Learning from Frankena: A Philosophical Remembrance

Abstract

William Frankena contributed as widely to moral philosophy and its neighboring areas as anyone in that remarkable group that dominated English-speaking ethics from the end of World War II well into the 1980s. From metaethics, the history of ethics, and normative ethical theory, to moral education, moral psychology, and applied ethics, to religious ethics and the philosophy of education, the sweep and quality of his ethical philosophizing was simply extraordinary. In some ways Frankena's greatest contribution was to show by argument and example how all these areas are inextricably linked. Like any field, ethics is given to fashions and enthusiasms, with all the action seeming to be in some particular area, which comes to be pursued more or less independently of, and out of balance with, the rest. This frequently causes a period of reaction, during which some other important but recently neglected area gains its day in the sun. Afterward, we sometimes get Hegelian synthesis, sometimes further reaction. For example, the 1950s and early 1960s were marked by a concentration on analytical metaethics to the exclusion of normative theory. Some even held that ethical philosophy can only be metaethical; normative ethics was said to be moralizing, not moral philosophy. In reaction, the late 1960s and much of the 1970s saw normative theory's Great Expansion, with metaethics receding into the far background.'