Abstract

Philosophers out of the idealist tradition—Kant, preeminently F. H. Bradley and H. J. Paton among our near contemporaries—have tried to set out a kind of objectivist grounding for moral principles which, I shall argue, moral principles do not and indeed could not possess. There have been many sadly defective rhetorical arguments against both absolutism and subjectivism in ethics; and rhetoric, in a quite different and indeed legitimate sense, has been employed to show that many anti-absolutist and pro-subjectivist arguments rest on conceptual confusion and rhetorical exaggeration. Close attention to the logic of our language—it has been claimed—would lead us to see that all grand talk of either objectivism or subjectivism is just so much rhetoric—switching once more to the pejorative sense of “rhetoric.” Still, more recently, some philosophers have tried to specify a sense of “subjectivism” which is coherent and which does pose a rational challenge to the claims of those idealist philosophers and to the claims of others as well that there are objectively true or objectively justified categorical moral claims or whole moral accounts of how we ought to live.