Evaluative Realism and the Argument from Queerness

Purely Evaluative Moral Realism is the view that there are moral facts, but they are always and only concerned with goodness and badness, without being con- cerned with reasons or obligations. In this book, I argue that such a view has the virtue of avoiding the Argument from Queerness for Moral Error Theory. Firstly, I lay out and examine the Argument from Queerness to show how it is a threat to moral realism. Next, I isolate and argue against one key premise of the Argu- ment from Queerness; that all moral facts are specially normative, which is to say concerned with a distinctive type of reason for action. Denying this claim creates conceptual space for Purely Evaluative Moral Realism. I then describe this view and demonstrate how it avoids the Argument from Queerness. In addition to all this, I defend Purely Evaluative Moral Realism from objections to show that it does not collapse into any sort of incoherence and is a legitimate rival to more familiar metaethical views. In doing so, I argue that Purely Evaluative Moral Re- alism is compatible with a surprisingly wide range of theories within substantive ethics, and that it allows us to account for many of our intuitions about moral language and moral reasons, so long as we accept that moral reasons may be more like our other reasons than is usually thought, and that they lack the features distinct to special normativity.