Metaethics for Dummies
A working vocabulary for people who’ve been arguing about morality their whole lives without knowing what they’re arguing about
Every moral argument you’ve ever watched collapse into mutual incomprehension has the same underlying problem. People are fighting about first-order questions — is this thing right or wrong? — while secretly, unknowingly disagreeing about second-order ones: what kind of thing is morality anyway? Can moral claims even be true or false? Do moral facts exist independently of us, or are they projections we mistake for discoveries?
That second, higher level is metaethics. It’s foundational to every ethical argument you’ll ever have, and only the experts engage with it consciously. Said experts are academic philosophers, fitting referred to via the specialisation metaethicists. The rest of us? We’re not there. Not in church. Not in school. Not in the discourse spaces where moral claims get made constantly, loudly, and badly.
This essay is a map. It will not tell you what’s right and wrong, at least not primarily. It will tell you what you’re actually committing to when you argue about morality itself. And, at the end, where I personally land on these questions.
The Compass: Four Terms, Four Combinations
The two most important axes in metaethics are objective vs. subjective and universal vs. relative. Think of them as the cardinal directions on a compass. (Yes, a moral compass, fogive the pun.) East-West runs objective to subjective. North-South runs universal to relative. Everything interesting lives at one of the four intersecting quadrants.
Objective moral claims are true (or false) independently of anyone’s beliefs, feelings, or preferences about them. Not “independent of evidence.” We can be wrong about objective matters. But the truth of the claim doesn’t bottom out to anyone’s mental states or desires. If “torturing children for fun is wrong” is an objective moral truth, then it would be wrong even if every human on Earth were somehow convinced otherwise (by bad arguments). The wrongness isn’t a function of the consensus.
Subjective moral claims are ones whose truth depends on someone’s mental states (desires, attitudes, emotional responses). On a subjectivist account, “X is wrong” really means something like “I (or we or they) disapprove of X,” and the truth of the claim is anchored in that psychology. Change the psychology, change the morality.
Universal (also referred to as Absolute) moral claims apply to all moral agents, full stop. No framework-relativization, no need to obsess over context, and no carve-outs. What’s true morally is true for everyone, everywhere, all at once.
Relative (or Contextual) moral claims are true only relative to a framework or a context — an individual, a culture, a tradition. Lying might be wrong for you given your values, but not for me given mine. Or wrong in this culture, permissible in that one. The moral truth floats against some background context.
Now the combinations — and this is where things get genuinely interesting, because most people assume only two of the four quadrants exist…!
Objective + Universal (Northeast or NE): There are real moral facts, and they apply to everyone. This is classical moral realism, the position of most academic moral philosophers, and the implicit assumption behind any argument that something is actually wrong regardless of what anyone thinks.
Objective + Relative (Southeast or SE): Moral truths are real, but they vary based on features of different contexts; things like resource distribution, climate, social structure change the score. Different societies having different moralities for non-arbitrary reasons. This view has some internal contradictions, but also some dogged defenders. It is perhaps the most niche combo.
Subjective + Universal (Northwest or NW): Moral truths are grounded in mental states, but those truths apply to everyone. The rules are stance dependent yet binding. The most prominent examples are: ideal observer theory on the secularist side, meaning what’s right is what a fully informed, fully rational, dispassionate (and hypothetical) observer would prefer; divine command theory on the theistic/religion side has roughly the same structure, but the observer is a real being (the Abrahamic God). In both, the mind/will/essence of the subject is the grounding. The universality comes from humanity’s inability to reject the commands or rational observations.
Subjective + Relative (Southwest or SW): Moral truths depend on individual or cultural attitudes, which vary. This is the quadrant most people picture when they hear “morality is subjective”—the full moral relativist package. It’s also, notably, the position that’s hardest to live with consistently, since it makes “what the Nazis did was wrong” a claim that can only mean “wrong relative to our framework,” with no further reach. It therefore is often rejected as untenable, even a strawman of its components.
Two things to tattoo on your brain before moving on: objective does not mean absolute, and subjective does not mean relative. These pairs are not synonyms. They track different questions entirely. The objective/subjective axis asks: what grounds the moral fact? The universal/relative axis asks: who does it apply to? You can mix and match.
Most confused moral discourse comes from people conflating these two axes and thinking there are only two positions—“morality is real and universal” versus “morality is just opinion and varies by culture”—when there are actually four, with meaningful positions in each quadrant. Northeast (NE) is moral realism, Northwest (NW) is either communal or theistic moral absolutism, Southwest (SW) is radical relativism, and Southeast (SE) is a way-station for objectivity that resists universal clarity.
We can acknowledge that there is potential for dispute from pedants about the way this landscape looks, especially the collapsing of absolute+universal and relative+contextual into opposing pairs of synonyms. Tho the argument for decoupling the former is dubious, amounting largely to semantic word games and proprietary preferences, the latter does have a borderline case for separation.
Relativism typically emphasizes diffidence around certainty, contextualism more prioritizes using nuance. That’s a distinction, yes, but not one of great salience here. Too granular for a simplified run-through. And, we must admit, appeals to nuance are often vehicles for denial of certainty. Distinction without hard difference, perhaps.
Moral Realism — Natural and Non-Natural
What Moral Realism Actually Claims
Moral realism is the NE quadrant. It holds three things simultaneously: moral claims can be true or false; some of them are actually true; and those truths don’t depend on anyone’s subjective beliefs or relative states about them. Not yours, not mine, not humanity’s collectively. Nor the will of a deity or deities. The wrongness of a thing is a feature of reality, not a report on any entity’s attitude toward it. Within realism, the major faultline runs between naturalist and non-naturalist versions, a respectful disagreement about what moral facts are and how they relate to the empirical world.
Naturalist moral realism holds that moral properties are reducible to natural ones, which is a fancy way of saying that what is good can be determined simply by observing empirical realities about the natural, rather than metaphysical, world at large. Facts about wellbeing, flourishing, social function, and so forth. Moral facts are real, but continuous with the material world. Cornell Realism (Sturgeon, Boyd, Brink) and Peter Railton’s reductive naturalism are prominent academic versions. Even Sam Harris’ position from The Moral Landscape belongs here too, tho Harris tends to sidestep the metaethical scaffolding his view actually requires.
Two central concerns for natural realism, especially more naive or slapdash versions like that of Harris (no hate, he’s still a cool dude), are things like G.E. Moore’s open question argument and David Hume’s is-ought gap. I will caution that neither of these count as what philosophers would call a hard defeater for the view of naturalist realism. Hume’s point is also widely misunderstood by laymen, as we’ll soon address.
Firstly, regarding Moore, his claim is basically: no matter what natural property we identify morality with, one can always coherently ask “yes, but is it good?” That question is always left open, it never seems empty or totally answerable, at least not with very careful and often perilous philosophical work. This suggests moral properties aren’t simply natural properties under another name.
Secondly, regarding Hume and is-ought: The idea is that there’s a divide (a “gap”) between descriptive or “is” facts and prescriptive or “ought” facts. This divide must be recognized and bridged by sophisticated reasoning. One cannot merely say “true statements exist” and then follow with “false statements are evil.” The latter is a non sequitur, literally meaning it does not follow. The two statements need a bridge, some connective tissue in-between. The existence of the gap does not prove morality false or selective or relative. It’s an observation about how to best construct arguments.
Naturalists will argue they can answer questions and bridge gaps satisfactorily. It is possible that they can. Yet it is also possible that their position, at least in the sloppier versions of it, is vulnerable to consistent and principled objections.
Non-naturalist moral realism takes both the gap and the open questions seriously. Moral properties are real but sui generis, i.e. not reducible to anything in the natural order. Moral facts, on non-naturalism, are essentially Platonic. They exist non-materially via rational/logical necessity. In this way they are more like mathematical facts (on some/most ontologies): abstract, necessary, discovered rather than invented.
Robust realism (Moore, Ross, Enoch, Shafer-Landau) is the most prominent family here. Non-naturalism bridges the gap by showing us that there are both is facts and ought facts, the ought facts just exist separately. This also answers the open question, in Moorean fashion, by declaring “Goodness exists, just like Truth.” Derek Parfit’s On What Matters argued at length that non-naturalist realism is where secular philosophy lands if it takes ethics seriously. The parsimony speaks for itself.
One main objection is Mackie’s strangeness/queerness argument: non-natural moral properties would be metaphysically strange, and our faculty for detecting them epistemically mysterious. The standard non-naturalist response is companions in guilt. The strangeness, and one’s resulting skepticism, would upend the apple-cart for all kinds of knowledge domains, from abstract mathematical objects to formal logic and so on. Yet few resoectable figures relativize about arithmetic. Why morality and only morality then? Non-natural realists would call this a special pleading problem.
Misclassification Problem: Why “Objective” and “Realism” Get Grafted to Subjective Universalism
What both families of moral realism share is the core commitment: moral facts are there to be gotten right or wrong, independently of what anyone thinks about them. Any entity, we should clarify. And that the morality reality cannot be reduced to the essence or will of any being or group, no matter how popular or purportedly powerful.
There is thus a confusion worth naming directly. Many people who champion “objective morality” in the public square—invoking it against relativism, crediting religion for it—are not describing objective morality in the philosophical sense. They’re describing universal subjective morality: moral truth that applies to everyone, but grounded in the commands or preferences of a divine mind. The universality is real. The objectivity, strictly speaking, is not.
A moral fact grounded in God’s will, or God’s essence, is stance-dependent. It depends on a subject, in this case a divine subject. Being tied to a maximally powerful entity, even the creator of the world, makes this version of morality subjective by definition. Furthermore, as we’ll cover further when we address the Euthyphro dilemma below, claiming that God is the ground of existence does not solve this. There are no escape hatches for divine command theory or other forms of absolute subjectivism. The scale might be cosmic, but category is still preference-based.
The misdescription happens because “objective” gets used rhetorically as a contrast to “just your opinion.” For many theists, divine command theory does clear that bar. God’s commands aren’t your personal preference; they’re universal and binding. In that context, “objective” becomes a loose synonym for “not arbitrary, not merely up to you.” Intelligible, but imprecise. Sloppy and arguably dishonest even.
The imprecision has also costs. If “objective morality” just means “not up to you personally,” then the real question—what grounds moral facts?—goes unasked. The moment you press on what makes God’s commands authoritative rather than merely powerful, you’re at the Euthyphro, and the “objective morality” framing has done nothing to help you escape it.
Moral realism, properly understood, isn’t simply about claiming humanity doesn’t make up morality or that it isn’t up to you. It’s the claim that moral facts are stance-independent, not grounded in any being, nor the preferences, essence, or commands, of any person or group. No matter whether they are human or divine.
Euthyphro’s Horns, DCT, and General Confusion
The Euthyphro dilemma is arguably the oldest puzzle in moral philosophy, posed by Plato over two thousand years ago and never satisfactorily addressed by theists who resent its implications, the two options it forces. It asks: is something good because the gods (or a singular God) issued commands about it, or do those commands only come about because the God(s) realized good exists independently?
The 1st option or horn, that good is good because God(s) commands it, makes morality contingent on divine will and therefore inherently arbitrary from a philosophical perspective. God could, in principle, have commanded child murder or social betrayal, and those things would then be moral by fiat. More pressingly: moral truth on this account is stance-dependent. It depends on what a particular will—God’s or the gods’—has constituted of their own volition.
This horn leads to the NW quadrant of our compass, or absolute subjective morality. Absolute (universal across all humans), but subjective. Grounding moral facts in divine attitudes is structurally identical to grounding them in human attitudes; the scale is different, that’s all. Calling it “objective morality” is a category error.
The 2nd horn, that God commands things because they’re good, preserves God’s moral authority and coherence, but at a cost the first-horn defender correctly identifies: it makes goodness independent of God. Moral facts exist prior to and constraining divine commands. God recognizes and tracks moral reality; he doesn’t constitute it. God or gods providing expert moral education, not cosmic sourcing.
This is compatible with objective morality in the robust sense, yet notice what’s happened. The 2nd horn implicitly concedes the secular moral realist’s central claim. Moral facts are real, mind-independent, not grounded in any will or preference. God’s role becomes that of a reliable reporter, not an author. You’ve landed in the Northeast, but you’ve arrived there by abandoning what made DCT distinctive.
Many Christian philosophers and apologists, including Robert M. Adams and William Lane Craig, try to run what they claim is a hybrid: moral values are grounded in God’s perfectly good nature rather than his will. This supposedly sidesteps the arbitrariness problem. Meanwhile moral obligations come from his commands. This is it still faces the question: what makes God’s nature good rather than merely powerful? If the answer is “it just is,” you’ve restated the problem. If the answer is “it tracks something independently good,” you’re back on the 2nd horn.
The Euthyphro is brilliant not because it serves as a trap or gotcha. It’s brilliant because it, like the is-ought gap and other important considerations, helps us to clarify our own understandings of morality reality (or nonreality and anti-reality, as we’ll get to soon). Every path from it either makes morality arbitrary or makes God morally complementary (rather than constitutive and total). That’s not an argument against God’s existence. It’s an argument that absolutist subjectivism is not, and can never be, a stable foundation for objective moral realism. And that people who claim otherwise owe us a cleaner account of what they mean by their word choices.
Anti-Realism and Nonrealism
Moral realism has serious opponents, which are all collectively called moral anti-realism. If we rightly consider absolute subjective morality as distinct from realism, we necessarily have to put in this cap, or something adjacent (perhaps nonrealism, which some may view as a semantic indulgence). Other considerations that may slot into the nonrealist frame, or even exist between realism and its opposition, would include moral constructivism (which we’ll cover elsewhere below) and various forms of objective relativism, that elusive SE quadrant of our compass.
For now in this section, let’s tackle the main families of anti-realism:
Error theory. J.L. Mackie is the name to know here, and he agrees with the realist that moral claims purport to be objective. When you say “that was wrong,” you’re not just expressing a feeling, you’re making a claim about reality. Mackie’s twist is that there isn’t any moral reality. All those claims are false. Not subjective, not relative—just false. Moral discourse is in systematic error, a collective fiction we’ve been running for millennia. Error theory is bracing and defiant. It’s also almost impossible to live out honestly, and suffers from a common “what next” objection. Both huge practical liabilities that many error theorists simply handwave. Some have understandably criticized it as “nihilism with extra steps,” which does sorta bear out descriptively.
Expressivism (and its subset emotivism) take a different approach. On these views, moral claims aren’t truth-apt at all. They don’t describe anything, they express attitudes. “Torture is wrong” is closer to “Boo, torture!” than to “Torture has the property of wrongness.” A.J. Ayer is the bluntest emotivist; more sophisticated expressivist accounts (Allan Gibbard, Simon Blackburn) try to preserve the logic of moral discourse without committing to moral facts. These views try to explain moral motivation; if moral claims express attitudes, it makes sense that they move us. Their weakness is capturing why moral arguments feel like they’re about something.
Quasi-realism is Blackburn’s project specifically, an ambitious anti-realist position. He starts from expressivism and tries to earn the right to talk like a realist—to say moral claims are true or false, to say we can have moral knowledge—without actually committing to mind-independent moral facts. Whether he succeeds is genuinely contested. Quasi-realism is philosophically sophisticated enough that some realists treat it as a form of realism in disguise. It still suffers from a flaw of denying stance- independence, but it operationalizes moral reflection and moral discourse in a way which few other forms of anti-realism even bother trying to.
Moral nihilism, often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche yet most properly elaborated on by Max Stirner and Emil Cioran, is simply the view that morality is completely and utterly void. It goes beyond subjectivity or relativity, embracing a theory of nonexistence and non-content regarding morality as such. Some moral nihilists are more broadly nihilists about knowledge and existence in most/all other areas, some simply invite the companions-in-guilt special pleading charge by targeting morality as exclusive devoid of substance. What differentiates nihilism from other forms of anti-realism, even from most sophisticated understandings of error theory, is that nihilism sees no point in claiming moral statements attempt to say anything. They see morality as hollow nonsense from soup to nuts, no further explanation or accomodation needed. It is an extreme view, and a simple one.
Miscellaneous Shelf
Two concepts that resist clean placement in the above:
Constructivism is a genuine tweener. On constructivist views (Rawls, Korsgaard), moral facts are neither entirely discovered in the fabric of reality nor mere expressions of preference. They’re constructed through rational procedures, what ideally rational agents would agree to under the right conditions. This sounds subjective (it depends on agents), but the rational constraints are meant to do real normative work. Some philosophers classify constructivism as a form of realism; others don’t. It lives in the borderlands and probably deserves its own space as such.
Internalism vs. externalism addresses a different question: if a moral fact is true, does it automatically give you a reason to act on it? Internalists say yes, that genuine moral obligations are necessarily motivating. If you sincerely believe something is wrong and feel zero pull toward avoiding it, internalists say you don’t really believe it. Externalists say moral facts can be true entirely independently of whether anyone is motivated by them. This matters practically because it shapes how you think about moral psychology, moral education, and what it even means to know something is wrong. Moral realists, for example, sometimes must work not only why morality is objective, but why moral facts move us to act on them.
Communities and Their Compass Positions
Mainline Abrahamic (Judaic, Christian, and Muslim) theists tend to claim the NE quadrant loudly and often. They insist they have “objective” moral truth…grounded in God’s nature and commands. The philosophical problem, which the next section addresses at length, is that the structure of divine command theory doesn’t actually land in the Northeast. The claim is realist; the mechanism is not. These theists are also worth noting for the productive minority within the tradition who’ve genuinely wrestled with this. Things like graded absolutism, natural law theory, and other sophisticated approaches all represent serious attempts to square the circle.
Secular (left-)liberals are implicit quasi-realists who haven’t read Blackburn. They argue like moral realists—they make universal claims, they treat violations as genuinely wrong, they demand recognition rather than mere disagreement—but when pressed on foundations they retreat to proceduralism and pluralism. “Who’s to say?” is the tell. They have the moral intuitions of a Northeast quadrant thinker and the philosophical commitments of someone who’s never had to defend them. This isn’t a personal failing; it’s what happens when a culture inherits moral realism from its religious foundations and then loses the metaphysical scaffolding without replacing it.
Atheists (general) are all over the map, and this matters because the widespread assumption—including among atheists themselves—is that rejecting God entails rejecting objective morality. It doesn’t. The majority position in academic moral philosophy is secular moral realism. You can think moral facts are as real as mathematical facts and have no theology whatsoever. Most atheists who’ve actually studied metaethics land here. (But studying metaethics is rare.)
Naive Humeans are what you get when atheists haven’t studied metaethics. The name is half-ironic: David Hume was a rigorous empiricist who argued carefully that moral judgments express sentiment rather than reason—a sophisticated, defensible position. The Naive Humean arrives at a Hume-adjacent conclusion through pure incuriosity: religion is superstition, superstition is subjective, therefore morality is subjective, therefore anyone who claims otherwise is sneaking religion in through the back door. The move collapses the entire Northeast and Northwest quadrants by assumption. Secular moral realism—Parfit, Scanlon, Enoch, Huemer—is simply not on their radar. They think they’re being skeptical and rigorous. They’re being lazy in the opposite direction from the people they’re criticizing.
Bayesian rationalist, EA-adjacent, and Gray Tribe types are a distinct species. They tend to treat moral realism as an open empirical question, apply Bayesian credences to ethical positions, and often end up near realism—tho not into it—by the gravitational pull of expected-value reasoning. The pathology is different: a tendency toward what you might call laundered consequentialism, where the rigor of the framework substitutes for the hard work of moral phenomenology. When your ethical system can justify almost anything at sufficient scale with sufficient probability, the math is doing moral work that should make you nervous. Their compass positions are genuinely varied, but the in-group pressure runs toward NW (subjective-universalist), grounded in idealized preferences, even when certain individuals would endorse NE.
Mormons are the surprising entry. LDS moral theology has a genuine “eternal law” tradition in which God is subject to moral laws, not the author. This is a striking departure from the mainline Christian DCT structure and lands Mormonism, almost uniquely among Christian/Abrahamic offshoots, closer to the true moral realism of the NE position. Most people assume all religious moral theology shares the same metaphysical architecture. Mormonism is a clean counterexample worth knowing.
Intellectualist Thomists (IT) are a sort of halfway point between the fully externalized eternal law of Mormonism and the more doggedly DCT-aligned views of many Christians. Natural law, a concept founded by Thomas Aquinas, includes in it ideas of eternal law, which it describes as either created by or substantiated by God at the founding of the universe. Depending on the particular writer, this form of Thomism can look strikingly similar to accepting the 2nd horn as well, tho there is much debate and divergence with IT types and in the broader Thomist ecosystem.
Where I Land
I’m a secular moral realist of the non-naturalist variety. Moral facts are real, mind-independent, and not reducible to natural facts about psychology, evolution, social contract, or anything else in the empirical furniture of the world. They’re more like mathematical facts; abstract, necessary, and discovered rather than invented. I am also an externalist, meaning I take the view that evidence doesn’t automatically compel action. People can know or believe something is wrong but do it anyway. Or vice versa for something good. This latter point seems orthogonal to the realism question tho.
Three things anchor moral realism for me. First, I think most knowledge domains have objective content in them, and I can’t imagine why morality or moral philosophy would somehow be the one exception. This is essentially the 2nd horn of Euthyphro, just run as a positive argument. Goodness exists. Right and wrong exist. Order and chaos exist. Flourishing and floundering are both real possibilities. Why? Well, because of the evidence.
Which brings me to the second reason. There is an evidentiary basis for moral realism. I understand morality to be rational system, again not unlike mathematics. That which is good aligns with a Platonic (perhaps more accurately Neo-Platonic) conception of The Good, a la Plato’s framework of the forms. The Good includes order, truth, and flourishing. That which goes against any of these is either per se wring or probably wrong. We can observe that murder lowers flourishing, thus it is wrong. Lying is wrong because it goes against truth. We can run experiments to test these claims. We obverse not only they are correct, but mutually inclusive.
We see that truth corresponds to goodness and aligns with flourishing and supports order. We see that murder reduces flourishing, increases suffering, leads to chaos, and so forth. These aren’t guesses, nor feelings. They are supported calculations, like math proofs. We do not need to have an exhaustive list of rules, or even to determine the “correct” system of normative or applied ethics (which are areas separate from metaethics anyway), to determine that these facts bear out. We run the test, we check the data, we see the results. That’s evidence and rationality.
Third, on the more negative side, the companions-in-guilt argument. The most common secular/atheist objection to moral realism—a weird and misguided faultline, one we already explained as confused, since morality doesn’t require religion—is that debunking arguments explain away our moral faculties as just intuitions or sentiments. We only believe what we believe because it was adaptive, not because we’re tracking moral truth. I have no idea why this would be the case, I will say flatly. Like saying we're only able to see because it's adaptive. How would that prove that our sight, or our moral faculties, are invalid?
Besides, such an argument would prove too much. Why is morality made void or suspect but not math? Not formal logic? Not skepticism or rationality themselves? No answer, save special pleading. I find this thoroughly uncompelling and frankly embarrassing. Is math a useful fiction? Or is it objective? Can we use rationality and evidence to discover truth? Or are we hopelessly doomed to blindness and self-deception? If you want to save logic and math from the debunking argument, and you should, then you need an account of why they survive whilst moral realism can’t. I haven’t seen one.
An implicit fourth consideration is therefore my broader view that moral realism is the high credibility default. The family of positions within metaethics that makes the most sense and has the most legitimacy. I would even argue that a majority of people are inclined to become, or simply already exist as, tacit moral realists. They simply haven’t cashed out the commitment in philosophically rigorous terms. I hope this article may give them the language to. For the anti-realists are obviously, provably wrong. This is considered unsporting (not untrue) to say, but I don’t care. I’ll be explicit about it.
Why I Reject Anti-Realism
And in the spirit of that explicitness, that candor, I’ll double down on the criticism I alluded to above. Anti-realism strikes me now as quite arguably the most confirmation biased nonsense in philosophy. I accept the inherent validity skepticism and inquiry as tools, but I use them as part of philosophical and scientific method. The same method Naive Humeans and other knee-jerk anti-realists claim to value, but selectively ignore in practice. The method requires looking at evidence, developing or judging available hypotheses, testing them to find a viable theory, and discarding the stuff that’s faulty. Discarding it for good, not just for now.
Yet anti-realists generally can’t tell us what makes morality uniquely vulnerable to dismissals they’d prefer not be levied at other topics. They can’t provide accounts of how to engage in moral reasoning or moral discourse that aren’t cartoonish and/or deeply non-compelling. Most of them, by their own admission, haven’t even studied metaethics thoroughly or properly. They arrived at a view they like, basically on vibes, and called it a day. And still they have the nerve to pretend they’re the rigorous, honest ones in all this. It’s pretty damn galling.
My support of realism is born precisely of doing the reading, as it were. I actually did study metaethics extensively for over three years. Autodidactically, but intensively. I’ve read all the major philosophers and core texts (plus plenty well outside the core). I’ve debated these matter endlessly with other such students, including PhD candidates. I know what the believe and why.
The three main drivers for anti-realism cash out as: aversion to rules and obligations (typically born of anti-theistic atheism); selective skepticism and special pleading (morality is can’t be proven in a lab, just like all the other things they still think are objective despite not being provable in a lab); and egoistic globalization of deficits or deficiencies (they can’t understand or explain morality, there no one can). Once these are all addressed and taken off the board, most/all anti-realists fold. Their reasons reveal their preferred position(s) to a house of cards. Simple as.
But I’ve demonstrated one needn’t be religious to be a realist. If anything, the opposite (secular realism) is parsimonious in the extreme. We have rules and obligations the same way we have logical consistencies or valid vs invalid equations. Skepticism is a tool for helping our inquiry, but it can (tho shouldn’t) be weaponized lopsided. And it is possible to be ignorant or confused on a personal level without globalizing those feelings onto everyone else. The world exists. Truth exists. Math exists. So too morality. Why would it not be so, except arbitrarily?
Conclusion
Metaethics has been, and does largely remain, my favorite area of philosophy proper. I love(d) wrestling with these concepts, these questions. Falsifying ideas, discovering new—at least to me—information about reality, and challenging orthodoxies. I have wanted to share that with others for years in long-form, but felt less comfortable and less confident doing so for various reasons.
I am not an academic, let alone a metaethics PhD. I’m a guy who reads a lot. But in that reading, and the rolling over of knowledge both in my head and in conversation with others, I have found there are core truths worth sharing. Ones I’m well versed in, ones I don’t feel the need to be diffident about. The basic landscape of metaethics, rendered with simplicity (or close) and minimal bias, is one such thing to share.
My own commitment to secular, (Neo-)Plationic moral realism is another. I’ve never been shy or quiet about having well thought views in general. But I do recognize that this topic may code as boring to some, a compound on me seeming as inexpert or unqualified to render verdicts on it. (Still, he persisted.)
Thank you for reading this. It will stay free, not just for the initial four to six weeks, but forever. Consider it my first (and probably last) major rendering on the topic. For myself, as a writer driven principally by my own knowledge and interests, yes, but also crucially for you, the person who may well get something out of it. (I sure hope so.)
Bibliography and Further Reading
Core Metaethics — Foundational Texts
Plato. Euthyphro. (~399 BCE) — The source. Short, readable, still undefeated.
Mackie, J.L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Penguin, 1977. — Primary source for error theory and the queerness argument.
Moore, G.E. Principia Ethica. Cambridge UP, 1903. — Open question argument; foundation of non-naturalism.
Moral Realism — Natural and Non-Natural
Enoch, David. Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism. Oxford UP, 2011. — Best contemporary defense of non-naturalist realism. Accessible.
Shafer-Landau, Russ. Moral Realism: A Defence. Oxford UP, 2003. — Rigorous non-naturalist case; good on companions-in-guilt.
Railton, Peter. “Moral Realism.” Philosophical Review 95.2 (1986): 163–207. — Canonical naturalist realism paper.
Sturgeon, Nicholas. “Moral Explanations.” In Morality and Moral Theory, 1985. — Cornell Realism’s best statement.
Harris, Sam. The Moral Landscape. Free Press, 2010. — Culturally influential; philosophically undercooked. Useful foil.
Anti-Realism
Ayer, A.J. Language, Truth and Logic. Gollancz, 1936. — Emotivism at its bluntest.
Gibbard, Allan. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Harvard UP, 1990. — Sophisticated expressivism.
Blackburn, Simon. Ruling Passions. Oxford UP, 1998. — Quasi-realism’s fullest statement.
Miscellaneous, Reference / Survey
Murphy, Mark. God and Moral Law. Oxford UP, 2011. — Serious philosophical engagement with theistic ethics.
Rawls, John. “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory.” Journal of Philosophy 77.9 (1980): 515–572. — Primary source for constructivism.
Korsgaard, Christine. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge UP, 1996. — Best constructivist account of moral obligation.
Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford UP, 1984. — More focused on personal identity, but still inclusive of, and significantly relevant to, moral philosophy. Landmark.
Shafer-Landau, Russ, ed. Oxford Studies in Metaethics (annual). — The field’s premier journal anthology. Dip in anywhere.
This was great, Quinn! I loved my ethics courses in college and at grad school, but it’s been a looong time for both. Good to have a refresher.
This is excellent, grounded in the texts and provides a compelling overview of the compass of metaethics. It took me back to my undergraduate philosophy and ethics courses, with both joy and curiosity. I might have to pull out some of my old books for a reread.