Moral Realism as a Conception of the Justification of Morality

Abstract

The paper reconstructs and evaluates the theory of the non-naturalist moral realism as an approach to the justification of morality. The justification of morality is the process of developing arguments that counteract doubts in the universal binding force of moral requirements. The non-naturalist moral realism considers the recognition of moral requirements the result of obeyance to the reason dealing with undeniable facts (moral facts). The simple, intuitionist, version of this conception presupposes that humans have an intuitive capacity revealing them general outlines of the system of moral obligations (S.Clarke, R.Price, W.D.Ross). The intuitionist moral realism is vulnerable to counterarguments appealing to the queerness of the background worldview of this conception and to the famous Prichard’s dilemma. The more complicated, constructivist, version of the non-naturalist moral realism avoids these criticisms through such an interpretation of moral facts that allows to distinguish them from natural facts – the main object of sciences (the position illustrated here by T. Scanlon’s metaethics). Though this turn requires from moral realists to justify morality on the basis of the built-in sensitivity of non-moral values to the moral imperative. So it transforms the constructivist moral realism to a kind of the eudemonistic ethics and makes it vulnerable to some counterarguments against the eudemonistic justification of morality (the argument from the possibility to pursue happy life exclusively on the basis of non-moral values and the argument from the impossibility to infer a fair and benevolent attitude to the other from the equal value of everybody’s happiness).