Empty formalism and modern moral philosophy

It is now hard to imagine how unpromising the lines of thought in this book seemed to most people with an interest in philosophical ethics when I first worked on them in the late 1960s. Many were then still drawn to more-or-less positivist claims that reasoned approaches to ethical or political claims were impossible, while those who favoured a reasoned approach usually proposed some version of ethical naturalism, mostly of a Utilitarian or Aristotelian variety. There was general agreement that Kant’s claim that practical reason can guide ethical action was wholly implausible.

Although Kant’s ethical and political philosophy had enjoyed considerable resonance in the wider world during the post-war decades, as is evident in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights, and of the West German and other constitutions, it had few admirers in Anglophone philosophy departments. This was not because philosophers at that time had no interest in or respect for Kant’s wider philosophy. Many admired both his metaphysical caution and the sweep of his arguments about human knowledge and its limits. But the consensus was that he neither showed how principles could guide action nor offered adequate reasons for any specific ethical or political principles, so that both his metaethics and his normative ethics were defective.