The central philosophical challenge of metaethics is to account for the normativity of moral judgment without abandoning or seriously compromising moral realism. In Morality in a Natural World, David Copp defends a version of naturalistic moral realism that can accommodate the normativity of morality. Moral naturalism is often thought to face special metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic problems as well as the difficulty in accounting for normativity. In the ten essays included in this volume, Copp defends solutions to these problems. Three of the essays are new, while seven have previously been published. All of them are concerned with the viability of naturalistic and realistic accounts of the nature of morality, or, more generally, with the viability of naturalistic accounts of reasons.

David Copp is professor of philosophy at the University of Florida. He is the author of Morality, Normativity and Society and has edited and co-edited several volumes including The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory. He served for many years as an editor of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy and is currently an Associate Editor of Ethics and the subject editor for metaethics of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Introduction; Part I. Naturalism: Epistemology and Metaphysics: 1. Why naturalism?; 2. Four epistemological challenges to ethical naturalism: naturalized epistemology and the first-person perspective; 3. Moral naturalism and self-evident moral truths; 4. Moral necessities in a contingent world; Part II. Referring to Moral Properties: 5. Realist-expressivism: a neglected option for moral realism; 6. Milk, honey, and the good life on moral twin earth; 7. Referring to moral properties: moral twin-earth, again; Part III. Naturalism and Normativity: 8. Moral naturalism and three grades of normativity; 9. The ring of gyges: overridingness and the unity of reason; 10. The normativity of self-grounded reason.