Dilemmas and Moral Realism - University Home page.docVIP

Published in Utilitas, 1999. Dilemmas and Moral Realism Nick Zangwill Glasgow University Abstract I distinguish two different arguments against cognitivism in Bernard Williams’ writings on moral dilemmas. The first turns on there being a truth of the matter about what we ought to do in moral a dilemma. That argument can be met by appealing to our epistemic shortcomings and to pro tanto obligations. However, those responses make no headway with the second argument which concerns the rationality of the moral regret that we feel in dilemma situations. I show how the rationality of moral regret can be explained on an ‘independent desire’ model. And I show how Williams’ second argument only appears to have force because of a certain faulty way of conceiving of the issue over cognitivism. But Williams’ argument rightly alerts us to the rational role of desire in our moral thought. A generation ago, Bernard Williams urged that the existence of moral dilemmas creates a serious difficulty for the moral realist. His argument has the structure of a modus tollens: if moral realism is true, genuine moral ‘dilemmas’ or ‘conflicts’ cannot arise; but there are genuine dilemmas or conflicts; so moral realism is not true. The argument can be put equally well in terms of whether realism allows that dilemmas or conflicts have certain properties, rather than in terms of whether they can arise at all. But nothing hangs on this. I shall separate two arguments that can be found in Williams’ papers. One of these arguments has caught the attention of the philosophical public, generating a large literature. The other argument has been neglected. But, as we shall see, this neglected argument is the more powerful of the two. Those who have replied to Williams, have deflected the first argument, but not the second. In spite of the critical attention that has been lavished on Williams’ papers, what is most interesting has not yet been extracted. I shall present my own view of moral dilemmas