Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?

Rating:
Summary: Excellent and thoughtful anlaysis and commentary
Review: Shafer-Landau clearly presents and discusses a very difficult issue and does it in a way that is informative and not condescending. Whether good and evil is relative or absolute may be high browed philosophy stuff for some people, but this book brings it us in an understandable and interesting way. I appreciate his thoughtfulness and his talent.

Rating:
Summary: Meta-Ethics for the Beginner
Review: This book is a very nice, and very basic, introduction to meta-ethics, the field of philosophy studying the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological issues concerning morality. Though it might help to have had some prior philosophy, it should be accessible to anyone who is interested in what philosophers might have to say about the these issues. Shafer-Landau has decided to introduce meta-ethics through an extended argument concerning a single topic: the objectivity (or lack thereof) of morality. And while this is only one of the issues that meta-ethicists discuss, it's perhaps the single most important and general issue in the field.

Shafer-Landau writes a clear and accessible style, and his book isn't jargon-laden. He is, moreover, up-front about the nature of his arguments, what he's assuming, and where people might respond to his arguments. He doesn't expect the reader to piece his arguments together for herself or to expend a great deal of effort trying to figure out just what he means. He makes his points lucidly and succinctly, and then he moves on to the next one. And despite its brief length, this book is packed full of interesting and important arguments both for and against the objectivity of ethics. (There's also a helpful short appendix that summarizes the main arguments of the book and Shafer-Landau's analysis of them.) Importantly, though, this is not a work covering the literature on this topic. Shafer-Landau refers to other philosophers only occasionally, and he tends to refer to major historical figures when he does refer to philosophers. Nor is this a work covering the various positions that have been defended in meta-ethics. It introduces meta-ethics by developing and defending a position on a particular topic in meta-ethics rather than by presenting and criticizing all the views that are of importance in the field. And this is the source of my only substantial criticism of this book. It would be nice if Shafer-Landau had engaged with the literature a little more. While this isn't such a major problem, it would have been nice if the book could work as a entry to the literature on the topic. Indeed, the book doesn't even include a guide to further reading on these topics, and so it provides no suggestions about where the reader might go from here.

Now for something about the relevant philosophical issues here. First, the most obvious question: What would it be for morality to be objective? According to Shafer-Landau, it would be for there to be right and wrong, good and bad, etc. independent of what human beings think or feel or desire. And Shafer-Landau's aim in this book is to argue that morality is indeed objective. What would someone who argues against this position think? What would it be for morality to be subjective? Shafer-Landau considers three different versions of subjectivism: nihilism, the view that there are no moral facts of any type; subjectivism, the view that the moral facts are constituted by each individual's beliefs or feelings or desires; and relativism, the view that the moral facts are constituted by each group's practices or conventions. All of this material is presented in the first two chapters of this book. The first chapter sketches the issue concerning the objectivity of ethics, and the second presents these positions.

The rest of the book is divided into two parts. The first part argues against the forms of subjectivism described above (and thereby presents a prima facie case for objectivism), and the second part argues against certain important objections to objectivism. The primary form of argument Shafer-Landau uses in the first part is that various types of subjectivism can't account for our ordinary conception of the status and nature of morality. Here he discusses several traditional lines of argument: that subjectivism allows for no notion of moral error, that subjectivism doesn't allow us to compare the quality of distinct moral views, that subjectivism can't make sense of the possibility of moral progress, that subjectivism isn't a good way to promote tolerance (and indeed subjectivists may not be able to argue against the intolerant, that subjectivism can't account for the nature of moral disagreement, and that subjectivism may in fact be an inconsistent position. Each of these objections is considered in a separate chapter, and each chapter--most of them less than ten pages long--discusses how each objection affects all three of the forms subjectivism discussed above.

The upshot of the first part is supposed to be that morality certainly does not seem to be subjective in the way these theories tell us, and so we have some reason to think that subjectivism is false and that some sort of objectivism is true. But how could objectivism be true? What could an objective moral position be exactly? Answering these questions is Shafer-Landau's aim in the second part of the book. He begins with a short chapter arguing that objectivism avoids all of the problems he developed for subjectivism. However, he admits that this doesn't constitute a knock-down argument for objectivism, as there are many arguments for the conclusion that objectivism isn't and couldn't be true. The rest of the second part is intended to undermine various traditional and important arguments that morality isn't objective, and so the rest of the book is largely defensive. He considers the following arguments: that objectivism is undermined by the existence and persistence of moral disagreement, that objective moral standards would have to depend on God, that objective moral values are inconsistent with a naturalistic and scientific worldview, that objectivists can't account for our ability to acquire moral knowledge, and that we have no good reason to be moral. Again, each of these arguments is considered in a separate chapter.

I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in what philosophers might have to say about the objectivity of morality, and to anyone who is coming to meta-ethics for the very first time. This would be a fine book for an introductory course on these issues. It's well-argued; it gives the reader a sense of how to argue about these issues; it would be accessible to someone with no background in this area; and its chapters are brief enough that there is quite a bit one could say to clarify its arguments, consider their nuances, and examine their cogency.

Rating:
Summary: Serious text for serious students
Review: This may be a short book but it is serious. It presents cogent arguments for serious consideration by serious students. It is a "philosophical conversation."

"Our moral duties are determined by us, and so are our reasons. The perfect coincidence of duty and reason explains why it is always rational to do one's duty: our duties, like our reasons, are determined entirely by the ends we select for ourselves." But "Why from a rational point of view, am I the only one who counts?"

I found it just right to be the ethics text for a course that includes an ethics portion.