Essays on Moral Realism (Cornell Paperbacks) [Paperback]

Basically, what is at issue between realists and anti-realists is the objectivity of ethics. According to Sayre-McCord, the central issue is the existence of moral facts. Realists claim that such facts exist; anti-realists deny their existence. There is more to the debate than this, however. The following is a list of claims that most realists will make about morality: (i) there are moral facts (or moral truths), and these facts (or truths) are mind-independent in some important way; (ii) cognitivism about moral discourse is true: that is, moral moral claims purport to describe moral facts (or moral truths), and (at least some of) these claims successfully do so; and (iii) moral knowledge is possible, and we have some of it.

Importantly, though, anti-realists needn't deny all three of this claims. In fact, there is an important divide in anti-realism between those anti-realists who are cognitivists and those who are noncognitivists. Anti-realist cognitivists argue that moral discourse purports to describe moral facts, but that there are no such facts. If there are no moral facts and cognitivism is true, then moral practice and discourse appears to involve a pervasive error, an error of attempting to talk about something that doesn't exist. Anti-realist noncognitivists, it seems, needn't accurse ordinary moral discourse and practice of any error. Indeed, if cognitivism is false, then it is realists (and cognitivists more generally) who are guilty of an error. Their error is one of having misunderstood the nature of moral discourse. Moral claims don't even purport to describe reality; instead, they serve some other purpose, like expressing our attitudes, influencing the behavior of others, or prescribing certain types of action.

After his introduction, Sayre-McCord divides the anthology into two sections, each of which includes six papers. The section on anti-realism begins with a classic defense of the doctrine from A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic. Ayer argues that moral realism conflicts with the tenets of his logical positivism and sketches a rather crude noncognitivist account of moral language. Despite its age, this paper is important as a source of some important anti-realist arguments. It's an early example of noncognitivists taking over Moore's Open Question Argument but rejecting his realist non-naturalist intuitionism as obscure and implausible. It's also an early example of anti-realists appealing to ethical disagreement and the difficulty of reaching moral consensus as evidence for their views. This section of the anthology includes several interesting papers in addition to Ayer's. In "Supervenience Revisited," Simon Blackburn argues that realists have trouble dealing with the supervenience of the moral on the natural, and that this is better explained by noncognitivist accounts of moral discourse. Sayre-McCord also includes work from J. L. Mackie and Gilbert Harman in which they present arguments for cognitivist forms of anti-realism. In the first chapter of his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Mackie argues that moral language and discourse purport to describe moral facts, but that we have good reason to think that no such facts exist since their existence would conflict with a naturalistic worldview. Harman's argument, which comes from his The Nature of Morality, is that the problem with moral facts is that they appear to be immune to observational testing. More generally, Harman's worry appears to be one about causal explanation: it is not clear to him that moral facts have any role to play in the sorts of causal explanations that can be offered by appealing to scientific facts. Since Harman takes the sciences to provide us with a model of objectivity, this makes putative moral facts suspect.

The section on realism includes some papers directly responding to the anti-realist arguments of the first section. Nicholas Sturgeon's "Moral Explanations" attempts to rebut Harman's argument for anti-realism. Sturgeon argues that at least some moral facts appear to be explanatory in just the way that Harman denies that they are. (Sayre-McCord includes a paper of his own in which he responds to the Sturgeon-Harman debate. He does so by questioning whether they've been debating the right question.) John McDowell responds to Mackie's error theory in his "Values and Secondary Qualities." The central contention of his paper is that Mackie has misunderstood what moral facts would have to be like. If we correctly understand the nature of moral facts, McDowell argues, we'll see that Mackie's metaphysical worries about realism aren't well-justified. This section of the anthology also includes two long, exploratory papers that defend forms of realism, David Wiggins's "Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life" and Richard Boyd's "How to Be a Moral Realist." In the latter Richard Boyd argues that the putative disanalogy between science and morality, a disanalogy to which many anti-realists appeal, disappears when one properly understands science and the source of its objectivity.

Of course, there are some other papers whose inclusion would have made this anthology even better. Two that immediately come to mind are Peter Railton's "Moral Realism" and David Brink's "Moral Realism and the Sceptical Arguments from Disagreement and Queerness." Nevertheless, the papers Sayre-McCord has chosen provide a good overview of the positions available to those in the debate and how those positions can be defended and criticized. And that, I suppose, is what a good anthology should do.

I should note that a lot of the material in this anthology is also present in Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton's Moral Discourse and Practice, an anthology intended to cover a wider range of issues in meta-ethics. If you're especially interested in the realism/anti-realism debate, the Sayre-McCord is probably the better of the two volumes. If your interest in meta-ethics is more general, however, then you might want to consider the Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton.