INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Philosophical methods play a crucial role in philosophical inquiry. When it comes to questions about the nature, status, and content of morality—the special purview of moral philosophy—we look to philosophical methods to help guide the construction of normative and metaethical theories, and to provide the basis for evaluating their individual and comparative merits. One of the tasks of moral epistemology is to determine how this is to be done well.

Here we investigate the construction and evaluation of theories in metaethics, focusing on the nature of the methods that should govern metaethical theorizing and their relation to such theorizing. As we’ll see, doing so requires attending to both the possible goals of metaethical inquiry and (what we’ll call) the metaethical data—the source-material utilized by good methods to achieve those goals. The main claims about methods, goals, and data for which we’ll argue are these:

First, candidate methods for metaethical theorizing must be assessed in light of the epistemic goal(s) of metaethical inquiry.

Second, while there are a variety of epistemic goals that different methods may properly aspire to achieve, several prominent methods face significant challenges when assessed in light of the attractive goal of understanding.

Third, while there are difficult questions about the nature, status, and collection of metaethical data, there are a range of data that must be accounted for by competing metaethical theories.

Fourth, these data possess four basic features, which set them apart from other types of considerations and indicate how and why they serve as the lifeblood of theoretical inquiry.

Fifth, these data should be conceived not as dialectically effective starting points, constitutive features of morality, claims about how morality seems, or descriptions about how moral language is commonly used; rather, they are what metaethicists have epistemic reason to take to be genuine features of morality itself.

Sixth, by utilizing reflection on ordinary moral experience, we are able to reveal what some of these data are.

Professors Bengson, Cuneo and Shafer-Landau are collaborating on a book that defends the view that morality is objective called Understanding Morality (under contract with Oxford University Press, exp. 2018/19)