The Futility of Philosophical Ethics puts forward a novel account of the grounds of moral feeling with fundamental implications for philosophical ethics. It examines the grounds of moral feeling by both the phenomenology of that feeling, and the facts of moral feeling in operation - particularly in forms such as moral luck, vicious virtues, and moral disgust - that appear paradoxical from the point of view of systematic ethics.
Using an analytic approach, James Kirwan engages in the ongoing debates among contemporary philosophers within metaethics and normative ethics. Instead of trying to erase the variety of moral responses that exist in philosophical analysis under one totalizing system, Kirwan argues that such moral theorizing is futile. His analysis counters currently prevalent arguments that seek to render the origins of moral experience unproblematic by finding substitutes for realism in various forms of noncognitivism.
In reasserting the problematic nature of moral experience, and offering a theory of the origins of that experience in unavoidable individual desires, Kirwan accounts for the diverse manifestations of moral feeling and demonstrates why so many arguments in metaethics and normative ethics are necessarily irresolvable.
- ISBN10 1350260649
- ISBN13 9781350260641
- Publish Date 24 March 2022 (first published 24 February 2022)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 28 September 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 280
- Language English