The Futility of Philosophical Ethics: Metaethics and the Grounds of Moral Feeling (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781350260641)

The Futility of Philosophical Ethics puts forward a novel account of the grounds of moral feeling with fundamental implications for philosophical ethics. It examines the grounds of moral feeling by both the phenomenology of that feeling, and the facts of moral feeling in operation - particularly in forms such as moral luck, vicious virtues, and moral disgust - that appear paradoxical from the point of view of systematic ethics.

Using an analytic approach, James Kirwan engages in the ongoing debates among contemporary philosophers within metaethics and normative ethics. Instead of trying to erase the variety of moral responses that exist in philosophical analysis under one totalizing system, Kirwan argues that such moral theorizing is futile. His analysis counters currently prevalent arguments that seek to render the origins of moral experience unproblematic by finding substitutes for realism in various forms of noncognitivism.

In reasserting the problematic nature of moral experience, and offering a theory of the origins of that experience in unavoidable individual desires, Kirwan accounts for the diverse manifestations of moral feeling and demonstrates why so many arguments in metaethics and normative ethics are necessarily irresolvable.

Author: James Kirwan
ISBN-10: 1350260649
ISBN-13: 9781350260641
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Language: English
Published: 03/24/2022
Pages: 280
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.23lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.63d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2023