Abstract

While James Fishkin's attempt to connect ethical theory with political philosophy is sketchy and inconclusive, he provides in this book a useful survey of various types of meta-ethical reasoning. Basing his carefully argued analysis on a series of dialogues with "ordinary reasoners" on ethical problems, he constructs a spectrum of meta-ethical positions ranging from absolutism to amoralism. Because his ordinary reasoners are nearly all undergraduate and graduate students at Yale and Cambridge, two caveats must be entered about their representative character. The ethical thinking of untempered youth is not a sure guide to a society's moral culture; and it may be surmised that a group of respondents from midwestern agricultural colleges would have provided a different set of responses than those from the elite institutions.