Does Metaethics Rest on a Mistake?

One consequence of the professionalization of philosophy is its ever increasing specialization. Within the normative domain, what has come to be known as metaethical inquiry is increasingly conducted independently of substantive ethical reflection. Even if this trend is intelligible given the economic and institutional pressures that spawned it, it is reasonable to wonder if insights are lost and distortions and illusions introduced by focusing exclusively on the limited perspective of metaethical inquiry. Dworkin laments this trend and is skeptical about contemporary metaethics. The division between “first-order”,“substantive” normative inquiry and “secondorder”,“meta” normative inquiry has come to seem natural to us and is fundamental to the way we standardly present these topics in our teaching. But it has not always been so. Thus, for example, Rawls (2000) has claimed that the moral philosophies of Hume and Kant cannot intelligibly be presented in this way. Instead, they exemplify what he calls a “philosophical ethics”. Both Hume and Kant address metaphysical and epistemological questions about ethics, but they do so in a way that is not independent from substantive ethical reflection. Dworkin, in the first part of Justice for Hedgehogs, presents an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy that is distinct from Rawlsian philosophical ethics but similar to it. According to Dworkin, all second-order, meta-normative claims are to be understood, fundamentally, as first-order, substantive, normative claims. If true, then meta-normative inquiry, or what passes for it, could not intelligibly be conducted independently of substantive, normative reflection. If Dworkin is right, then contemporary metaethics rests on a mistake. (As will emerge, this echo of Prichard 1912 is deliberate.) Dworkin’s brief against metaethics is a small part of a larger case for the unity of value. The unity of value is the great idea of the book in virtue of which Dworkin counts as a hedgehog set against the prevailing orthodoxy of foxes. The unity of value is not the claim that there exists one master value to which all other values must reduce; rather, it is a distinct value monism that claims that all values are mutually dependent. What it is to be a value of a certain kind will depend upon what it is to be a value of a distinct kind. Consider the following analogy. Schaffer (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010) distinguishes between existence monism, according to