Moral Stance-Independence.
Terence Cuneo (University of Vermont)
Robust moral realist views maintain that morality is objective. Part of what it is for morality to be objective, realists claim, is for there to be a range of moral facts that are stance-independent. (Roughly, a fact is stance-independent just if there is a full metaphysical story about it that is stance-free—where a stance is an attitudinal state or activity, whether actual or counterfactual.) Views in the broadly constructivist tradition reject this claim. This paper defends realism’s commitment to the stance-independence of moral facts by offering two arguments, both of which turn on the contention that fundamental moral facts admit of essence explanations.