The nature of moral thinking

Abstract

Most recent texts in moral philosophy have either concentrated on practical moral issues or, if theoretical, have tended toward one- sided presentations of recent, fashionable views. Discussions of applied ethics are certain to be circumscribed unless underlying philosophical assumptions about deeper, more general issues are treated. Similarly, recent approaches to ethics are difficult to understand without a knowledge of the context of the historical views against which these approaches are reacting. The Nature of Moral Thinking will satisfy the intellectually curious student, providing a solid and fair discussion of the classical philosophical questions about our moral thinking, surveying the main types of meta-ethical and normative ethical theories, while not excluding the more recent discussions of moral realism, of anti- realism, and of virtue morality. Francis Snare demonstrates that a very common kind of glib intellectualistic thinking about morality, especially in regard to relativism and subjectivism, is seriously flawed. Serious attention is given to the question of whether particular theories of the origins of morality (for example, Nietzsche’s and Marx’s) undermine morality.