Taking Morality Seriously A Defense of Robust Realism

InTaking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust RealismDavid Enoch develops, argues for, and defends a strongly realist and objectivist view of ethics and normativity more broadly. This view--according to which there are perfectly objective, universal, moral and other normative truths that are not in any way reducible to other, natural truths--is familiar, but this book is the first in-detail development of the positive motivations for the view into reasonably precise arguments. And when the book turns defensive--defending Robust Realism against traditional objections--it mobilizes the original positive arguments for the view to help with fending off the objections. The main underlying motivation for Robust Realism developed in the book is that no other metaethical view can vindicate our taking morality seriously. The positive arguments developed here--the argument from the deliberative indispensability of normative truths, and the argument from the moral implications of metaethical objectivity (or its absence)--are thus arguments for Robust Realism that are sensitive to the underlying, pre-theoretical motivations for the view.

David Enoch teaches law and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since graduating from the NYU Philosophy Department in 2003, Enoch has published papers in metaethics (in such journals as The Philosophical Review, Ethics, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, and Philosophical Studies); in epistemology (in Nous, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Mind); and in political and legal philosophy (in Law and Philosophy, Legal Theory, The Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, and Theoretical Inquiries in Law).