The history of moral philosophy can seem a disappointing spectacle. Large tracts of the project can be interpreted as thinkers taking their own moral preferences and trying desperately to prove them correct. The most ambitious among them will aspire to objective absolute necessary truth for their moral claims. Failing this (as fail it does), various softer projects will be countenanced: Perhaps objectivity is asking too much; maybe we can allow that moral truths are in some manner constituted by human practices. Or perhaps absolutism can be dropped; maybe we can be satisfied with one moral truth for us and another moral truth for them. And so on. The theories are plentiful, the convolutions byzantine, the in-fighting bitter, the spilt ink copious, and the progress spectacularly unimpressive. It is a disappointing spectacle not merely because we have so little to show for it after two and a half thousand years, but because this enterprise of self-exoneration can seem immature—as deriving from an anxious need for reassurance. Yet when one reflects on where our moral judgments come from, it appears unlikely that this reassurance will be forthcoming. By the time we take our first tottering steps, each of us is already immersed in a social world rich in concepts like right and wrong, desert (relating to rewards and punishments), must and mustn’t. Our childhood is one grand advertising campaign designed to get us to internalize and take these concepts seriously—a campaign, moreover, that in all likelihood we are biologically designed to find compelling (because thinking in this fashion helped our ancestors produce more babies than their competitors). And so we do. But nowhere does this account of how we come to make moral judgments presuppose that any of the beliefs in question are actually true (even approximately so); and now, as adult philosophers—being in a position to stand back and see the process for what it is—do we really need to concoct cunning theories designed to earn this missing truth for our moral beliefs? Even supposing this mission were possible (regarding which the fat back catalog of failed theories cautions pessimism), the motivation to demonstrate that one’s current moral framework—the product of a particular contingent cultural trajectory interacting with a particular contingent evolutionary history—is more-or-less correct (even if only “correct for us”) seems an expression of grotesque hubris...