Week 5: Realism and Anti-realism

Essay question

Are moral values real?

Key readings

• Brink, D. O., Moral Realism and the Sceptical Arguments from Disagreement and Queerness, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 62, no. 2 (June, 1984), pp. 111-125.
• Mackie, J. L., Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, ch. 1.
• Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, Moral Realism, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring, 2015.

Further reading

• Dancy, Jonathan, Two Conceptions of Moral Realism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, sup. vol. 60 (1986), pp. 167-187.
• Nagel, Thomas, The View from Nowhere, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, ch. 8.
• Parfit, Derek, On What Matters, vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, part 6.
• Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, Moral Realism, in David Copp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, ch. 1.
• Shafer-Landau, Russ, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003.
• Smith, Michael, Moral Realism, in Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, ch. 1.

Exam questions

• ’Moral experience presents moral values as being objective, or real’. Does this put any constraints on what could be an adequate moral theory?
• ’If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe’ (MACKIE) Has the objectivist an effective reply?
• Can one be an objectivist about morality without being a realist?