Stephen J. Sullivan

Ibram X. Kendi’s bestselling book How to be an Antiracist (2019) has been enormously influential and deserves the serious attention it has received. It follows his important historical work Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016), which is much more scholarly and won the National Book Award the year it came out. But these books seem to take for granted a fairly simple version of cultural relativism in ethics that is widely regarded by moral philosophers as seriously defective. I want to take these doubts further and show that cultural relativism is a disastrous theoretical choice for an anti-racist like Kendi to make. In Section I I explain the kind of relativism I have in mind: agent-based, cultural, normative ethical relativism. In Section II, using the two books I have mentioned, I give textual support to my attribution of this kind of relativism to Kendi. In Section III I argue for my theoretical-disaster claim and defend it against some Kendi-inspired criticism. In Section IV I address some serious relativist doubts about ethical universalism, the opposite of relativism. Finally, in Section V I offer some brief concluding remarks.

Atheist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Kurt Baier, though from different philosophical traditions, shared a common concern about the traditional Judeo-Christian-Muslim doctrine that human beings are the creations of a Supreme Being. For Sartre, in “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1946), a God who designed us would thereby detract from our freedom and dignity. For Baier, in “The Meaning of Life” (1957), the idea that God designs us to serve his own purposes was deeply offensive in treating us as artifacts, domestic animals, or slaves. Indeed, Baier said explicitly what was implicit in Sartre: that the divine creation of humans as would violate Immanuel Kant’s respect for persons principle. But this Kantian objection is badly flawed in ignoring the crucial role of human free will in traditional Abrahamic theism. Still, if we focus not on the divine-creation doctrine but on the doctrine of eternal torment for non-worshippers of God, then traditional Abrahamic theism does arguably undermine human freedom and dignity. For the threat of eternal torment is extraordinarily coercive. Keywords: theism, artifacts, free will, eternal torment, coercion

In his 1967 paper 'A Causal Theory of Knowing', Alvin Goldman sketched an account of empirical knowledge in terms of appropriate causal connections between the fact known and the knower's belief in that fact. This early causal account has been much criticized, even by Goldman himself in later years. We argue that the theory is much more defensible than either he or its other critics have recognized, that there are plausible internal and external resources available to it which save it from many objections in the literature (in particular, objections raised by Harman, Pappas and Swain, Klein, Dretske, Goldman, Shope, Ackermann, Morawetz, and Collier).

Recent developments in the philosophy of language and epistemology--in particular, the "naturalizing" of reference, knowledge, and justification--have important metaethical implications. In my dissertation I show the relevance of causal theories of reference and knowledge, and of an noncausal but still nonfoundationalist theory of justification, to the metaethical debate over moral realism, and use these theories to defend realism against several popular objections. ;In Chapter 1 I characterize moral realism and argue both for a presumption in its favor and against traditional forms of realism. ;In Chapter 2 I motivate and adopt a sophisticated version of the causal theory of reference which emphasizes the linguistic community's possession of significant knowledge of the referent. I then apply this account of reference to moral terms and on its basis sketch a metaethical perspective from which the moral realism debate can be seen as a complex empirical issue. ;In Chapter 3--the heart of the dissertation--I elaborate on that perspective in order to rebut what is perhaps the most influential objection to moral realism, namely, that no plausible epistemology of ethics is available if realism is true. I argue that theories of the nature of the referents of moral terms are to be assessed in essentially the same way as scientific theories of the nature of the referents of natural-kind terms. Drawing on my own "contextualist" account of justification, I argue as well that this approach to moral epistemology renders normative ethical theories no more vulnerable to skeptical doubts about their justificability than it does scientific theories. ;In Chapter 4 I examine three other important objections to moral realism, which appeal to metaphysical considerations and to facts about moral disagreement, and use the metaethical apparatus of the previous two chapters to rebut these objections

In "Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief" Robert Merrihew Adams defends a theistic argument from the nature of morality according to which the existence of God is entailed by the divine-command theory, which Adams believes is our best account of morality. In reply I examine the four arguments for the modified divine-command theory that Adams develops in this and later papers, and I show that three of the arguments are much too weak to enable him to make a case for theism in this way and that the fourth itself depends on the assumption that there is a God and so would render that case circular.