ABSTRACT
Contemporary pragmatists often tout their views as providing us with a superior account of certain philosophically problematic areas of discourse such as morals or modals—an account that legitimates such discourse, without thereby taking on the metaphysical or epistemological commitments of more “full-blooded” forms of realism. In the moral case, this sort of broadly “quasi-realist” approach can be motivated by a variety of metaphysical and epistemological concerns. But here I’m going to focus on just one of these: namely, the claim that the moral realist cannot satisfactorily explain our reliability about moral questions. At first glance, this issue might seem ideally suited to quasi-realist treatment. But, as we will see, it is surprisingly difficult to pin down quasi-realism's advantages over realism here. Nonetheless, I believe it is possible to isolate at least one respect in which the quasi-realist is better placed than the realist on this score. As we will see, doing so will have important lessons, not merely about the “score card” in debates about moral realism, but also about the explanatory structure of quasi-realist metaethical theories.
