Paul Bloomfield

Morality seems to play a special role in human life distinct from conventional norms, like those of etiquette, or simple preferences based on subjective tastes. There are various theories of the foundations of morality, some of which treat morality as 'subjective' in an important way. 'Moral realism' is however a family of theories that take morality to have an objective factual basis, such that morality is not 'up to us' and is not 'under our control'. The contributions in this handbook explore the central ideas and themes constituting moral realism and defend particular views about it.

The question “Why is it bad to be bad?” might seem either tautologous or poorly formed. It may seem like a tautology because it seems logical to think that badness is necessarily bad and so it must, of course, follow that it is bad to be bad. It might seem to be malformed because it may seem like anyone who asks the question, “Why is it bad to be bad?” must fail to understand the meaning of the words they are using: generally, if something is X, it cannot fail to be X. If so, then it may seem as if there must be something wrong with the question itself or with the linguistic abilities of the person asking it. The inclusion of “all things considered” is crucial. Some think that there is a problem with the idea of an all-things-considered point of view since it seems to them that the plurality of values one attempts to bring together in a single perspective may be incommensurable, so there is a problem in the idea of engaging such a perspective.

While emotions can play positive, contributory roles in our cognition and our lives, they frequently have the opposite effect. Michael Brady’s otherwise excellent introduction to the topic of emotion is unbalanced because he does not attend to harms emotions cause. The basic problem is that emotions have a normative aspect: they can be justified or unjustified and Brady does not attend to this. An example of this is Brady’s discussion of curiosity as the emotional motivation for knowledge. More importantly, while emotions can and sometimes do reveal to us what we value, it is far less frequent that emotions reveal objective value.