◼︎ How to Test a "Moral" System: A Field Guide to Metaethics, Value Disagreement, and the Architecture of Values

This book offers a non-realist field guide for examining proposed "moral" systems without assuming stance-independent moral facts. It treats "moral" and "immoral" as empty status words until a system specifies the values, domains, statuses, reasons, facts, priority rules, and revision procedures that give them content. The book argues that a coherent "moral" system is theoretically possible but that familiar systems have not established the authority they claim. It develops diagnostic tests for domain, object, value, meaning, status, generation, justification, consistency, conflict, evidence, usability, origins, and revision, then applies those tests to major traditions such as utilitarianism, Kantianism, virtue ethics, care ethics, divine command and natural law, relativism, contractualism, and constructivism. A central theme is that the failure of transcendent "moral" grounding does not diminish human meaning, self-worth, compassion, or social life: people have emotions, and life is demonstrably better when compassion, patience, humility, honesty, gratitude, courage, and repair-oriented dispositions are cultivated. Proposed "moral" systems are treated as objects of critical inquiry rather than as sources of value or obligation.