The Anti-Realist Interruption and Sterling's Restoration

 

The Anti-Realist Interruption and Sterling's Restoration

Claude:

The twentieth century saw a dramatic reversal in moral philosophy. Strong anti-realist movements emerged in rapid succession — logical positivism, emotivism, error theory — and for a time anti-realism dominated analytic metaethics so thoroughly that moral realism became a minority position requiring elaborate defense. Understanding that arc is essential to understanding what Sterling's Core Stoicism is doing and why it matters.

The Anti-Realist Dominance

The dominance was not the result of decisive philosophical argument. Logical positivism declared moral statements meaningless by the verification principle — but the verification principle itself could not survive its own test and collapsed from within. A.J. Ayer's emotivism reduced moral claims to expressions of attitude — sophisticated in construction but ultimately unable to account for moral reasoning, moral argument, or moral progress in any robust sense. J.L. Mackie's error theory was at least philosophically honest: he acknowledged that moral discourse purports to describe objective facts and concluded those facts simply do not exist. But his argument from queerness against moral properties — the claim that objective moral facts would be metaphysically strange entities unlike anything else in the natural world — was a metaphysical prejudice dressed as an argument.

What drove the anti-realist dominance was less the quality of the arguments than the cultural and institutional pressure toward naturalism. If physical science is the model of genuine knowledge, then moral intuitions look like noise — subjective static to be explained away rather than data to be taken seriously. The positivists and their successors were applying a methodology appropriate to empirical investigation to a domain where it systematically misfires.

The Partial Revival

The late twentieth century saw the beginning of a realist revival, most significantly in the work of Derek Parfit. His late masterwork On What Matters is essentially a prolonged argument that objective moral truth exists and is accessible to reason. Parfit came from within the analytic tradition and on purely analytic grounds concluded that moral realism is more defensible than its rivals. He arrived at a position close to W.D. Ross's intuitionism by a different route — without invoking Ross's framework directly but converging on the same core insight that some moral truths are self-evident to careful rational attention.

The revival is significant because it came from inside the tradition that had marginalized moral realism. Parfit did not appeal to classical sources or theological authority. He worked through the analytic literature and found the anti-realist positions wanting on their own terms.

The Full Restoration

Seen against this arc the historical trajectory runs as follows: classical moral realism in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics — an anti-realist interruption of roughly a century driven more by cultural naturalism than by sound argument — a partial restoration beginning with Parfit and others in the late twentieth century.

Sterling's six commitments represent the full restoration rather than the partial one. Parfit recovered moral realism. Sterling adds the complete metaphysical and epistemological architecture that Parfit left underdeveloped: substance dualism to preserve the reality of the perceiving self, libertarian free will to preserve genuine moral agency, ethical intuitionism to explain how moral truth is accessed, foundationalism to ground the epistemic structure, and correspondence theory of truth to specify what moral knowledge is knowledge of.

Parfit got moral realism back onto the table. Sterling built the table.

The anti-realist interruption now looks less like philosophical progress and more like a detour — a century-long institutional commitment to naturalist assumptions that were never adequately argued for, producing a consensus that marginalized positions far better supported by careful philosophical analysis. The Academic skeptics that Epictetus argued against in the first century and the logical positivists and emotivists of the twentieth century are running the same fundamental move: treating discursive empirical reasoning as the only legitimate epistemic instrument and dismissing direct rational access to moral reality as naive.

Sterling's restoration is the contemporary answer to both.

A Sober Assessment