Metaethics

A Contemporary Introduction

Mark van Roojen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN: 9781040710555
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

This book maps the terrain of the part of ethics that reflects on the nature of ethics itself, a field known as metaethics.

It helps upper-level undergraduates and other interested readers understand the main theoretical innovations as reactions to puzzles about moral disagreement, reference, moral epistemology, metaphysics, and moral psychology. The book provides the necessary background to grasp the puzzles and to understand the solutions offered. More complex positions are displayed as developments of simpler ideas and theories. Positions covered include error theory, subjectivism, relativism, noncognitivism, fictionalism, supernaturalism, nonnaturalism, and naturalism. Several charts map the relations between the positions.

Key Updates to the Second Edition:

• A text that is easier to follow throughout, now with regular references to the main explanatory chart in the Introduction.
• An expanded and more self-contained discussion of supernaturalism, which now can be better used as its own module or omitted completely from a class syllabus.
• Additional understanding and/or extension-oriented questions at the end of almost every chapter.
• Updates to citations and Suggested Readings.
• Reassurances to the student reader that uncertainty about certain difficult topics is both natural and expected.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A Brief Introduction
• 2 A Subject Matter for Ethics?
• 3 Moral Epistemology and the Empirical Underdetermination of Ethical Theory
• 4 The Practicality of Morality and the Humean Conception of Reason and Motivation
• 5 Error Theory
• 6 Simple Subjectivism
• 7 The Cognitivist Heirs of Simple Subjectivism: Ideal Observers and Ideal Agents
• 8 Noncognitivist Heirs of Simple Subjectivism
• 9 Fictionalism
• 10 Externalist Backlash
• 11 Scientific Naturalism I: Cornell Realism
• 12 Scientific Naturalism II: Moral Functionalism and Network Analyses
• 13 Nonnaturalism and Antireductionism
• 14 Supernaturalism
• 15 Odds, Ends, and Morals
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index