Abstract

I am exceedingly grateful to John Doris, Josh Gert and Valerie Tiberius for their gracious, thoughtful and penetrating commentaries. They have each brought out aspects of The Emotional Construction of Morals that are both core to the project and in need of further elaboration and defence. Or, better than ‘defence’, I should say discussion, since I take many of these issues to be unsettled. Also, the commentaries are refreshingly constructive. In a limited space, they manage to advance substantive theses about the nature of morality. These are not book reviews; they are significant contributions to the literature. Tiberius stakes out a subtle strategy for rendering relativism irrelevant. Gert offers a rosy new way of viewing the analogy between morals and secondary qualities. Doris crafts an innovative story about why history should matter to moralists. In my replies, I offer some reasons for upholding the perspective charted out in ECM, but my thinking about all of these issues has been deepened by the exchange