Moral relativism is moral realism

Abstract

I begin by describing my relation with Nicholas Sturgeon and his objections to things I have said about moral explanations. Then I turn to issues about moral relativism. One of these is whether a plausible version of moral relativism can be formulated as a claim about the logical form of certain moral judgments. I (now) agree that is not a good way to think of moral relativism. Instead, I think of moral relativism as a version of moral realism. I compare moral relativism with the relativity of motion and with the relativity of language. Moralities are real in a way that is similar to the way that languages are real. Next I discuss resemblances between nonhuman animal behavior and human behavior having to do with language or communication and with moral or proto-moral behavior. However, I am more interested in aspects of language and morality that are not found in nonhuman animals, aspects that appear to depend on a kind of recursive structure in human language and morality but not in animals. This leads me to argue that aspects of moral theory might benefit from a comparison with certain aspects of linguistic theory. Another comparison is between moralities and legal systems: I speculate that the content of legal and moral systems is influenced by legal and moral bargaining.