Sublime

realism, or a “realist empiricism.”117

Just as Hume seeks to found morality on the passions because his arguments have excluded the possibility of founding it on reason, so Kant founds it on reason because his arguments have excluded the possibility of founding it on the passions, and Kierkegaard on criterionless fundamental choice because of what he takes to be the compelling nature of

People are not monads. A real, live human self is always already partial to certain, select others. Morality needs to take this essential fact about human selfhood into account rather than pretend to override it.

In both cases I have argued that we are confronted with what is intelligible only as the end-product of a process of historical change; in both cases I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be the historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary

Utilitarianism advanced its most successful claims in the nineteenth century. Thereafter intuitionism followed by emotivism held sway in British philosophy, while in the United States pragmatism provided the same kind of praeparatio evangelica for emotivism that intuitionism provided in Britain. But for reasons that we have already noticed

but from the study of logic and mathematics. It’s a very weird framework that doesn’t come out of empiricism, but of a certain kind of armchair philosophizing that turned out to be very useful. So the minimality expectations can be dropped. You could have a very, very cumbersome computational system that produces the correct output. So that’s

The philosopher Erik Wielenberg argues for this, what he calls “non-natural non-theistic moral realism.”

Moreover Gewirth adopts what is at once a clear and a strict view of what reason is: in order to be admitted as a principle of practical reason, a principle must be analytic; and in order for a conclusion to follow from premises of practical reason, it must be demonstrably entailed by those premises.