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This chapter begins by explaining the distinction between meta-ethics and normative ethics. It then introduces the main issues in the two fields and provides a critical overview of the chapters in the volume. In meta-ethics, it focuses on explaining the different kinds of moral realism and anti-realism, including the divine command theory, naturalism, non-naturalism, relativism, nihilism, and non-cognitivism. Quasi-realism illustrates how the distinction between anti-realism and realism can become blurred. A variety of views about the relation between morality and practical reason, including contractarianism, are discussed. In normative ethics, the chapter focuses on the distinction, among theories of right action, between consequentialism and non-consequentialism, as well as the distinction between theories of right action and other kinds of normative theory, such as rights theory, virtue theory, and the ethics of care. There is an overview of the debate between consequentialism and deontology regarding moral constraints, as well as a discussion of indirect consequentialist responses to deontological objections.

This chapter advocates a return to Moorean independence. One dominant metaethical trend is moral epistemology naturalized. Another metaethical trend has been conceptual analysis, often called ‘analytic ethics’. It is argued that both trends are philosophically misguided. Ethics naturalized is un-philosophical in lacking the kind of supreme generality and abstractness that is distinctive of philosophical inquiry; it takes human beings to occupy moral centre stage. By contrast, we find in Moore a kind of cosmological ethics, focused on the value of all things in the universe as a basis for ethical inquiry. Moreover, ethics naturalized lacks competence in that its scientific pretensions are at odds with how philosophers go about their business. Analytic ethics, on the other hand, which is explicitly concerned with armchair, intuitive judgments about meanings, cannot overcome the lack of competence signaled by the philosophical lessons about conceptual analysis found in Kant, Quine, and Wittgenstein. In light of these failures, the chapter advocates returning to the cosmological orientation of Moore's ethics, which can be properly understood as avoiding the traditional metaethical debate between realism and anti-realism, as well as avoiding the battery of objections to the effect that Moore's ethics is not relevant to action. Such a return to a Moorean view of ethics would represent a version of ‘ethics dehumanized’: cosmological in its focus and thus properly philosophical.

Nietzsche defends the metaphysical thesis that there are no objective (i.e. mind-independent) facts about values, including moral values. His primary arguments for his moral anti-realism are “best explanation” arguments: the best explanation of our moral judgments, indeed of the two-millennium long disagreements among moral philosophers, make no reference to objective moral facts. The details of an “inference to the best explanation” are laid out, and illustrated with Nietzsche’s own texts. Contemporary attempts to defend the explanatory role of moral facts are critiqued, and the radical implications of the argument from disagreement among philosophers considered and defended.

This chapter defends pro-realism, the view that it is better if moral realism is true rather than any of its rivals. After offering an account of philosophical angst, I make three general arguments. The first targets nihilism: in securing the possibility of moral justification and vindication in objecting to certain harms, moral realism secures something that is non-morally valuable and even essential to the meaning and intelligibility of our lives. The second argument targets antirealism: moral realism secures a desirable independence for moral justification that is qualitatively different from the anti-realistic construal of independence that is only explicable in terms of degrees of distance from our subjective responses and attitudes. Finally, the chapter argues that while the pan-expressivist semantic program of quasi-realism has significant effects on what can be appropriately said in meta-ethical discourse, it provides no comfort to the pro-realist who is already angsty about anti-realism.

This chapter defends our pre-philosophical commitment to moral objectivism. It is an essential prelude to the main argument, for it establishes the standard which the rest of the book will use to determine which secular accounts are ‘sufficiently’ objective. The chapter defends two distinct claims. The first is that in their practical deliberation, all human beings seek to approximate a truth which goes beyond their sentiments or the conventions of their culture. The second is that this quest is not in vain: which is to say, that humans have some capacity to attune their beliefs more closely to that moral truth, when they honestly and carefully seek it out. It draws on arguments made by David Enoch, Ronald Dworkin and Roger Crisp, and considers the case against moral realism presented by John Mackie.

This chapter considers the contrast that Kant draws between the human and the holy will, and the significance of this contrast to his ethics more broadly. The key issue here is Kant’s claim that while the human will is subject to the imperatival force of morality, because we have desires that pull against moral action, for the holy will there are no such desires, and thus no such imperatival force. This chapter then explains how, when it comes to familiar debates in ethics between realism and anti-realism, and between externalism and internalism, we can see Kant’s distinction as enabling him to combine elements of both sides in a way that may fruitfully resolve these controversies, and so contribute to the contemporary discussion.

This paper considers Kant's distinction between the human will and the holy will, and the place and significance of that contrast in his ethics. It is argued that it plays a central role in Kant's account of the obligatoriness of morality. A variety of puzzles arising from this distinction are considered, and also how far this commits Kant to a problematic dualism between reason and desire, and between duty and inclination. Finally, it is argued that taking this distinction seriously can help show how Kant's ethics is able to combine elements of realism and anti-realism, and internalism and externalism, and thus perhaps get beyond the oscillation between them.

This chapter examines Korsgaard’s broader constructivist interpretation of Kant’s ethics and its defining intellectualism and moral anti-realism, arguing that Korsgaard’s interpretation, despite the many virtues, is fundamentally flawed, both philosophically and as an interpretation of Kant’s ethics. The chapter considers Korsgaard’s main defence, both of her interpretation of Kant’s account of choice and of the remainder of her constructivist interpretation of Kant. It also addresses the most plausible evidence in favour of Korsgaard’s constructivist interpretation, namely, Kant’s cryptic views about the metaphysics of the self. The chapter also argues that we cannot identify the noumenal self with the higher faculty of reason alone. Finally, it shows that the interpretation of Kant, according to which he recognizes that immoral choices can be perfectly coherent, does not render his ethics less inspirational than if it were to deem immoral actions completely incoherent.

It is undeniable that the Ethics contains seemingly incompatible claims about the nature of goodness and badness. The text presents its share of challenges to anyone who sets out to construct a coherent interpretation of Spinoza’s moral philosophy. It is not a surprise that these difficulties have led scholars to interpretations that do not agree on every detail. This chapter focuses on what in the author’s judgment is a major difficulty for a charitable interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of goodness and badness and then he examines Michael LeBuffe’s way of meeting this challenge, a way that constitutes an alternative to the moral realist reading defended in chapter 3.

This chapter offers a new interpretation of Nietzsche’s argument for moral skepticism, an argument that should be of independent philosophical interest as well. On this account, Nietzsche offers a version of the argument from moral disagreement, but, unlike familiar varieties, it does not purport to exploit anthropological reports about the moral views of exotic cultures, or even garden-variety conflicting moral intuitions about concrete cases. Nietzsche, instead, calls attention to the single most important and embarrassing fact about the history of moral theorizing by philosophers over two millennia: namely, that no rational consensus has been secured on any substantive, foundational proposition about morality. Persistent and apparently intractable disagreement on foundational questions, of course, distinguishes moral theory from inquiry in the sciences and mathematics. According to Nietzsche, the best explanation for this disagreement is that, even though moral skepticism is true, philosophers can still construct valid dialectical justifications for moral claims because the premises of different justifications will answer to the psychological needs of at least some philosophers and thus be deemed true by some of them. The chapter concludes by considering various attempts to defuse this abductive argument for scepticism.

The essay considers two related questions: (a) whether Sextus was a philosophical influence on Nietzsche, and (b) whether there are significant connections between their philosophies. On the first question, it is notable that while Nietzsche cites Sextus Empiricus numerous times in his early scholarly works, it is always for purely antiquarian reasons; he never shows interest in Sextus as a philosopher in his own right. On the second question, a considerable philosophical overlap is identified, especially concerning the perspectival character of all human thinking, and the possibility of forms of knowledge and inquiry that do not aspire to any absolute status. One significant difference, however, concerns Nietzsche’s moral anti-realism. This appears to be inconsistent with the general emphasis on perspective that he shares with Sextus—although paradoxically, it also puts him in contact with another part of Sextus’ writing, Against the Ethicists, that is itself inconsistent with Sextus’ outlook elsewhere.

To suggest as Chapters 5 to 8 together have done that for the idealist value is both relative to mind and metaphysically foundational to reality itself might seem a contradiction. This chapter is one of the most important in the whole book and explains why, far from being a defect, this duality constitutes the most fundamental and original insight which idealist ethics has to offer. Idealism rejects the traditional opposition between moral realism and moral anti-realism. To be an idealist is precisely to hold that the universe is so constituted that things are real if and only if they are ideal: to hold that uncovering in any item indicators of the work of mind makes that thing more, not less, significant. The notion of the moral self (articulated by both Josiah Royce and Charles Taylor) challenges any simple subjectivism, while consideration of pleasure and of the value of value itself allow us to see the essentially self-reflexive nature of value.

One argument put forward by Christine Korsgaard in favour of her constructivist appeal to the nature of agency, is that it does better than moral realism in answering moral scepticism. However, realists have replied by pressing on her the worry raised by H. A. Prichard, that any attempt to answer the moral sceptic only succeeds in basing moral actions in non-moral ends, and so it self-defeating. This chapter spells out these issues in more detail, and suggest that both sides can learn something by seeing how the sceptical problematic arises in Kant. Doing so, he argues, shows how Korsgaard might raise the issue of scepticism against the realist whilst avoiding the Prichardian response.

This chapter considers Christine Korsgaard’s argument for the value of humanity, and the role that her transcendental argument plays in this, to the effect that an agent must value her own humanity. Two forms of that argument are considered, one of which turns on a regress of identities, and the other on a regress of value. The second form of the argument is defended. The analysis of her position is also put in the context of debates about transcendental arguments more generally, where it is suggested that this counts as a ‘modest’ form of transcendental argument, as it takes anti-realism about value for granted, and so is ‘subject-directed’ rather than ‘world-directed’, and hence modest in this sense.

This essay defends a reading according to which Spinoza is a type of moral anti-realist. Since Spinoza allows that we can have certain knowledge of the good, this naturally invites the question, what is it that such knowledge is knowledge of? Spinoza’s political theory, in Rosenthal’s view, holds the answer to this question. Just as there is neither a transcendent nor a natural foundation for knowledge of the means to our good, Rosenthal argues that, for Spinoza, there is neither a transcendent nor a natural foundation for knowledge of justice and a just society.