Metaphysics of Morality by Christopher Kulp (review)

Metaphysics of Morality is an effort to layout the metaphysical features of our ordinary moral thought. The questions it answers are: What are the metaphysical commitments that our ordinary discourse on morality requires, and, given these commitments, why should the requisite metaphysics be deemed correct? The work of answering these questions progresses over six chapters in three discernable stages: first, a clarification of the necessity of a metaphysical foundation for morality; second, a technical explication of the various metaphysical features morality entails; and third, a gathering of these features into an integral body of thought.

Chapter 1 clarifies the importance of metaphysics to commonsense moral thought. This task is then continued in chapter 2 via contrast to the metaphysical implications of a variety of antirealist ethical theories. Initially, Kulp draws on prevalent opinions in Western culture, to argue that a universally shared moral understanding is evident in significant cases and "the proper place to begin." Notwithstanding certain worldwide cultural differences, a list of epistemological and ontological beliefs is identified as both universal and commonsensical: Some acts have moral properties; some moral generalizations are true; some moral states are invariably wrong; these states hold objectively; and we can be mistaken about them. These claims are especially important for Kulp as he maintains common sense offers the basic test of validity for moral thought. Chapter 2 surveys theories antithetical to ordinary moral thought in terms of moral locution, realism, factuality, and properties. Indeed, Kulp's book is here especially ambitious, as it presents several major alternatives to moral realism for later refutation. These moral "skepticisms," including noncognitivism, nihilism, relativism, and pragmatism, are analyzed neatly according to the listed features of ordinary moral thought.

In the second stage, the essential metaphysical features of morality are explained over chapters 3, 4, and 5. In chapter 3 the importance of locational form is highlighted since the communicative dimension of morality shows it is fundamentally conceptual, at least insofar as it exceeds mere physiological reaction and is expressed according to syntactic language rules. More significantly, it seems obvious to the author that morality includes synthetic a priori propositions—though there is a distinct absence of any further Kantian explanations employed. Crucially, for Kulp, moral discourse has no more ambiguity than nonmoral discourse, and the successful denotation of terms for objects in first-order moral discourse follows the same truth conditions as nonmoral propositions do. This is deemed to signal the plausibility of moral cognitivism and metaphysics ahead of the investigation into moral facts and properties, undertaken in the next two chapters, respectively.

The main bulk of the theoretical work, however, is done in chapter 4, which separately examines the four main elements of the moral metaphysics: cognitivism, truth, facts, and properties. In the mechanics of Kulp's growing metaphysical scheme, facts are states of affairs that obtain, propositions express these facts, and these facts supervene on physical ones but are not reducible to the latter. Here, it is the properties that attend to facts that ultimately determine whether a proposition is true or false. This leads naturally to an extended discussion in the next chapter about the metaphysics of properties upon which all seems to finally depend. Kulp explains that properties are platonic universals instantiated by particulars to which "thin" and "thick" moral concepts apply. The analysis appears ultimately deficient, however, as a full account of what instantiation of moral properties involves, as distinct to, say, mathematical properties, is not given. This is tied to Kulp's oft-repeated decision to forgo an attempt to resolve a basic issue pertinent to his metaphysics, such as the existence of platonic moral universals and instantiation of thick moral concepts.

The last stage in the book is to draw the findings together into a coherent whole. This is undertaken in chapter 6, which begins with a restatement of commonsense morality and then arguments against the antirealist theories initially analyzed in the second chapter. Although these refutations are meant to further persuade the reader of moral realism's exclusive adequacy, Kulp...