Morality and Constructivism

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I think that some people you know we have examples of people who just won't see reality for what it is let's forget about moral reality for right now. It's possible for someone to just be blind to the moral equality of a woman or an African American and there's nothing you can say. I'm not saying this is your view but let's just take a simple kind of relativist view about morality according to which morality is grounded in some kind of social or cultural consensus. whatever follows from the from the deep morays of a culture or society is what's morally right.

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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