The end of the Second World War saw the rise of a new strand of political conservatism rooted in a technocratic ideology.1 This ideology, exemplified by McCarthyism in the United States, perceived any serious social, political, or ethical critique of the established order as a grave danger to the status quo. The academy was not exempt from the effects of McCarthy-era repression. According to the philosopher John McCumber, the philosophical profession was particularly hard-hit by McCarthyism since many professional philosophers working in fields such as political economy, critical social theory, Marxism, and even some branches of ethics lost their academic positions. This purge of radicals from American universities impacted the kinds of research that were pursued and the kinds of questions that were posed (McCumber 2001; 2016). In ethics, the crackdown on left-leaning intellectuals shifted research paradigms away from concrete problems and made a largely apolitical interest in “metatheory” the dominant approach to moral philosophy.