Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism

This book develops, argues for, and defends a strongly realist and objectivist view of ethics and normativity more broadly. This view - according to which there are perfectly objective, universal, moral, and other normative truths that are not in any way reducible to other, natural truths - is familiar, but this book is the first in-detail development of the positive motivations for the view into full-fledged arguments. And when the book turns defensive - defending Robust Realism against traditional objections - it mobilizes the original positive arguments for the view to help with fending off the objections. The main underlying motivation for Robust Realism developed in the book is that no other metaethical view can vindicate our taking morality seriously. The positive arguments developed here - the argument from the deliberative indispensability of normative truths, and the argument from the moral implications of metaethical objectivity (or its absence) - are thus arguments for Robust Realism that are sensitive to the underlying, pre-theoretical motivations for the view.