ABSTRACT
In this book I argue that moral theories need to satisfy some ambitious criteria to be metaethically objective. Many objectivist thinkers believe that subjectivist moral theories must meet other difficult requirements. This disagreement seems to me to mark a real clash over the burden of proof in a philosophical dispute, and, hence, is not likely to yield a clear winner. It seems only fair, however, to explain why I do not believe that these are fair demands on the subjectivists, despite the fact that most subjectivists themselves accept them. In section 1, I expand on the reply I gave in chapter 1 to the charge
that subjectivists need to provide semantic accounts of moral language in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions or accounts that come close to analyticity. My view about this opposes much of the objectivist and subjectivist literature of the Twentieth century, including Moore’s (1903) claim that ‘right’ can be defined in terms of ‘good,’ Ayer’s (1952) emotivism, Stevenson’s (1944) and Gibbard’s (1990) norm-expressivism, Hare’s (1952) prescriptivism, Timmons’s (1999) ethical contextualism, and Blackburn’s (1993) quasi-realism. In section 2, I argue that subjectivist theorists do not need to explain the place of reason in ethics, another familiar requirement in Twentieth-century metaethics. I admit that doing these things could be helpful both as additions to one’s moral theories and as reasons for preferring subjectivism. I argue, however, that metaethical subjectivists do not need to do them. Moreover, such attempts often hurt the attractiveness of subjectivism by tying it to less plausible theses. In section 3, I look at Alan Gibbard’s Wise Choices, Apt Feelings to illustrate the points from sections 1 and 2.
