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According to one dimension of the generalist tradition, moral principles are built into the very meaning of moral predicates. They are analytic truths, and thus anyone who is in fact competent with a given moral concept is (perhaps implicitly) committed to the associated principle that spells out the object to which the concept applies. On this view, certain moral principles are constitutive of moral thought and judgment; this view is called ‘constitutive generalism’. This chapter defends a form of generalism and it argues against constitutive generalism by deploying a version of G. E. Moore’s Open Question Argument.

This chapter focuses on Green's non-naturalism, which commits him to his own dualism, inasmuch as he seems to think that a precondition of conscious experience is an active self-conscious mind that is prior to and independent of experience and so outside space and time. It is argued that Green's non-naturalism is problematic. His non-naturalism about the self threatens to reintroduce the very dualism for which he criticizes Kant. A related problem afflicts his view of the Absolute. Whereas the metaphysical and epistemological arguments of the first part of the Prolegomena seem to demand a single transcendent self-consciousness that is outside space and time, much of Green's ethics, political philosophy, and theology seems to treat the corporate spiritual principle as a transhistorical agent that is immanent in the lives of individual agents and progressive social institutions. Green must choose whether the Absolute is transcendent or immanent.

This chapter provides a partial defence of non-naturalism. It first provides an epistemological criterion for understanding the metaphysical thesis of non-naturalism and then proceeds to mount a defence of the view against two common objections: objections based on facts about ethical disagreement, and on causal criteria for having ontological status. The strategy is to call attention to the close parallel between ethical inquiry and philosophical inquiry generally, and to argue that these parallels provide a basis for rejecting the lines of objection in question and also provide positive reasons to favour non-naturalism over its metaethical rivals. So first, just as disagreement in philosophy itself does not undermine (or should not undermine) thinking that there are objective truths about such matters, neither should disagreement in ethics undermine thinking that there are objective truths, or justified belief in such truths. As for the causal efficacy criterion of ontological status, Shafer–Landau argues that even if moral facts do not possess causal efficacy, we need not be sceptics about their ontological status as objectively real. If one insists on the causal efficacy test, then it looks as if all putative normative facts fail the criterion and are not real. The implausibility of this implication, then, casts doubt on the causal argument against moral facts.

It is widely accepted that the ethical supervenes on the natural, where this is roughly the claim that it is impossible for two circumstances to be identical in all natural respects, but different in their ethical respects. This chapter refines and defends the traditional thought that this fact poses a significant challenge to ethical non-naturalism, a view on which ethical properties are fundamentally different in kind from natural properties. The challenge can be encapsulated in three core claims which the chapter defends: that a defensible non-naturalism is committed to the supervenience of the ethical, that this commits the non-naturalist to a brute necessary connection between properties of distinct kinds, and that commitment to such brute connections counts against the non-naturalist’s view. Each of these claims has recently been challenged. Against Nicholas Sturgeon’s recent doubts about the dialectical force of supervenience, this chapter defends a supervenience thesis as deserving to be common ground among ethical realists. It is then argued that attempts to explain supervenience on behalf of the non-naturalist either fail as explanations, generate near-identical explanatory burdens elsewhere, or appeal to commitments that are inconsistent with core motivations for non-naturalism. The chapter concludes that, suitably refined, the traditional argument against non-naturalism from supervenience is alive and well.

It has been long established that television dramas and other television programs greatly affect the manner in which audiences perceive their realities along with the actual state of British politics, society, and culture, among other things. The debate whether popular television programs sufficiently represent the naturalism and realities of its audience has been continuously argued by various groups. Television critics have, then, conceptualized the term non-naturalism and modernism as a result of this contention. This chapter explores the non-naturalistic facet and criticism of British television dramas as well as the accuracy of its depiction of reality.

This chapter focuses on two recent trends in meta-ethics. One is the revival of non-naturalistic realism. The other is the preoccupation with reasons. The two trends are not unconnected. The renewed interest in non-naturalism seems to have gained fuel from the preoccupation with reasons. The chapter distinguishes old and new non-naturalism. Old non-naturalism places intrinsic goodness at the normative centre stage; new non-naturalism places the notion of a reason at the normative centre stage. There is a presentiment about that new non-naturalism's shift of focus from intrinsic goodness to reasons promises to make non-naturalism more credible. It is argued that this line of thinking involves an ‘extensional fallacy’. Unmasking the fallacy reveals that the notion of a reason is no less problematic than the notion of intrinsic goodness, and that the supervenience of the normative on the natural is no less problematic for new non-naturalism than for old non-naturalism.

How should we characterize the quarry of practical thought? Some hold that practical thinking must ultimately find some non‐evaluative fact to be a reason for action. Some have affirmed a ‘buck‐passing’ view of the good, according to which talk of goodness or value can be reduced to talk of the reason‐giving force of non‐evaluative facts. In this book, it has been argued that practical thinking must sometimes apprehend the intrinsic goodness or value of an activity, where this cannot be reduced to the reason‐giving force of any non‐evaluative fact. The task of this chapter is to show that this latter, recognizably Ancient understanding of value‐talk remains implicit in a great deal of our talk about value, and that we cannot consistently renounce it without incurring a steep cost in the metric of articulacy about value. Nor can we sequester off a subset of the things we care about, under the heading of the moral, and reduce our talk of values to talk of reasons in this domain. Our actual sense of the moral value of human beings cannot plausibly be characterized in terms of the reason‐giving force of non‐evaluative facts about them.

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.

Defends ethical non‐naturalism. Presents G. E. Moore's open question argument as the basis for drawing a natural/non‐natural divide, and discusses various ways of marking the distinction between the natural and the non‐natural. Includes criticisms of ethical naturalism.

This chapter identifies the features that made the philosophers from Sidgwick to Ewing a unified and distinctive group in the history of ethics. These include their conceptual minimalism, whereby all normative judgements can be expressed using a few basic concepts; their non‐naturalist metaethics, whereby moral judgements express sui generis truths that can be known by moral intuition; their goal of theorizing common‐sense morality by relating it to more abstract principles; their interest in moral explanations, or in why acts are right or wrong; and their pursuit of what can be called ‘structural’ as against ‘foundational’ explanations. Many of these views are summarized in the idea that some moral duties, the basic ones, are underivative.

Metaethical non‐naturalism went from being a dominant theory at the turn of the nineteenth century to being an intellectual curiosity a few decades later. With regard to the mercurial fortunes of non‐naturalism, the work of A. C. Ewing is an interesting case. In his 1947 The Definition of Good he defended non‐naturalism. But by the early 1950s he proposed a ‘middle way in ethics’ — a metaethical position meant to represent a compromise between non‐naturalism and its rival, non‐cognitivism, defended in his 1959 Second Thoughts in Moral Philosophy. One aim of this chapter is to further explain and illustrate the decline of non‐naturalism, using Ewing's two main works on moral philosophy as case studies. But we are also interested in the plausibility and indeed the metaethical space for the kind of compromise view Ewing aimed for with his middle way, and how his view contributes to contemporary metaethical debate.

This appendix compares the theory of practical expressivism developed in this book with two recent developments of expressivism: those developed by Schroeder in his book Being For, and by Ridge in his book Impassioned Belief. Practical expressivism rejects what Schroeder labels ‘The Basic Expressivist Maneuver’ and ‘Mentalism’. It also rejects the hybrid expressivist idea that all moral judgements express both beliefs and desire-like states. Other authors have raised problems for both these alternatives; the purpose of this appendix is simply to show that practical expressivism is a distinct alternative (and therefore avoids the known difficulties of the alternative views).

This chapter considers a number of metaethical accounts which are often regarded as rivals to a divine command account. The chapter argues that some of them, such as ethical naturalism, ethical non-naturalism, and sensibility theories, are actually not rivals to a divine command account when developed in a reasonable form. Error theory, while certainly a rival, also provides support for a divine command account at key points. The chapter argues that varieties of expressivism fail adequately to account for the objectivity and authority of moral obligations. Some constructivist accounts, such as social contract theories, also have these defects, and fail to explain the universality of moral obligations as well. Other constructivist accounts, such as that of Christine Korsgaard, turn out to be forms of moral realism on close inspection, and are compatible with a divine command view when developed in accordance with Kant's account.