"We cannot account for necessary truths in terms of things that could have been different. To take Aristotle’s view: We might have evolved to have natures direc

"We cannot account for necessary truths in terms of things that could have been different. To take Aristotle’s view: We might have evolved to have natures directed toward cruelty. In such a counterfactual scenario, we would have moral grounds for cruelty, which runs counter to our deepest moral convictions. Any view which tries to ground moral truth in things that might have been different is going to face a similar problem. There will be some counterfactual scenario in which the putative ground of morality is absent or points us toward evil rather than the good." What is cruelty? He's just juxtaposing abstract "cruelty" with some unspecified hypothetical and assumes it is meaningful. Cruelty presumes opposition to nature, so it makes no sense to say that some act A, understood in the abstract, is cruel. "Different statues are made of different clay; on the container view in contrast, everything that does, or could, exist is a manifestation of the same Reality." Prima facie, sounds like a vulgarization of God-as-Being, i.e., all things exist as potentially existing in relation to actually existing things, and actually existing things are like potential things in relation to the act of existence that causes them to be, which is God. "If we follow Aristotle in grounding moral truth in the goal-directed nature of human beings, then we fail to account for the necessity of moral truths." The aim was never necessity but nature. The natural law is called thus for a reason. I don't know what "good" or "bad" is apart from the nature of a thing. "My proposal is that the inherently directed nature of Reality entails that it’s objectively good for Reality when it manifests as pleasure and objectively bad for Reality when it manifests as pain." He's elevating the world of plural substances to the level of a single substance and referring to it as Reality. But this does nothing to convert the natural moral law into the necessary moral law because you've just reduced the universe to one thing whose nature is such that such-and-such is good for it and such-and-such is not. To accomplish that kind of necessity, he would have to identity nature with necessity and that would require identifying what he called "Reality" with God. If Reality is God, then this is pantheism. But why this need to posit necessity? "Foundational theories of morality have been locked in a perennial tug of war between the supernaturalism of Plato and the naturalism of his opponents." Has he explored Thomism? Forms exist only in things and the mind, but also in God. Thus, you have both access to moral truths by knowing the natures of things, but even with the destruction of those things, they continue to exist in God (even if we may not be able to know them). Also, it is bad for human beings to harm others at least because it harms the common good and thus their own good. It is against our own natures to do so.