Précis of Facts, Values, and Norms

Abstract

Moral thought and feeling are integral to how we see ourselves, how we live, and how we understand one another. Yet morality itself remains in many ways hard to understand. We speak of it as if it were a domain of knowledge, but what sort of knowledge could this be, and how would we acquire or test it? We appeal to it as if it afforded an objective standard for criticism and justification, rising above the level of personal aims or local custom, but what ground can we point to if asked to back this up? And we see it as having significant action-guiding force or normative authority, yet find it no easy matter to explain what this means, much less what would account for it. Small wonder Kant took seriously the worry that moral notions might covertly be based in mere high-flown fantasy. The essays collected in Facts, Values, and Norms attempt to make morality a bit more understandable, and thereby a bit less vulnerable to skepticism. They do so within what strives to be a coherent framework for meta-ethics and normative ethics, a form of naturalistic realism that treats moral inquiry as continuous in method with empirical science. Many philosophers believe, I know, that such a view is wrong-headed from the outset. Whatever morality is, they argue, it is not an empirical theory of anything morality's character and methods belong to practical rather than theoretical reason. I believe that such criticisms run together things we do with moral language express commitment, claim authority, guide action, exert sanctions with what moral claims literally say such that moral discourse could sustain such uses.