A Subject Matter for Ethics?

A natural place to start in any philosophical domain is with a characterization of what it's about: an account of the subject matter. Insofar as thinking about metaethics is thinking about ethics, it would be natural to want an explanation of the subject matter of ethics. But that is itself a controversial metaethical question. So instead of answering it in a forthright way, I will try to explain why it is difficult to provide an account of the sort we might expect for any domain that genuinely has a subject matter. The difficulties have led some theorists to deny that ethics is a genuine subject, while it has led others to propose various divergent and incompatible accounts of the subject matter. This chapter and the two that follow are all part of that explanation. This chapter sets out what it would be to provide an account of the subject matter that treats ethics as similar to other domains with a genuine subject matter to “be about.” And it endeavors to show how several different phenomena related to disagreement and to lack of agreement about ethics cause trouble for providing such a story. On the one hand, we have disagreement, where one person affirms what another denies. The amount of ethical disagreement among intelligent people grounds an argument for doubting that they are talking about a common topic. At a different level, it seems that people can rationally doubt any informative characterization of the nature of that topic. This fact provides further reason to wonder whether they all speak of the same reality. And then we notice that the possibility of genuine disagreement seems to require us to address common topics about which we disagree. If so, an otherwise plausible relativism also seems to be ruled out by the fact of disagreement of the first sort, where one person affirms what the other denies.