Contemporary Ethics and Feminist Philosophy

Twentieth-century metaethics, the branch of moral philosophy concerned with the meaning, metaphysical status, and epistemology of moral claims rather than with first-order questions about what is right or wrong, developed into a rich field of competing positions after Moore's early work on the naturalistic fallacy. Moral realism holds that there are objective moral facts or properties that our moral judgments aim to describe correctly, independent of what anyone believes or desires, a view defended in varying forms by philosophers throughout the century. Expressivism, developed from the earlier emotivism of A. J. Ayer and C. L. Stevenson and refined later by philosophers such as Simon Blackburn under the label 'quasi-realism,' instead holds that moral judgments do not describe facts at all but primarily express speakers' attitudes, emotions, or commitments, such as approval or disapproval, while quasi-realists attempt to explain why moral discourse nonetheless behaves, in many ways, as though it were describing objective facts. A third major position, moral error theory, defended most influentially by J. L. Mackie in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), holds that ordinary moral claims do purport to describe objective moral facts, but that no such facts actually exist, so that every substantive positive moral judgment, strictly speaking, is false.