The Futility of Philosophical Ethics : Metaethics and the Grounds of Moral Feeling

I would like to thank Kansai University for the sabbatical in 2015 that allowed me to write most of the following work. I would also like to thank Andy Hamilton for the opportunity to present some of the ideas developed here in a research seminar meeting at the Department of Philosophy, Durham University, and Sorin Baiasu for the same at an invited lecture in the School of Politics, Philosophy, International Relations and Environment, Keele University. I would also like to thank Chelsey Wong, who later took my postgraduate seminar in ethics at Kansai University and, to the best of my recollection, disagreed with me about everything. I am also very grateful to Simon Kirchin and two anonymous readers for Bloomsbury for the care with which they read part or all of my original manuscript and for their very helpful comments. Finally, I would like to thank Jade Grogan, commissioning editor at Bloomsbury, for making the publishing process a pleasure. Having established in Part I of the book that the moral response really is as problematic to reflection as it first appears, the second part addresses the idea of that response as an emotion. It does so by attempting to discover what common goal -what implicit but unacknowledged desire or aversion -can be discovered by considering the range of objects of that response. This analysis begins in Chapter 3, which examines the ostensible implicit goal of moral feeling as it is subjectively experienced. In practice, this is equivalent to the traditional pursuit of a governing principle implied in either moral feeling itself or in the majority of our moral responses: a definition of 'the Good' . However, here such a "principle" is sought not, as is customary in ethics, to serve as a conscious principle for arbitrating ethical disputes, for establishing relative degrees of "wrongness" or "permissibility", but rather to discover to what extent a single goal is actually implicit in the existence of moral responses. If such a 'Good' could be discovered, it would then give us the desired object, the achievement or frustration of which is signalled by the emotional reaction that is the moral response. For, "What is the right thing to do?" is functionally equivalent to "What would have to happen for the desire implicit in my "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."-- Provided by publisher 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.0Using 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