Contemporary Metaethics An Introduction [Paperback]

This new edition of Alexander Miller’s highly readable introduction to contemporary metaethics provides a critical overview of the main arguments and themes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century contemporary metaethics. Miller traces the development of contemporary debates in metaethics from their beginnings in the work of G. E. Moore up to the most recent arguments between naturalism and non-naturalism, cognitivism and non-cognitivism.

From Moore’s attack on ethical naturalism, A. J. Ayer’s emotivism and Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism to anti-realist and best opinion accounts of moral truth and the non-reductionist naturalism of the ‘Cornell realists’, this book addresses all the key theories and ideas in this field. As well as revisiting the whole terrain with revised and updated guides to further reading, Miller also introduces major new sections on the revolutionary fictionalism of Richard Joyce and the hermeneutic fictionalism of Mark Kalderon.

The new edition will continue to be essential reading for students, teachers and professional philosophers with an interest in contemporary metaethics.

Preface

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 Moore’s Attack on Ethical Naturalism

Chapter 3 Emotivism and the Rejection of Non-Naturalism

Chapter 4 Blackburn’s Quasi-Realism

Chapter 5 Gibbard’s Norm-Expressivism

Chapter 6 Mackie’s ‘Error-theory’, The Argument From Queerness and Moral Fictionalism

Chapter 7 Judgement-Dependent Accounts of Moral Qualities

Chapter 8 Naturalism I - Cornell Realism

Chapter 9 Naturalism II - Reductionism

Chapter 10 Contemporary Non-Naturalism -lC@