Table Of ContentComparative Metaethics
This collection of original essays explores metaethical views from
outside the mainstream European tradition. The guiding motivation is
that important discussions about the ultimate nature of morality can
be found far beyond ancient Greece and modern Europe. The volume’s
aim is to show how rich the possibilities are for comparative metaethics
and how much these comparisons offer challenges and new perspectives
to contemporary analytic metaethics. Representing five continents, the
thinkers discussed range from ancient Egyptian, ancient Chinese, and the
Mexican (Aztec) cultures to more recent thinkers like Augusto Salazar
Bondy, Bimal Krishna Matilal, Nishida Kitarō, and Susan Sontag. The
philosophical topics discussed include religious language, moral discovery,
moral disagreement, essences’ relation to evaluative facts, metaphysical
harmony and moral knowledge, naturalism, moral perception, and quasi-
realism. This volume will be of interest to anyone interested in metaethics
or comparative philosophy.
Colin Marshall is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Washington, Seattle, USA. His research focuses on the intersection of
historical and contemporary philosophy of mind and metaethics. He is
the author of Compassionate Moral Realism (2018).
Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory
Putting Others First
The Christian Ideal of Others-Centeredness
T. Ryan Byerly
Methodology and Moral Philosophy
Edited by Jussi Suikkanen and Antti Kauppinen
Self-Transcendence and Virtue
Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Technology
Edited by Jennifer A. Frey and Candace Vogler
Moral Rights and Their Grounds
David Alm
Ethics in the Wake of Wittgenstein
Edited by Benjamin De Mesel and Oskari Kuusela
Perspectives in Role Ethics
Virtues, Reasons, and Obligation
Edited by Tim Dare and Christine Swanton
Self, Motivation, and Virtue
Innovative Interdisciplinary Research
Edited by Nancy E. Snow and Darcia Narvaez
Morality in a Realistic Spirit
Essays for Cora Diamond
Edited by Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor
Comparative Metaethics
Neglected Perspectives on the Foundations of Morality
Edited by Colin Marshall
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Studies-in-Ethics-and-Moral-Theory/book-series/SE0423
Comparative Metaethics
Neglected Perspectives on the
Foundations of Morality
Edited by Colin Marshall
First published 2020
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This volume is dedicated to the lost and silenced metaethicists,
those thinkers whose insights died with them .
Contents
Introduction 1
COLIN MARSHALL
PART I
Moral Metaphysics 17
1 The Metaethics of Maat 19
KEVIN DELAPP
2 The Groundedness of Normativity or Indigenous
Normativity Through the Land 40
BRIAN YAZZIE BURKHART
3 The Nature of Mexica Ethics 60
JAMES MAFFIE
4 Etemeyaske Vpokat (Living Together Peacefully):
How the Muscogee Concept of H armony Can
Provide a Structure to Morality 81
JOSEPH LEN MILLER
5 Species and the Good in Anne Conway’s Metaethics 102
JOHN GREY
6 The Art of Convention: An Aesthetic Defense of
Confucian Ritual 119
IRENE LIU
7 Matilal’s Metaethics 139
NICOLAS BOMMARITO AND ALEX KING
viii Contents
PART II
Moral Experience 157
8 Goblet Words and Moral Knack: Non-Cognitivist Moral
Realism in the Zhuangzi ? 159
CHRISTOPHER C. KIRBY
9 Constructing Morality With Mengzi: Three Lessons on the
Metaethics of Moral Progress 179
JING HU AND SETH ROBERTSON
10 Nishida Kitaro¯’s Ko¯iteki Chokkan: Active Intuition and
Contemporary Metaethics 198
LAURA SPECKER SULLIVAN
11 Augusto Salazar Bondy’s Philosophy of Value 213
CLARK DONLEY
12 Sontag on Impertinent Sympathy and Photographs of Evil 236
SEAN T. MURPHY
Author Biographies 257
Index 260
Introduction
Colin Marshall1
The chapters in this volume offer a rich garden of ideas about the nature
of morality that emerged on five continents across thousands of years.
The topics range from grand views about the very fabric of the cosmos to
nuanced suggestions about humans’ layered moral experiences. Reflect-
ing on these ideas promises to both challenge and enrich contemporary
Euro-American metaethics.
Metaethics, broadly speaking, is the investigation of the underlying
nature of morality.2 While any more precise characterization of what this
involves is risky, a few general statements will help clarify what this vol-
ume aims to accomplish.
One way to locate the field of metaethics is via certain “why?” ques-
tions. If a child asks why she shouldn’t hit someone, the answer is pretty
easy: it’s wrong to hurt others. If she asks why it’s wrong to hurt oth-
ers, though, it’s hard to find an easy answer (aside, perhaps, from “it
just is”). Metaethics attempts to answer the most basic “why?” questions
about ethics, that is, questions that would arise even if we had settled
what we should do, which things are good, and what sort of people we
should be. For example, even if we all affirm the sentence, “it’s wrong
to hurt others”, we can still ask “why?” – where we are now asking (for
example) what that sentence means , how we k now that it’s true, or what
its truth c onsists in. Since every human society has some form of moral
code, and the temptation to repeatedly ask “why?” seems deeply rooted
in human psychology, it seems likely that humans across the globe have
been discussing metaethics in one way or another since before the start
of recorded history.
Contemporary metaethics, however, became established as a distinct
subfield of philosophy only in the 20th century – largely in response to
the writings of G.E. Moore, A.J. Ayer, and J.L. Mackie. 3 The first peri-
odical dedicated to metaethics ( Oxford Studies in Metaethics ) appeared
only in 2006. Despite this late start, metaethics is one of the most vibrant
and quickly growing areas of Anglophone philosophy. Dissertations,
articles, monographs, and conferences about metaethics are increasingly
common.
