¹ A good entry into the first stages of this debate is afforded by Essays on Moral Realism, Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey (ed.) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).Google Scholar See also Morality, Reason, and Truth, Copp, David and Zimmerman, David (eds) (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985).Google ScholarGibbard's, Allan, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990) is an exceptionally sophisticated naturalistic account of morality that can be read as creating a case for anti-realism, and many of the comments in this essay will be addressed to Gibbard's book.Google Scholar

² Cf. Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 56.Google Scholar

³ For a brief characterization of axiology see my ‘Axiological Ethics’, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Ted Honderich (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1995). See also Findlay, J. N., Axiological Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Chapter 6 of my Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). For a dividing line between morality and other forms of normative judgment, see Mill's, Utilitarianism, Chapter 5, para. 14.Google ScholarGibbard, Allan echoes Mill's division; see Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, p. 293Google Scholar, and also ‘Moral Concepts: Substance and Sentiment’, Philosophical Perspectives 6, Tomberlin, James E. (ed.) (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1992).Google ScholarA lengthy discussion of the boundaries of morality is found in my Foundations of Morality (London: Geo. Allen & Unwin, 1983), Chapter 1.Google Scholar

⁴ A Treatise of Human Nature, Selby Bigge, L. A. (ed.), second edition revised by Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 475 ff.Google Scholar

⁵ Cf. Strawson, P. F., ‘Social Morality and Individual Ideals’, Philosophy 36, No. 136 (01) 1961.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ ‘Do We Desire Only Pleasure?’, Philosophical Studies, 34, No. 4, (November 1978).

⁷ For cognitive psychotherapy, see Brandt, Richard, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).Google Scholar

⁸ See my ‘Suffering, Joy, and Social Choice’, Public Affairs Quarterly, 8, No. 1 (January 1994).

⁹ See Isenberg, Arnold, ‘Critical Communication’, in Aesthetics and Language, Elton, William (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953).Google Scholar

¹⁰ See Malcolm, Norman, Ludwig Wittgenstein. A Memoir (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 100.Google Scholar

¹¹ The late Andy Warhol was quoted as saying, ‘I love to be bored’; and this might be thought to provide a counter-example to my claim. His remark might be interpreted as saying either (1) that boredom for him was a pleasant emotional experience, or (2) that he was motivated to pursue and have more of what he thought boring, or (3) both. We cannot rule out a priori that someone might be motivated to pursue what he or she thinks boring, although it remains true that for most of us an urge to squirm away from the experience is part and parcel of being bored. Let me suggest, on the other hand, that we can rule out a priori that someone might enjoy being bored. If one enjoys something entirely unexciting and uneventful (such as a film of someone sleeping), ‘bored’ is simply not the word for one's response.

¹² Strawson, P. F., ‘Truth’, Truth, Pitcher, George (ed.) (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964), 37.Google Scholar Bede Rundle has pursued this point, arguing that if facts were in the world, it should be possible to say where; ‘yet there appears to be no answer to such a question as “Where is the fact that inflation has fallen?”’ Facts are ‘undetectable by the senses or by any scientific instrument’. See Rundle, Bede, Facts (London: Duckworth, 1993), 10.Google Scholar

¹³ In his Introduction to Essays on Moral Realism, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord places emphasis on the view that assertions are ‘literally true’ (cf. 5) as an earmark of realisms. It is not clear what work the word ‘literally’ does here. Someone could be an ontological realist in the sense in which ontological realism opposes Berkeley's idealism without holding that there is only one correct story to be told about the mind-independent stone one kicks: does this require a literal truth about the stone? Apart from this, one may be uneasy with the word ‘true’ in connection with ethics. At the risk of sounding finical, let me say that the word ‘true’ is at home in cases in which claims that look both simple and discrete are assessed in terms of correspondence with a reality. More complicated claims (e.g. scientific theories) that present themselves as webs of belief more naturally are termed ‘correct’ or ‘acceptable’, and it seems more idiomatic to accept ethical claims as ‘correct’ or ‘right’ that as ‘true’. A great deal of high-powered recent philosophy has been simple-minded in its employment of a single term (e.g., ‘desire’, ‘belief) for a broad range of diverse cases, and the word ‘true’ especially has been used as a blunt instrument of language.

¹⁴ Cf. Solomon, Robert, The Passions (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1977)Google Scholar; Sousa, Ronald de, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Armon-Jones, Claire, Varieties of Affect (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).Google Scholar Armon-Jones does not place as much emphasis as Solomon and de Sousa on a cognitive element of emotion; but her book is eminently compatible with the reflection that moral emotions can involve construing (seeing) something as impermissible and disturbing, and that this could be given high or low marks as a cognitive performance. See McDowell, John, ‘Virtue and Reason’, Monist 62 No. 3 (07 1979) for a consonant line of thought.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Two good recent books that connect emotions and ethical judgments are Gaus, Gerald, Value and Justification (Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, and Oakley, Justin, Morality and the Emotions (London: Routledge, 1992).Google Scholar

There is a circularity problem in Gibbard's analysis of analysis of moral emotions if something like Robert Solomon's analysis is correct. See D'Arms, Justin and Jacobson, Daniel, ‘Expressivism, Morality, and the Emotions’, Ethics, 104, no. 4 (07 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wise Choices, Apt Feelings 149.

¹⁵ Harman, Gilbert, ‘Moral Relativism Defended’, Philosophical Review 84 (1975),CrossRefGoogle Scholar and The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), Part I; Sturgeon, Nicholas, ‘Moral Explanations’, in Copp and Zimmerman, (eds), Morality, Reason and Truth (and reprinted in Sayre-McCord, Essays on Moral Realism). One should note also Thomas Nagel's contention that the requirement set by philosophers like Harman and Mackie is an unreasonable one. See ‘The Limits of Objectivity’ in Sterling McMurrin, (ed.), The Tanner Lectures (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 114n. Of interest also is McDowell's gambit, which offers a carefully qualified analogy between ethical and secondary qualities.Google Scholar See ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’, in Honderich, Ted, (ed.), Morality and Objectivity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985).Google Scholar

¹⁶ Rosen, Michael, ‘Must We Return to Moral Realism?’, Inquiry, 34, 1991, p. 194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁷ Much depends, it should be clear, on what one holds to constitute ‘moral realism’. Moral anti-realists want it to hinge on ‘moral facts’, whatever these might be; if this is the issue, then Gibbard's argument has considerable strength in relation to morality, although nothing like it has much strength with regard to axiology.

¹⁸ The author wishes to thank Jonathan Bennett, Diana Meyers, and Kwong-loi Shun for helpful comments on a first draft of this essay.