Is There a Good Moral Argument Against Moral Realism?

Abstract

It has been argued that there is something morally objectionable about moral realism: for instance, according to realism, we are justified in believing that genocide is wrong only if a certain moral fact obtains, but it is objectionable to hold our moral commitments hostage to metaphysics in this way. In this paper, I argue that no version of this moral argument against realism is likely to succeed. More precisely, minimal realism―the kind of realism on which realist theses are understood as internal to moral discourse―is immune to this challenge, contrary to what some proponents of the moral argument have suggested, while robust non-naturalist realists might have good answers to all versions of the argument as well, at least if they adopt a certain stance on how to form metaphysical beliefs in the moral domain.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Golub, C https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3934-5842
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords:	Moral realism . Moral arguments. Robust realism . Minimal realism
Dates:	Accepted: 9 October 2020 Published (online): 13 October 2020 Published: March 2021
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science (Leeds)
Funding Information:	Funder Grant number EU - European Union 837036
Depositing User:	Symplectic Publications
Date Deposited:	12 Oct 2020 14:14
Last Modified:	25 Jun 2023 22:27
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer
Identification Number:	10.1007/s10677-020-10129-5
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:166502

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Is There a Good Moral Argument Against Moral Realism?

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