What is a Moral Law? Ask the Normative Ethicists

Many metaethicists hold that particular moral facts must be explained in part by general moral principles, but they have struggled to give a satisfactory account of the nature of these explanatory moral laws. While the content of the moral laws has always been taken to be a matter of normative ethics, I explore the possibility that we could turn to normative ethical theory for an account of their nature as well. Could it be that the moral laws just are the contractualist’s principles that no one could reasonably reject, or the rule-consequentialist’s optimific rules, or the dispositions of the virtuous agent? I argue that accounts of this kind offer at least a partial solution to the problem: though they may not succeed as fully general accounts of moral lawhood, they show considerable promise as accounts of the deontic laws—the moral laws that explain facts about right and wrong.