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This book develops a novel interpretation of the late-nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche as holding a distinct and original metaethical position (a theory about our practice of ethics). David Emannuel Rowe characterizes it as a human-centered metaethics. A central achievement of A Nietzschean Metaethics is to bring Nietzsche into a conversation with the analytic metaethical tradition. To do so, Rowe interprets Nietzsche's use of such concepts as the notorious “will to power”; his ideal agent, the superman or Übermensch; nihilism; the eternal recurrence; Perspectivism; and Being and Becoming. The result is a view of Nietzsche as a radical moral error theorist, which is to say he defends the view that all statements that appeal to some value for their truth are false. This theory is radical because Nietzsche argues that insofar as language requires certain concepts for its truth it is in error, in virtue of an appeal to some value. Rowe also offers a view where the increase in one's power is a standard by which one can make sense of Nietzsche's so-called re-evaluation of all values. By means of this resolution, Nietzsche criticizes some contemporary themes in metaethics, such as particular views about moral motivation, reasons, moral error theory, and agency.

This volume explores the importance of constitutivism for legal studies. Constitutivism is the view that the normative force, or authority, of practical reasons is grounded in principles, capacities, aims, or functions that are essential to, and thus constitutive of, agency. While the implications that the constitutivist approach has on the fundamental metaethical disputes and central ethical debates have been extensively explored, the literature on the relations between constitutivism and law remains scarce, unsystematic, and sporadic. This collection brings together world-renowned practical philosophers and legal theorists to fill a noticeable gap in the literature. The authors systematically and innovatively address key dimensions of the relationships between constitutivism and the theoretical study of law, as well as programmatically offering novel insights into the conceptual connections between constitutivist claims, fundamental legal concepts and practices, legal issues, and, ultimately, the law as a distinctive concept. The book will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the areas of Legal Philosophy, Legal Theory, Jurisprudence, Moral Philosophy and Metaethics.

Metaethics: A Contemporary Introduction provides a solid foundation in metaethics for advanced undergraduates by introducing a series of puzzles that most metaethical theories address. These puzzles involve moral disagreement, reference, moral epistemology, metaphysics, and moral psychology. From there, author Mark van Roojen discusses the many positions in metaethics that people will take in reaction to these puzzles. Van Roojen asks several essential questions of his readers, namely: What is metaethics? Why study it? How does one discuss metaethics, given its inherently controversial nature? Each chapter closes with questions, both for reading comprehension and further discussion, and annotated suggestions for further reading.

Terence Cuneo develops a novel line of argument for moral realism. The argument he defends hinges on the normative theory of speech, according to which speech acts are generated by an agent's altering her normative position with regard to her audience, gaining rights, responsibilities, and obligations of certain kinds. Some of these rights, responsibilities, and obligations, Cuneo suggests, are moral. And these moral features are best understood along realist lines, in part because they explain how it is that we can speak. If this is right, a necessary condition of being able to speak is that there are moral rights, responsibilities, and obligations of a broadly realist sort.