"This book provides a cumulative case for moral realism, the combination of both prescriptivity and objectivity. It provides positive arguments to believe in morality realistically construed, from Moorean arguments to indispensability arguments to from partners in guilt arguments to C. S. Lewis's arguments in The Abolition of Man. It also discusses defenses of such robust moral objectivity ranging from queerness objections to moral arguments against morality to debunking objections to moral knowledge. It offers critiques of several alternative views provided by the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, error theory, classical expressivism, constructivism, and sensibility theory. It also takes up issues related to whether laws require lawgivers. It delves as well into evidential considerations that go beyond the purely philosophical-ranging from the aesthetic to nondiscursive, from the affective to the literary. In the process it endorses a generous empiricism and expansive conception of rationality. The sort of robust objectivity defended is of the sort that simultaneously is interesting and mysterious enough to call for substantive explanation, yet accessible and common sensical enough that those from a wide assortment of worldview commitments readily apprehend and affirm it. Its self-evidence is not self-justification, so an argument for morality of a robust and realist sort leaves underdetermined the nature of its best explanation. The book argues that a supernaturalist explanation, predicated on a classical theist or theistic personalist view of deity, should remain on the table of living possibilities worth careful exploration"-- Provided by publisher.
