This book maps the terrain of the part of ethics that reflects on the nature of ethics itself, a field known as metaethics.
It helps upper-level undergraduates and other interested readers understand the main theoretical innovations as reactions to puzzles about moral disagreement, reference, moral epistemology, metaphysics, and moral psychology. The book provides the necessary background to grasp the puzzles and to understand the solutions offered. More complex positions are displayed as developments of simpler ideas and theories. Positions covered include error theory, subjectivism, relativism, noncognitivism, fictionalism, supernaturalism, nonnaturalism, and naturalism. Several charts map the relations between the positions.
Key Updates to the Second Edition:
- A text that is easier to follow throughout, now with regular references to the main explanatory chart in the Introduction.
- An expanded and more self-contained discussion of supernaturalism, which now can be better used as its own module or omitted completely from a class syllabus.
- Additional understanding and/or extension-oriented questions at the end of almost every chapter.
- Updates to citations and Suggested Readings.
- Reassurances to the student reader that uncertainty about certain difficult topics is both natural and expected.
Table of Contents:
1. A Brief Introduction 2. A Subject Matter for Ethics? 3. Moral Epistemology and the Empirical Underdetermination of Ethical Theory 4 . The Practicality of Morality and the Humean Conception of Reason and Motivation 5. Error Theory 6. Simple Subjectivism 7. The Cognitivist Heirs of Simple Subjectivism : Ideal Observers and Ideal Agents 8. Noncognitivist Heirs of Simple Subjectivism 9. Fictionalism 10. Externalist Backlash 11. Scientific Naturalism I: Cornell Realism 12. Scientific Naturalism II: Moral Functionalism and Network Analyses 13. Nonnaturalism and Antireductionism 14. Supernaturalism 15. Odds, Ends, and Morals
About the Author :
Mark van Roojen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. He works primarily in ethics and metaethics but remains interested in the rest of philosophy. His most widely read papers are on moral rationalism, expressivism, moral psychology, and the semantics of moral terms.
Review :
Praise for the First Edition:
"The contemporary landscape of metaethics is a topsy-turvy field of complex contributions, new twists on old views, and fundamental disputes about how, even, to describe the basic questions under dispute. In Metaethics: A Contemporary Introduction, one of the masters of the craft cuts through this complexity in order to put readers in a position to see the compelling philosophical problems that lead to these different comprehensive theories."
— Mark Schroeder, University of Southern California, USA
"Mark van Roojen's new work is now the finest book of its kind. It is focused on the right questions, it sympathetically reconstructs and fairly criticizes the major arguments offered for the major metaethical positions, and it is informed throughout by a deep familiarity with the philosophical terrain. This will be a huge help for those seeking to acquaint themselves with the history of metaethics over the past two generations. This is a terrific book."
— Russ Shafer-Landau, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
