A Sober Assessment

 

A Sober Assessment

Claude from ChatGPT's outline account:

The narrative of classical realism interrupted by a century of anti-realism and now restored by Sterling's six commitments is coherent and rhetorically strong. But philosophically it compresses the twentieth century too aggressively and overstates both the interruption and the restoration. Here is the more careful picture.

1. Was There an Anti-Realist Interruption?

There was a powerful anti-realist wave in early to mid twentieth-century analytic philosophy — Ayer's emotivism, Mackie's error theory, logical positivism broadly. For several decades, especially 1930 to 1960, noncognitivism and related views were highly influential in Anglophone metaethics. But two corrections are necessary.

First, realism never disappeared entirely. G.E. Moore predates positivism and remained influential. Mid-century intuitionists and later Cornell realists kept the realist position alive throughout the period. Second, the anti-realist period was not purely cultural drift. It was driven by the rise of scientific naturalism, linguistic analysis, verificationist epistemology, and deep suspicion of metaphysics after nineteenth-century excess. It was a serious philosophical movement responding to real pressures, not mere institutional prejudice. Calling it an interruption suggests illegitimacy. It was more accurately a methodological shift with unintended consequences for ethics.

2. Parfit and the Revival

Derek Parfit does represent a major realist resurgence. But Parfit's realism is non-naturalist, quietist about heavy metaphysics, and deliberately minimalist. He avoided substance dualism, libertarian metaphysics, and theological commitments. He aimed to show that moral truth is defensible without reviving pre-modern metaphysical systems. So he did not leave the architecture underdeveloped accidentally. He intentionally kept it light.

3. Is the Twentieth Century Best Seen as a Detour?

That depends on one's metaphysical commitments. If one holds substance dualism, libertarian freedom, correspondence realism, and foundationalism, then the naturalist reduction looks like a detour. But from within analytic philosophy the naturalist turn was seen as cleaning up speculative metaphysics, demanding epistemic rigor, and avoiding ontological inflation. The disagreement is deeper than institutional fashion. It concerns what kinds of entities are admissible, what counts as explanation, and whether normativity fits into a naturalist ontology. Those are not trivial disputes.

4. The Strongest Part of the Thesis

Where the narrative has real force is here: the anti-realist period often treated empirical methodology as the universal epistemic standard. In that framework non-empirical knowledge looked suspicious, normativity became difficult to place, and moral objectivity looked queer in Mackie's sense. That structural pressure is real. And it does parallel the ancient conflict between the Stoics and the Academic skeptics — though the metaphysical background differs significantly.

5. The Risk in the Restoration Framing

The phrase full restoration implies that history had a correct baseline, that modernity deviated from it, and that a system now re-establishes the original integrity. That is rhetorically powerful but philosophically ambitious. Once you add substance dualism, libertarian free will, and foundationalism you are no longer merely restoring moral realism. You are re-opening every major metaphysical controversy of modern philosophy. That is a coherent project — but it is not a small claim.

6. Bottom Line

The arc — classical realism, anti-realist dominance, realist revival, metaphysical restoration — is a defensible interpretive framework. But it simplifies the persistence of realism throughout the twentieth century, the intellectual seriousness of naturalist anti-realism, and the fact that Parfit's realism was intentionally metaphysically restrained. The debate was not a century-long mistake. It was a clash between competing epistemic and metaphysical models. Whether one sees it as detour or development depends on one's starting commitments.

What is undeniable is this: the twentieth century destabilized moral realism's default status. And the late twentieth century re-legitimized it as a serious analytic position. That much is historically solid.

On What Side of the Debate are the Stoics?