ABSTRACT
Companions in Guilt Arguments (CGAs) are a popular defensive strategy often employed by moral realists in response to certain kinds of objection. It has recently been argued that CGAs face a dilemma that ensures they cannot work. If this objection is right, it’s a big worry for realists, since it would show that a defensive strategy they have relied extensively on is bound to fail. This would mean that they’d need to supply other arguments to resist the objections, and – since there’s no guarantee that effective alternative arguments are forthcoming – it opens up the possibility that these objections are a real threat to realism. In this paper I argue that the dilemma objection is limited in its scope. To show this, I present a new kind of CGA which I argue escapes the dilemma. CGAs, I argue, can take two importantly different forms: metaphysical and dialectical. Despite the ubiquity of CGAs, this distinction has so far been unnoticed.
