Ordinary Morality and Its Detractors

Abstract

Ordinary moral thought is committed to non-relative moral truth, moral facts, and objective first-order properties like rightness and wrongness—in short, is committed to moral realism. Many metaethical theories deny all or some of these commitments. Moral non-cognitivists deny that first-order moral discourse is either true or false. Moral nihilists hold that first-order moral discourse is false because there are no moral properties. Moral relativisms—sociocultural, radical subjectivist, pragmatist, et al.—deny that there are any transcendently objective moral truths or facts. All of these views deny that there is anything specifically “moral” to metaphysically ground. Evolutionary morality locates moral truth and facts in nature, not in the sui generis “moral,” contrary to the view I develop in later chapters.