Abstract

This book professes to be “an unabashed exercise in metaethics”. The first few pages explain that the author does not attempt to answer normative questions, such as “what it is that makes right acts right, what the various virtues and their interrelations are, what constitutes a proper excuse for vile behavior, and so on”. Instead he answers questions of supposedly another ilk: “What is the relation between ‘ought’ and ‘good’?... What are imperfect duties? Does ‘ought’ apply only to actions, or does it have broader scope? Ought one to be perfect? Does ‘ought’ imply ‘can’?... Can someone succeed in sloughing off an obligation through sheer laziness?... Are there gradations of obligation and wrongdoing? Can there be obligations without rights? Can someone be obligated to do, or to cause himself to do, wrong? If one person ought to advise another to do something, ought the latter to do that thing? Can someone... be in a genuine moral dilemma? What is the relation between wrongdoing and guilt? Can one go beyond the call of duty? Can it be right to prevent someone from doing what’s right? Can two wrongs make a right?” Now at this point the reader might be puzzled as I was. Zimmerman seems to suggest that the latter type of questions are purely logical and linguistic and that one can answer them without normative assumptions or without appealing to normative principles. Yet this seems, at the least, to be counter-intuitive. Lurking behind metaethical analysis is invariably the assumption that the is-ought distinction is decisive. Of course, this is a naive and self-refuting assumption, since even the is-ought distinction presupposes the value of truth and obligation.