Does anything really matter?

Oxford University Press

2017

317 p.

9780199653836

Peter Singer: Preface1: Larry Temkin: Has Parfit's Life Been Wasted? Some Reflections on Part Six of On What Matters2: Peter Railton: Two Sides of the Meta-Ethical Mountain?3: Allan Gibbard: Parfit on Normative Properties and Disagreement4: Simon Blackburn: All Souls Night5: Michael Smith: Parfit's Mistaken Metaethics6: Sharon Street: Nothing 'Really' Matters, but That's Not What Matters7: Richard Chappell: Knowing What Matters8: Andrew Huddleston: Nietzsche and the Hope of Normative Convergence9: Frank Jackson: In Defence Of Reductionism In Ethics10: Mark Schroeder: What Matters about Metaethics?11: Bruce Russell: A Defense of Moral Intuitionism12: Stephen Darwall: Morality, Blame, and Internal Reasons13: Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer: Parfit on Objectivity and 'The Profoundest Problem of Ethics'

Ethical subjectivism or skepticism, in one form or another, has dominated moral philosophy for the past eighty years. In On What Matters Derek Parfit rejects all forms of subjectivism in ethics, as well as ethical naturalism. Instead he argues that there are objective, non-natural normative truths. If there are no such truths, he claims, nihilism awaits and his life has been wasted, as have the lives of all those who have spent their time trying to work out what we ought to do. In defending this position, Parfit criticizes, sometimes sharply, many leading contemporary philosophers. In this volume Peter Railton, Mark Schroeder, Frank Jackson, Allan Gibbard, Simon Blackburn, Michael Smith, Sharon Street, and Stephen Darwall reply to Parfit’s criticisms of their views, and in so doing shed light not only on Parfit’s position, but also on the long-running debate about whether there can be objectively true normative statements. Additional essays on Parfit’s defence of ethical objectivism are contributed by Larry S. Temkin, Bruce Russell, Richard Yetter Chappell, Andrew Huddleston, and Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, and Peter Singer. These essays, along with Parfit’s responses (available in this book’s companion volume, On What Matters, Volume Three) greatly advance the debate about the possibility of truth in ethics. Taken together, the two volumes achieve something rare in philosophical disputes, for they show that sometimes such exchanges, rather than merely consolidating opposing positions, do bring opponents closer to agreement

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