Ethics and Meta-Ethics
My two introductory ethics textbooks feature pragmatic methods in practice. tuned to the complexity of concrete problematic situations and the promise of creative and constructive engagement, framing ethical dialogue as a mode of intelligent community-building. More methological and provocative professional articles follow.
A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox
with Professor Bob Fischer
(5th edition, Oxford University Press 2023)
Winner of the Textbook & Academic Authors Association's Textbook Excellence “Texty” Award, 2025.
Publisher’s blurb:
“Thoroughly optimistic, A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox invites students to approach ethical issues with a reconstructive intent--to make room for more and better options than the rigid "pro" and "con" positions that have developed around tough problems like abortion, climate change, and racism. Employing an accessible, consistently engaging writing style, Anthony Weston and Bob Fischer cover the skills that are vital to making real progress in ethics, including critical thinking, creative problem-solving, moral vision, and genuine dialogue. Provocative selections from a wide range of philosophers, essayists, activists, and students are interwoven with the authors' own discussions.”
A Practical Companion to Ethics
(Oxford University Press, 6th edition, 2021)
Companion offers a very short version of what Toolbox offers at length. It's quite on purpose a companion to an ethics or ethics-related course rather than the main textbook, while still framing ethics as a constructive and creative form of practical intelligence rather than primarily as a theoretical or judgmental project. “An elegant introduction,” says OUP, “to the practical skills and attitudes that make ethics work”.
Articles and Chapters
When I was in graduate school, meta-ethics meant the study of ethical language. Fairly quickly, though, this morphed into the study of the nature and justification of ethical claims, the role of ethical theories, and objectivity or subjectivity in ethics, extending into value theory as well. Pragmatism has much to say about these things, though I've mostly preferred to say it indirectly – letting the proof be in the pudding. Here are a few more direct statements.
For a Meta-Ethics as Good as Our Practice
In Elizabeth Burge, ed., “Negotiating Dilemmas of Practice: Applied Ethics in Adult Education”, special issue of New Directions in Adult and Continuing Education (Jossey-Bass, 2009).
A somewhat out of the way publication, but this is my fullest single statement of my meta-ethics and general approach to ethical problems.
“Ethical issues in adult education are often open-ended, complex, problematic situations. The real question is not which side is right, or to which moral choice principle we must appeal, but rather how we can engage those situations themselves intelligently and constructively.”
Drawing Lines: The Abortion Perplex and the Presuppositions of Applied Ethics
The Monist 67:4, Ethics and the Modern World, October, 1984, pp. 589-604.
An early essay calling out on the insistence on drawing sharp lines between persons and non-persons in moral arguments about abortion, and suggesting that a kind of gradualism that draws no such lines is not only far wiser practically but also helpfully leverages a philosophical reframing in applied ethics generally
For more developed arguments in the same key, see my early book Toward Better Problems: New Perspectives on Abortion, Animal Rights, the Environment, and Justice (Temple University Press, 1992). Some of its treatments are rather dated now, as with the abortion piece, but the larger Pragmatic program remains the same.
Inge Anderegg, “On the Natural History of On the Natural History of Values”
In Jobs for Philosophers, Chapter 5.
A fictional award-acceptance address from my pseudonymous collection of reviews, exploring the life cycle of values, especially ethical ones, with an eye to how new systems of value emerge, as environmental values are emerging today, and welcoming them precisely on account of their contingency and novelty, as well as the moment’s desperate need.
“Ethics too often enthusiastically incapacitates itself when it comes to dealing with values that are now entering an originary stage… Formal ethics, contrariwise, continues to present itself as the only kind of ethics there is, and thus we give up entirely even recognizing those values that are in the process of formation or change. We continue to regard the contingency, open-endedness, and uncertainty of ‘new’ values as an objection to them, ruling them out of ethical court entirely or else as a kind of embarrassment to be quickly papered over with an ethical theory.”
Way Beyond Trolley Problems
I've written (very critically) about the Trolley Problem, and its earlier cousin the Heinz Dilemma, in a number of places. The treatment in A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox might well be read alongside Chapter 4 of Philosophy’s Big Chance. For another somewhat more detailed and somewhat less patient treatment, see my (unpublished) “Way Beyond Trolley Problems.”
Relevant Papers
Relevant papers that address questions of general ethical method in the context of Environmental Ethics are fully cited in the Eco-Philosophy section. These include:
- Beyond Intrinsic Value, Environmental Ethics, 1985.
- “Introduction” (Chapter 1) to my book, The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher: Essays from the Edges of Environmental Ethics
(SUNY, 2009) - “Before Environmental Ethics,” Chapter 2 in The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher, first published in
Environmental Ethics. - “Between Means and Ends,” The Monist, 1992.