Title: The End of Morality: Taking Moral Abolitionism Seriously, edited by Richard Garner and Richard Joyce
Abstract: This is a collection of twelve original essays exploring the consequences of moral error theory.The central topic is the case for and against abolitionism about morality, or the view that it would be advisable to do without engaging in moral thought altogether.Yet some of the papers also explore alternatives to the abolitionist view.And several papers consider the empirical case for abolitionism based on specific case studies, such as social oppression, feminist critique and climate change.It is possibly in this last group of papers that readers will find most that is genuinely novel in this book.Many of the core contributions, on the other hand, consist in the re-elaboration of ideas that are either already familiar from the recent literature or, when they transcend it, only do so in embryonic form.Moral error theory is by now an established part of the philosophical "mainstream."This is mainly due to the great strides made over the last twenty years by a small vanguard of scholars, including Richard Garner and Richard Joyce, the joint editors of this volume.One mark of the "arrival" of moral error theory as part of mainstream philosophy was the publication in 2007 of a special issue in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, devoted to J.L. Mackie's 1977 work Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, a collection which was then subsequently published by Springer in book form under the title A World without Values in 2010.Where the primary focus of the 2007/2010 papers was the intrinsic plausibility of a moral error theory, the primary focus of The End of Morality a decade later is what follows from its acceptance.It is therefore only natural to consider Joyce and Kirchin's 2007/2010 volume and Garner and Joyce's 2019 volume as a complementary pair.And there is much, apart from the topic, that the two volumes have in common.There is a significant (but not excessive) overlap among the contributors.Thus, both the two editors and Caroline West appear in both collections.Both volumes also include the reproduction of work written a considerable time before this topic became fashionable.Thus, in the present volume we find extracts of an unpublished monograph by Jordan Howard Sobel and selections from a work by Ian Hinckfuss initially published in 1987 and reprinted here under its intended title "To Hell with Morality."Although the contents of these two pieces are arguably of more historical than philosophical interest given all the things that have happened since, the editors are to be thanked for doing their bit as custodians of the philosophical record.Apart from that, it is only fair to report that I found the general quality of the papers in the 2007/2010 volumes to be higher than those in the 2019 volume.