Good In Virtue Of

In recent years, grounding has become an essential part of the metaphysician’s toolkit. In this book, grounding is put to work by applying the grounding framework to the metaethical debate. Starting with the common intuition that objects have normative properties in virtue of having other properties, we can ask what kind of relation this in-virtue-of relation is. Since this question is often neglected in the metaethical debate, this book closes a significant gap by proposing that the grounding relation is the desired relation. In the course of the book, it is shown that grounding fits the core characteristics of the desired relation better than other candidate relations such as supervenience, constitution and composition. Furthermore, it becomes apparent that applying the grounding framework to the metaethical debate leads to interesting reformulations of standard debates in metaethics and provides useful new insights and arguments, particularly in the debate on atomism and holism. Since in this book two different areas of analytical philosophy are brought into an interesting and fruitful dialogue, authors from the metaethical debate as well as authors from the grounding debate might benefit greatly from reading it.