On Cuneo's Defence of The Parity Premise

Abstract

In his book 'The Normative Web' Terence Cuneo provides a core argument for a paradigmatic instance of moral realism. At the heart of this instance lies the ontological thesis that there are irreducible moral facts. The parity premise is the first and main premise of Cuneo's core argument. It claims that 'if moral facts do not exist, then epistemic facts do not exist'. In this paper I first introduce and explain Cuneo's core argument. Subsequently I present and interpret his defence of the parity premise. It will be shown that Cuneo's defence, although intriguing, is not adequate and should therefore be refuted.

Keywords

• moral realism