Chapter 1 provides the background in the philosophy of science. The goal is twofold. First, I aim to provide the reader with a firm grasp of the general idea of scientific underdetermination. For this purpose, I start with some examples to illustrate the phenomenon, ranging from everyday situations to physics to other domains of science. Then, I introduce the two main progenitors of the idea, Pierre Duhem and W. V. O. Quine. Second, I provide a more systematic overview of two issues that inform the later discussion in ethics. On the one hand, I introduce the main argumentative strategies that have been employed to argue for underdetermination in science, i.e., the inductive, the holistic, and the algorithmic strategies. On the other hand, I make a number of distinctions between different versions of underdetermination to provide a picture of the various forms that underdetermination can take. These distinctions are: existence vs. non-uniqueness vs. egalitarian, local vs. global, permanent vs. transient vs. recurrent, and deductive vs. ampliative.

The first Chapter is the Introduction. I start with a puzzle stemming from the fact that even though the Textbook View of moral theories conceives of the main traditions as both explanatorily and extensionally incompatible, many philosophers have recently argued that much more agreement is possible. I argue that this puzzle might be best explained by the fact that just as scientific theories can be underdetermined by the evidence, so can moral theories be underdetermined by their extension. This analogy to the philosophy of science has received little attention so far, and the book provides the first comprehensive analysis of it.I characterize the main idea in some more detail by distinguishing it from several others. The idea is neither that the moral is underdetermined by the non-moral, nor that moral theories leave our particular choices underdetermined, nor that theories are underdetermined because the evidence is somehow lacking. Finally, I give an outline of the structure of the book.