An introduction to contemporary metaethics - Alexander Miller

An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics provides a highly readable critical overview of the main arguments and themes in twentiethcentury and contemporary metaethics. It 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 nonnaturalism, cognitivism and noncognitivism. Individual chapters deal with: the openquestion arguments and Moore's attack on ethical naturalism; A. J. Ayer's emotivism and the rejection of nonnaturalism; Simon Blackburn's quasirealism; Allan Gibbard's normexpressivism; J. L. Mackie's errortheory' of moral judgement; antirealist and best opinion accounts of moral truth; the nonreductionist naturalism of the Cornell realists'; Peter Railton's naturalistic reductionism; the analytic functionalism of Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit; the contemporary nonnaturalism of John McDowell and David Wiggins; and the debate between internalists and externalists in moral psychology. The book will be an invaluable resource for students, teachers and professional philosophers with interests in contemporary metaethics.