Speech and Morality
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Terence Cuneo develops a novel line of argument for moral realism. The argument he defends hinges on the normative theory of speech, according to which speech acts are generated by an agent's altering her normative position with regard to her audience, gaining rights, responsibilities, and obligations of certain kinds. Some of these rights, responsibilities, and obligations, Cuneo suggests, are moral. And these moral features are best understood along realist lines, in part because they explain how it is that we can speak. If this is right, a necessary condition of being able to speak is that there are moral rights, responsibilities, and obligations of a broadly realist sort.
Terence Cuneo is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont. In addition to having published a wide array of essays in the foundations of ethics, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of religion, Cuneo's books include The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism (OUP, 2007), which was awarded Honorable Mention, American Philosophical Association Biennial Book Prize 2007-2009, Foundations of Ethics (edited with Russ Shafer-Landau; Blackwell, 2007), and The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid (edited with René van Woudenberg; CUP, 2004).