Abstract

Do the introspectively ascertainable aspects of our moral experiences carry ontological objective purport—portraying reality as containing worldly moral properties and facts, thus supporting moral realism? Horgan and Timmons answer this question in the negative, arguing that their non-realist view, cognitivist expressivism, can accommodate the introspectively ascertainable moral phenomenology just as well as realism can—where accommodating the phenomenology means accounting for it without construing it as misleading or erroneous. If sound, this constitutes an important defense of cognitivist expressivism, undermining a central attraction of realism. They thus pose a challenge to realists to identify any aspects of moral phenomenology that cannot be accommodated by expressivism and instead favor realism. I here take up that challenge, in two stages. First, I argue that cognitivist expressivism does not after all capture certain important aspects of the phenomenology of the sort of moral experience on which they focus, while realism does. This argument does not depend on claiming that the phenomenology has ontological objective purport. The claim so far is just that there is more to categorical authoritativeness than the expressivist account captures, though this leaves the door open to Kantian rationalism as well as realism. Second, I will go on to argue that although some aspects of moral phenomenology may only point to this broader range of views, others do specifically carry ontological objective purport and thus directly support realism insofar as we take the phenomenology seriously.