Précis of The Possibility of Moral Community

My book, The Possibility of Moral Community, is an attack on moral and normative scepticism. It seeks to show how to make philosophical sense of our normative and moral lives. However, it seeks to do this in a metaphysically highly unassuming way. Many people think we can make sense of these things only if certain large and questionable metaphysical assumptions are true; notably, the assumptions incorporated in what is sometimes called robust normative realism. Many people have argued that we must therefore believe these questionable assumptions or find ourselves facing a dispiriting nihilism. Other people, error theorists, have argued that we cannot believe the questionable assumptions; so, we must face up to all our moral beliefs, and perhaps much more, being false. I say we should stop worrying about the questionable metaphysical narrative. A piece of architecture holding nothing up, it does no work. Which is why, when we take it away, nothing falls down. Error theorists throw out the questionable metaphysics and ask themselves What next? How much of our moral thinking can be salvaged from this wreckage? The mainstream answer they themselves tend to give is that, one way or another, an awful lot of it can. Nothing we have any reason to care about depended on the questionable metaphysics in the first place: morality is ‘precious and consequential’ in its own right (page 106, quoting Joyce 2001: x). The important thing about the stuff we have reason to care about is just that we have reason to care about it. For real.