Customer Reviews

Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language

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Smith provides a welcome historical corrective to the too-often repeated charge that analytic philosophy abandoned life's deep questions about value and meaning, showing how these questions were repeatedly addressed through four overlapping but roughly successive movements in the analytic tradition. Much of the historical discussion of the first movements is quite valuable. I especially liked Smith's survey of ten criticisms of ethical emotivism. Also of considerable interest is his criticism that ordinary language philosophy, like the positivism that preceded it, fails by its own criteria of meaning.
The last three chapters and a subsequent conclusion are equal parts lucid exposition of the four-decade-old (but still vital) movement of linguistic essentialism, and an impressive addition to essentialist discourse in philosophy of religion and ethics. Whether Smith has successfully refuted Plantinga's Free Will Defense and thereby revived the deductive version of the Atheistic Argument from Evil is, in my judgment, doubly questionable. Part hinges on whether Smith makes his case that since theists hold God to be both free and yet necessarily morally good, theists should also concede that it must also be logically possible for God to create moral agents who are also both free yet necessarily morally good. Smith's greatest flaw as a philosopher is a certain overassured, categorical finality he expresses in his conclusions; a self-confidence Aristotelian in its proportions.
In the chapter on essentialist ethics, Smith truely shines, making a valuable case for moral realism. Although he attributes his metaethical approach to Robert M. Adams, he makes it wholly his own, expanding on every detail of essentialist ethical analysis. Although I am not aware that it has generated as much discussion as it deserves, his normative ethical theory, Naturalistic Perfectionism, is quite interesting. (I also wonder, however, whether Smith really succeeds showing that his position is as independent of intuitionism as he claims.) The final discussion of Naturalist Pantheism is also quite interesting and evocative.

Although this is not the only topic Smith addresses in the book, I really appreciate the work he did on atheistic moral realism. Smith reviews all of the relevant literature--including that by J.L. Mackie, Robert Adams, and David O. Brink--and demonstrates the inherent plausibility of an atheistic moral realism.

Smith also has occasion to defend a logical argument from evil. While I am skeptical of such arguments, Smith's book should serve as a reminder to theists who wish to proclaim the death of logical arguments from evil.

If you've ever wondered how an objective morality could exist if God does not, and you've wanted a really thorough treatment of the issue, this book is for you. Although Smith's book can be difficult reading (especially for nonphilosophers), it is well worth the effort.