Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy) [Hardcover]

This is an important book in contemporary meta-ethics since it is the first and only book-length treatise on so-called "Cornell Realism." What is perhaps most distinctive of the Cornell Realists is that they draw on work in recent philosophy of science to argue that we have good reason to believe that moral inquiry is objective in much the same way that scientific inquiry is objective. They also adhere to a battery of views on specific meta-ethical issues, and this helps to distinguish them from other thinkers. At the center of their metaphysics of morality is the view that moral facts and properties are natural, though they cannot be reduced to the properties of physics, biology, chemistry, or any other discipline in the natural sciences. They favor a semantics of moral discourse according to which moral terms cannot be wholly analyzed into the language of other disciplines. They defend a coherentist moral epistemology, and they argue that the Rawlsian method of reflective equilibrium is a discovery procedure employed in both ethics and the sciences. Finally, they defend externalism about motivation and reasons for action. In his book Brink defends all of these positions.

Since there's no point in trying to analyze Brink's arguments in a review of this length, I'll simply try to say something about the overall structure of the book and how it relates to Brink's project. He begins by distinguishing moral realism from its noncognitivist and constructivist competitors, and he argues that many of our common-sense beliefs about moral language and inquiry provide evidence for realism. Brink also argues that, pace certain anti-realists, the choice between realism and anti-realism does have some effect on our normative practices. These conclusions, he thinks, provide some prima facie evidence for moral realism. Unless the anti-realist can show that there is something seriously wrong with realism, there is good reason to accept realism.

Brink then argues that his form of realism can provide a plausible account of morality, and that it isn't undermined by certain well-known objections to realism. He begins by developing his views on moral epistemology and the practical aspects of morality. He then considers some objections to moral realism. The first objection is one based on the is/ought thesis, the thesis that moral statements cannot be derived from non-moral ones. Brink argues that this thesis, even if it is true, does not undermine realism, as this sort of inferential gap is present in other areas as well. This is followed by a chapter on a posteriori objections to moral realism. Most of this chapter is devoted to answering worries about the objectivity of morality that have been developed by J. L. Mackie and Gilbert Harman. He argues that Mackie's argument from queerness fails because moral facts are natural facts and because moral facts don't involve any intrinsic and categorical prescriptivity. In response to Mackie's other argument for anti-realism, the argument from disagreement, he argues that the nonexistence of moral facts isn't clearly the best explanation of the existence and persistence of moral disagreement. Finally, he argues that Harman is wrong to think that moral facts are explanatorily irrelevant.

The virtues of Brink's book are the characteristic virtues of good analytic philosophy. On all of the topics he discusses, Brink's arguments are admirably clear. He's patient in his analysis and criticism of arguments, and he draws on a substantial amount of literature on these topics in formulating his views and distinguishing them from other approaches. Furthermore, he's often willing to point out areas of his argument that might not be especially compelling and that leave room for proponents of views other than the one he prefers.

The book ends with an extended account of the outlines of the sort of teleological normative theory Brink defends as both independently plausible and consistent with his version of moral realism.

This book should be accessible to anyone with some background in meta-ethics, though it seems clearly intended for those who specialize in these areas. The work doesn't presuppose a lot of knowledge of the details of this debate--and Brink is very good at providing an account of the issues, their importance, and other positions before he presents his own views--but the comprehensiveness and intricacy of the book's arguments suggest that its intended audience is those who are students of meta-ethics.

For those studying the realism/anti-realism debate in meta-ethics, this book is essential reading. And for anyone seriously concerned with issues pertaining to the objectivity of morality, I recommend this book as an example of one approach to these issues.

(And one might want to compare this to Russ Shafer-Landau's recent book, Moral Realism: A Defense. That book is similar in scope to Brink's, and it covers much of the same ground. In some ways, Shafer-Landau's book can be seen as an update to Brink's. For, like Brink's book, it includes a comprehensive defense of realism that involves a comparison of realism's virtues with the supposed weaknesses of its most important competitors and an attempt to deal with the most important objections to realism that have been raised by other philosophers. But, while the two agree on quite a bit, Shafer-Landau argues for a form of non-naturalism about moral facts and for a reliabilist account of moral epistemology.)

Michael Martin