My interest in the issues considered here arose out of my great frustration in trying to attack the all-pervasive relativism of my students in introductory ethics courses at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. I am grateful to my students for forcing me to take moral relativism and skepticism seriously and for compelling me to argue for my own dogmatically maintained version of moral objectivism. The result is before the reader. The conclusions reached here (which can be described either as a minimal objectivism or as a moderate verson of relativism) are considerably weaker than those that I had expected and would have liked to have defended. I have arrived at these views kicking and screaming and have resisted them to the best of my ability. The arguments of this book are directed at those who deny that moral judgments can ever be correct (in any sense that is opposed to mistaken) and who also deny that we are ever rationally com pelled to accept one moral judgment as opposed to another. I have sought to take their views seriously and to fight them on their own grounds without making use of any assumptions that they would be unwilling to grant. My conclusion is that, while it is possible to refute the kind of extreme irrationalism that one often encounters, it is impossible to defend the kind of objectivist meta-ethical views that most of us want to hold, without begging the question against the non-objectivist.

Inhalt
One: A Brentanist Theory of Moral Judgments.- 1.1. The Theory.- 1.2. Grounds for Preferring the Brentanist Theory to the Standard Non-Cognitivist Theories.- 1.3. Grounds for Preferring the Brentanist Theory to the Standard Cognitivist Theories.- 1.4. Answers to Some Objections to the Brentanist Theory.- Two: The Ideal Observer Theory and Moral Objectivism.- 2.1. An Argument for Accepting the Ideal Observer Theory as a Standard for Determining the Correctness of Moral Judgments.- 2.2. Firth's Version of the Ideal Observer Theory.- 2.3. My Characterization of the Ideal Observer.- 2.4 Three Versions of the Ideal Observer Theory and Their Implications for the Objectivity of Moral Judgments.- 2.5. Sermonette on the Importance of Empathy.- 2.6. Intuitionism and the Ideal Observer Theory.- Three: Relativism and Nihilism.- 3.1 Some Different Meanings of the Term 'Ethical Relativism'.- 3.2. The Definition of 'Meta-Ethical Relativism'.- 3.3. Some Necessary Conditions of One's Accepting a Moral Judgment or a Moral Principle.- 3.4. Meta-Ethical Relativism and Nihilism.- 3.5. A Non-Nihilistic Version of Meta-Ethical Relativism.- 3.6. Conclusion.- Four: The Wages of Relativism.- 4.1. What Sorts of Attitudes and Commitments Presuppose a Belief in the Objectivity of Normative Judgments?.- 4.2. Causal or Psychological Connections Between Meta-Ethical Views and Attitudes and First-Order Normative Standards.- Appendix I: Nietzsche on the Genealogy of Morals.- 1.1. Nietzsche's Claims Concerning the Genealogy of Morals.- 1.2. What Are Nietzsche's Genetic Claims Intended to Show?.- Appendix II: Normative Relativism and Nihilism.- Appendix III: Hare's Version of the Ideal Observer Theory.- Notes.- Selected Bibliography.