Abstract

The task of giving a philosophical account of moral judgements—both of the language used to express such judgements and of what must be in the mind and surrounding circumstances of the agent who makes them—has been high on the agenda of ethical theory for some time. David Copp proposes to take care of that item in this book. The result is a theory which, at the analytic level, endorses cognitivism, realism, naturalism, relativism, and motivational externalism. At the normative level, it is perhaps closest to rule utilitarianism, though it does not strictly conform to any of the usual definitions. The book moves always at the level of theory, without taking up applications to real moral issues, though it is easy to see how there might be such applications.