The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism

272 Pages·2007·1.24 MB·English

by  Terence Cuneo

The Normative Web
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The Normative
Web
An Argument for Moral Realism
Terence Cuneo
1
1
GreatClarendonStreet,Oxfordox26dp
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ISBN978–0–19–921883–7
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For my wife Kari Anne,
our three daughters
Janina, Olivia, and Esther;
and to the memory of a fourth:
Jessica Elise
(10 September—10 September 1999)
AI(cid:1)NIA MNHMH
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Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Moral Realism of a Paradigmatic Sort 20
Chapter 2: Defending the Parallel 52
Chapter 3: The Parity Premise 89
Chapter 4: Epistemic Nihilism 115
Chapter 5: Epistemic Expressivism: Traditional Views 124
Chapter 6: Epistemic Expressivism: Nontraditional Views 145
Chapter 7: Epistemic Reductionism 185
Chapter 8: Three Objections to the Core Argument 224
Bibliography 248
Index 261
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Introduction
The types of silence that punctuate ordinary conversation come in many
varieties. There are awkward silences, pregnant pauses, and the types of
silencethatsignalthattwofriendshaveunderstoodeachotherperfectlywell
on some matter. This book is concerned to address a type of silence that
characterizes not ordinary conversation, but philosophical conversation, at
least the type of philosophical conversation one hears in contemporary
ethics. Theclosest analogue inordinary conversation tothe type ofsilence
with which I am concerned is one in which things are not said that
one would expect to be said. Somewhat more precisely, it is that type
of silence that signals that something has been passed over or otherwise
ignored that one would not have expected to have been passed over or
ignored. (The passing over or ignoring, of course, needn’t be deliberate.)
I can pinpoint still more exactly the sort of silence that I have in mind
by furnishing several examples of it from discussions in contemporary
metaethics.
Onthefirstpageofhisinfluentialbook,Ethics:InventingRightandWrong,
J. L. Mackie writes:
The claim that valuesare not objective,are not part of the fabric of the world, is
meanttoincludenotonlymoralgoodness,whichmightbemostnaturallyequated
with moral value, but also other things that could be more loosely called moral
values or disvalues—rightness and wrongness, duty, obligation, an action’s being
rotten and contemptible, and so on. It also includes non-moral values, notably
aesthetic ones, beauty and various kinds of artistic merit. I shall not discuss these
explicitly, but clearly much the same considerations apply to aesthetic and moral
values, and there would be at least some initial implausibility in a view that gave
¹
theoneadifferentstatusfromtheother.
¹ Mackie(1977),1.