The Good, the Right, and the Real: Is Value a Fact?

The Good, the Right, and the Real: Is Value a Fact? argues for a strongly objective understanding of ethics. This book offers a cumulative case for robust moral objectivity, the combination of both prescriptivity and objectivity. It provides positive arguments to believe in morality realistically construed, from Moorean arguments to indispensability arguments; from partners in guilt arguments to C. S. Lewis's arguments in The Abolition of Man, and more. This book outlines critiques of such moral objectivity ranging from queerness objections and moral arguments against morality to debunking objections to moral knowledge. It offers critiques of several alternative views like those of Friedrich Nietzsche, error theory, classical expressivism, constructivism, and sensibility theory. In the process of endorsing a generous empiricism and expansive conception of rationality, it delves into evidential considerations that go beyond the purely philosophical. This book argues that a supernaturalist explanation of morality realistically construed should remain on the table of living possibilities worth careful exploration. Read more