Abstract

Professor Yong Huang (Citation2023) claims that Zhu Xi’s ‘agent-centred’ moral realism can avoid four canonical metaethical critiques—Hume’s is-ought problem, Moore’s open question argument, and Mackie’s argument from queerness and argument from intractable disagreement. The central problem running through them is that naturalness and normativity are incompatible. Huang believes that we can escape this problem since these critiques supposedly only apply to ‘act-centred’ and not ‘agent-centred’ moral realism—theories which treat actions rather than agents as the bearers of fundamental normative properties. By turning to agents as bearers of virtue, virtue seems like a natural and normative property. Here, I pose a thorny dilemma for Huang. Either the normativity of virtue is merely apparent or the normativity of virtue is categorically different from normativity as understood by Hume, Moore, and Mackie. My commentary explains how each horn implies that Zhu Xi’s brand of moral realism does not avoid the central problem on the critics’ own terms. It just changes the subject.