system
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human
Why do so many critiques in ethics seem lacking in rigor compared with other branches of philosophy?

I'm just a layperson, but when I read books, papers, and summaries in other areas of philosophy, I almost never see commentary like the below, even from second-hand sources.

I would be interested to know whether this is a matter of different generations or schools of philosophy, or something else (?).  It crops up comparatively often in ethics, and it seems a little bit lacking in rigour.

For an example of what spurred the question, I have been researching metaethics, specifically on Mackie as I was digging around on error theory and some of the criticisms of it etc. I saw the following paragraph referred to in a teaching resource summarising Korsgaard's work on ethics as a "brilliant criticism" of the argument from queerness:

>According to Mackie, it is fantastic to think that the world contains objective values, or intrinsically normative entities. For in order to do what values do, they would have to meet certain impossible criteria. They would have to be entities of a very strange sort. utterly unlike anything else in the universe. The way that we know them would have to be different from the way that we know other sorts of facts. Knowledge of them, Mackie said, would have to provide the knower with both a direction and a motive. For when you met an objective value, according to Mackie, it would have to be — and I'm nearly quoting now — able both to tell you what to do and make you do it. And nothing is like that.  
>  
>But Mackie is wrong and realism is right. Of course there are entities that meet these criteria. It's true that they are queer sorts of entities, and that knowing them isn't like anything else. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist. John Mackie must have been alone in his room with the Scientific World View when he wrote those words. For it is the most familiar fact of human life that the world contains entities that can tell us what to do and make us do it. They are people, and the other animals.

Whether we agree or disagree with Mackie's arguments, which have been fairly argued by others to have some pretty considerable problems, I struggle to actually see an argument here, or what is brilliant about it except in terms of appeals to sentiment -- it rather reads like something a pundit would put in a newspaper column, rather than a paragraph of rigorous philosophy or even a responsible conclusion to an argument... Korsgaard makes some really interesting points elsewhere, but here I'm surprised by the absolute certainty behind "X is wrong, (thing I agree with Y) is right, OBVIOUSLY things that meet this criteria are there, for example: (category error)"

Have I been lucky enough to avoid this when I read on epistemology etc., or is this just something one getting stuck into their ethics has to deal with?
gpt
I'd say this is just a bad way to try to get to what Korsgaard is talking about. The quoted part comes at the very end of her *Sources of Normativity*. It's literally the last two paragraphs of the book. And they make more sense given what came before them. Korsgaard is drawing upon what she has argued previously and using a kind of turn of phrase to recast a sort of objection to Mackie's view. It's a bit of a flourish, as one might engage in when one is ending a book.