Metaethics of Virtue Ethics

The re-emergence of virtue ethics in the 20th century revolutionized moral philosophy. This is the first book-length introduction to elaborate and defend its complex philosophical framework, natural normativity.

The Metaethics of Virtue Ethics is the first book-length account of the philosophical framework underpinning the neo-Aristotelian revival of virtue ethics by philosophers including Elizabeth Anscombe, P.T. Geach, Phillipa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Rosalind Hursthouse: an approach in metaethics known as natural normativity.

Bringing together and digesting key scholarship on the subject up to and including recent research, the book provides a fundamental reference point for students of moral philosophy, helping overcome barriers to the understanding of natural normativity and by extension neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics.

The Metaethics of Virtue Ethics contextualizes neo-Aristotelian natural normativity against the backdrop of the broader history of ethics. The first two sections are structured around two central questions in metaethics: 1) What is a moral judgment? and 2) Whether one has reason to be moral? These chapters explain and defend natural normativity’s distinctive answer to these foundational questions in metaethics. The third section, “Answering the Critics,” deals with several important objections to natural normativity that have emerged as the tradition has developed.

This book appeals to the growing number of scholars and students interested in the philosophical contributions of “the Quartet,” the four women who met at Oxford during World War II—Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch—and, by some accounts, revolutionized ethics.