ABSTRACT
“Reenchantment” and “ethics” can cover many things. In this chapter, I consider what might be involved in the reenchantment of ethics by contrasting two candidates for such reenchantment: the position called “robust realism” in metaethics and the recently proposed model of “humane philosophy” in the philosophy of religion. The aim of the analysis is to show that there are good and bad ways of reenchanting ethics, and that an overinvestment in quasi-scientific theorizing has prevented robust realism in particular from remaining true to the nature of moral experience. The argument has three steps. First, to define the experience of enchantment in terms of the realist appeal of moral values; second, to argue that recent robust realist attempts to rehabilitate this experience run the risk of falling into reification rather than reenchantment; and, third, to demonstrate that adopting a humane approach to ethics salvages our moral experience in a way that avoids the reification of value.
