ABSTRACT

Mark Platts defended moral realism at a time when that was quite unfashionable. His account of morality, and of how it impinges on our lives, is subtle and suggestive in a variety of ways. It is grounded in a careful examination of motivation. Platts regards morality as objective: objective in the sense that it obtains in its own right, independently of what anyone thinks or feels about it. Kant puts it rather differently, in terms of a moral law rather than moral facts, but his moral law is both objective and prescriptive, independent in its own right, given to our consciousness as binding. Since both Platts and Kant regard morality as objective and prescriptive, Platts as well as Kant must be committed to holding that an action has a special kind of value if it is done because the agent sees that the situation morally requires it. Kant puts this by saying that only such actions have "genuine moral worth."