Abstract

In recent analytical moral theory a debate has been raging for some time now about the merits and demerits of realism about morality. Two main schools of moral realists have emerged on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In the US various naturalist realists 'prominent amongst them, the socalled Cornell realists' have canvassed various versions of the view that moral properties are real and are either reducible to, or are constituted out of natural properties. 1 In the UK moral realism has taken a somewhat different direction. More under the thrall of Moore and the 'open question argument' than the Americans, the British realists have tended to reject the naturalist path and have tried to find some way in which to defend a conception of moral properties in which such properties are seen as objective and mindindependent, without thereby being reduced, to or constituted out of natural properties.