’ realism can be understood to apply more generally throughout the normative realm. One face of the debate focuses on ‘morality’ in the form of moral claims, and is addressed to the question of whether these have truth-values (of a kind that are attitude-independent, in a sense to be explained). The weakest, semantic kind of moral realism that affirms this is denied by expressivism, the strongest kind of antirealism, represented here by Mark 2 Four Faces of Moral Realism © 2007 The Author Philosophy Compass 2 (2007): 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00100.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Timmons. ‘Moral realism’ has been influentially defined as holding merely that some moral claims are true in this sense (Sayre-McCord 5), but this neglects the other important dimensions of the debate. Another face is ontological, addressing whether moral claims describe and are made true by some moral facts involving moral entities (e.g., reasons, obligations), relations (e.g., justification), or properties (e.g., goodness, rightness, virtue). In rejecting this kind of realism, expressivism is joined by metaethical pragmatism, represented here by Hilary Putnam. Other philosophers accept that moral claims describe moral facts, entities, relations, and properties, but raise metaphysical questions about the attitude-independence of these. Metaphysical kinds of moral realism, which hold that there are moral facts involving moral entities, relations, and properties that do not consist in what anyone’s attitudes are or would be under any conditions, are rejected also by subjectivists like Michael Smith. Less obviously but no less importantly, a final thread of the debate addresses the normative authority of morality. Normative kinds of moral realism hold that morality is authoritative for agents independently of their desires and other motivational attitudes. Although often overlooked, this issue plays an important role in the obscure debate between ‘naturalistic’ and ‘nonnaturalistic’ metaphysical versions of moral realism (the former represented by Paul Bloomfield and Philippa Foot, the latter by Russ Shafer-Landau and T. M. Scanlon) and is crucial to the claim of error theory, pressed by Richard Joyce, that morality is built on false presuppositions. The following diagram shows the different faces of moral realism, the theoretical positions just described and their representatives, and the relationships between them: