ABSTRACT
This chapter develops an approach to understanding moral realism that can account for culturally diverse moral realities and incommensurability without devolving into relativism. The chapter begins by outlining the nature of the problem that cultural diversity presents to moral realism, considering ethnographic evidence that moral realism is fundamental to human nature. The “ordinary ethics” position is then considered and critiqued in order to frame an approach to moral realism that is both hermeneutic and ethnographically grounded. This chapter provides an ethnographic example of “ancestral personhood” from Hmong in Thailand, which is used to demonstrate simultaneously what is “real” about moral realism, but also how these realities can only be fully grasped through the cultural ontologies that frame them. Juxtaposing objectivist accounts of morality against relativism, this chapter then develops a pluralist approach, building on the insights of Nicholas Rescher, Isaiah Berlin, and Richard Shweder. This pluralist approach can reconcile the apparently competing demands of moral realism and ethnographic evidence of incommensurability in what culturally distinct moral realities actually look like. This chapter concludes with a summary of how this approach can influence both psychological and anthropological understandings of morality and ethics through the lens of hermeneutic moral realism.
