Moral Realism by Other Means: The Hybrid Nature of Kant’s Practical Rationalism

Abstract

Please cite published version - Moral realism in eighteenth-century moral philosophy"A philosopher who asserts that she is a realist about theoretical science, for example, or ethics, has probably, for most philosophical audiences, accomplished little more than to clear her throat," as Crispin Wright once observed. Such an observation effectively conveys the familiar 1 uneasiness with these terms of art, along with a kind of prejudice against views apt to be considered as realist. In a similar vein, Korsgaard writes that "[t]here is a trivial sense in which everyone who thinks that ethics isn't hopeless is a realist." In this perspective, examining a 2 philosophical view with regard to these terms risks being not very productive. 'Realism' and 'antirealism' are maybe even more ambiguous than similar terms of art, to the extent that merely declaring a view realist or not-realist does not amount to a helpful statement. Things may become especially problematic when such labels are applied to philosophical views of the past, as in discussing Hume's or Kant's own thought, since they did not employ these terms to characterize their perspectives. Here the risk of anachronism seems difficult to avoid. As John Skorupski has recently remarked, the very attribution of the label 'moral realism' (or 'moral realist') to views which do not share specific philosophical assumptions with the current debates, for instance regarding the semantics of moral words or the truth-value of judgments, is hardly appropriate, since it connects or even equates views that are in fact heterogeneous in important respects. 3 In light of these difficulties, a helpful way to gain a clearer understanding of the questions at issue with regard to Kant is, I believe, to briefly consider what moral realism could be taken to Wright (1992, p. 1).