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This chapter discusses the philosophies of Harman and Mackie with a view to highlighting six claims of central concern: (1) whether issues of objectivity should be raised ‘reflexively’ at the meta-level of enquiry; (2) whether the best account of objectivity will essentially vindicate itself in its own terms; (3) the reducibility of moral properties figuring in moral explanations; (4) whether moral explanations are ever the best explanations of belief; (5) the appropriateness in this context of a causal theory of knowledge; and (6) whether the concepts deployed in morality are to a certain extent local or perspectival in the sense of tied in to our particular sensibilities. It is argued that the framework of minimalism about truth is the best way of prosecuting debates over objectivity.

Many philosophers maintain that common sense is committed to a kind of moral objectivism. This chapter exploits recent empirical work to defend this claim. The chapter also maintains that the account of moral judgment developed in the volume contributes to a familiar Humean argument against moral objectivism. However, even if the commonsense commitment to moral objectivity is wrong, that does not immediately lead to an “error theory” according to which all commonsense moral judgments are false since they all presuppose objectivity. Rather, there are fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind that need to be settled before we can determine whether error theory follows. In any case, recent evidence suggests that many of the central characteristics of moral judgment can be preserved in the absence of a commitment to objectivity.

John Mackie argued that God's perfect goodness is incompatible with his failing to actualize the best world that he can actualize. And God's omnipotence is incompatible with his being unable to actualize a morally perfect world. Mackie was entirely right. If God predicts that every significantly free essence always goes right only if every significantly free essence always freely goes right. But then Mackie's conclusion follows. But the chapter also offers three Impossibility Arguments which show that it is impossible that, necessarily, God actualizes the best possible world or that, necessarily, God actualizes a morally perfect world or that, necessarily, God actualizes a good enough world. The logical problem of evil is necessarily unsound. It is true in every possible world that God can actualize a morally perfect world, but it is false that, necessarily, God can actualize a morally perfect world only if he does actualize a morally perfect world.

The moral error theorist faces many kinds of opposition. One kind of opponent offers an identity claim between moral properties and certain naturalistic properties (e.g., of the format “Goodness = N-ness”). Usually the error theorist will object to the plausibility of this identity claim, but sometimes another kind of defense of the error theory is possible: when there is uncertainty whether the description of the naturalistic property in question (“N-ness”) even succeeds in denoting anything. Perhaps the naturalistic description is incomplete, such that we can be confident that it fails to denote. Or perhaps the naturalistic description leaves it open whether it denotes anything; the advocate of the theory assumes that it does, but there are serious grounds for doubt. If we take such an identity claim seriously, but there exists doubt about whether the right-hand side of the equation denotes anything, then there is equal doubt about whether the left-hand side, the moral descriptor, denotes anything. Thus the would-be moral naturalist is, or may be, unwittingly advocating a moral error theory. Examples of this mistake are canvassed, including dispositional theories of moral value and virtue ethics.

There is often thought to be an asymmetry between belief and desire, such that belief is more rational than desire, or possessed of cognitive content that desire lacks. In this chapter, it is argued that this sort of asymmetry thesis is difficult to sustain when beliefs and desires are thought of as propositional attitudes. The most common arguments for the asymmetry view all depend upon a problematic form of epistemic foundationalism. When this sort of foundationalism is rejected, there is no reason to treat desires, or preferences more generally, as less susceptible to rational deliberation and control than beliefs.

This chapter lays out the central elements of non-theistic robust normative realism. It pays particular attention to the supervenience of moral properties upon non-moral properties, addressing challenges to such supervenience from John Mackie, Mark Schroeder, Frank Jackson, Campbell Brown, and Tristram McPherson. At the heart of the defense against these challenges is Michael DePaul’s view that we must distinguish between supervenience and a more robust sort of dependence relation—the making relation. It is suggested that the making relation is best understood as a robust sort of causation. The final section of the chapter begins to contrast non-theistic robust normative realism with theistic approaches to ethics: it is argued that whereas proponents of theistic versions of moral realism seek to make God the foundation of objective moral truth, it is at least as plausible to construe objective moral truth as not needing an external foundation at all.

Even if according to all plausible theories of distributive justice, spending more on the care and cure of patients suffering from mental illness should be a priority rather than on marginal life extension, this will not happen. The reason has to do with fear of death and human irrationality. Does the fact that we will not abide by any one of the theories, even if we are convinced that it is true, mean that there is something wrong with it? Does our reluctance to act on the theories mean that they must be false? I think not. Here I avail myself in my argument of moral realism. If there is a truth in the matter, there is no reason to believe that the correct moral theory must be such that we abide by it, once we accept it (theoretically speaking) as true. This means that our unwillingness to live according to the theories does not show that they are unreasonable. The problem lies not with the theories themselves but rather with our unwillingness to abide by them. We are to blame, not abstract moral theory.