The book begins with an overview of metaethics and a rejection of the metaethics/normative ethics distinction, and discusses the strengths and limitations of the popular idea that morality is a set of rules for how we treat one another. It then explains subjectivist, intersubjectivist, and objectivist accounts of the truth conditions of moral statements,. It considers Divine Command Theory and Kant's categorical imperatives, in his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, along with David HumeÕs arguments in A Treatise of Human Nature and Enquiry Concerning the Principals of Morals, and A. J. Ayer's ÔemotivismÕ. The Final chapter sketches a naturalist objectivism and suggests that the obstacles to its acceptance are typically grounded on spurious asymmetries between ethics and other disciplines.
The author is tutor in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.