ABSTRACT
"Naturalistic realism" names a family of metaethical approaches that seek to provide a unified response to these challenges by grounding ethics in the natural world in a way that leaves no "unexplained residue"—whether metaphysical, conceptual, epistemic, or semantic—that could be considered indispensable to the well-foundedness of ethical distinctions or to their practical significance. A naturalistic vindication of ethics would thus need to accommodate both its factuality and its normativity. Realism about the external world is sometimes put in terms of its mind-independent existence, but this will hardly do for realism about mental states—or, according to most naturalists, for realism about ethics. Naturalistic realism involves a parochial attitude toward ethics. Taking evolutionary theory seriously is incompatible with realism about ethics. Naturalistic realism does not provide a satisfactory account of the normative character of ethical judgments.
