Companions in Guilt

This book presents a critical analysis of contemporary arguments for objectivity in ethics.

Some arguments for the objectivity of ethical claim have a ‘companions in guilt’ form. These arguments defend the objective credentials of ethical claims by comparing them with other claims the objective credentials of which are not in doubt, but which share the features of ethical claims that lead some toward scepticism about ethical objectivity. In this book, the most influential contemporary manifestations of this strategy are subjected to critical analysis for the first time.

HALLVARD LILLEHAMMER is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy at Cambridge University, UK, and a Fellow of King’s College. He is co-editor of Real Metaphysics (2003) and Ramsay’s Legacy (2005).

“Moral philosophers often engage in local skirmishes without awareness of the more generic strategies that they and their opponents are employing, without knowing that down the corridor colleagues from another field of philosophy are engaged in the same pattern of argument. Lillehammer draws attention to one such repeating pattern in theoretical ethics–the “companions in guilt” stratagem–and in this he has done metaethicists of all stripes a lasting service. Nobody, now, has an excuse for deploying such an argument without deliberating carefully about its structure and its merits. Lillehammer brings clarity to a complex and often messy debate; his thinking is well-informed, appropriately patient, and genuinely original.”– Richard Joyce, Australian National University

Companionship in Guilt * Value, Normativity and the Mind * The Normativity of Practical Reason * Fact, Value and Truth * Values and Secondary Qualities * Ethics, Science and the Absolute Conception * Ethical Objectivity and Rule Following * Objectivity, Relativism and Inescapability * Index