Abstract

This work argues that leading forms of contemporary moral realism are inadequate, and that the philosophical attempt to vindicate the naive moral realism implicit within popular ethical opinion is misguided. In their place a form of moral anti-realism is defended which construes the appropriateness or inappropriateness of moral practices and the correctness or incorrectness of moral judgments as relative to linguistic conventions, but it is also argued that such relativism does not undermine the objectivity of moral truth if one is prepared to adopt Blackburn's quasi-realist conception of ontological commitment