Sergio Cremaschi’s L’etica del Novecento offers a clear and careful account of the development
of ethical theory in English-language and German Philosophy. The focus on meta-ethics and
normative concerns allows the author to offer a very concise, reliable and comprehensive
overview of philosophical ethics. In this respect the book effectively fills the gap left by the
lack of a good, updated history of ethics. Although those qualities establish Cremaschi’s work
as a valuable reference book, a few doubts are raised about the highly theoretical approach
adopted. On the one hand this choice proves not to be very hospitable to some traditions
(like most of French philosophy, Marxism, Virtue ethics etc.) and overlooks the connections
between ethics and the socio-historical world, with the effect of giving a picture of moral
philosophy as a very abstract and academic discipline. On the other hand it is not clear
whether the emergence of applied ethics is to be greeted as the culmination of the resurgence
of normative ethics, or whether it is conspiring with other trends to undermine the whole
enterprise of constructing normative theories. If, as I suspect, the latter is the case, the moral
of Cremaschi’s narrative may be different from the one he suggests.
