Abstract

It is a truism that our current common sense morality is the product of a complicated historical development. Whether and in what way classic questions of moral philosophy need to be informed by this history is, however, a matter of controversy.Some recent work in meta-ethics has taken the broad contours of morality’s history as important for answering questions about the existence of moral facts and the justifications of our beliefs about such facts. For instance, moral diversity and the history of moral disagreement have been cited as reasons to believe there are no objective moral facts. The absence of moral facts is—according to such arguments—the best explanation of the intractability of such disagreement.1 ..