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Ethical theories are theories about right and wrong action, good and bad moral character; they tell us about how we should live as good, moral people. They address questions concerning topics such as happiness, well-being, meaning in life and moral obligation. Some of the basic and standard normative theories that might be discussed include consequentialism, deontological approaches, contract theories, and virtue ethics. Topics may include “meta” questions about moral truths, moral knowledge, moral language, and the relation between morality, psychology, human evolution, etc.
The philosophical study of ethics can be divided into three main areas- normative ethics, practical ethics, and metaethics. This book discusses metaethics, which concerns the status of morality. It begins with four key issues- metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. The book also presents the four main theories in this field of study- nonnaturalism, expressivism, error theory & fictionalism, naturalism. The book then gives a summary of the core of metaethics, introduce some contemporary theories, and outline several outstanding issues, from metaethics to metanormative theory and to metaepistemology.
This handbook surveys the contemporary state of the burgeoning field of metaethics. It is divided into three parts. Part 1 introduces seven influential research programs that frame metaethical discussions- non-naturalistic realism, naturalistic realism, error theory, fictionalism, expressivism, contexturalism, relativism. Part 2 focuses on central problems and strategies in metaethics, such as the supervenience challenge to non-naturalism, vagueness and indeterminacy in ethics, the Frege-Geach problem, cognitivism and non-cognitivism, constitutivism, constructivism, intuitionism, etc. Part 3 presents debates over the status of metaethics, and the appropriate methods to use in metaethical inquiry, covering pragmatism, feminism, quasi-realism, etc.
This book on metaethics is concerned with questions about meaning, metaphysics, epistemology and justification, phenomenology, moral psychology, and objectivity. It provides a critical overview of some main themes and issues in twentieth- and twenty-first-century metaethics, from Moore’s attack on ethical naturalism, A. J. Ayer’s emotivism and Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism, through Gibbard’s norm-expressivism, mackie’s error theory, and judgement-dependent accounts of moral qualities, to Cornell realism, reductionist realism, and McDowell’s moral realism. This second edition introduces major new sections on the revolutionary fictionalism of Richard Joyce and the hermeneutic factionalism of Mark Kalderon.
