So here we are, two hundred pages deep in this book, having learned all about deontology and utilitarianism and contractualism and virtue ethics and a bunch of other stuff, and along comes a morose Frenchman to tell us that there’s no God and people define themselves through action and we have to just make decisions with no guidance except “the essential anguish of our own existence” or something. He’s telling us that Kant and Bentham and Scanlon and Aristotle are about as helpful to our moral lives as a coin flip. Should we listen to him, and junk all these other theories?
