Customer Reviews

Moral Reality

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When I was an undergraduate student in philosophy in the 1960's, ethics culminated with Professors Moore, Hare,and Von Wright, and the assignment was how to describe what we are doing when we use the language of morals. It was a given that we are NOT making statements which could be true or false. Ethics was tolerated in philosophy departments, but the sense was that it really belonged in the anthropology or mythology departments. When you surveyed philsophers' writings on ethics, the purpose seemed to be how to understand mistaken thinking. Normative ethics were finished.
Since my college days, it seems some writers of philosophy have had the temerity to attempt normative ethics anyway. Books on virtue ethics, applied ethics, practical ethics, bioethics, and medical ethics are pretty common on the philosophy shelves.
And a phrase, moral realism, describes a school of thought, which stands in opposition to the sentence from Shakespeare that says, "There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so."
Moral Reality by Paul Bloomfield is a readable, clear survey and rejection of those arguements that say ethics is but emotion and feeling, and therefore outside the true boundaries of philosophy. It says that moral claims CAN be accurately described as true or false. In doing so, the book operates on two levels: as survey of a host of past writings on ethics and as defense of a particular model of moral realism. The core belief defended is that actions do have objective moral properties, to be discovered by philosophical investigation. The model or metaphor is biological health.
One thing I would maintain regardless of who is right about the language of morals: excursions into normative ethics are more interesting to read than descriptions of the varieties of goodness. Paul Bloomfield's book presents it all: how the battle was joined, who were the effective proponents and opponents of the move to junk normative ethics, and a new offering that says, take a swing at me.
The book is readable by non-academics and non-"ethicists" (an awkward word to me still). The book uses contemporary language and references, giving it a friendly tone. I find it a little gem.

This book provides an original and provocative defense of moral realism. While I certainly don't agree with all of its conclusions, Bloomfield is clearly in the first rank of the new moral realists.