The first half of the course consisted in a "tour through the landscape of metaethics." I used the following flowchart as our "roadmap" through that landscape, which - in tandem with our discussions, of course - I felt helped the students to understand how the various views hang together, which, in turn, helped them to understand the various views themselves.

 

This flowchart is in various respects oversimplified.

 

• First, the flowchart concerns moral judgments/claims/properties/facts generally, rather than Fness judgments/claims/properties/facts, for some particular moral property, Fness. The flowchart therefore excludes views that handle different moral properties differently.

 

• Second, fans of Sturgeon-style non-reductionist naturalism may complain their view is not represented. Given how I think of reductive definition, I would actually resist this claim. But it would take me a bit to explain why.

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• Third, the flowchart does not leave space for reductions of moral normative phenomena to non-moral normative phenomena taken as irreducibly normative.

 

• Fourth, fans of views that disentangle the question of a moral judgment's truth-aptness from that of the corresponding moral claim's truth-aptness ought to complain that the flowchart leaves no space for their views. Quasi-Realism isn't strictly a view of this sort, but, in a similar vein, the flowchart leaves no room for the Quasi-Realist's particular combination of moral psychological commitments and semantic commitments.

 

Were I to teach the course for majors, I would at least upgrade to using the schema of which the last, more sophisticated flowchart in the sequence is an instance, which handles the first and third of these problems.

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