The Good, the Right, and the Real: Is Value a Fact? is the fourth book written by David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls as part of their project to defend different versions of moral arguments for theistic belief. Their first book, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2011), defends a metaethical view which explains metaphysical, epistemological and practical aspects of morality in theistic terms. In their second book, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2016), the authors, considering several versions of non-theistic metaethical views, argue that these alternatives are not as good as the theistic alternative they proposed before. Their third book, The Moral Argument: A History (Oxford University Press, 2019), narrates the history of moral arguments for theistic belief. In the present book, the authors aim to defend the claim that moral realism is the philosophically best alternative compared to the other main alternatives. The importance of the book for the broader project of Baggett and Walls is that, as they emphasize, moral arguments for the existence of God take moral realism as a premise (xvi).

The book consists of four parts. Part I includes two chapters. In Chapter 1, the authors clearly explain moral realism with its four main features (3–10). One of these is that moral judgments have cognitive content – that is, they assert propositions. Another is that some of these moral judgments are true. The third feature is that what renders true moral judgments true are objective moral facts. The last feature concerns knowledge that we have some substantial moral knowledge. Types of moral realism are classified as moral naturalism and non-naturalism (10–13). The latter, which is the type of moral realism defended throughout the book, includes both ‘moral Platonism and theistic ethics’ (268). The former is the claim that moral facts exist objectively as abstract objects without any appeal to God in their explanation. The latter explains the existence of objective moral facts by different features of the God of the Abrahamic religions (God’s nature, commands, etc.). This chapter also includes a short survey of arguments against moral realism (18–24). Chapter 2 is about Friedrich Nietzsche. This chapter explains his aversion to the conception of morality that involves altruism and emphasizes that Nietzsche’s view of morality rests on theism.

Part II, composed of four chapters, has been reserved for the rivals of moral realism. Chapter 3 deals with moral error theory, which is the view that moral judgments concerning objective moral facts are all false. Baggett and Walls, in this chapter, engage mostly with John Mackie’s arguments. They consider four different ways Mackie argued that objective moral facts will be odd in his argument from queerness against moral realism (74–86). Chapter 4 explains the expressivist view that moral judgments don’t have cognitive content. The authors explain this view by citing the early defenders of it. These are Alfred Ayer, Charles Stevenson and R. M. Hare. Chapter 5 delineates different types of moral constructivism, the view that morality is, in some way, a human product. One type of moral constructivism stated is ideal observer theory defended by Roderick Firth. Another one is moral relativism defended by Gilbert Harman. The first one explains moral properties with a hypothetical scenario concerning what an ideal observer would endorse. The second one involves a situation where a specific society actually selects some rules to be moral rules (131–135, 138–140). In Chapter 6, Baggett and Walls explain ethical views that stress the importance of sentiments, with their historical figures in the 17th and 18th centuries. These are Lord Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Thomas Reid. The authors emphasize that the views they classify as ‘sensibility theory’ are not a unique view but a family of views depending on the role sentiments play (177). For instance, according to the authors, Hume is not a moral objectivist, but Reid is a moral realist. It is also suggested, citing some contemporary figures, that emotions can have some function in acquiring knowledge of objective moral facts (172).

Part III includes two chapters. Chapter 7 considers an important and recently much discussed objection against moral knowledge. This objection is called ‘Evolutionary Debunking Arguments’, which claims that our substantial moral judgments are explained to an important extent by evolutionary processes, and these processes don’t refer to objective moral facts. Based on this, the fact that the origins of morality don’t aim at the truth of moral judgments leaves our moral intuitions without epistemic justification. Against this charge, Baggett and Walls (and some other theist philosophers) stipulate God as the guiding factor of evolution, which will provide justification for our moral beliefs. In Chapter 8, the authors consider and rebut some objections against theistic metaethics. One of them is that positing God as the creator of moral law is redundant. The other is the well-known arbitrariness objection against divine command theory. This objection states that if divine commands determine the moral qualities of our acts, any act such as torturing may be morally obligatory, which is counterintuitive.

Part IV comprises Chapter 9 alone. In this chapter, the authors provide eight arguments for moral realism benefitting mostly from contemporary moral Platonists. They don’t intend any of them to be deductive arguments to the conclusion that objective moral facts exist. Instead, Baggett and Walls suggest that these arguments cumulatively make moral realism more likely than moral anti-realism (235–237). The arguments for moral realism vary in type. One of them, for instance, rests on the failure of alternative views in explaining the moral data, such as objectivity or moral knowledge (243–246). Another one, defended by David Enoch, argues that our reasoning on how to act supports objective moral truths since they have practical relevance (254–256).

Unfortunately, this book is far from fulfilling the aim of the authors – namely, providing a substantial defence of moral realism. I will note three things about this. Firstly, Part II (from Chapter 3 to Chapter 6) is more like a history of four main alternatives to moral realism than an evaluation of these views. Each chapter includes only a very short discussion of the metaethical views considered there. For instance, in Chapter 3, in dealing with the queerness objection of Mackie, Baggett and Walls (80–81, 92) are content with citing Mackie’s brief remarks in his later work The Miracle of Theism (Oxford University Press, 1982) that the existence of an omnipotent being – God – would overcome the difficulties stemming from the queerness worries. But Mackie’s intention regarding how God’s existence will make a difference in alleviating the worries against moral realism isn’t clear. Moreover, the authors already provided detailed suggestions concerning metaphysical, epistemological and practical features of objective moral facts if they are metaphysically explained in a theistic way in their first co-authored book, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality.

Secondly, an important obstacle to moral realism is the stubborn diversity of moral beliefs between different people and different communities. This is known as the epistemic argument from disagreement against moral realism (19). I would expect at least a whole chapter to be devoted to this objection and to responses to it in the relevant literature. But this major objection against moral realism is mentioned briefly in a few places, and regarding this objection, Baggett and Walls only point out that disagreement is widespread also in metaethics (19, 69–73).

Thirdly, in Chapter 9, in stating the arguments for moral realism, each argument is presented in only one or a few pages. Of course, this will neither be satisfying for someone who has some doubts about the existence of objective moral facts nor be sufficient to understand the subtleties of these arguments. It would be preferable to handle each or some of these arguments in detail with criticisms each one has faced so far. The authors say that this is a project for the future that they will accomplish (243).

Despite these shortcomings, this is an instructive book which will help the reader to understand metaethical views including moral realism and its rivals. The different views are clearly defined, and their historical development is explained. Readers will also notice a chart which will enable them to see the metaethical terrain in a snapshot (30, 246).