Abstract

onald Dworkin says he does not believe in the metaphysics of morality. He is a 'quietist' about this issue. He thinks that there are no coherent 'external' or 'archimedian' questions that we can raise about the whole discipline of moral thought and talk, and that the only questions we can raise are 'internal' ones about what moral thoughts we should think. Dworkin thinks that some metaphysical debates can go ahead, it is just the metaphysics of morality that is ill-gotten. This is because those other areas of thought involve causal claims about the origins of our thought, as part of their content; but moral thought does not (p. 119). So Dworkin thinks that religious and astrological thought can be assessed in terms of the causal claims they make, but moral thought is not the kind of thought which can be assessed in that way. But is moral thought really answerable to nothing except itself? How convenient for it! Furthermore, does this unanswerability generalize to any form of thought which does not involve causal claims? For example, is the attempt to give mathematics a foundation misguided and worthy of the derision that Dworkin heaps on meta-ethics? Are morality and mathematics as it were free-floating modes of thought held up by nothing? Even if Dworkin is right that some forms of thought are not to be measured in causal terms, the idea that they are answerable to nothing is bizarre.