Moral Objectivity without Moral Facts

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Manfred Harth
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy ; Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 290859428

Recently non-naturalist realism, i.e. the thesis that the world contains epistemically independent, irreducibly moral facts, shows a notable revival and increase in attention. To considerable extent this is due to David Enoch’s influential book “Taking Morality Seriously”. On the opposite, antirealist side of the debate, mostly non-cognitivist and relativist theories are discussed today. A position “in-between”, i.e. antirealism that is neither relativist nor non-cognitivist nor an error-theory, only gets marginal attention, although a very prominent philosopher, Crispin Wright, has introduced this position into the debate years ago and has further developed it since then in several articles. However, such objectivist antirealism is quite attractive: on the one side, it avoids the notorious problems of relativism and the problematic semantic reconstructions of non-cognitivism and error-theory; on the other side, it shares the crucial virtues of realism without catching its epistemological problems. In the current project, this objectivist shape of antirealism has been substantiated mostly in comparison to its robust realist rival. Enoch’s attempt to answer the crucial epistemological question – How are our moral beliefs correlated with the epistemically and causally independent facts? – has been shown to be utterly problematic. Since antirealism doesn’t face such kind of problem, the objectivist antirealism advocated in the current project turned out to have the edge over realism. Even though realism has a slight advantage as regards a further challenge that arises from the argument from faultless disagreement – antirealist have to adopt a non-standard conception of truth and to revise logic –, objectivist antirealism, on balance, is the much more plausible position. However, so far in the project, no positive argument has been taken into consideration that by itself speaks in favour of objectivist antirealism. This is to be made up for in the continuation of the project. The basic idea is this. The two arguments put forward in “Taking Morality Seriously” in favour of robust realism shall be made useful for objectivist antirealism. The first argument speaks “solely” in favour of objectivism, anyway, and, therefore, can be directly adopted by objectivist antirealists provided it can be defended against its critics. With respect to the second, more important argument that is intended to support robust realism it shall be argued that it doesn’t show so much as it is supposed to show, viz. the plausibility of realism, but rather that it solely shows the plausibility of objectivism. If compelling, this argument will offer good reasons that speak in favour of objectivist antirealism. Finally, for completing the overall project, the results shall be brought together and published in a book – working title “Moral Objectivity without Moral Facts”.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants