New Essays on Normative Realism [Paperback]

A collection of essays with multiple viewpoints on the nature of the normative, both in general and in the specific domains of morality, logic, mathematics, and aesthetics.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.1. Normative Realism: An Introduction to the Issues,Paul Boghossian and Christopher Peacocke2. Moral Realism: A Rationalist Metaphysics-First Treatment,Christopher Peacocke3. On Foundational Moral Knowledge,Declan Smithies4. Ethics: How Hard Can It Be?,Sarah McGrath5. How to Be a Relativist About Normativity,Sharon Street6. Alternative Concepts, Ardor, and Elusive Questions,Matti Eklund7. Objectivity as a Normative Notion (Twice Over),Shamik Dasgupta8. Minimalism, the Synthetic A Priori, and Alternative Normative Concepts,l3z