New Problems for Moral Anti-Realism

When you make a moral judgment, say you judge that it is morally wrong to eat meat, do you afterwards ever wonder whether that judgment is objectively true? This question of whether there are objective moral facts lies at the heart of the debate between moral realists and moral anti-realists. Moral realists believe that there are objective moral facts, moral anti-realist do not. This thesis develops several novel problems for some of the most prominent anti-realist theories. The source of most of these problems is one particular way in which philosophers have defended moral realism: by arguing that there are conceptual moral truths. A moral realist of this persuasion, claims that the content of our moral concepts entail certain moral truths. Were these conceptual moral truths to indeed exist, they would be objective moral truth, which is a problem for moral anti-realist theories. This thesis argues that setting aside this matter of conceptual moral truth is more difficult for anti-realists than it might at first glance seem to be. This is a novel problem, because it cannot be resolves by calling upon the solutions that anti-realists have given for more well-established problems for their theory. This thesis therefore puts the onus on anti-realists to develop news solutions to the problems that it puts forward.