Abstract

Before I begin my reply to Kurt Baier I want to express my gratitude and indebtedness to him. I regard The Moral Point of View as the book that brought analytic philosophy back from metaethics, that is, an examination of the meaning of moral judgments, to normative ethics, that is, to an attempt to describe and justify our common moral system. I think of my work as building on his and probably impossible without it. Even the title of my first book The Moral Rules: A New Rational Foundation for Morality echoes the title of Baier’s book, The Moral Point of View: A Rational Basis of Ethics.