Current focused route — morality and religion
Morality and Religion - Learning Path selects introductory ethics, Fisher, primary readings, and later theistic/secular specialist accounts for this debate. Use it before treating the entire list below as required. The route links to Does Morality Require Religion - Master and a guided practice prompt.
Metaethics has an unusually clean canon, so a sequenced path works well here.
Start here
- Andrew Fisher, Metaethics: An Introduction — the best short orientation. Fast, clear, no padding.
- Alexander Miller, Contemporary Metaethics: An Introduction (2nd ed.) — the standard serious survey, organized historically from Moore forward. Denser, but it’s the one that actually maps the terrain.
- Michael Smith, The Moral Problem — not a textbook, but the single best statement of what the field is arguing about: the tension between objectivity, motivation, and Humean psychology. Frames everything else.
The foundational primary texts
- G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica — the open question argument; the field starts here.
- A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (ch. 6 only) — emotivism in its sharpest form.
- J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong — error theory, the argument from queerness, the argument from relativity. Short, lucid, and the challenge every realist since has had to answer. If you read only one primary text, read this.
Realism
- Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence — the standard non-naturalist defense.
- David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously — robust realism via an indispensability argument; combative and clear.
- Terence Cuneo, The Normative Web — argues moral and epistemic normativity stand or fall together. Directly useful against presuppositionalist arguments, since it shows the “you can’t ground norms without God” move proves too much.
- Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness — neo-Aristotelian naturalism, grounding evaluation in life-form facts. This is the closest thing in analytic metaethics to what Rasmussen and Den Uyl are doing, and probably the highest-value item on this list for your rights project.
- Peter Railton, Facts, Values, and Norms — the essays, especially “Moral Realism,” for the naturalist reductive alternative.
Anti-realism and expressivism
- Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions — quasi-realism, the attempt to earn realist talk without realist metaphysics.
- Allan Gibbard, Thinking How to Live — the most sophisticated expressivism.
- Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value” — a paper, not a book, but it reset the debate. Read it.
Constructivism and agency-based grounding
- Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity — derives normative authority from the structure of rational agency itself. Given that your rights work runs through rational agency and non-coercion, this is the most direct competitor-and-resource for that derivation.
- T.M. Scanlon, Being Realistic about Reasons — short, reasons-first, unusually readable for what it’s doing.
Anthologies
- Shafer-Landau and Cuneo, Foundations of Ethics — the best single collection.
- Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton, Moral Discourse and Practice — older but the editors’ introduction is a superb history of twentieth-century metaethics.
One structural note: Rand’s derivation is usually attacked at exactly the point metaethics is best equipped to examine — the move from “life is the standard of value” to “therefore you ought to value your life.” That is a version of the is-ought problem, and Foot, Korsgaard, and Mackie between them give you the three most serious ways of assessing it: naturalist vindication, constructivist reconstruction, and error-theoretic rejection. Reading those three against each other would probably do more for the project than any survey text.
I can turn this into a phased reading plan in your Obsidian format if that’s useful.