Copp David. Morality in a Natural World: Selected Essays in Metaethics

Cambridge University Press, 2007. — 377 p.The central philosophical challenge of metaethics is to account for the normativity of moral judgment without abandoning or seriously compromising moral realism. In Morality in a Natural World, David Copp defends a version of naturalistic moral realism and argues that it can accommodate the normativity of morality. Largely because of the difficulty in accounting for normativity, naturalistic moral realism is often thought to face special metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic problems. In the ten essays included in this volume, Copp defends solutions to these problems. Three of the essays are new, while seven have previously been published. All of them are concerned with the viability of naturalistic and realistic accounts of the nature of morality or, more generally, with the viability of naturalistic and realistic accounts of reasons.
David Copp is professor of philosophy at the University of Florida. He is the author of Morality, Normativity and Society and has edited and coedited several volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory. He served for many years as an editor of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy and is currently an associate editor of Ethics and the subject editor for metaethics of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.