Overview

It's difficult to explain the point of normative judgments--judgments like "You ought to donate to charity," or "You ought to believe that smoking is bad for you, given the evidence"--without assuming that such judgments express objective truths. And yet philosophers have always been puzzled by such a "realism" about the normative, for an array of conceptual, epistemological, and metaphysical reasons. This book gathers together a collection of essays on this classic philosophical problem, authored by a mix of senior and junior contributors. Taken together, they illustrate the great progress that has been made on these fundamental but thorny issues. They also introduce some new puzzles about normative realism which had not been previously appreciated. The topics covered include the objectivity, epistemology, and metaphysics of normative judgments; the possibility of alternative normative conceptual schemes; and the way in which normative issues arise in such disparate areas as arithmetic and aesthetics. The volume opens with a substantial Introduction by the editors that provides a contemporary overview of the landscape of issues facing a realism about the normative and situates the authors' contributions within it.