Quietism
Abstract
Metaethical quietists agree with realists that moral judgments express beliefs and that some of those beliefs are true. But, quietists continue, this is so even though moral truths lacks truth-makers. To its advocates—including McDowell (1979), Lovibond (1983), Nagel (1997), Dworkin (1996), Rorty (1998), Kramer (2009), Parfit (2011), Scanlon (2014), Crary (2016), and Sepielli (2022)—quietism offers a simple way out of an otherwise intractable quagmire. To its detractors, what it offers is either utterly opaque or unacceptably anti-realist. That charge partly stems from the observation that most quietists mainly offer a negative program—as in Parfit's claim that normative properties exist "in a non-ontological sense" (2011: 747). This chapter critically evaluates the two leading accounts of quietism as a positive program: Scanlon's Being Realistic About Reasons and Sepielli's Pragmatist Quietism.