Abstract

This book is both a critical history of metaethics from Moore to the present and an argument for a particular quasi-Wittgensteinian metaethical position Arrington calls "conceptual relativism." Although the details of metaethical arguments are often torturously complex, the general sweep of the history of metaethical theory, as Arrington relates it, is surprisingly simple. At the beginning of the century, metaethical theory was dominated by a kind of cognitivism, the most important form of which was Moore's intuitionism. This position was replaced by several noncognitivist theories, most importantly, by Hare's prescriptivism, which dominated metaethics until the early seventies. At that time there was a general return to cognitivist theories which today take three general forms, rationalism, realism, and relativism.