Richard Joyce
Professor of Philosophy
Victoria University of Wellington
Books:
Click on covers below for further details on each book:
Morality: From Error to Fiction
Richard Joyce (Oxford University Press, 2024)
More information here soon.
Moral Fictionalism and Religious Fictionalism
Edited by Richard Joyce & Stuart Brock (OUP, 2023)
More information here soon.
The End of Morality: Taking Moral Abolitionism Seriously
Edited by Richard Garner & Richard Joyce (Routledge, 2019)
"This is an excellently edited collection of essays around a theme which has so far received too little attention. … The list of authors offers a good mix of experts on error theory and philosophers from other areas who contribute with new perspectives. I can highly recommend the volume to any student of the subject."
— Folke Tersman
The Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy
Edited by Richard Joyce (Routledge, 2017)
"The Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy is a superb introduction to the field. Particularly impressive are the breadth of topics and the incredibly encouraging range of authors: young and old, male and female, and from so many countries and cultures. This is a book that will last."
— Michael Ruse
Essays in Moral Skepticism
Richard Joyce (Oxford University Press, 2016)
"The delicate contours of moral error theory, skepticisms, and related territory are mapped out here better than anywhere else. ... Even though the essays are largely previously published, they mesh together into a cloud of views, questions, lunges and dodges that are best read together. Essays in Moral Skepticism is a rare and welcome case of a collection of an author’s previous work being much more than the sum of its parts."
— Jack Woods, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Cooperation and Its Evolution
Edited by Kim Sterelny, Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott, & Ben Fraser (MIT Press, 2013)
“This rich, diverse collection is essential reading for anyone working on cooperation.”
— Robert William Fischer, Metapsychology
A World Without Values: Essays on John Mackie's Moral Error Theory
Edited by Richard Joyce & Simon Kirchin (Springer, 2010)
"A World without Values contains some of the best contemporary evaluations to date both of Mackie's error theory and of its wider philosophical significance. It is also the first multi-authored work on this scale devoted exclusively to this topic. As such, it is a significant event."
— Hallvard Lillehammer, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
The Evolution of Morality
Richard Joyce (MIT Press, 2006)
“Joyce's book is brilliant. There is nothing more important than knowing what we are doing when we speak in the language of value. We are animals that judge with cognitive and affective equipment. Joyce explains who we are. Nothing matters more.”
— Owen Flanagan
The Myth of Morality
Richard Joyce (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
"Moral fictionalism is an idea whose time has come. We increasingly fear that morality rests on some mistake; we increasingly hope that make-believe acceptance of what we cannot in good conscience accept outright will deliver the benefits of genuine acceptance without the costs. Joyce makes an unexpectedly persuasive case that make-believe moralizing could be unconfused and honest and no less socially beneficial than the real thing."
— David Lewis
Richard’s homepage is here.