Alex Miller - Metaethics: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide

METAETHICS

OXFORD BIBLIOGRAPHIES ONLINE RESEARCH GUIDE

Alex Miller

University of Birmingham

2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

ISBN: 9780199808960

TABLE OF CONTENTS

OXFORD BIBLIOGRAPHIES ONLINE RESEARCH GUIDE

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OXFORD BIBLIOGRAPHIES ONLINE | Philosophy

Authority and Innovation for Scholarly Research Written by a leading international authority and bearing the Oxford University Press stamp of excellence, this article is a definitive guide to the most important resources on the topic. The article combines annotated citations, expert recommendations, and narrative pathways through the most important scholarly sources in both print and online formats. All materials recommended in this article were reviewed by the author, and the article has been organized in tiers ranging from general to highly specialized, saving valuable time by allowing researchers to easily narrow or broaden their focus among only the most trusted scholarly sources. This is just one of many articles within the subject area of Atlantic History, which is itself just one of the many subjects covered by Oxford Bibliographies Onlinea revolutionary resource designed to cut through academic information overload by guiding researchers to exactly the right book chapter, journal article, website, archive, or data set they need.

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INTRODUCTION

Metaethics can be described as the philosophical study of the nature of moral judgment. It is concerned with such questions as: Do moral judgments express beliefs or rather desires and inclinations? Are moral judgments apt to be assessed in terms of truth and falsity? Do moral sentences have factual meaning? Are any moral judgments true or are they systematically and uniformly false? Is there such a thing as moral knowledge? Are moral judgments less objective than, say, judgments about the shapes and sizes of middle-sized physical objects? Is there a necessary connection between moral judgments and motivation? Are moral requirements requirements of reason? Do moral judgments have a natural or non-natural subject matter?

A useful way of starting on metaethics is to distinguish between realist and non-realist views of morality. Moral realists hold that moral judgments express beliefs, and that some of those beliefs are true in virtue of mind-independent moral facts. Opposition to moral realism can take a number of forms. Expressivists deny that moral judgments express beliefs, claiming instead that they express non truth-assessable mental states such as desires or inclinations. Error theorists and fictionalists claim that moral judgments are systematically false. Response-dependence views of moral judgments allow that moral judgments express beliefs and that at least some of them are true, but hold that they are true in virtue of mind-dependent moral facts. Moral realism itself comes in many varieties: reductionist, non-reductionist, naturalist, non-naturalist, internalist, externalist, analytic, and synthetic.

GENERAL OVERVIEWS

Overviews of metaethics are often found in larger reference works about ethics. The volumes listed in this section contain a broad range of high-level introductory essays by key researchers in metaethics. Singer 1991 is an overview of ethics in different cultures and historical settings before moving into theories and practical applications. LaFollette 2000 has a section on metaethics that includes essays on relativism, naturalism, moral intuition, and objections to ethics. Copp 2007 devotes the first half of the book to issues surrounding metaethics. Skorupski 2010 devotes a section to these issues as well, including error theory and fictionalism.

Copp, David, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

The first half contains twelve essays on metaethical themes by Blackburn, Railton, Sturgeon, Dancy and others, as well as an introductory essay by the editor.

LaFollette, Hugh, ed. The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory . Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

The first half contains eight useful introductory chapters on metaethical themes.

Singer, Peter, ed. A Companion to Ethics . Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

Part 4 contains several very useful chapters on metaethical themes by leading metaethicists such as Dancy, Smith, and Hare.

Skorupski, John, ed. The Routledge Companion to Ethics . London: Routledge, 2010.

Part 2 contains several essays on some central topics in metaethics.

TEXTBOOKS AND ANTHOLOGIES

McNaughton 1988, Darwall 1997, and Miller 2003 are the best available survey texts, while Smith 1994 can serve as one. The serious student would get a sound grounding by reading one or more of these, supplemented by readings from Darwall, et al. 1997, Fisher and Kirchin 2006, and/or Shafer-Landau and Cuneo 2006. Dreier 2006 is probably the most advanced of the volumes.

Darwall, Stephen. Philosophical Ethics: An Historical and Contemporary Introduction . Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997.

The first half is a very useful introduction to metaethical themes, while the second half looks at historical philosophers such as Kant, Aristotle, Mill, and Nietzsche.

Darwall, Stephen, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton, eds. Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches . New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

A selection of twenty-three high-level papers and chapters from 20th-century metaethics. Contains many of the papers referred to in this bibliography.

Dreier, James, ed. Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory . Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.

Contains five pairs of articles (generally taking distinct perspectives) on reason and motivation, and moral facts and explanations.

Fisher, Andrew, and Simon Kirchin, eds. Arguing about Metaethics . London: Routledge, 2006.

A comprehensive collection of key papers and chapters in recent metaethics. Also contains excellent editorial introductions to each of the main themes covered by the selections.

McNaughton, David. Moral Vision: An Introduction to Ethics . Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.

A good introduction, written from a particularist and non-naturalist perspective.