The epistemological challenge to metanormative realism: how best to understand it, and how to cope with it

Philosophical Studies 148 (3):413-438 (2009)
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Abstract

Metaethical—or, more generally, metanormative— realism faces a serious epistemological challenge. Realists owe us—very roughly speaking—an account of how it is that we can have epistemic access to the normative truths about which they are realists. This much is, it seems, uncontroversial among metaethicists, myself included. But this is as far as the agreement goes, for it is not clear—nor uncontroversial—how best to understand the challenge, what the best realist way of coping with it is, and how successful this attempt is. In this paper I try, first, to present the challenge in its strongest version, and second, to show how realists—indeed, robust realists—can cope with it. The strongest version of the challenge is, I argue, that of explaining the correlation between our normative beliefs and the independent normative truths. And I suggest an evolutionary explanation as a way of solving it

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David Enoch
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Citations of this work

Evolutionary Debunking of Moral Realism.Katia Vavova - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (2):104-116.
Evolutionary Debunking Arguments.Guy Kahane - 2010 - Noûs 45 (1):103-125.
Debunking arguments.Daniel Z. Korman - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (12):e12638.
Psychophysical Harmony: A New Argument for Theism.Brian Cutter & Dustin Crummett - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion.

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References found in this work

On the Plurality of Worlds.David K. Lewis - 1986 - Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell.
What We Owe to Each Other.Thomas Scanlon (ed.) - 1998 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
The View From Nowhere.Thomas Nagel - 1986 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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