Acta Anal (2009) 24:4361

DOI 10.1007/s12136-009-0045-5

The End of Moral Realism?

Steven Ross

Received: 16 December 2008 / Accepted: 16 January 2009 / Published online: 5 February 2009
# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract The author considers how constructivism, presently known to us

essentially as a theory for generating rules of social cooperation, embodies a certain
conception of justification that in turn may be thought of as a general theory. It is
argued that moral realism and projectivism are by turns platitudinous and
unsatisfactory as conceptions of justification; by contrast the general conception of
justification in constructivism makes sense of reason giving and coherent rivalry.
The author argues that once the right picture of justification is in place, the picture
constructivism illustrates or embodies, the problem of moral ontology disappears.

Keywords Constructivism . Justification theory . Moral realism . Projectivism .

Norm-expressivism

Appealing as constructivist arguments may be, at least to some of us, it is not

obvious that constructivism can be construed as a meta-ethical doctrine. One of the
obstacles to doing so is what I will call the domain problem. Constructivism seems
to be a theory that speaks only to a very specific domain of moral life, albeit a very
important one: that (roughly) of identifying the fundamental principles of social
cooperation (Scanlon), or the principles that ought to determine the basic structure of
society (Rawls), or anything else along these lines.1 Constructivist arguments do not,
apparently, say anything about e.g., what we might owe to the politically persecuted
in Tibet, whether rudeness may sometimes be a virtue, whether capital punishment is
ever defensible, the justifiability of affirmative action, and so forth (contrast it with
1
By constructivism I mean arguments like Rawls or Scanlons that propose to understand right or fair
principles as those that would be agreed to by rational agents under appropriately constrained conditions.
The term, constructivism, awkward as it is, refers to the way such principles represent a solution to the
problem of fair cooperation (and these principles are a construction), and to the related idea that, apart
from such a solution, there is no further way of identifying what is right or fair.
S. Ross (*)
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Hunter College/CUNY, 369 Seventh
Ave. #3, New York, NY 10001, USA
e-mail: sonokal@earthlink.net
44 S. Ross

utilitarianism in this regard). That constructivism as it is presently before us appears

to address only a particular moral problem, and so has a correspondingly limited
scope, seems undeniable. Yet constructivism also seems to illustrate or embody a
distinctive conception of justification, and I am interested in whether this conception
of justification can be separated from the context in which it is presently best known
to us and characterized more generally. If so, it might in that form support, or more
accurately, lead to, a distinctive meta-ethical conception.
That at least is the thought I will be exploring, somewhat speculatively, here. In a
sense, this is a kind of bookend project to the one of Rawls later years. There,
Rawls sought to interpret constructivism in an as pragmatic, as non-philosophical a
manner as possible, handling, he thought, the problem of consensus across different
conceptions of the good in the way he thought least vulnerable to objection.2 Here I
(with a great deal less talent) will move in the other direction. I will seek to identify
the abstract conception of justification that animates the constructivist argument in
say Rawls Kantian Construction in Moral Theory3 and A Theory of Justice, and
speculate on how this conception of justification, when abstractly understood, might
be applied generally, which is to say, to any moral context whatsoever. My thought
is this: constructivism as it presents itself to us today is something of a hybrid. On
one hand it is an argument designed for a specific task, that of identifying what
social or political principles of cooperation are best. On the other, it is a strategy that
embodies a certain way of thinking about justification, what it means to say this is
the right principle, or, if you will, what the magic word right means in that
remark. And here, constructivism offers us a method that can, I think, be thought of
generally, described apart from the context with which it is, for the most part,
presently identified. I do not think that outside of this context, which again, to
repeat, is that of identifying fundamental principles of cooperation, we will get very
decisive results with this approach very often, but to me, that is actually a sign of
having got things right. The right conception of justification will indeed give us
decisive objective answers in moral life some of the time, but not very much of the
time, because in fact, such answers are not very often out there to be had.
I will begin my argument somewhat obliquely. I will begin by rehearsing what
undeniably are meta-ethical views, realism and projectivism, (and to the extent it is a
distinct view, norm-expressivism), and say why none of these will give us a
satisfactory conception of justification. To be fair, there are versions of realism and
projectivism, or theses we may call realist or projectivist, respectively, which are
compatible with a satisfactory conception of justification, but these turn out to be
trivial ontological claims, platitudinous, bearing no deep philosophical content. On
the contrary side of the ledger, to the extent realism and projectivism are understood
to give us distinct, substantive conceptions of justification, to that extent those meta-
ethical views are unsatisfactory, and we are driven to seek an alternative.
Constructivism, suitably developed away from any particular context, is that
alternative. Because I think constructivism embodies or illustrates the right

2
Obviously, I have the arguments of Rawls Political Liberalism and Law of Peoples in mind.
3
John Rawls (1980)
The End of Moral Realism? 45

conception of justification generally, it will also be compatible with those

ontological theses of realism and projectivism that are true but trivial.

1 Moral Realism

What a term! I propose the following taxonomy. On one hand one might think there
are non-natural moral things, as perhaps Moore and Plato did. We can call this
version of moral realism Platonic moral realism. Or one might think that moral states
supervene upon natural states in a straightforward type-type wayit would seem
Peter Railton holds this viewso that moral terms refer to natural things, just
obliquely.4 So far so good; we have two versions of moral realism, in one of them,
moral terms refer to non-natural (moral) things, and in the other, moral terms refer,
via a straightforward type-type identity relation, to natural ones.
To this let me add a third, which helps differentiate the second type from what I
will call the trivial or platitudinous version of moral realism. Suppose one said:
whenever a moral term is justly applied to anything, that thing is necessarily in the
natural world, and so can also be picked out within a wholly natural vocabulary. I
will call this token-moral realism and I want to stress how little this says. This claim
is consistent with any sort of autonomous view of moral language and justification;
it simply holds, rightly, that the referents of moral talk are in the natural world, no
more. It does not hold that the natural facts in the world are what drive the
justification or moral-attribution story. Let me illustrate the point. So if you are a
Kantian say, you are certainly likely to believe that the intentions that pass the
categorical imperative test are realized in the brain and once there, can be also
picked out by some naturalistic vocabularywhy not?but you hardly hold that the
natural facts about these brain states are what explains why some maxims pass and
others do not, why this maxim to promise falsely is immoral. If you are an
Aristotelian, you surely think that virtuous actions are in the world and so (of course)
can be picked out by whatever natural physical vocabulary you like, but you do not
think that the natural vocabulary, the physical facts plus the causal laws, determines,
or gives us the truth conditions for, what makes that action courageous as opposed to
rash. Token moral realism leaves utterly open how moral language operates, how
moral justification is to be described, and simply says: however it operates, whatever
the right justification story turns out to be, the referent of that story will be in the
world. So far this tells us (almost) nothing, and so with claims like these I think no
one needor even candisagree. But by contrast, and this is important, the
Platonic moral realist and the natural type-type supervenience moral realist must
hold that the thing the moral talk refers to does determine the truth conditions for
moral attribution, and so does determine what we say is the right account of
justification. This is an important claim. And it is these substantive versions of moral
realism that cannot be right.
And why is that? My reasons for thinking so are several-fold, but because I do not
think anyone really thinks morality could possibly be this way, be captured in this

4
See Peter Railton (1986)
46 S. Ross

sort of account, I will be as brief as possible. There is of course before the Platonic
realist the familiar unhappiness with the ontology, a problem the type-type naturalist
to be sure escapes. But the naturalist has the counterpart difficulty of affirming a
most implausible identity. There is simply no way any non-vacuously identified set
of natural properties can be said to track or constrain the justified attribution of moral
terms across all cases (this of course is what really gives the so-called open
question test its apparent force). The Platonist gets the non-identity right but posits
the wrong sort of ontology. The naturalist gets the ontology right but posits the
wrong sort of identity.
I appreciate that I have so far simply made a set of accusations; I have not yet
proved them. But I dont plan to rehearse the familiar arguments that support these
charges, because to me, more important than these difficulties with ontology or
identify is the following artificiality that both these versions of moral realism share,
however much they otherwise differ. In both views, if we are consistent, by treating
moral states of affairs as facts out there in the natural or non-natural world, we have
implausibly turned justification into a species of fact detection. Moore, to his credit,
embraced this strange consequence quite straightforwardlywe justify our belief
that X is good by simply pointing to the goodness out there that caused us to see it.
And it is not the obscurity of either the ontology or the epistemology that I am
drawing attention to here. It is the same account of justification under type-type
naturalist realism too. There is a fact out there, we detect itand the justification of
a moral judgment must then come down to the rehearsal of how or why. If we demur
here, and say this is not quite fair: it is not just the facts themselves that explains
our judgment; our interest in these facts also plays an important role in the
justification and attribution story, then we have shifted ground and are no longer
faithful realistsindeed, we are now flirting with mere token realism, since
consistently described intereststhe expressive, the original, the nautically stable,
the just5invariably take diverse objects, naturalistically described.6 If it is not the
fact in the world that explains the attribution but something elsean interest, a
teleology, a stand alone normative conceptthen what does it mean to call yourself
a realist to begin with, save that the objects of our attribution are, whatever else
they are, also in the world? And this is, as I have said, is an innocuous claim, one no
one need deny. If the account of why the attribution goes as it does is not tracking
some object-kind, but instead follows some stand alone normative set of concepts,
we are no longer realistswe are instead simply what I would prefer to call
referentialists. If we try to say it does track some natural thing or object-kindas
Railton doesthen we are just wrong. That view should be set aside as implausible,
if not, from the start, then certainly upon reflection.

5
Of course, in including the just in this list, I am being intentionally provocative. It seems so obvious
that other these norms, for example the expressive, cannot admit of type-type identity I enjoy adding a
moral term to take advantage of the thought. I acknowledge that this sort of talk is no argument and
shamelessly assumes one side of issue here against someone like Railton. This is fine; at this point I am
content to point out the assumption just seems so much more natural than its counterpart.
6
This is not always soour interest in sex or even in something as diverse as the erotic, may well be
constrained by certain natural factsthis is quite possible. I do not wish to rule this possibility out from
the start. I very much doubt moral life may admit of that sort of analysis, but that is exactly the sort of
analysis that would vindicate substantive naturalistic moral realism as I understand it.
The End of Moral Realism? 47

2 Projectivism

Thus realism is either a platitudinous claim about the objects of moral attribution or a
serious and implausible one about how moral attribution is in fact determined.7 What of
projectivism? Here too, we may distinguish roughly two kinds of claims. Projectivism
may be a general and essentially negative claim about ontology, about what is out
there. The projectivist says there is no person independent moral reality our moral
judgments track (unlike our remarks about objects in space say, which do track a
person independent reality).8 As such, the projectivist simply affirms the falsity of
extreme or implausible moral realism, no more. And since extreme moral realism of
this kind is implausible, this tooits converseis merely a philosophical platitude
with no controversial content. One rarely calls oneself a projectivist about art or about
law because one believes, (and who doesnt?) there is no art reality or law reality
out there our aesthetic or legal claims mirror. Who would even bother to say that?
(perhaps some Frenchman from the 1980s; I cannot think of anyone else). So, as an
ontological claim about what is out there, projectivism is just something like
naturalism broadly understood and of no deep interest. And by this I mean, here, as
was the case with token moral realism, nothing about what the right justification story
is yet follows. We are still yet to say. Consider the kinds of justification stories we
would offer for: Constitutional legal argument, literary criticism, etiquette, finding
something spicy, the rules of a board game, on some views, even mathematics
consider how different these stories would be, how different the role of convention
would be in each, how different the idea of objectivity might be in each, and how in
none of these do we speak of any counterpart legal, literary, board game or taste
reality out there. So from this claim, simply that there is no such thing as a
counterpart moral reality, absolutely nothing about what the right justification story is
with respect to moral life has yet been implied. Consistent with what has been said so
far, we could call Kant a projectivist. He hardly holds the categorical imperative test
mirrors some moral reality out there. He of course feels there are certain
descriptions of persons that are true, and morality would be very strange if it did not
take these into account, but that is very much a different matter. The same point can be
rehearsed for Mill. There are Mill thinks facts about persons no morality should fail to
consider, (obviously, their capacity for pleasure and pain), but there is no fact in the
world the moral principle, promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number
mirrors. Are we to say Mill and Kant are projectivists? Well, we could, in this
strange, attenuated sense of the termthey do not understand the world to include
stand alone moral facts that justified moral principles match or mirror. But so
what? When that is said, and set aside, what do we now know about their moral

7
Obviously, I do not mean here by realism objectivism. To hold that certain moral judgments may be
objectively justified, as say Rawls does, or Kant does, is not the same as to be a realist in the sense I am
using the term here. I am very anxious to draw this distinction and resist the conflation of any view that
speaks of moral judgments admitting of an objective justification, (again, such as Kant, or Rawls), with
realism which is best thought of as an ontological-justification doctrinethere are things, either in the
world or in some non-natural world, that explain why a moral attribution is so. To use the term realism
in such a way so that Moore and Kant, or Moore and Mill, are both the same, both realists, is just not
at all helpful.
8
See Simon Blackburn (1988)
48 S. Ross

theories, about how that is right or that is good are actually to be understood?
Almost nothing (that is, we know they do not understand such expressions in
implausible ways; that is all).
On the other hand, more interestingly, projectivism may be understood to speak to
just this issue; it may be understood as a theory about how moral judgments are formed
or how moral attribution is to be characterized. This is what it means to call Hume a
projectivist, for example. Moral attributions may appear to be the detection of some
property true of the action or person (the willful murder is vicious) but in fact they
are something elsenot the detection of some fact, but a reaction to some fact, which
in turn has a distinctive phenomenology or feel, which inclines us to act or react, and
which we then project onto the set of facts that brought it about, seeing such facts in
that light or through that lens. In the certain contemporary versions of projectivism,
sometimes called expressivism, the phenomenological aspect of the argument is
dropped and the emphasis is on a language or structure of moral judgmentsthus
Alan Gibbard or R.M. Hare.9 Moral judgments follow from more general moral
principles (Hare) or life plans (Gibbard) that we have affirmed because we can accept
the consequences of such principles or plans in all relevant respects. Such views are
still rightly called projectivist because the world bears moral content only through
some plan or principle that is projected onto the world; in turn, this plan or principle
cannot be thought of as true or false, as getting any fact in the world wrong or right. It
is not that kind of thing. It expresses a preference, an idea of what one wants, can
affirm, can see as okay to do.10 Imagine an artist who feels a strong preference for
abstract expressionism over figurative paintingthis value utterly structures his life.
But no one, including the artist himself, thinks of the sentence Abstract
expressionism is in all ways superior to figurative painting as expressing a fact in
the world he was lucky enough to detect. This is how the projectivist wants to
understand moral judgment and moral attribution throughout. Of course, this claim
entails the (trivial) ontological thesis that there is no moral reality out there. But it
is much more interesting because, obviously, it is not itself entailed by it.
Since realism, understood as a strong ontological claim, cannot be right, it follows that
projectivism, understood merely as the denial of that claim, gets something right all too
easily. When understood as a view of moral judgment formation however, it is not right
at all. Why? Well, as the example of the artist and his preferences suggests, it is not
because this model could never provide an accurate characterization of value and value
formation anywhere. Projectivism draws a lot of its power, and rightly, from the fact that
values sometimes are exactly what the projectivist or expressivist says they are
postures towards the world that in no way reflector seek to reflectfacts in the world.
But it cannot be the right account of moral value in the central case. And this is because
we cannot, when within projectivism, represent certain things in the world, for example,
the autonomy of persons, as deserving a certain sort of consideration. Or, to put the same
point another way: the idea of what it is for a fact in the world to deserve a certain sort
of regard cannot be understood in a satisfactory way.

9
See R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals, (Oxford, 1952) and Alan Gibbard, Thinking How to Live
(Harvard, 2003). This is not always so; John McDowell carries on the sensibility tradition. See his Values
and Secondary Properties in Honderich Value and Objectivity.
10
This is of course Gibbards remarkable expression, in Thinking How To Live
The End of Moral Realism? 49

This is an important and elusive point, and I will take some time to make it. Let me
begin with a suggestion: think of our evaluative life as lying along a certain sort of
spectrum, as more or less reactive, as more or less infused with intentional content. At
one end of the spectrum are those evaluations that are so closely tied to reaction or taste
we may even balk at calling them evaluationsour responses to food for example.
Finding beauty in nature, or in a pattern of cloth, cannot be far behind. The
explanation for why we find the sushi tasty or the aurora borealis gorgeous lies,
fundamentally, in us, in the contingent facts of our biology. When we consider works
of art, particularly complex ones, the story begins to change. Here we are responding
to intentional properties too (indeed, where the art work has no important sensory
component, as is the case with literature, then intentional properties will be more or
less all there is to respond to). To find The Golden Bowl stylistically and
psychologically sophisticated is to find what James so painstakingly put there. To
find De Koonings mature work both expressive and original is to see features that
are tied to a long historical story in which artists explore their subject and repertoire
with increasing imagination and self consciousness. And here, the idea of
justification, of criticism, gets a foothold for just these reasons. It would be hard
to see the point of writing at length as to why the sushi deserves the praise I give it to
those who just do not like this taste (or even to those who dothe point is not about
disagreement but about what lies behind whatever agreement there is). The same
point holds for our rapturous sighs before the evening sky. If there are those who
dont have the reaction, we can hardly accuse them of failing to see some fact, of
failing to give whatever facts are out there, the evaluation such facts deserve. Nor do
we represent our reactions, however widespread, as this sort of thing to ourselves.
This idea, the idea of some consideration in the world that deserves a certain sort of
evaluative acknowledgement can get no foothold here, not yet.
The art case is more complicated. There is no question but that the later James is
complex. People may or may not be moved by this fact, and it is here that criticism
often has a role, helping us not only see that so and so is the case, but how it is that
its being the case can underwrite a certain sort of engagement. However, given the
reasonable variation in what people can want from art, or the variation of interest
people may (quite legitimately) take in it, in the aesthetic case, we can make sense of
how certain statements are both objectively justified and yet, for all that, of limited
reach. Nevertheless, the idea of justification, and so of desert, very much gets off the
ground here. The intentional object (The Golden Bowl, the Sistine Chapel) has
certain (intentional, aesthetic) properties true of it and as such, we can speak of
certain attributions being deserved, certain others being unwarranted.
What would the projectivist say? Well, there is the annoyingly familiar ontological
pointthere is no art reality out thereart, as a practice, a form of life, is something
persons have constructed. Had persons been very different there would have been no art
(as indeed was the case for quite some timeunlike, needless to say, the objects of
natural science). No one ever thinks otherwise, so that point, presumably about ontology,
is not very important.11 As a view of value formation, projectivism, in its Humean or
secondary quality incarnation at least, fits the aesthetic case very badly (that is, it fits the

11
I dont like the projectivist getting to claim credit for this platitude with which no one disagrees but I
suppose Mackie and Blackburn were the first to trumpet this claim as central in their arguments.
50 S. Ross

intentional art object case very badly; it is perfect for our aesthetic responses to nature).
We cannot see The Golden Bowl as warranting or deserving the attribution of
stylistically complex because we cannot, within a fundamentally causal model,
make space for the idea of the deserved or merited at all.12 Clearly, we cannot,
when within a projectivist model, characterize the object of our reaction in a way that
draws on the language of normative accomplishment from the startthat would
violate the very point of the project, which is to present value states as in the world
only through our reactions. Such reactions cannot, clearly, be characterized as
acknowledgments of what is the case apart from them, not that is, consistent with what
this strand of projectivism demands. We might as well say the murder is vicious quite
independently of our response, and as a result, underwrites or deserves the reaction of
vicious we usually do in fact go on to have. I mean, of course, we could say this, for
indeed, something like this is in fact true, but then, clearly, we are no longer being
projectivists about value at all.
The projectivist/expressivist of Hare or Gibbard like stripe would have a different
reply entirely (and a more interesting one): the artificiality of a Humean model before
something like the central aesthetic case is unimportant it will be said, for the aesthetic
case and the moral one are quite disanalogous. In the moral context, we are uniquely
concerned with identifying principles by which we are to live; the aesthetic case
presents no comparable project.13 It is therefore unimportant whether a projectivist or
expressivist account fits what we think is right before art or art criticism (or anything
else along such lines)what matters is its independent power as a model for moral
life. And where moral life is concerned, the argument continues, we choose principles
or life plans that we can endorse or affirm. Further, we cannot think of the content of
such plans in any way as representations of anything. It is that second point that is the
especially important one here. Such plans are not to be thought of as beliefs about the
world that may be assessed for truth; rather such plans or principles are conceptions of
what one will do, or of what would be all right should anyone else do it.
A version of moral expressivism that need not ask, let alone worry, whether an
account along such lines would make any sense were it applied to any other
evaluative domain brings with it obvious strategic advantages. However, the earlier
problem, making sense of how certain facts in the world deserve a certain sort of
consideration remains very much the same. However we understand these plans or
principles, whatever language we think we can use to assess them, we cant, within
the constraints of the argument, say they recognize or acknowledge that which
deserves a certain sort of consideration. We cannot say for example that suffering or
autonomy deserves to count, in any plan, quite independently of whatever plan or
principle anyone actually takes up, because that would violate the fundamental idea
behind the argument, which is to present value as entering into the world only
through such plans or principles. Expressivists of an earlier generation, like Hare or Sartre,
acknowledged this consequence with a certain fatalistic shrugthere was a bracing
12
To his credit, McDowell concedes that the secondary property model, so useful a corrective to Mackies
queerness argument, as it counters Mackies claim that no fact could have an intrinsic connection to an
internal state, nevertheless cannot make space for the idea of the merited. See his Values and Secondary
Properties op. cit.
13
For the classic, and most provocative, version of this view, for this way of taking the contrast between
aesthetics and ethics, see Stuart Hampshires Logic and Appreciation The World Review, 1952.
The End of Moral Realism? 51

existentialist willingness to face the void, beret in hand, in those days. Nowadays,
expressivists like Gibbard and Blackburn prefer to reassure their readers, rehearsing, with
the charm of real estate brokers, the easy cases (e.g., that cruelty is wrong) in the
language of so-called quasi realism. Hare rehearsed what the Nazi justification of racial
supremacy argument looked like under his model and conceded that the right view of
moral language (i.e., his view) had the consequence that we could not say there was
anything objectively amiss and that this fact just had to be swallowed.14 The Nazi and
the liberal were, famously, objectively, philosophically, on a par, so long as the latter
really did comply with the constraints of universal principle formation and sincere
prescriptivism. We never hear that kind of admission now! But my point is not supposed
to be taken as an alarmist one. It is not as if I am unhappy with some meta-ethical views
consequences and then saying something like and God forbid we cannot say more than
that to the awful, awful Nazi! Rather I am making a philosophical point. There is
something really and truly wrong with a view that cannot make sense of there being
considerations, facts true of persons that deserve respect or weight of a certain kind,
quite apart from whatever choices or affirmations then get made.
I mean, of course, all this is just theory. I cannot point to some hard fact my
theory gets right theirs does not; I can only point out that the expressivist cannot
make sense of what I for my part very much do want to make sense of, which is the
very same thing that makes Mill and Kant so plausible and such irreplaceable figures
in our introduction to philosophy courses, and that is the idea that, as I say, there are
certain descriptions true of persons that ought to count (what these features are and
how they ought to count may be a subject of some dispute of coursebut that
should not obscure the deeper agreement). If we do not say this, or try to make sense
of this, we cannot speak of plans or principles as getting anything right, or failing to.
Conversely, (and perhaps, within the context of meta-ethics, this is the more
important way to put this point), if we are committed ahead of time through our non-
factualism about the moral to the idea that nothing in the world (when described
apart from any plans) can be thought of as having moral content, then we have also
committed ourselves ahead of time to denying that certain facts true of persons could
have moral importance just in virtue of the sorts of facts they are.
Of course, I do not deny that the expressivist can help himself to all the evolutionary-
naturalist talk he likes, and within that story, we can certainly explain how it is that most
people love their children or act decently without reference to anything so spooky (or
kooky) as being guided by some moral reality out there. But I take it as obvious that
where moral life is concerned, a purely naturalist or evolutionary story is of very limited
use to us. It is certainly of limited use before any moral-skeptical challenge, and the
contrast with skepticism in the epistemological context is worth pausing a moment to
rehearse. The person who really cannot be sure whether his senses give him truths about
the external world is a philosophical construction and no more, not something we need
ever worry about in the real world at all. Soothing naturalist reassurances do all the work
that needs to be done, herewhich is very little in the first place. But very awful moral
institutions or beliefsconsider, just for starters, slavery, sexual trafficking, the casual
use of tortureare not only as common as sand, they are often even historically

14
See the Toleration and Fanaticism chapter his Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 1963) for this bracingly
clear account.
52 S. Ross

dominant. No easy going reference to what is natural for us, what made sense from
a developmental standpoint, what evolution prefers, can possibly do any serious
work here. And so we are left with the fundamental point: as a general ontological
negative claim, projectivism or expressivism is true but uninteresting. It is just
naturalism broadly understood, as agnostic as to what the right justification story is as
a Quine-ian must be when asked his opinion of how best to understand legal
argument. As an account of value formation or value attribution it must be judged
unsatisfactory. It seems just flat out wrong to me that, prior to the affirmation of any
plan, prior to the endorsement of any conception of how to live or what is okay to
do, the fact that I have red hair and the fact that I can engage in rational deliberation
are ontologically, on a par. That just cannot be right. It is, in the end, the same old
problem. If we draw the fact-value distinction too rigidly, the world of facts becomes
uniformly inert with respect to value, and it is this uniformity, as well as the inertness,
that is then so implausible. Some facts matter, morally (my intentionality, my capacity
for pain), others (the number of hairs on my head) very much dont. If we cant
represent that, we have not done justice to one of the more intractable and I would
think undeniable bits of data that any moral theory needs to accommodate.
Projectivism or expressivism cannot do justice to this thought; their inability to do
so is woven into their commitment to non-factualism. Each must hold not just that
rightness or goodness cannot be thought of as a fact in the world (for this is so),
but that no fact in the world can be said to have moral weight in virtue of the sort of
fact it is. But this last claim is exactly what is not so. This is exactly what makes
projectivism and expressivism, in so far as they are interesting theories about value
and the world, just absolutely wrong.

3 Constructivism, I

So now to constructivism, which, it has been conceded, is not yet obviously a meta-
ethical view. But it does embody a certain conception of justification I wish to tease
out. And in developing this conception, I will want to underline the way the
constructivist argument, or constructivist conception of justification, (1) avoids the
mistake of strong realism, which is to say, it avoids a characterization of justification
that assimilates it to fact detection, and (2) avoids the mistake of projectivism, and is
able to make sense of how it is that certain facts, in particular, certain descriptions of
persons, deserve a certain sort of consideration in moral life, while others do not.15

15
Actually, I think both views often make both mistakes. Under the sensibility version of projectivism at least,
evaluative justification is also a species of fact detectionone just looks elsewhere, inward, and detects the
fact/ the response going on inside ones head. (Recall Hume in this regard.) That Moorean realism can make no
sense of why some fact-types matter more than others I take as obviousthe open question test makes sure of
that. Railton like realism is harder to assess in this regard. Some fact-types (e.g., social stability) and not others
will be reliably constitutive of goodness of course, but it is not obvious within the constraints of the theory that
this is something we can explain; it may be that this must just be presented as a brute contingent fact of
nature, like the way we happen to like the look of the evening sky and not the look of earthworms. However,
we need not settle this; it may be that a brute naturalistic explanation of what people like or value, while in
my lights unsatisfactory in terms of getting at the truth of moral life, is nevertheless a plausible philosophical
candidate. The main point survives. We have two mistakes here, presenting justification as a species of fact
detection and failing to make sense of why some facts but not others must matter in moral life. That the right
view should not make either of them is sufficient for my purposes here.
The End of Moral Realism? 53

Constructivism sees morality as a certain project, that of identifying fundamental

principles of cooperation. Perhaps this puts it needlessly strongly; there is no reason
for the constructivist to deny there are other matters included in the term morality
(say, identifying the qualities of character by which a man flourishes). But leaving
the perils, and charms, of essentialism aside, we may understand constructivism to
hold that morality at least includes this project, that this project is central to how we
understand the idea of morality, and so forth. And, what is crucial here, this project
has content. It is because of this, because of the content, that it is not mysterious why
certain facts about persons merit consideration. Given that we are interested in the
principles of norm governed cooperation, how can it be surprising that we are
interested in the intentionality of persons (say), and not in their hair? The idea of the
relevant and the not-relevant gets sorted or explained by the content of the project.
This is not to say it is always absolutely clear how the sorting is to go. We may agree
about the nature of the project generally understood and reasonably disagree about,
for example, whether our tendency to envy others is something we should take
seriously, consider as relevant. But on no account of any plausible theory of what
persons are, and what cooperation is, could my hair, its color, its thickness, or even
its sheen, ever matter. Within the constructivist argument, certain facts in the world
matter from the start, others do notjust like in real life. And this, I suggest, is a
very gratifying result for a theory to have.
Now, assume we have the initial components assembled: the nature of the project
has been described and the considerations that matter have been identified. The next
task lies in saying what the right principles are. As everyone knows, constructivism
resorts to a distinctive device, a distinctive conceit, here. We construct hypothetical
parties, in an imaginary situation, such that these parties and their circumstances
represent just those facts, and just those considerations, that are taken to matter,
given this project. For example, in Rawls argument, by imagining the parties
ignorant of certain facts about themselves yet desiring to do as well for themselves
as possible once the principles of social cooperation have been chosen, the veil of
ignorance presents one way of representing, and exploring, the idea of equal concern
for all. As a result, the principles these hypothetical parties would agree to, under
these circumstances, will express this norm (among others). I am not interested in
rehearsing the constructivist argument in detail here. What I am interested in
drawing attention to is rather the picture of justification that animates the
constructivist view, the sort of thing justification is here. So, to stay with this
example, to justify the difference principle is to show how it handles, in a
satisfactory way, the considerations we have identified as relevant, given the project
we have here taken up. Here, the considerations in play are, roughly, twofold: first,
that persons will, rightly, think of themselves as equally entitled to whatever equal
opportunity turns out to include, and second, that persons will find natural some
asymmetry of distribution outcome given asymmetry of talent or effort. The
difference principle is put forward as the most satisfactory way of handling these two
considerations. And, the hypothetical choice of the parties in the hypothetical choice
situation of the difference principle simply illustrates this claim. It is not some bit of
magic that for the first time makes it so. Presenting the parties as choosing the
difference principle simply illustrates, in a heuristic way, a claim or argument we can
make, and make sense of, quite apart from any such constructionand this would be
54 S. Ross

(again) the claim that, given that persons will think of themselves as equally entitled
to equal opportunity (when framing principles of social cooperation), and given that
differences in talent or effort are rightly thought of as having some influence on
distribution, the difference principle is the optimal means by which these
considerations can be reconciled. For the constructivist, to say of any principle that
it is right is really to say that it best handles the relevant considerations in light of the
project we have taken up. Of course, this claim is usually presented in different
termsit is said the two principles of justice are principles hypothetical parties
would choose under the right veil of ignorance. Fine. But to say these sorts of
things, that they would choose these principles is just to say they are the best,
the best way of handling or bringing forward the relevant considerations into
practice, given our project.
It is important to keep the relevant contrasts in mind too. Notice that we do not
detect goodness in the difference principle. Nor do we choose some conception of
what is okay to do that the difference principle then instrumentally serves. We do
not react to some fact in the world with some brute non-cognitive (but still somehow
evaluative) inner state. Rather, we show how a certain arrangement serves an
outcome. We show how the difference principle handles these considerations well,
perhaps even best, given this end. To say that some hypothetical self interested
parties under the right sort of veil of ignorance would choose the difference principle
is just a way of making, or illustrating, that argument. Given the things that count
about persons and their relation to one another when persons are thought of socially,
and given the project here, figuring out what the best principles of normative
cooperation are, the argument is that this distributive principle will be part of the
arrangement that best handles these considerations and serves this end. And that is a
real justification.
My claim here (among others) is that it is only when we conceive of justification
as having this sort of structurewhere principles are said to handle the relevant
considerations well (or are criticized for failing to do so), given the teleologythat
we can make sense of justification in a satisfactory way. It is only against this sort of
account that we dont turn a consideration into a fact that just causes another fact to
be true (supervenience realism), or a reaction to obtain (projectivism). Unsurpris-
ingly, as a corollary to this, it turns out that it is only when we think of justification
as having this sort of structure that we can make sense of reasonable rivalry across
different views too. It is entirely understandable, for example, that Nozick will argue
Rawls account of persons does not adequately capture the idea of entitlement
through effort, that this is a consideration, or fact about persons (the fact being that
persons do make things, and have well founded attitudes of ownership towards those
things) that he thinks is insufficiently acknowledged in the account Rawls offers.
Again, whether Nozick is right to say this is not my concern here (I believe he is
not); it is the reasonableness of the argument, the reasonableness of the
disagreement between the two views that I am trying to capture. Both are arguing
within this general teleology, and both are committed to finding principles that best
represent or handle the features of persons said to be relevant. The issue between
them lies in just how this fact about persons gets represented, in how much weight it
is given, and the degree to which it must be balanced against other considerations
that ought also to count. I think Rawls, for a variety of reasons, has the better
The End of Moral Realism? 55

argument here (if only because he has the more satisfactory way of understanding
equality of opportunity), but I detect no fact in saying this, nor do I simply chose a
norm that has it so. Rather, I make a judgment. I look at the considerations each is
willing to take account of, the descriptions of persons each puts forward as central,
the principles each offers that seem best to handle these considerations, given the
teleology in play, and judge which is best; which has the most satisfactory
description of persons, and the best way of carrying those descriptions forward into
principles of cooperation. Obviously, this is often going to be a complex judgment,
and contrasts between rivals will often be shifting matters of degreeagain,
gratifyingly, just as it is in real life.
But this very ordinary claim, this relatively non-controversial description of what
it is to compare plausible rival conceptions and judge one better than another as a
matter of degree, is, I submit, in fact very hard to capture when within realism or
projectivism. It is probably not even worth rehearsing the unsatisfactory nature of the
account a Moore like realist would give of coherent, or close, rivalry. But under
naturalist supervenience realism, the results are not much better. It is not merely that
we must see the rivalry along weirdly empirical lines, it is that we cannot really
capture the way these rivalries reflect reasonable differences about the relevant
normative conceptions in the first place. So, take this Rawls/Nozick rivalry. If I am a
supervenience realist along Railton-like lines, I have to believe that the right way to
think of this contest is as follows. Imagine the social world as Rawls would have it
arranged, well call that arrangement R, and imagine the social world as Nozick
would have it, call that N. Since I believe that goodness is caused by or constituted
by some specific type of natural fact (we can leave open at this point just what that
fact, or facts, might be), I have to believe that either the underlying facts in R
(whatever they are) cause more goodness than those in N, or that it is the other way
round. The idea that this is really what the dispute between them is strikes me as, as I
say, quite weird. Could we really think of this dispute as translating into our
shuttling between the two societies with our goodness meters, our moral Geiger
counters taking readings and clicking away? But there is a philosophically
interesting reason why this seems more like a sketch out of Monty Python than
anything like political argument. By treating goodness as a fact, as governed by truth
conditions in the way facts are, we cannot capture what theory really does, which is
offer proposals for how our normative notions are to be understood. Suppose we did
set up these two arrangements, N and R, our very own moral laboratory. The thing
is, when Nozick and his fellow libertarians look at N, they (understandably) will see
or detect a just state. Most of us do not. I am not saying there are no constraints on
the concept, or that it is all in the eye of the beholder, or any other implausible
thing along such lines. Just because the realist is wrong about normative judgment
(turning it into fact detection) does not mean the projectivist is right about factsit
is not as if any arrangement of underlying facts, call it H-S-B-P (yep, once again, of
hair styles arranged in a beauty parlor) could intelligibly support a rival moral view.
What I am saying is that the idea of plausible rivals among normative theories
cannot be made sense of if we construe goodness to be a kind of fact that in turn is
caused or constituted by other facts. If I think Nozick is wrong, it is not wrong in
the sense that someone might be wrong if he mistakenly thought there was more heat
in one object than in another, where what heat is cannot be in dispute between us.
56 S. Ross

We have to make sense of libertarianism as an alternative way of construing the relevant

concepts, more like the way abstract art, whatever else it was, was an alternative
proposal for how to understand the idea of painting. These normative proposals can be
unsatisfactory, inferior to their best rivals (as Nozicks is) or all sorts of other things
it is not as if there is no room for evaluating these offerings, and doing so aggressively.
But we have to make sense of the way in which the project here, generally understood,
while bearing upon the theories we offer, cannot be said to determine them. There is
room for invention, originality and insight in normative theory too. In moral life, and
in moral argument, it cannot be right to present us as the passive recorders or detectors
of fact. We consider a normative proposal and make a judgment on how well it
realizes the ambition, generally understood, at hand. And in saying this I do not mean
to imply that the content of the project or ambition is wholly fixed prior to this
assessment, for it is not; that is the point of the including the phrase generally
understood in the sentence above. The teleology here is not to be thought of as
clearly fixed in the way it might be when building a race car. When we consider a
normative conception (such as Rawls) we also reflect on whether this way of refining
the project, this particular way of understanding it, is satisfactory. The issue is not just
who, between Rawls or Nozick, has those principles that are superior with respect to
the project of social cooperation. It is also which of these has the better conception of
what social cooperation is, how social cooperation is to be understood. The structure
of the constructivist argumentnot realism, not projectivismalone can actually
make sense of this otherwise remarkably elusive truism.

4 Expanding the Conception

With any luck, it should not now be hard to imagine how this characterization of
justification could be developed apart from the political context and understood
more generally. The idea is that we begin with some description of the project, the
ambition, the bit or subset of moral life with which we are here concerned. This
description in turn will be more or less constrained by non-controversial
considerationsnot simply depending on the context, which is to say, on what the
project is, but where we are in history. So, to illustrate: the general sense we share at
this point in history about what political life is rightly concerned with, including, for
example, that the state will have some posture with respect to the distribution of
wealth or opportunity, would not have been so obvious or so non-controversial in the
sixteenth century. And if we consider something like family life, or punishment, the
room for reasonable differences over what the project is here will be substantial. But
this is how things are; it is not a fault of the theory that it represents them so. And to
repeat a point that has already been often repeated: even when characterized in its
most general or innocuous terms, the project in question will still have some content,
enough to pick out what is relevant and why.
Let me illustrate this by way of an example. So consider punishment, and within a
general theory of punishment, the much vexed question of capital punishment. What
would it be like to approach this issue from within what I am calling a broadly
constructivist conception of justification? Well, on my view, we begin with some
idea of the project, an account of what a theory here is supposed to do. The idea is
The End of Moral Realism? 57

for this account to be non-controversial, or as non-controversial as possible, by

which I mean, one that does not beg any substantive questions between competing
theories. Nevertheless, such an account will say something that guides us as to what
a good theory in this domain will take up, what considerations will matter. Making
sense of proportionality at the upper limits of wrongdoing, worries about the limits
of state sponsored force, the special status of a life, if one thinks lives do have such
status, all rightly figure as considerations, all have some role in any justification
story, either way. Arguments may understandably combine these considerations in
different ways, or seek to show that some subset of these considerations may be
accorded lesser weight for whatever reasons, but again, given the nature of the
project here, how could considerations like these not count? It would be quite
unsatisfactory to hold it is a matter of choice or attitude or projection that they
do. Again, we want to be able to make sense of why, when taking up this issue,
height or beauty cannot matter, cannot be relevant. But conversely, I do not want to
see the counting I am referring to here as anything like what happens when real
facts in the world cause certain things or certain properties to come about. Making
sense of degrees of wrongdoing, differences in intention, matters in any good
punishment theory, and a good theory will quite naturally point to what it says about
proportionality as a reason for its being good, but this consideration does not support
a theory, if it does, in anything like the way the atomic structure of the table causes
that table to be solid. The reference to certain considerations or facts in the world in
a normative argument cannot be understood along those sorts of lines at all. Or:
support here cannot be understood against a realistic, or causal, or
naturalistic model. (Or: you can try, but the results just wont be plausible, thats
all.) The better description is this: we identify certain considerations as relevant to
the project, given the content the project is said to have. Our arguments, our
principles, our justification stories, seek to show that they carry these considerations
forward into rules or principles in a satisfactory way. Nor is it in any way an
embarrassment for me to acknowledge that sometimes our sense of the project, how
we understand it, and our sense of what considerations matter, all unfold together
over timethis is exactly what has happened in political theory. No one ever said
our account of moral justification was to be some sort of wholly a priori affair,
divorced from what we learn as we live in history. But neither can it be thought of as
empirical in anything like the way the sciences are, where we can speak of facts
lying about, out there, like magnetic fields, we will if we are lucky just discover with
patience. It is, for example, very hard for us to imagine how any moral theory could
be plausible to us now and not weigh great physical pain or the loss of a life far more
than getting ones clothes wet, and the power of Singers arguments more than trades
on this thought; it utterly, and rightly presumes it. But I do not want to present this
claim as the detection of some pre-existing fact in the moral universe, for that would
be wrong. Even this thought, this almost clich like presentation of relative weights,
may be rightly thought of as hard won knowledge of a special sort. For these
principles (always do that which causes great benefit at little expense) are just
ways of representing considerations that matter in ways that we can endorse. The
principles that Singer would champion are simply the result of taking certain facts
that matter (death, as opposed to wet clothes) into principles of action, and doing so
in a satisfactory way.
58 S. Ross

Now the reader exclaims: well what does that mean, in a satisfactory way? Its
a good question. Maybe. It certainly seems to be. But I am not sure how much of a
systematic answer there is to be had here, or, if that turns out to be so, whether this
fact in turn poses a genuine difficulty for my argument. When we read Rawls and
Nozick and judge which of these writers has the more satisfactory account of the
considerations we think relevant to a theory of political cooperation, what is going
on here? When we think about Mill and Kant, and think about what each includes or
emphasizes about persons, what each leaves out, and how these considerations are
brought forward into principles, what is going on there, exactly? I am not sure that
any further description I would give here would make this practice any clearer to us.
Justification stories are long with us, and so is the practice of our assessing them. It
is certainly not obvious to me that I should try to analyze this form of life in terms of
something more basic, or antecedently comprehensiblelike one fact causing
another, or some state of affairs causing an inner state, or an instance falling under a
rule, generating a practical syllogism. That is the mistake, the temptation, one might
say, that must be resisted. The hard thing about normative life, at least when thinking
about normative justification philosophically, is to accept the ways in which this
practice, this form of life is not quite like anything elseyet not, for all that,
mysterious. Re-description of justification along the lines of these other, familiar
(and to my mind, inexplicably enduring) models only generates deeply artificial
results. And while I do not claim the constructivist argument explicitly makes this
claim, it is I think the view that most congenially illustrates it.
Of course, as I have said from the start, I am taking the idea of
constructivism to embody or illustrate a more general picture of justification
than that which might be attributed to an ideal contract argument considered on
its own. But in doing so, I think I am simply taking up a feature of
constructivism that is usually just overlooked. Rawls himself reminds us that the
ideal contract argument is simply a way of illustrating, or elaborating upon, an
argument we easily could make in other terms if we chose to. The hypothetical
contract is not to be thought of as some special bit of argumentative alchemy
that does what no other argument-form can do; rather it is simply a way of
developing arguments we should be able to find persuasive in their own right. As
Rawls himself says, [t]he idea here is simply to make vivid to ourselves the
restrictions that it seems reasonable to impose on arguments for principles of
justice, and therefore on these principles themselves.16 Constructivism here
(which is to say: given this project, that of identifying fundamental political
principles) calls for, or at the least, is nicely served by, an ideal contract device. It is
a helpful way to illustrate things like: when thinking of what the rules of political,
cooperation should be, the parties should be thought of as free and equal, or as not
able to exploit advantages of fortune, or favor any conception of the good. But as
such, or so I have argued, the argument also illustrates a more general picture of
reason giving and justification, and it is this picture that I want to present as meta-
ethical. Considerations that undeniably matter, given the project, are handled by
principles put forward as best. It is this conception of justification that offers an
alternative to the reductively naturalistic accounts of justification we find within

16
A Theory of Justice, p. 18
The End of Moral Realism? 59

realism or secondary property projectivism, or to our inability to say which facts

matter and why when within norm-expressivism.
It follows on my view that the philosopher who wants to affirm constructivism as
a meta-ethical conception of justification does not have to have (and should not have
to have) a ready answer for questions like: so what would parties under a veil of
ignorance with respect to their conceptions of the good think about pornography?
Or: what would parties who did not know their position in society think about
torturing those who may have information about future terror attacks? Or: what
would parties ignorant of their talent think would be the right sort of copyright law,
or whether corporations have a fiduciary duty to anyone besides their share-
holders?17 To ask these questions, and to ask them either with the idea of pointing
out what are taken to be the theorys limitationsor to ask them with the thought
that figuring out the answer in each case is the only way to make constructivism a
full blown moral theoryis to have the wrong idea as to what constructivism in fact
offers moral theory in the first place. Or, if I am right here, it is to have a conception
of the theory that is needlessly constrained, needlessly tied to a particular
constructivist argument-context, albeit, to be sure, a particularly impressive one. I
am arguing for seeing constructivism as naming an approach to moral issues that
in this case, (in the case of determining the principles governing the basic structure
of society), finds in the idea of hypothetical parties under a veil of ignorance
deciding upon some sort of an ideal contract the right way to go forward. But the
device is not the approach. It is what the approach, in this case, calls for; thats all.
And in this approach we find a distinctive, plausible, general conception of
justification.

5 Constructivism and Ontology

Let me now turn to a promise made at the start, saying how this picture of justification is
compatible with the non-controversial claims that may be thought of as contained
within realism and projectivism. When within this conception of justification, we will
be realists in the non-controversial sense that we will be token realists. Those
policies we think justified (in politics, in punishment, whatever) will be, or can be,
realized in the world (of course), and, once realized, tokens instances of these may be
picked out in any realist or special sciences vocabulary you like. This is hardly
surprising, or, to me at least, even all that interesting. Turning to projectivism, it
should be equally clear that this picture of justification makes no reference to, or is in
any way reliant on, that great bogey man of projectivist argument, a moral reality
out there. We have here an autonomous conception of moral argument, nothing that
complicates our ontology, or our endorsement of naturalism broadly understood. This
claim also seems to me so obvious, so uninteresting, it is barely worth making, and I
look forward to the day (I truly do) when no one feels it is philosophically worth while
to say it. But that is one of the ambitions of this argument too. Among other things, I
am very much trying to change the subject, or the focus, when doing so called meta-

17
I believe Ronald Milo makes just this mistake in the last section of his Contractarian Constructivism
(1995).
60 S. Ross

ethics. Get the right conception of justification or, at the least, the conception you
think is plausible, and then just let the ontology fall where it may (let the ontology
wither away, one might equally say). You will find that common sense happily comes
to the rescue; no strange entities have been embraced, nor have any weird
pronouncements (there is no moral reality out there!) been enshrined. Constructiv-
ism has long done this, or illustrated this, when thinking about the fundamental
principles of social or political cooperation. By thinking more generally about how it
does this, we can identify a general conception of reason giving we can claim is right
everywhere.

6 Constructivism and Projectivism; Constructivism at the Limits

Well, perhaps this last remark is not quite rightclose perhaps, but not the whole
story. I think in fact something suggested earlier before the aesthetic case may be the
case here tooand it should not be any difficulty to acknowledge this. I think what
justification is like when taking up the central cases of moral life is very much what I
have outlined it to be here we offer principles, and we seek to show how these
principles manage the relevant considerations in a satisfactory way, given the project
or teleology in question. But not all of our moral life is so straightforwardly tied to
some end or other. Our responses to character traits outside of a context which calls
for one thing or another may have the free floating reactive aspect they have in
certain low level aesthetic contexts. In the army, or classroom, some qualities of
character are undeniably good, others not. This is not to say that in such contexts
evaluative judgments must be thought of as beyond challenge. Hardly. Of course
there will be reasonable disputes, reasonable rivalries. But such disputes will be
between competing accounts each of which will admit of this rough teleological
structure (as is the case in the dispute between Rawls and Nozick, for example). By
contrast, when simply interacting with one another in the subway or in a waiting
room, we may find ourselves evaluating each other more or less as the projectivist
has it everywherefinding people charming, brusque, impressive, annoying, what
have youwithout anything like the structural justificatory apparatus I have
described here in play. Or, a related point, we may assess people against norms
that in turn cannot be thought of at all representational with respect to the world, but
rather as more or less self expressive (this is how I imagine D.H. Lawrence assessing
others, for example). I am inclined to think that here, in cases like these, something
very much like what Hume, or what the norm-expressivist, describes may be right
which is also what I think goes on when we look at aesthetic objects that do not have
much in the way of intentional properties. But so what? There is no reason to think
that before something as rich or as deep as moral life that one and only one sort of
thing goes on under the general rubric evaluation (any more than we would be
inclined to think this of our relation to art). The crucial question is: what is
evaluation like, what is going on, in the central case, in the cases where our theories
are at their most ambitious, and where the stakes are at their highest? When we think
about cooperation, or punishment, or promise keeping, or slavery, or marriage, how
would evaluation and justification go there? And here I am inclined to say: pretty
much the way the constructivist describes it in the social theory context. We must
The End of Moral Realism? 61

think about the project or teleology in a way that both begs the fewest possible
questions and identifies the considerations that matter. We offer principles or
recommendations that purport to represent these considerations in a satisfactory way,
presenting, in so doing, a more precise conception of the project too. And then we
compare these principles to rivals, which of course are also formed against the same
desiderata, and judge which is best. If this seems rightand it seems very right to
methen perhaps we can set aside as uninteresting the so called doctrines of
realism, expressivism, projectivism. Perhaps we can begin to imagine the end of
moral realism as a subject in philosophy. That, in offering this paper, is very much
my hope.

References

Blackburn, S. (1988). How to be an ethical anti-realist for this claim, and for the argument that it is a
central feature of projectivism. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 12, 361375.
Milo, R. (1995). Contractarian constructivism. The Journal of Philosophy, 92(4), 181204.
Railton, P. (1986). Moral realism. Philosophical Review, 95, 163207.
Rawls, J. (1980). Kantian constructivism in moral theory. The Journal of Philosophy, 77, 515572.