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  1. The Presumption of Realism.Nils Franzén - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (5).
    Within contemporary metaethics, it is widely held that there is a “presumption of realism” in moral thought and discourse. Anti-realist views, like error theory and expressivism, may have certain theoretical considerations speaking in their favor, but our pretheoretical stance with respect to morality clearly favors objectivist metaethical views. This article argues against this widely held view. It does so by drawing from recent discussions about so-called “subjective attitude verbs” in linguistics and philosophy of language. Unlike pretheoretically objective predicates (e.g., “is (...)
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  • Oh, All the Wrongs I Could Have Performed! Or: Why Care about Morality, Robustly Realistically Understood.David Enoch & Itamar Weinshtock Saadon - 2023 - In Paul Bloomfield & David Copp (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Moral Realism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 434-462.
    Suppose someone is brought up as an orthodox Jew, and so only eats kosher, is very conservative sexually, etc. Suppose they then find out that this Judaism stuff is just all a big mistake. If they then regret all the shrimp they could have eaten, all the sex!, this makes perfect sense. Not so, however, if someone finds out that moral realism is false, and they now regret all the fun they could have had hurting people’s feeling, etc. Even if (...)
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  • Moral Necessitism and Scientific Contingentism.Harjit Bhogal - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Metaethics.
    Here is a puzzling phenomenon. Moral theories are typically thought to be necessary. If act utilitarianism is true, for example, then it is necessarily true. However, scientific theories are typically thought to be contingent. If quantum field theory is true, it’s not necessarily true — the world could have been Newtonian. My aim is to explore this discrepancy between domains. -/- In particular, I explore the role of what I call `internality’ intuitions in motivating necessitism about both moral and scientific (...)
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  • Is there a Good Moral Argument against Moral Realism?Camil Golub - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (1):151-164.
    It has been argued that there is something morally objectionable about moral realism: for instance, according to realism, we are justified in believing that genocide is wrong only if a certain moral fact obtains, but it is objectionable to hold our moral commitments hostage to metaphysics in this way. In this paper, I argue that no version of this moral argument against realism is likely to succeed. More precisely, minimal realism―the kind of realism on which realist theses are understood as (...)
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  • On the Alleged Laziness of Moral Realists.Daniel Weltman - 2020 - Journal of Value Inquiry 54 (3):511-518.
    Melis Erdur has argued that there is something morally wrong with moral realism. Moral realism promotes morally objectionable lethargy by recommending that we accept moral knowledge that could be acquired effortlessly. This is morally objectionable, because morality requires us to be reflective about moral truths. I argue that the moral realist need not be worried, because if reflection about morality is a genuine value, the realist can accept this: moral realism entails no prescriptions about how one morally ought to acquire (...)
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  • Melis Erdur’s Moral Argument Against Moral Realism.Joshua Blanchard - 2019 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (2):371-377.
    In a previous volume of Ethical Theory & Moral Practice, Melis Erdur defends the provocative claim that postulating a stance-independent ground for morality constitutes a substantive moral mistake that is isomorphic to the substantive moral mistake that many realists attribute to antirealists. In this discussion paper I reconstruct Erdur’s argument and raise two objections to the general framework in which it arises. I close by explaining why rejecting Erdur’s approach doesn’t preclude normative criticism of metaethical theories.
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  • Moral Realism and the Incompletability of Morality.Melis Erdur - 2018 - Journal of Value Inquiry 52 (2):227-237.
    If what we want from moral inquiry were the obtainment of objective moral truths, as moral realism claims it is, then there would be nothing morally unsatisfactory or lacking in a situation, in which we somehow had access to all moral truths, and were fundamentally finished with morality. In fact, that seems to be the realists’ conception of moral heaven. In this essay, however, I argue that some sort of moral wakefulness – that is, always paying attention to the subtleties (...)
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  • (Im)moral theorizing?Stavros Orfeas Zormpalas - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (7):1881-1903.
    Recent work by Matthew Bedke and Max Hayward develops a new attack on metaethical non-naturalists: that they are committed to an immoral state of mind, because they must be willing to change their mind about the moral importance of certain actions given possible evidence about the layout of the non-natural realm. For example, they must be willing to decrease their credence that torturing babies is bad, if they ever get evidence that torturing babies is not in the extension of a (...)
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  • Why bother with so what?N. D. Cannon - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-19.
    I address a family of objections I label the _So What?_ objection to robust non-naturalist realism (or, just non-naturalism). This objection concludes that non-naturalism fails to identify the _moral properties_ in virtue of failing to explain why non-natural properties would have all the features we expect _moral properties_ to have and can be extended to provide the conclusion that the non-naturalist is therefore immoral. I argue that _So What?_ is question-begging because it disallows non-naturalists their central theoretical claim: there are (...)
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  • By Which We May Be Judged: Moral Epistemology, Mind-Independent Truth Conditions And Sources Of Normativity.Maarten Van Doorn - 2022 - Dissertation, Central European University
    Many hope that our values, purged of messy human contingency, could aspire to correspond with mind-independent, rationally obligatory, and eternal ethical facts. But if the arguments of this thesis are on the right track, we should reject the search for non-natural and mind-independent moral truths.
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  • Kowtowing to a Non-natural Realm.Matthew S. Bedke - 2022 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (6):559-576.
    Non-naturalists face a dilemma. They either leave their normative views hostage to a non-natural realm, which is immoral, or they do not, which is irrational. David Enoch has argued that the problem rests on cases of junk knowledge — conditionals that cannot be used to expand knowledge via modus ponens. Camil Golub has suggested that the dilemma rests on questionable assumptions about how we might come to know about the non-natural. Here I reply to these worries, sharpen the dilemma, and (...)
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  • Thanks, We’re good: why moral realism is not morally objectionable.David Enoch - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (5):1689-1699.
    This paper responds to a recently popular objection to non-naturalist, robust moral realism. The objection is that moral realism is morally objectionable, because realists are committed to taking evidence about the distribution of non-natural properties to be relevant to their first-order moral commitments. I argue that such objections fail. The moral realist is indeed committed to conditionals such as “If there are no non-natural properties, then no action is wrong.” But the realist is not committed to using this conditional in (...)
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  • Metaethical angst and the solace of sentimentalism.Patrick Fleming - 2024 - Philosophical Forum 55 (3):323-333.
    Perhaps, nothing matters. Life might be devoid of value and meaning. Such thoughts can prompt feelings of angst. What kind of philosophical view could provide us with comfort? Some moral realists think that moral realism can. Moral realism does not comfort me. I think the comfort it gives others is an illusion. If we are moral realists, moral facts may be forever beyond our grasp. However, if we are anti-realist sentimentalists, then moral facts are built for us to find. If (...)
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  • On Moral Objections to Moral Realism.Justin Horn - 2020 - Journal of Value Inquiry 54 (2):345-354.
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  • Family Resemblances: Human Reproductive Cloning as an Example for Reconsidering the Mutual Relationships between Bioethics and Science Fiction.Solveig L. Hansen - 2018 - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 15 (2):231-242.
    In the traditions of narrative ethics and casuistry, stories have a well-established role. Specifically, illness narratives provide insight into patients’ perspectives and histories. However, because they tend to see fiction as an aesthetic endeavour, practitioners in these traditions often do not realize that fictional stories are valuable moral sources of their own. In this paper I employ two arguments to show the mutual relationship between bioethics and fiction, specifically, science fiction. First, both discourses use imagination to set a scene and (...)
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