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Does Anything Really Matter? Essays on Parfit on Objectivity

Online ISBN:
9780191823916
Print ISBN:
9780199653836
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Does Anything Really Matter? Essays on Parfit on Objectivity

Peter Singer (ed.)
Peter Singer
(ed.)
Princeton University/University of Melbourne
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Published online:
23 March 2017
Published in print:
19 January 2017
Online ISBN:
9780191823916
Print ISBN:
9780199653836
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

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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