My aim in this paper is to consider a series of arguments against Dispositional Moral Realism and argue that these objections are unsuccessful. I will consider arguments that try to either establish a dis-analogy between moral properties and secondary qualities or try to show that a dispositional account of moral properties fails to account for what a defensible species of moral realism must account for. I also consider criticisms from Simon Blackburn, who argues that there could not be a corresponding (...) perceptual faculty for moral properties, and David Enoch, who argues that Dispositional Moral Realism does not most plausibly explain the difference between moral disagreements and disagreements of mere preference. Finally, I examine a novel criticism concerning the relationship between the diverse variety of moral properties and the range of our normative affective attitudes, arguing that the view has no problem accounting for this diversity. (shrink)

This paper takes up an important epistemological challenge to the naturalistic moral realist: that her metaphysical commitments are difficult to square with a plausible rationalist view about the epistemology of morality. The paper begins by clarifying and generalizing this challenge. It then illustrates how the generalized challenge can be answered by a form of naturalistic moral realism that I dub joint-carving moral realism. Both my framing of this challenge and my answer advertise the methodological significance of non-fundamental epistemological theorizing, which (...) defends and deploys epistemological claims without adverting to the most fundamental epistemological facts. (shrink)

This book is a systematic treatment-perhaps the first-of “attitudes of the heart”-remorse (versus guilt), love, trust, gratitude, personal anger (versus righteous anger), jealousy, and others-and their role in mediating personal relationship, attachment, and connection. This is obviously interesting in its own right, but it also shows how heartfelt attitudes mirror more extensively studied “reactive attitudes” of guilt, resentment, and blame (“attitudes of the will”). Whereas the latter mediate moral relations of mutual respect and accountability, attitudes of the heart are the (...) currency of heartfelt connection and personal relationship. (shrink)

An important challenge for non-naturalistic moral realism is that it seems hard to reconcile it with the (purported) fact of our reliability in forming correct moral beliefs. Some philosophers (including Cuneo and Shafer-Landau) have argued that we can appeal to conceptual truths about our moral concepts in order to respond to this challenge. Call this “the conceptual strategy”. The conceptual strategy faces a problem: it isn’t clear that the relevant moral concepts are “extension-revealing” in the way that the conceptual strategy (...) needs them to be. A further problem stems from the tradeoff between the “extension-revealing” and the “authority-revealing” aspects of normative concepts. To underscore the import of these issues, I discuss a version of the reliability challenge that concerns authoritative normative facts in ethics (rather than moral facts). The problems I identify for the conceptual strategy carry over to versions of it that are used in response to a range of epistemological arguments in ethics that (like the reliability challenge) are tied to Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma” argument. These problems also bear on the prospects of the conceptual strategy for explaining our (purported) reliability in other domains (e.g., in epistemology, law, and politics). (shrink)

This paper is divided into two parts. In the first one I distinguish between weak and strong Anti-Archimedeanisms, the latter being the view that metaethics, just as any other discipline attempting to work out a second-order conceptual, metaphysical non-committed discourse about the first-order discourse composing normative practices, is conceptually impossible or otherwise incoherent. I deal in particular with Ronald Dworkin’s famous exposition of the view. I argue that strong Anti-Archimedeanism constitutes an untenable philosophical stance, therefore making logical space for the (...) practice of a discipline such as metaethics—conceived as ethically neutral. This makes space, concurrently, for neutral conceptual jurisprudence. In the second part of the article, I attempt to show two things. On the one hand, that Dworkin’s widely discussed ‘challenge of disagreements’ to legal positivism is founded upon strong Anti-Archimedeanism. On the other hand, that having rejected strong Anti-Archimedeanism we should consequently reject the challenge as a serious challenge to positivism. This move, of course, does not thereby imply that accounting for legal disagreements is not an important jurisprudential task. But it marks—contra Dworkin—that there is no principled or a priori impossibility of doing so within a positivist framework. (shrink)

Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 50, Issue 1, Page 84-102, March 2022.