Abstract

A critique of a kind of 'moral realism' that is in fact a rather thinly disguised version of global historicist idealism. If you don't like the idea that facts are hard and values are soft, you can pump up the values to make them as hard as the facts or soften down the facts to make them as soggy as the values. Lovibond prefers the latter strategy. After some critical remarks about Lovibond's book (including its implicit authoritarianism) I conclude with some equally critical remarks about McDowell's blurb. Unusually for a review and for a first publication, this has actually been cited in the literature, for instance in the second edition of Platts' *Ways of Meaning*