I Can't Relax! You're Driving me Quasi!

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (3) (2017)
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Abstract

Robust Realists think that there are irreducible, non-natural, and mind-independent moral properties. Quasi-Realists and Relaxed Realists think the same, but interpret these commitments differently. Robust Realists interpret them as metaphysical commitments, to be defended by metaphysical argument. Quasi-Realists and Relaxed Realists say that they can only be interpreted as moral commitments. These theories thus pose a serious threat to Robust Realism, for they apparently undermine the very possibility of articulating the robust metaphysical commitments of this theory. I clarify and respond to this threat, showing that there is in fact space to develop and defend a robust moral ontology.

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Stephen Ingram
University of Manchester

Citations of this work

Prospects for a Quietist Moral Realism.Mark Warren & Amie Thomasson - 2023 - In Paul Bloomfield & David Copp (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Moral Realism. Oxford University Press. pp. 526-53.
Epistemology shmepistemology: moral error theory and epistemic expressivism.Stephen Ingram - 2018 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (7):649-669.
A defence of the evolutionary debunking argument.Man Him Ip - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Birmingham

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References found in this work

Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism.David Enoch - 2011 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.Fred Feldman & J. L. Mackie - 1979 - Philosophical Review 88 (1):134.
Ethics and language.Charles Leslie Stevenson - 1944 - New York: AMS Press.
Ruling Passions.Simon Blackburn - 1998 - Philosophy 75 (293):454-458.

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