Abstract

The paper focuses on some standard criticisms to ethical theory. After having defined the two main tenets endorsed by authors willing to build an ethical theory (generalism and monism), two objections are considered and rejected: the idea that a monist ethical theory is unduly revisionist, and the contention that ethics is uncodifiable, and this makes a generalist ethical theory impossible. Moreover, the paper shows that generalist pluralism could be reduced to particularism, and that the uncodifiability objection conflates questions about warranted natural or non-moral realizers of moral properties with the issue whether the latter properties could lose, or revert, their usual valence. A defence of the possibility of a monist ethical theory is provided.