Is there a Good Moral Argument against Moral Realism?
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Is there a Good Moral Argument against Moral Realism? Camil Golub 1,2 Accepted: 9 October 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
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. Keywords Moral realism . Moral arguments . Robust realism . Minimal realism
1 Introduction Moral realism―the view that there are objective moral facts, to which we have reliable access―is often defended with moral arguments. Only realism, it is argued, can make good on commitments that we hold most dear, e.g. that genocide is wrong no matter what anyone thinks about it, while anti-realist views such as subjectivism or relativism have unpalatable consequences with respect to such first-order moral issues, so we have moral reason to accept realism. However, some philosophers have argued that there is something morally objectionable about realism itself. According to realism, for instance, we are justified in believing that genocide is wrong only if a certain moral fact obtains. So, if we discovered that there was no such fact, or that the moral facts were different, we would have to abandon our belief that
* Camil Golub [email protected]
1
Rutgers University–Newark, Newark, NJ, USA
2
University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
C. Golub
genocide is wrong. But we should not hold our moral commitments hostage to metaphysics in this way. Or so the argument goes.1 A version of this worry was first raised by Blackburn (1993): those who insist that morality must have a metaphysical grounding, he argued, exhibit a defective sensibility, similar to the moral flaw involved in believing that nothing matters unless it matters to God. More recently, Erdur (2016), Hayward (2019), Bedke (2019) and Kremm (2019) have developed this argument in several directions, focusing on different connections that realists seem to posit between moral facts and our moral commitments.2 For instance, Erdur argues that the moral explanations offered by realists involve an independent moral reality in a problematic way, while Bedke and Kremm hold that realism is objectionable because it allows for revising our moral beliefs on purely non-moral, metaphysical grounds. The different versions of this argument also vary with respect to their targets. Here we need to distinguish two versions of realism. Minimal realism is
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