On the Existence of Moral Facts

Abstract

In the last four chapters I have tried to offer a defence of the following beliefs: That the world available through sense perception exists independently of our representations of it, and that, contra Kant and other constructivists, we can know something of this world within the limits of our evolutionarily endowed capacities; that truth is a verification-transcendent property of sentences, and so, contra Dummett and the semantic anti-realists, the principle of bivalence ought to be maintained for beliefs about regions of space and time that lie beyond our verificational capacities; that human beings and other animals have representational states like beliefs, desires, hopes, expectations and so on, and that these states can be adverted to in order to explain behaviour, contra the Churchland and other eliminativists in the philosophy of mind; and finally that we human beings can be, and often are, responsible for our actions in a manner which makes us appropriate subjects of reactive attitudes, contra van Inwagen and Strawson. The pattern of these defences has been uniform throughout. I begin by shifting the burden of proof onto the opposition by establishing that the target conclusion is rightly granted the status of default position, and then, by identifying the errors in the arguments of the opposition, show that this burden has yet to be discharged. The leading idea has been that the target conclusion wins by default once these errors have been identified and so requires no further independent proof.