Abstract

Probably no one has done more than Frankena to bring about the recent shift in philosophical interest from the primarily linguistic concerns of metaethics to what he calls “meta-morals,” that is, to questions about morality as a whole. Instead of investigating what so-called ethical terms stood for, or whether ethical utterances employed propositions or proposals or imperatives or whether they expressed feelings, beliefs, descriptions or prescriptions, or whether they conformed to ordinary propositional logic or to an imperatival or some other logic of their own, Frankena set out to investigate the moral enterprise itself. Quite recently he put together the results of these reflections in two series of lectures, “Three Questions About Morality” and Thinking About Morality. My own views had always been very close to his, but these recent lectures, which for the first time put his thoughts on this topic together in a systematic way, have made clear to me that, while the starting point of our investigations is indeed the same, our conclusions diverge on a number of important points. I want to take up some of the problems to which we offer different solutions.