What Anderson finds most remarkable about his boss is the way Pearson took "infinite pains to inculcate his convictions on the moral objectives of the newspaper column and the just society".
The story is an old one in which politicians, who often begin with the best of intentions seeking tirelessly to achieve their various moral objectives, ultimately find themselves in compromising situations, capitulating to the views of their supporters, political advisers, or even adversaries.
Transparency, independence, the free flow of information, moral clarity, objective truth — these notions took hold and flourished in the last century at papers like The Times.
To be sure you will now give different answers than you once would have when you are asked about moral facts, objective truths, irrefutable evidence and so on; but when you are engaged in trying to decide what is the right thing to do in a particular situation, none of the answers you might give to these deep questions will have any bearing on your decision.
In sum, I do not know how consciousness works, or the likelihood of variation that would allow natural selection to bring forth moral instincts, objective knowledge and conceptual thought.
Aquinas's central natural-law thesis is that valid positive law is necessarily derived from objective moral principles (or moral truths).
According to this objection, if strong emotivism is true, then there can be no objective moral truth, no rational criticism of one's moral judgments, no rationally resolvable moral disagreement.
Hampton sounds a similar theme, contending that through its expressive content—"representing the rapist as master and the victim as inferior object"—rape does an objective "moral injury" to its victim's value (1999, 135).
Perhaps the most general source of reservations against the constructivist interpretation is that Kant's claims about the nature of objective moral cognitions seem best vindicated by moral realism, while constructivism is sometimes taken to be a form of antirealism (Ameriks 2003, 268, 274; Wood 1999, 167; Wood 2008, 108, 337, 374 375).
