| dc.description.abstract | The purpose of this paper is to defend a position in metaethics, saving morality from certain
reductionist attempts, and arguing that a moral point of view denotes a distinct attitude toward the
world with a set of relatively stable conditions. I discuss the problem of demarcation between the
moral and the non-moral domains, and contrast the two basic approaches – moral neutralism and
moral descriptivism. Moral neutralism is defined as a view which builds no content requirements into
the definition of moral rules, whereas moral descriptivism or essentialism places identifiable
constraints on the content of an action-guiding principle if such a principle is to count as a moral, as
opposed to a non-moral, rule. I show that adopting neutralism is tantamount to giving up ethical
theory as a scholarly activity with a distinct subject matter altogether. It is further argued that W.
Frankena’s essentialist definition of morality, as well as a more recent view of Catherine Wilson,
share a similar weakness and fall short from neutralizing neutralism. Finally, I propose a modification
to the essentialist account of morality, which would significantly increase the resilience of such an
account to attempts of reducing moral prescriptions to any action-guiding policy whatsoever, as long
as such policy is sincerely adhered to and followed consistently. The proposed modification is
described as a Realism constraint, and it refers to the connection between one’s expectations of the
outcome of observing a prohibition or following a certain rule and the actual consequences of
following a given policy. | |
