Moral Realism with a Human Face: Objectivity in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

This chapter restates and regiments Williams’s main metaethical theses in light of advances in metaethics during the past three decades. It is argued that Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy aimed to find a middle way between full-strength realism about ethical judgment and various forms of skepticism and noncognitivism. The author attributes to Williams the claim that while ethical judgments are sometimes simply true and so correspond to genuine facts, ethical judgments are “perspectival” and so enjoy at best a “limited objectivity.” However, according to the author, this view is best understood as an epistemological thesis according to which the warrant for ethical judgments can never be intersubjectively compelling in the broadest sense. Consequently, Williams’s metaethical position is not a metaphysical view and has nothing to do with the mind- or practice-independence of ethical facts.