What Happened to Good and Evil?

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I think there is a difference between morals and purposes, let's say. The most compact way of describing what the physical things going on in the world might be in terms of purposes. Whereas I think that morals are more subjective than that. Both of them have this character that they can play an explanatory role at some level of description but not at another one. And therefore you wouldn't call them fundamental pieces of the architecture of reality. But people have different views about what the fundamentality amounts to.

Despite occasional and important disagreements, most people are in rough agreement about what it means to be moral, to do the right thing. There’s much less agreement about why we should be moral, or even what kind of answer to that question could be convincing. Philosopher Russ Shafer-Landau is one of the leading proponents of moral realism — the view that objective moral truths exist independently of human choices. That’s not my own view, but ethics and meta-ethics are areas in which I think it’s wise to keep an open mind and listen to smart people who disagree. This conversation offers food for thought for people on either side of this debate.

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Russ Shafer-Landau received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Arizona. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Among his numerous books are Moral Realism: A Defense and Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? He is the editor of Oxford Studies in Metaethics, and is the founder and organizer of the annual Madison Metaethics Workshop.

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