Abstract

This dissertation attempts to establish coordinates which would make it easier to distinguish sharply the many versions of moral realism from the equally plentiful anti-realisms. These coordinates are offered as a means of tidying up a confusing web of issues. ;It is argued that minimal moral realism is best defined as the view that there is moral truth and falsity which is independent of our beliefs, evidence, and our theories of right and wrong. This way of mapping the debate over the objectivity of ethics takes the main issue to be moral truth and its nature, and takes the main anti-realists to be noncognitivists, who deny truth, and the constructivists, who do not deny truth, but make it dependent on our beliefs and evidence. ;The debate is not best construed as a dialectic between two modern opponents, whose respective theories both allegedly entail a distinctively "modern" fact/value thesis. This quasi-MacIntyrean construal erroneously assumes that realism is committed to the existence of irreducible moral properties and that such irreducibility implies a distinctively modern fact/value distinction. ;On the contrary, this dissertation maintains that moral realism can be reductive. A moral realist can say, with the quasi-MacIntyrean, that moral predicates just are--because they reduce to--factual ones put to a particular use. Furthermore, it is argued that the ascription of irreducible moral facts and properties also need not entail a distinctively modern fact/value distinction. With the conjunction of John Post's notion of nonreductive determination and Ruth Millikan's notion of proper function we can see the beginnings of a plausible realist account which could accommodate classical versions of practical judgment . Thus the quasi-MacIntyrean does not have sufficient reason to displace or elude the coordinates of the moral realism debate. Any Aristotelian account of practical judgment amounts to another version of moral realism, distinctions between "classical" and "modern" notwithstanding.