Around the turn of the twentieth century a new emphasis in ethics was introduced, known as "metaethics," which dominated ethics until fairly recently, when moral philosophers began to return to normative issues in ethics and to move into the new field of "applied ethics" (which we will discuss in the next chapter). Metaethics is part of a larger movement in British and American philosophy known as "analytic" philosophy that concentrates on philosophical problems created by logical and linguistic confusions of various sorts.

The history of Twentieth Century philosophy can be broadly described as the swing of the pendulum away from self-confident theorizing about the most important issues of life, toward a more cautious and limited conception of philosophy as the clarification of common sense ideas which we already possess. That movement was followed, beginning in the early 1970's, by the reverse swing of the pendulum (which we will took at in the next chapter) away from self-doubt and back once more to normative issues and systematic theory building.

There are often said to be two trends in the history of philosophy, one critical and the other constructive. Most philosophy is a combination of critical and constructive. But some philosophers are primarily critical, concerned with defining terms, analyzing assumptions, getting arguments straight, and less concerned with developing theories or getting the "right" answers. Other philosophers are primarily constructive in the sense that their main aim is to answer questions, discover the truth in controversial matters and to state and defend theories expressing these answers. Looked at in this way, we may say that in the first half of the Twentieth Century philosophy was almost exclusively critical, becoming gradually more constructive in the last thirty years or so. In this chapter we will examine how this critical period in the first half of the Twentieth Century affected ethics...