Abstract
In his book 'The Normative Web' Terence Cuneo provides a core argument for a paradigmatic instance of moral realism. At the heart of this instance lies the ontological thesis that there are irreducible moral facts. The parity premise is the first and main premise of Cuneo's core argument. It claims that 'if moral facts do not exist, then epistemic facts do not exist'. In this paper I first introduce and explain Cuneo's core argument. Subsequently I present and interpret his defence of the parity premise. It will be shown that Cuneo's defence, although intriguing, is not adequate and should therefore be refuted.
Highlights
In his book ‘The Normative Web’ Terence Cuneo provides a core argument for his moral realism of a paradigmatic sort
The third and final thesis states that some of these facts irreducibly exist. The latter means that these facts cannot be reduced to facts of a type that fail to satisfy our commonsensical conception of moral facts. This conception consists of the platitude that ‘acts that have one or another positive [negative] moral status are generally concerned to promote [undercut] human flourishing’ (T36) and the platitude that ‘moral facts are authoritative insofar they provide categorical reasons to act in a certain way’ (T38)
Is the one that can be found in the introduction: “I maintain that there is a class of standard objections ordinarily leveled against the claim that moral facts exist
Summary
In his book ‘The Normative Web’ Terence Cuneo provides a core argument for his moral realism of a paradigmatic sort. According to the speech act thesis, the nature of some moral discourse is assertoric This means that some of our ordinary moral sentences are used explicitly to present moral propositions. The third and final thesis states that some of these facts irreducibly exist The latter means that these facts cannot be reduced to facts of a type that fail to satisfy our commonsensical conception of moral facts. This conception consists of the platitude that ‘acts that have one or another positive [negative] moral status are generally concerned to promote [undercut] human flourishing’ (T36) and the platitude that ‘moral facts are authoritative insofar they provide categorical reasons to act in a certain way’ (T38). The core argument that Cuneo provides for his paradigmatic moral realism consists of three premises:. I intend to refute Cuneo’s defence of the first premise. Cuneo’s core argument for moral realism has to be rejected if my refutation holds
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