This little book is a rare gem.

It seems to me that Shafer-Landau has actually succeeded in writing an entry level meta-ethics text that is intelligible to the educated layman. Unlike, say, Chisholm's Theory of Knowledge or Hempel's Philosophy of Natural Science, Whatever Happened to Good and Evil seems to me to be truly introductory in nature. Too often, philosophers are contracted to write introductory or popular level volumes and emerge from their caves with volumes that are either too watered down to be of any use or too complicated to qualify as introductory (see the aforementioned titles).

In the present text, the complicated language is left to a minimum, philosophical concepts are introduced clearly and only when absolutely necessary, and the writing itself is crisp, clear, and has a bit of dry wit.

Now, although the volume is introductory, it is most certainly an opinionated introduction rather than an impartial survey. Shafer-Landau has an axe to grind, and herein it is with all of the bad reasons people embrace to undergird their skepticism about morality. His project is to defend the objectivity of moral facts against those who would deny that there are such facts (moral nihilists) and those who would argue that such facts are merely man-made cultural constructs (subjectivists and relativists).

Shafer-Landau's defense goes through two stages. First, he shows that there are serious problems (of consistency, coherence, and plausibility) with all the flavors of moral skepticism. This provides a negative argument for moral objectivism (no other position will work). Then, Shafer-Landau attempts to flesh out the positive arguments for moral objectivism while also arguing that many of the problems thought to beset moral objectivism are either overstated or rest on arguments that would undercut not just the objectivity of moral facts but of philosophy itself (such as those aimed at the possibility of a priori knowledge).

I'm a partisan in this debate, and thus, since Shafer-Landau plays for my team, it's no surprise that I think he's won the day. But what this book is of interest to all, regardless of their prior meta-ethical views, is not its conclusion. Rather, what Shafer-Landau has given us is a workable first glance at the major issues and arguments in meta-ethics. Pretty much everything is here, and an emotivist or error theorist could use this text profitably without agreeing with all its claims.

Some philosophers might be a bit wary about some of Shafer-Landau's appeals to intuition or to "what we all think/believe". Argument that shows that some postion Y conflcits with what we all beleive certaintly doesn't show that Y is incorrect and sometimes our author seems to go in this direction. However, given his pedagogical aims I think this is acceptable. Part of what he is trying to do is to clearly lay out the consequences of some pretty widely held skeptical arguments. The hope, I think, is that many casual moral skeptics, upon confronting the ways in which their position conflicts with "what we all think" will abandon their skepticism. This is because most people just aren't prepared to go where real moral skepticism leads. For those philosophers willing to bit some pretty rough bullets this obviously won't be sufficient, but such philosophers are not the target audience.

I plan to use this text in my introduction to ethics course this spring (2009). Perhaps I will update this review after I give it a test drive in the classroom. ( )