The Nature of Moral Judgment: A Study in Contemporary Moral Philosophy by Patrick McGrath (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 155 believe, in showing the inadequacies of the views of Hare and Foot; he is surely correct in arguing that not everything can count as a moral reason and that the intelligibility of a moral argument depends on agreement over certain fundamental concepts and ideas. He is also quite right in stressing the role that cultural background, heritage, traditions, and membership in a given political and/or religious community play in providing these concepts and in offering us a framework within which meaningful discussion can take place. Yet his position logically leads to moral relativism, for he is incapable of offering any reasons why any particular moral code should be preferred to any other. In final analysis, this means that there is ultimately no irrefutable reason why any type of human activity should be considered right or wrong. The ultimate criterion, consequently, of the rightness or wrongness of a human act, must be non-rational. Although Beardsmore's position illuminates many aspects of the rational character of moral discourse, it finally issues in the absurd. Corpus lnstrumentorum Washington, D. C. WILLIAM E. MAY The Nature of Moral Judgment: A Study in Contemporary Moral Philosophy . By PATRICK McGRATH. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969. Pp. 327. $6.50. The decade of the 1960's may well be remembered by future historians of ethics as a period of stock-taking and consolidation. After nearly 50 years of unparalleled vitality and development, a growing number of moral philosophers in the Anglo-American world seem to be '-:'eady to slow the pace for a moment in order to assimilate and reevaluate the rapid steps of the recent past. The evidence for this is twofold: first, the rather surprising dearth of novel, groundbreaking work in ethics during the last ten years and, second, the near simultaneous appearance of a number of books devoted in large measure to the task of giving a critical, historical review of the development in Anglo-American ethical philosophy since G. E. Moore. The Nature of Moral Judgment falls squarely into this latter category and as such will inevitably be compared with such excellent recent works as The Revolution in Ethical Theory by George Kerner and G. J. Warnock's Contemporary Moral Philosophy. Any such comparison, however , is bound to yield a favorable judgment of Father McGrath's work. His treatment of individual theorists is remarkably fresh, and his view- 156 BOOK REVIEWS point provides a valuable and much needed perspective on the issues under consideration. All of the previous works of this genre have been written by philosophers who stand squarely in the tradition of linguistic-analytic philosophy itself. Warnock and Kerner, for example, are both students of the late J. L. Austin. And while their assessments of the fruitfulness of the direction which recent ethical thought has taken vary widely, they share many assumptions in common with the philosophers whose work they discuss. Father McGrath, by contrast, approaches the analytic tradition in ethics with the concerns of traditional moral philosophy uppermost in his mind. The result, however, is not an unsympathetic diatribe against "linguistic" philosophy of the sort which has been all too common in recent years. Instead, one finds a balanced and generally sympathetic presentation of the views of all the " classic " ethical theorists in the analytic tradition, along with constructive criticism of each. McGrath's book is divided into four parts, the first three devoted to exposition and criticism and the fourth to a development of the author's own constructive views. Part One, " The Emotive Theory of Moral Judgment," presents sketches of l\foore's refutation of naturalism and of the theories of meaning developed by Logical Atomism and Logical Positivism. It then goes on to probe the emotivist ethical theories of A. J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson, showing them to be a near inevitable response to Moore's work in view of the theory of meaning extant among the early analysts. Part Two, " The Function of Ethical Statements," is devoted to a careful analysis of the ethical writings of J. 0. Urmson, R. M. Hare and P. H. Nowell-Smith. What separates the work of these philosophers from that of the...