Is Moral Realism False?

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How do I know objectively and definitively what the right answer is? How could I possibly know, not realistically, but in potential? How couldI? Good. So yeah, so taking that way, it's an invitation for the realist to explain how it is, sorry, my kind of non-naturalism. But for someone like me who thinks that morality is really in more features are discontinuous from scientific features of the world, then whatever standard scientific means of gaining access to the natural world are,. they're not going to be sufficient to get us moral knowledge. And again, there are different epistemologies.

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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