Moral realism: facts and norms

Abstract

This essay is a critical notice of David Brink’s “Realism and the Foundations of Ethics”. Brink presents a strong and sophisticated case for a form of moral realism that is nonreductive, naturalistic, and externalist. This essay argues, however, that Brink’s approach is unable to explain the normativity of moral judgment, and that it cannot deal adequately with a form of nihilism that denies the existence of moral requirements, moral goods and bads, moral virtues and vices. These deep problems are due to basic features of the theory.