On the morning of March 15, 2023, police at the Green Village interchange near Tel Aviv arrested a middle-aged professor of philosophy and law. He had walked down onto the road with other protesters to block traffic. The protest targeted the Netanyahu government’s plan to remake the Israeli judiciary. When the policeman came for him, the professor put his hands behind his back and did not resist. He later wrote on Facebook that the hard part was psychological, a barrier you cross once and then it is crossed. Police released him after about two hours. He went back to work.
The professor was David Enoch (b. 1971), and the arrest made news in the philosophy world for a simple reason. Enoch is the most prominent living defender of the view that moral truths exist objectively, independent of what any person, culture, or government thinks. When a man who has spent his career arguing that “torturing children for fun is wrong” states a fact about the universe gets dragged off a road by police, colleagues notice. One commenter on the philosophy blog Daily Nous put it this way: you know something is wrong when people like David Enoch are getting arrested.
Twenty months later, in November 2024, Enoch stood in a lecture hall at Oxford to deliver his inaugural lecture as Professor of the Philosophy of Law, one of the most prestigious chairs in his field, a line of succession that runs through H.L.A. Hart (1907-1992), Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013), John Gardner (1965-2019), and Joseph Raz (1939-2022) as the dominant figures of Oxford jurisprudence. Enoch opened with a story. Catherine the Great (1729-1796) once wrote to the French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713-1784) that philosophers have it easy. They write on paper, and paper is patient. An empress writes on the susceptible skins of living beings. Enoch told the room that the same holds for law. Legal philosophers write on patient paper. The law itself writes on skin. A discipline that forgets this, he argued, drifts into conceptual puzzles that no living being needs solved. The lecture, published in 2025 in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, reads as a mission statement from a man who holds two of the most abstract jobs in the academy, metaethicist and legal philosopher, and who keeps insisting that the abstractions answer to the street.
The two scenes, the road and the lecture hall, frame his career. Enoch argues in seminar rooms that objective moral facts exist. He acts in public as though they do.
He came to philosophy through disappointment with law. Born in 1971, he grew up wanting to be a lawyer, or thinking he did. He enrolled at Tel Aviv University to study law, and within his first few weeks two things happened. The law disillusioned him, and an introductory jurisprudence class introduced him to philosophy. He told the interviewer Richard Marshall years later that the shift did not surprise him. He had always argued about the kinds of questions he later learned to call philosophical. He finished both degrees in 1993, a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy, then took the most coveted apprenticeship in Israeli law: a clerkship at the Supreme Court for Justice Dorit Beinisch (b. 1942), who later became the Court’s president. A clerk in that building watches how judicial power actually operates, which petitions get heard, which arguments move a justice, what a ruling costs the people named in it. Enoch absorbed the education and declined the career. He left for the philosophy department at New York University.
NYU in the late 1990s ran the strongest philosophy department in the English-speaking world, and its ethics faculty had no rival. Enoch studied with Derek Parfit (1942-2017), Thomas Nagel (b. 1937), and Hartry Field (b. 1946), three philosophers who agreed on little except the seriousness of the questions. Parfit and Nagel inclined toward moral objectivity. Field, a hard-nosed philosopher of mathematics and logic, thought the whole idea false. The combination shaped Enoch’s style. He completed his dissertation in 2003, a defense of what he called robust meta-normative realism, and the dissertation became the spine of everything he has written since. Field’s judgment of the mature work appears as a blurb on Enoch’s first book, and it may be the best blurb in academic philosophy: “on the scale of texts arguing for an obviously false conclusion,” Field wrote, this one ranks high. Russ Shafer-Landau (b. 1963), the philosopher most responsible for reviving moral non-naturalism, called it the best defense of ethical realism ever written. Enoch printed both.
The book is Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (2011), and its thesis can be stated in a sentence. There are moral facts, they are objective, they do not reduce to psychology or biology or physics, and we discover them rather than invent them. Slavery was wrong before anyone said so. It stayed wrong in every society that practiced it. The claim sounds like common sense, and Enoch trades on that. Much of twentieth-century philosophy treated the common-sense view as naive, a relic that Darwin, anthropology, and logical positivism had buried. Morality, the sophisticated said, expresses emotion, or encodes social convention, or projects human attitudes onto a blank universe. Enoch’s book argues that the sophisticated position fails on its own terms.
His signature argument runs through deliberation. Every person deliberates. You sit with a hard choice, whether to take the job, whether to report the colleague, whether to end the treatment, and you try to work out what you should do. Enoch argues that this activity makes no sense unless some answers are better than others in a way you do not control. If your reasons were just your preferences in costume, deliberation would reduce to introspection, checking which desire is loudest. Nobody deliberates that way. The practice assumes there is something to get right. And a commitment that indispensable, Enoch argues, earns the same respect we give the indispensable commitments of science. Physicists posit electrons because explanation requires them. Deliberators presuppose objective reasons because deliberation requires them. The argument borrows the structure of the Quine-Putnam case for mathematical objects and points it at ethics.
His second famous move answers the skeptic who shrugs. Suppose someone says: fine, I reject morality and follow my own system, call it schmorality, which resembles morality but claims no objective authority. Enoch’s reply: the skeptic still faces the question of whether to follow morality or schmorality, and that question asks what he should do. The “should” comes back in the front door. You cannot deliberate your way out of normativity, because deliberating is normativity. A related argument, the companion-in-guilt strategy, targets the critic who scoffs at moral facts while trusting evidence. Anyone who thinks you ought to believe what the evidence supports already accepts an objective normative fact, an epistemic one. The objections against moral facts, that they are metaphysically weird, that no sense organ detects them, apply with equal force to epistemic facts. Reject both and you have abandoned rational inquiry. Keep epistemic facts and the case against moral facts collapses. Skarsaune, Wedgwood, Björnsson, and a small industry of critics have spent a decade probing these arguments, which is the academic form of a compliment. The book is now a standard reference in metaethics, and by some counts non-naturalist realism, a minority heresy in 1990, now approaches majority status among ethical theorists. Enoch did not cause that shift alone. He wrote its most complete brief.
After NYU he went home. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem gave him a joint appointment in law and philosophy in 2003, and in 2005 he took the Rodney Blackman Chair in the Philosophy of Law. He co-directed the university’s Center for Moral and Political Philosophy, won the university President’s Award for outstanding research in 2022, and built a second body of work in legal philosophy that has proved as influential as the first.
His legal philosophy starts with a provocation. The central question of twentieth-century jurisprudence, what is the nature of law, bores him. He has published a paper asking whether general jurisprudence is interesting and answering mostly no. The questions worth a philosopher’s time, he argues, are normative: what the law should do to the people it touches. On these questions he has produced a stream of arguments that lawyers and judges actually cite. His account of law as a triggering mechanism holds that legal rules rarely create new moral obligations. A statute directing traffic to the right side of the road creates no new virtue of rightward driving. It creates a coordination point, and the old duty not to endanger others now requires you to comply. Law changes the circumstances of morality. It does not add to morality’s inventory.
His work on statistical evidence, much of it with Talia Fisher and Levi Spectre, asks why courts hesitate to convict on bare probabilities. If a hundred prisoners riot and ninety-nine participated, the statistics make each prisoner ninety-nine percent likely to be guilty, yet no court convicts a particular prisoner on that basis alone, and Enoch thinks the courts sense something real. Statistical evidence, unlike an eyewitness, does not track the individual defendant. Had this defendant been the innocent one, the statistic would look the same. The argument, framed through the epistemologist’s notion of sensitivity, has become a fixture of evidence theory and grows more urgent as algorithms and risk scores enter courtrooms. He has also argued that moral luck probably does not exist, that two drivers identical in conduct do not differ in blame because a child ran in front of only one of them, and he traces what that means for a legal system that punishes the unlucky driver more. His account of consent is contrastive: consent to one thing against one set of alternatives, not consent in the abstract, which reframes hard questions about medical treatment, sex, and coercion. His papers on nudging and on false consciousness push liberalism to admit that choices can be voluntary and still fail as expressions of the person, because manipulation and oppressive conditions shape desire itself. The essay “False Consciousness for Liberals” appeared in the Philosophical Review, the field’s flagship, in 2020.
Against Rawlsian orthodoxy in political philosophy, Enoch is blunt. John Rawls (1921-2002) taught two generations that state power must justify itself through public reason, arguments all reasonable citizens could accept regardless of their deeper commitments. Enoch’s essay “Against Public Reason” rejects the whole apparatus. Political life cannot launder away substantive moral judgment, he argues, and pretending otherwise breeds evasion. He defends a comprehensive liberalism that names the objective values, autonomy chief among them, on which liberal institutions stand. Consensus deserves less reverence than philosophers give it. A moral conviction does not become illegitimate because reasonable people reject it.
That position stopped being academic in January 2023, when the new Netanyahu government moved to give the ruling coalition control of judicial appointments and an override of Supreme Court rulings. Enoch, who had clerked in the building the government sought to subdue, treated the program as regime change and said so. He organized. Over one hundred Israeli philosophers signed a letter he helped publicize. He joined the Israeli Law Professors’ Forum for Democracy, which produced position papers against the legislation by the dozen. He went to the roads, and to the police station. In July 2023 he published an essay in the Forward with a headline calibrated to burn bridges: if you want to support Israel, boycott its new government. He had already argued in Haaretz that the standard premises of the boycott debate deserve challenge, a stance that drew fire from pro-Israel watchdog groups who noted his university had just given him its research prize. Enoch has spent his career telling philosophers that reasonable disagreement does not neutralize moral truth. In 2023 he ran the argument in public, at cost.
Oxford called that same year. He became Professor of the Philosophy of Law and a Professorial Fellow of Balliol College while keeping his Hebrew University appointment, a two-institution life split between Oxford and Tel Aviv, where he lives with his family. In 2025 he co-edited Engaging Raz: Themes in Normative Philosophy with Andrei Marmor and Kimberley Brownlee, a volume on the legacy of the man whose Oxford chairs he now occupies territory near. Google Scholar counts his citations near seven thousand and climbing.
His prose explains part of the influence. Enoch writes philosophy the way trial lawyers wish they wrote briefs, in short declarative pushes, with jokes, with the objections stated at full strength before he answers them. Critics who think his conclusion false, and Field is not alone, still teach his papers, because the arguments are built to be argued with. He describes his own view as shameless. The word fits. In a discipline where sophistication long meant distance from moral conviction, Enoch bet his career on the opposite: that the person who says cruelty is wrong, full stop, holds the reasonable position, and the burden falls on everyone else. The bet has paid. Whether the universe contains the facts he says it does remains the open question of his field. That a philosopher got arrested acting on them is a matter of record.
Notes
The arrest scene and Facebook account come from a *Daily Nous* report published on March 16, 2023: Daily Nous. Enoch’s Facebook post describes overcoming the psychological barrier to arrest and having his hands placed behind his back. The remark that “you know something is deeply wrong” comes from a commenter on that post, not from Enoch himself.
The Oxford inaugural lecture and the Catherine the Great story come from the lecture delivered in November 2024 and later published as “Law, Philosophy and the Susceptible Skins of Living Beings” in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 45, Issue 4 (Winter 2025), pp. 872-895: DOI.
The account of becoming disillusioned with law school comes from Richard Marshall’s interview, “Shameless Realism Goes Robust,” at 3:16: 3:16. Enoch explains that he entered law school intending to become a lawyer but became disillusioned within the first few weeks. A jurisprudence course introduced him to philosophy. The description “shameless” is his own and also appears on his Hebrew University profile.
Career details, including his 1993 degrees from Tel Aviv University, clerkship with Justice Dorit Beinisch, Ph.D. from New York University in 2003, joint appointment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and appointment to Oxford in 2023, are documented by the University of Oxford Faculty of Law and Wikipedia.
The endorsements by Hartry Field and Russ Shafer-Landau are quoted in a published review of Taking Morality Seriously: Academia.edu. Shafer-Landau describes it as the finest book yet written in defense of ethical realism. Field jokes that, among books arguing for what he regards as an obviously false conclusion, it ranks unusually high. Both endorsements also appear on the book jacket.
Enoch’s role in organizing opposition to Israel’s proposed judicial overhaul, including the philosophers’ open letter, is documented by *Daily Nous*: Daily Nous. His membership in the Law Professors’ Forum is documented at Wikipedia.
His Forward essay of July 31, 2023, “If You Want to Support Israel, Boycott Its New Government,” is available here: The Forward. The same page confirms that he lives with his family in Tel Aviv. The *Haaretz* boycott article and criticism from Israel Academia Monitor appear here: Israel Academia Monitor. Because that site is openly hostile, it should be used cautiously. The factual references to the President’s Award and the underlying *Haaretz* article can, however, be independently verified.
His citation count, approaching 7,000, can be confirmed through Google Scholar.
His work with Ronald Fisher and Levi Spectre, including “False Consciousness for Liberals” in the Philosophical Review (2020), as well as the 2025 volume Engaging Raz, edited with Andrei Marmor and Kimberley Brownlee, appears on the publications list maintained by the Oxford Faculty of Law.
The Ghost Enoch Defends: David Enoch Through Stephen Turner’s Account of Normativity
Stephen Turner (b. 1951) has spent forty years telling philosophers that their central object of study does not exist. In Explaining the Normative (2010) and a shelf of related work, he argues that “normativity,” the special binding force that philosophers find in reasons, rules, meanings, and obligations, is an invention of the seminar room. Strip it away and nothing in the world goes missing. People still expect things of each other. They still sanction violations, teach children, feel the pull of habit and the sting of shame. Social science can describe all of this in ordinary causal terms, as Max Weber (1864-1920) described it, through belief, expectation, training, and interest. The philosopher looks at these plain facts and adds a ghost: a force that makes the rule not just followed but binding, the reason not just felt but real. Turner’s charge is that the ghost does no work. Every explanation the normativist offers succeeds or fails on its social and psychological content, and the added normative force explains nothing that the content did not already explain.
David Enoch (b. 1971) is the strongest living opponent of this view, which makes him the best possible test of it. His career is a defense of the ghost, conducted with more candor than the ghost usually receives. Most philosophers who traffic in normativity hedge. They naturalize a little, they construct a little, they say the binding force is somehow grounded in agency or language or practice. Enoch refuses the hedges. Taking Morality Seriously (2011) asserts that irreducibly normative facts exist, that they float free of anything humans do or feel, that they live, as he puts it with a smile, in Plato’s heaven. He concedes they cause nothing. He concedes no sense organ detects them. He calls his view shameless and prints his critics’ insults on the book jacket. Turner’s framework predicts that a discipline organized around a fiction will eventually produce someone who defends the fiction in its purest form, because the pure form is what the discipline’s training selects for. Enoch is that man, and running Turner’s deflation against Enoch’s three best arguments shows what each theory looks like at full strength.
Start with deliberative indispensability, Enoch’s flagship. People deliberate. Deliberation assumes that some answers to the question “what should I do” are better than others in a way the deliberator does not control. Since we cannot quit deliberating, we are entitled to the assumption, the way physicists are entitled to electrons. Turner’s reply comes in two cuts. First, the analogy fails at its load-bearing joint. Electrons earn their place by causing things: tracks in cloud chambers, currents in wires. Remove electrons from physics and the predictions collapse. Enoch’s normative facts cause nothing, by his own admission, so removing them changes no prediction about anything. A posit that pays no explanatory rent is what Turner means by a ghost. Second, the felt need for objective reasons is itself a plain social fact with a natural history. Children get trained into the practice of asking for and giving reasons. The training installs expectations, and the expectations feel like demands coming from outside, the way grammar feels like a demand from outside. Turner’s Weberian point: an account of why deliberation feels answerable to something beyond preference requires no facts beyond the training. The philosopher takes the feel of the practice and promotes it into metaphysics. Deliberation is real. The heaven it seems to point at is the shadow the practice casts.
Enoch anticipates a version of this and answers with the schmorality argument. Imagine a skeptic who says he rejects morality and follows his own system, schmorality, which resembles morality but claims no objective authority. Enoch’s trap: the skeptic must still decide whether to follow morality or schmorality, and deciding means asking which he should follow. The “should” returns through the front door. Normativity cannot be escaped because the escape route runs through it. Turner’s reading of this trap is that it shows something true about a practice and nothing about the world. The question “which should I follow” has grip only on someone already trained into the reason-asking game. The trap catches everyone in Enoch’s seminar because everyone in the seminar shares the training. It catches no one outside it, and it never has. Billions of people have lived and died inside customs they never interrogated with an unconditioned “should.” The regress that Enoch presents as proof of inescapable normative structure is, on Turner’s account, the machine of academic philosophy manufacturing its own necessity: define a question so that only the discipline’s vocabulary can pose it, then cite the question as evidence for the vocabulary. Kelsen ran a version of this machine in law. Hans Kelsen (1881-1973) saw that legal validity chains upward and posited a basic norm at the top, then admitted the basic norm was a fiction, a presupposition of legal thinking rather than a thing. Turner regards Kelsen’s admission as the honest terminus of the whole normativist program. Enoch stands at the same summit and declares the fiction a fact.
The companion-in-guilt argument is Enoch’s deepest move, and against most opponents it wins. The critic who scoffs at moral facts still believes you ought to follow the evidence, and that “ought” is as spooky as any moral one. Reject both and you abandon rational inquiry. Keep the epistemic one and the case against the moral one collapses. The argument works by finding a normative commitment the critic cannot afford to drop. Turner is the rare critic who drops it. On his account, science runs the way every practice runs, on training, habituation, communal sanction, and the accumulated tacit skill of people who learn from other people. Scientists who ignore evidence get corrected, excluded, and unfunded. The corrective machinery is social all the way down, and it functioned for centuries before philosophers described a realm of epistemic facts for it to answer to. So the companionship holds, and both companions go down together, and nothing collapses. Laboratories open the next morning. The prediction Enoch’s argument needs, that abandoning objective epistemic facts undermines inquiry, fails against the observed history of inquiry, which has never run on those facts and has run fine.
Enoch has a counterpunch left, and it is the best one available. Turner says his deflationary account explains the phenomena better than the normativist account. “Better” is a normative word. The companion-in-guilt argument bites its author: the man who says normativity is a ghost still claims his theory is the one we should accept. Turner’s answer is that “better” here means nothing transcendent. It means more economical, more consistent with the rest of science, more useful to people with the ordinary purposes explainers have. Those are preferences and standards internal to a practice, held by people trained into it, enforced by a community, which is all “better” has ever cashed out to. Enoch hears this answer and replies that standards internal to a practice cannot make the practice worth engaging in, and Turner replies that “worth” is the ghost again, and here the two theories stop touching. Each man’s rejoinder is question-begging by the other’s lights. The dispute has no neutral ground because one side holds that neutral ground of the required kind exists and the other holds that the demand for it is the disease.
At this point Turner’s second question becomes the productive one. Set aside whether the ghost exists and ask what its cult does for its members. Turner’s work on expertise gives the answer shape. A community that believes in objective normative facts, discoverable through reasoned reflection, has thereby created a role: the person trained in reasoned reflection, whose judgments track the facts better than the layman’s. Normativity converts the philosopher from one voice among many into an instrument that detects something. Enoch embodies the conversion at both of his addresses. In the seminar room, robust realism underwrites the authority of the metaethicist, since if moral truths sit in Plato’s heaven, the man with the sharpest arguments sits closest to the window. In public life the stakes rise. Enoch clerked at the Israeli Supreme Court, and in 2023 he organized, marched, and got arrested defending that court against a coalition that won an election and moved to subordinate the judiciary to itself. His inaugural lecture at Oxford in November 2024 argued that law writes on the susceptible skins of living beings. Turner might accept every word of the lecture and draw the deflationary moral: yes, law writes on skin, through police, prisons, and expectation, and that writing is the whole of the phenomenon. The judicial fight, read through Turner, was a contest between two social authorities, a court whose personnel claim to answer to standards above politics and a coalition that claims to answer to voters. The normativist description of that fight, rule of law against raw power, objective right against majority will, is the self-description of one side. It recruits the metaphysics as a combatant. A philosopher who has spent thirty years arguing that binding standards exist independent of anyone’s say-so arrives at the barricade already armed, and the arrest photograph completes the argument in a way no journal article can: here is a man bound by something, look at his hands behind his back. Turner’s framework does not call the conduct insincere. It calls the sincerity the product, the thing the training exists to produce, and it notes who benefits when a society believes that certain trained people have access to standards the rest must obey.
The clean test between the two theories is the one Enoch himself supplies. Ask what would differ observably if he were wrong, if the normative facts were absent and only the practices remained. His answer is: nothing. The facts are causally inert, so the world of a true robust realism and the world of a false one look identical, down to the last deliberation and the last arrest. Enoch treats this as no objection, since mathematics survives the same test. Turner treats it as the confession. A hypothesis that no observation could distinguish from its negation belongs, on his view, to the category Kelsen finally admitted, useful fictions, and the only remaining questions about it are sociological: who is trained to affirm it, what the affirmation costs, and what it pays. Enoch’s career answers the sociological questions with unusual completeness. The affirmation cost him nothing in his profession, where the view he defends has moved from heresy toward orthodoxy across his working life, and it paid him the Rodney Blackman Chair, the Oxford professorship, and a public role as the philosopher who stands where the ghost tells him to stand. Whether the ghost is there, or the standing produces it, is the whole disagreement, stated once more.
The Clerk of Heaven: David Enoch’s Hero System
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued in The Denial of Death (1973) that a man cannot live on food and shelter. He needs to matter, and he needs to matter in a universe that is going to kill him, so every culture builds a hero system, a structure of roles and values within which a life adds up to something that death cannot repossess. The system works only while its members forget it is a system. They experience it as reality.
David Enoch faces two terrors, and his career is the management of both. The first is the terror of the anti-realist universe. If the expressivists and the relativists are right, then the wrongness of torturing a child has the same status as the badness of cilantro, a fact about us rather than a fact. Enoch has said in print that this possibility strikes him as a kind of horror, and his first book exists to close the door on it. The second terror is quieter and more Beckerian. The man who makes the arguments is an animal. He tires, he ages, he will die, and every institution he serves, the Hebrew University, the Israeli Supreme Court, Oxford, can be defunded, packed, or burned. Against these two deaths Enoch has built one of the most elegant immortality projects in contemporary intellectual life. He posits a realm of normative facts that are causally inert, outside space and time, dependent on nothing. What does nothing cannot be damaged. What sits outside time cannot decay. His critics treat the causal inertness of his moral facts as the fatal concession. Read through Becker, the inertness is the point. Enoch has located the one province no army can enter, and he has spent thirty years as its advocate on earth. He does not claim to own the facts or to have made them. He claims the humbler and more durable role, the clerk of a court that cannot be dissolved.
Every hero system tells a subtraction story, an account of the illusions it has heroically given up. Enoch’s is the purest in his field. He has subtracted God, afterlife, revelation, national myth, and the warm certainties of tribe, and he stands, so the story runs, on argument alone. He calls his realism shameless. He prints on his book jacket the verdict of his own teacher, Hartry Field (b. 1946), that the book argues for an obviously false conclusion, and the printing is the boast of a man who claims to need no shelter from ridicule. Becker’s framework reads the subtraction story the way it reads all subtraction stories, as the hero system’s denial that it is one. The man who says I have given up every comfort and kept only the truth has made truth do the work that God, flag, and family do for other men, and he has kept, unexamined in the basement, the biggest comfort of all, the conviction that the universe contains a standard and that his life of service to it therefore counts.
The word truth is where the systems begin to diverge, because sacred words do not travel. Inside Enoch’s system, truth is a location. The normative truths sit, he writes, in Plato’s heaven, independent of us, waiting to be discovered by disciplined argument, and the discovery chain, seminar, journal, monograph, is the pilgrimage route. Carry the same word three miles from his Tel Aviv apartment into a Bnei Brak study hall and it inverts. The Talmud teaches that the Torah is not in heaven, lo bashamayim hi; a heavenly voice once interrupted a legal debate to announce the correct answer, and the sages overruled the voice, because truth had been handed to the house of study and the argument itself is where God now lives. The yeshiva student and Enoch both give their lives to argument about what one must do, and one of them spent two millennia moving truth out of heaven while the other, a secular professor, has spent his career moving it back in. For a Soviet-born refusenik grandmother in Ashdod, truth is neither a location nor an argument; it is what the state once jailed her husband for saying, a thing you know by what it costs. For a quantitative trader in Singapore, truth is whatever the market has not yet priced, and a truth that does nothing, that moves no instrument, is a contradiction in terms; Enoch’s entire heaven, causally inert by design, is for the trader a portfolio of assets with zero yield held at infinite cost. Each of these people can pronounce the sentence truth matters and mean it, and no two of them are making the same claim, because the word takes its meaning from the hero system that houses it.
Law splits the same way, and the split became visible on a road. On the morning of March 15, 2023, Enoch walked down onto the Green Village interchange near Tel Aviv with other protesters and blocked traffic against the government’s plan to subordinate the judiciary. A policeman took him. Enoch put his hands behind his back and did not resist, and wrote afterward that the barrier was psychological and you cross it once. Consider the scene from three positions. For Enoch, law is the writing on the susceptible skins of living beings, his image from the Oxford inaugural lecture, and the writing must answer to the heaven, so a statute that unbinds the court from review is not law with a defect but force wearing law’s uniform, and blocking a road becomes an act of fidelity to law in its true sense. For the policeman, law is a shift that started at six, a sergeant, a quota of cleared lanes, and a professor who at least keeps his hands where they should be; the uniform is the meaning, and the heaven has never come up. And for a Likud voter from Netivot idling four cars back, late for work at the packing plant, the scene reads in a third grammar entirely, one worth developing at length, because his hero system is the developed rival here, the one whose collision with Enoch’s organized a country for a year.
Call him the third-generation voter. His grandfather came from Morocco in 1955 and was sprayed with DDT at the port and sent to a transit camp in the south while the founding elite built the universities, the courts, and the kibbutzim in its own image. His sacred words are family, land, vote, and God, and each carries a meaning Enoch’s system cannot host. The vote, for him, is the instrument by which his people, mocked for decades as primitives, finally took the state, and every institution that can override the vote, a court that appoints its own successors, an attorney general who cannot be fired, a professoriate that signs letters, belongs to the old estate defending itself. When he says democracy he means my ballot counts at last. When Enoch says democracy he means a structure of rights and review that no ballot can repeal. The two men use one word, and each hears the other emptying it. Within the third-generation voter’s system, the professor arrested on the road is a hero of nothing; he is the estate’s son lying down in front of the movers. Within Enoch’s system, the voter is dismantling the one structure that stands between his own family and unchecked power. Becker’s point is that neither man is confused. Each is performing heroism, correctly, by the liturgy of his system, and each system supplies its members with what Becker says all systems must supply, a role in a drama that outlasts them. The voter’s drama is the return of a humiliated tribe to its inheritance. Enoch’s drama is the defense of the timeless against the temporary. There is no neutral stage on which one drama beats the other, which is the fact Enoch’s philosophy, of all philosophies, is built to deny, since his heaven exists to be the neutral stage.
The rivals multiply past this one. The religious-Zionist reservist holds a system in which land is covenant and the court that evacuates a hilltop profanes it; his sacred word is inheritance, and Enoch’s autonomy is, inside that grammar, the word for a man who belongs to nothing. The postmodern seminar in Paris runs a hero system of its own, unmasking as heroism, in which Enoch’s heaven is the last unmasked idol and the career spent defending it is naivety at scale. The tribalist, nationalist, traditionalist system, the one this publication’s author works within, reads Enoch with its own lens: a gifted son of a small, endangered people, equipped with the Talmud’s argumentative inheritance, who universalized the inheritance and subtracted the people, and who now serves an abstraction that will not sit shiva for him. That reading is one legitimate competitor among several, and it has its answer ready when Enoch’s system calls it parochial, which is that parochial is what universalists call the things that keep men alive.
Seriousness is the third sacred word, and it is the one Enoch put in his title. Taking morality seriously means, within his system, taking it as objective, and the equation is load-bearing: if morality is our practice rather than heaven’s fact, he argues, we are not taking it seriously enough. A hospice nurse in Manila takes morality with a seriousness Enoch’s equation cannot measure, twelve-hour shifts, the washing of bodies, the sitting with the dying, and she has no view on metaethics and needs none; within her system, seriousness is presence, and a man who flew to a conference to argue that her duties are objectively grounded has, by her grammar, left the room where the duties live. A Becker reading notices what the demand for seriousness protects. The insistence that morality must be more than human practice is the insistence that a human life spent on morality must be more than a human life. The seriousness Enoch demands for morality is the seriousness he requires for himself, and the title of his book, read through the frame, is a petition: take this seriously, because I have bet everything on it.
How much of this does he see? More than most heroes see, which is what makes him the hard case. Enoch stages the strongest objections to his view in his own chapters, jokes about Plato’s heaven while asserting it, and concedes in print that a universe with his normative facts and a universe without them look identical from the inside, down to the last deliberation and the last arrest. A man who concedes the mirror world has stood, at least once, outside his own hero system and looked at it, which Becker thought nearly impossible and nearly unbearable. Enoch bears it with the instrument his system trains, argument, and with the armor his persona supplies, shamelessness, a word he chose himself and which functions the way armor functions, announcing that the wearer expects to be hit. The one thing the self-awareness does not extend to is the diagnosis itself. Show him this essay and he has a reply ready, that the psychological function of a belief is irrelevant to its truth, and the reply is correct by the rules of his system, and the rules of his system are what the essay is about. The circle does not embarrass him. He has written that the circle does not embarrass him. At some point the observer must simply report that the armor has no gap and say what that costs.
The shape of the hero, then: a clerk in the highest court there could be, one with no building, no budget, and no enemies capable of reaching it, filing briefs on behalf of facts that cannot lose because they cannot act. The rival he does not name: the believer, and nearest of all the Jewish believer, whose architecture his system reproduces beam for beam, a revealed order, a canon, a method of disputation, a life of service rewarded by participation in the eternal, with the Author’s name struck from the title page and the study hall renamed a department. And the cost that no ledger in his system can price: the heaven he serves is, by his own careful specification, inert. It cannot intervene at the interchange, cannot commute a sentence, cannot mourn its clerk. The believer’s God at least watches. The tribesman’s people at least remember. Enoch has pledged his one mortal life to the only client that can never fail him and can never thank him, and whether that is the purest heroism on offer or the loneliest is a question his court, by design, will never rule on.
If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, then the philosophical project of David Enoch faces a foundational crisis.
Enoch is a leading contemporary defender of Robust Metaethical Realism. In his 2011 book, Taking Morality Seriously, he argues that there are objective, universal, and irreducibly normative moral facts. These facts do not depend on human attitudes, desires, or cultures; they exist independently in the universe, waiting to be discovered rather than constructed.
If Mearsheimer’s view of man is accurate, Enoch’s robust realism is undermined in three critical ways.
Enoch’s premier positive argument for realism is the Argument from Deliberative Indispensability. He argues that when we deliberate about what to do (e.g., “Should I boycott this institution?”), we are rationally required to believe that there is a single, objectively correct answer out there to be uncovered. Because deliberation is a non-optional project for human agents, objective normative reasons are indispensable to us, meaning we are justified in believing they exist.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology completely flips the psychology of this process. If people have limited choice in formulating a moral code because their family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on them, then what Enoch calls “deliberation” is largely an illusion. We do not use detached, autonomous reason to discover independent, abstract moral facts. Instead, our reasoning skills develop late, serving primarily to rationalize and defend the tribal sentiments and cultural programming we received during a long, vulnerable childhood. The feeling that we are seeking an objective, external truth is simply the psychological mechanism by which intense socialization manifests itself.
Enoch relies on a Moorean trust in our strongest moral intuitions; he argues that we are entitled to believe that the infliction of horrible pain on random victims is objectively wrong because that claim is vastly more plausible than any metaphysical argument denying it.
However, if humans are tribal at their core and driven by inborn attitudes designed for group survival, our moral intuitions are heavily contaminated by evolutionary and social utility. Mearsheimer states that the main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society. Therefore, our deep-seated feelings about right and wrong are not tracking abstract, non-natural moral facts in the ether (as Enoch claims). They are tracking tools developed by the human animal to maintain group cohesion, enforce inside-the-tribe cooperation, and defend against outside-the-tribe threats. If Mearsheimer is right, our moral confidence is an evolutionary survival device, not a tracking device for cosmic truth.
Enoch explicitly states that if Robust Realism fails to make sense of our moral discourse, the only honest alternative left is an Error Theory—the view that morality structurally claims to be objective, but those claims are systematically false, much like discourse about astrology or witches.
Enoch fights error theory by arguing that alternative explanations cannot account for why we take morality so seriously. Mearsheimer’s anthropology provides the exact causal framework the error theorist needs to win. We take morality seriously because we are born into social groups that shape our identities well before we can assert our individualism. The intense, prolonged socialization of childhood fills the mind with values that feel objective, universal, and absolute.
If Mearsheimer is correct, Enoch has accurately described the phenomenology of human morality—we certainly experience it as robust, heavy, and objective—but Mearsheimer has exposed the social and biological engine behind that experience. Enoch’s independent, non-natural moral facts become redundant baggage; man’s tribal nature and intense socialization are entirely sufficient to explain why we take morality so seriously, without the universe needing to contain a single objective moral fact.
David Pinsof argues that intellectuals view the world through a comfortable lens: every human catastrophe stems from a big misunderstanding. If people only thought more clearly, memorized their cognitive biases, and listened to experts, peace and cooperation might follow. This narrative serves a clear purpose. It makes the intellectual the necessary savior of humanity. David Enoch, a philosopher who defends the existence of objective moral facts in his book Taking Morality Seriously, fits perfectly into the target zone of this critique.
Enoch argues that universal, mind-independent moral truths exist in a realm akin to Plato’s heaven. He claims that when we debate ethics, we must assume these objective truths exist, or else our deliberation makes no sense. To Pinsof, this philosophical framework represents the absolute peak of the intellectual’s self-serving myth. Enoch constructs an elaborate system where human conflict looks like a failure to track cosmic facts. When groups fight over territory, resources, or political power, the robust realist sees a breakdown in moral reasoning. He treats the parties as though they simply misread the ethical manual.
Pinsof offers a colder alternative. Humans are not broken radios failing to receive signals from Plato’s heaven. The human mind works perfectly. Evolution shaped it to win arguments, capture state power, and secure status over rivals. When partisans demonize each other or politicians lie, they do not suffer from a brain fart or a failure of logic. They participate in high-stakes, zero-sum competition over the coercive apparatus of the state.
From this perspective, Enoch’s search for objective normativity is not an impartial journey toward cosmic truth. It operates as a strategic tool in the social marketplace. By framing moral preferences as independent cosmic facts, intellectuals create a benchmark that they happen to be uniquely qualified to interpret. They turn local political alliances into universal laws. It allows the educated elite to claim moral superiority and dismiss their rivals not merely as competitors, but as irrational creatures who fail to see reality.
Enoch acknowledges that selective forces shaped our minds for survival rather than for tracking abstract truths, but he posits a pre-established harmony where evolution somehow guided us toward the good. Pinsof rejects this harmony. Animals do not evolve to care about the universe; they evolve to care about themselves and their allies. Stated motives about universal love or objective duties simply cover up actual motives like status-seeking and resource dominance. The world does not suffer from bad beliefs that a philosopher can correct. It runs on conflicting interests that no amount of analysis can resolve. The only misunderstanding in metaethics is the belief that a moral disagreement is a misunderstanding at all.
