Abstract

Sergio Cremaschi’s L’etica del Novecento offers a clear and careful account of the development of ethical theory in English-language and German Philosophy. The focus on meta-ethics and normative concerns allows the author to offer a very concise, reliable and comprehensive overview of philosophical ethics. In this respect the book effectively fills the gap left by the lack of a good, updated history of ethics. Although those qualities establish Cremaschi’s work as a valuable reference book, a few doubts are raised about the highly theoretical approach adopted. On the one hand this choice proves not to be very hospitable to some traditions and overlooks the connections between ethics and the socio-historical world, with the effect of giving a picture of moral philosophy as a very abstract and academic discipline. On the other hand it is not clear whether the emergence of applied ethics is to be greeted as the culmination of the resurgence of normative ethics, or whether it is conspiring with other trends to undermine the whole enterprise of constructing normative theories. If, as I suspect, the latter is the case, the moral of Cremaschi’s narrative may be different from the one he suggests