Gary L. Drescher

'Ambitious' does not do justice to the scope of this book's project of explaining no less than all of reality and dispelling the most beguiling of modern philosophical paradoxes. Drescher's title 'Good and Real' alludes to the is/ought dichotomy of what there 'is' and how moral agents 'ought' to act. He presents solutions to both using reasonable assumptions based on modern scientific evidence and then extrapolating those into cleverly simplified toy models.

Underlying all of Drescher's thinking is a foundational construction of the 'real' or what 'is' and can be summarized as a deterministic quantum-mechanical configuration space based on Everett's many-worlds interpretation that sits statically and timelessly representing the possibility space of spacetime. Using this foundation, he offers a theory of the 'good' or what 'ought' to be done and can be summarized as following the rule of subjunctive reciprocity, which is the use of acausal counterfactual reasoning to justify following Kant's categorical imperative. In reaching this conclusion, Drescher spends time reconciling notions of free-will with a deterministic universe and puts forth arguments for using acausal counterfactual reasoning as the preferred way of thinking about means-end relations that is more general than causal relationships but also more strict than mere evidential relationships.

I found Drescher's arguments sound and consistent, and his assumptions more than reasonable, and thus can agree with his general conclusions for the most part without much reservation. It goes much further than other recent attempts at grounding ethics within a naturalistic framework, such as Sam Harris' failed attempts in his recent book 'The Moral Landscape', but I fear the necessarily more technical style of Drescher's book will impede it from receiving the popular attention it deserves.… (meer)