Why Do You Believe Moral Realism?

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Lee: Why do I believe moral realism and then why do I favor the non-naturalism? Is that okay? Or like that? Yeah. Well, if you think back to the taxonomy I gave earlier, one way to see the attractions of moral realism is by seeing what's problematic with the opponents. It's not necessarily just an argument from elimination, but it helps to put the attractions of realism into sharp focus,. So if you've got a nihilist version, I think I myself think that's a version of last resort. And my thought is that when doing philosophy, there's no alternative but to rely at various junctures on our intuitions.

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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