Book chapter
The Metaethics of Critical Theories
Stahl, Titus
Published in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory
Abstract
Critical theories, from their beginning in Marx’s philosophy to the Frankfurt School with its different generations, have always been characterized by a certain ambivalence toward moral questions. They often conceive themselves as an alternative to traditional moral philosophy, which is criticized both for separating context-free normative justification and empirical descriptions too strictly and for its seeming commitment to moral and normative standards developed independently from historical and social contingency. The different generations of critical theory have all attempted to develop a theory of normative judgment which is appropriately critical but which nevertheless does not require any commitment to naive moral naturalism or context-free realism. In the chapter, the author traces this through the different stages of the development of critical theories, and argues that at least some of the answers we can find in this tradition do not fit into the usual division between realist and antirealist theories in contemporary metaethics.
Publication details
- Date of publication
- 2017
- Publication link
- View publication
- Pages
- 505-522
- Edited by
- Thompson, Michael J.
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Additional links
Bibliometrics
OpenAlex
View record- Citation count
- 7
- Collected 2026-08-22
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 4.37
- Collected 2026-08-22
- Citation percentile
- 95.5%
- Percentile among comparable publications of the same age and field.
About FWCI: Field-Weighted Citation Impact compares citations received with the number expected for a work of the same type, year, and subfield. A value of 1.0 represents the world average.
Google Scholar
View record- Citation count
- 20
- Collected 2026-08-16