by Zack Beauchamp
Joel Marks has written a follow-up defending his post I critiqued here. It's less mystico-cryptic than the original, but still, I don't think, really defends his view that morality doesn't exist. One minor quibble:
What I did not explain in the earlier essay is that I am making two distinct claims. One is that morality does not exist. This, odd as it may sound to say so, is relatively uncontroversial in modern ethical philosophy; for what I mean by morality here is its metaphysical conception as a truth or command that comes to us from “on high.” Very few well-known philosophical moralists have believed in such a thing since a century and more.
This is flatly wrong. As I wrote in my response, a number of very prominent contemporary moral philosophers and, indeed, whole schools of thought accept objective morality. Just to take an easy example, one might look at a new book defending the idea by Derek Parfit, one of the most influential living scholars. Even worse for Marks, a recent survey of philosophers found that over half of them believe in an objectively true morality. Over half! Does that sound "uncontroversial in modern ethical philosophy" to you?
The Dish 