Descriptive Ethics: What does Moral Philosophy Know about Morality?

✍ Scribed by Nora Hämäläinen (auth.)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 142
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book is an investigation into the descriptive task of moral philosophy. Nora Hämäläinen explores the challenge of providing rich and accurate pictures of the moral conditions, values, virtues, and norms under which people live and have lived, along with relevant knowledge about the human animal and human nature. While modern moral philosophy has focused its energies on normative and metaethical theory, the task of describing, uncovering, and inquiring into moral frameworks and moral practices has mainly been left to social scientists and historians. Nora Hämäläinen argues that this division of labour has detrimental consequences for moral philosophy and that a reorientation toward descriptive work is needed in moral philosophy. She traces resources for a descriptive philosophical ethics in the work of four prominent philosophers of the twentieth century: John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, and Charles Taylor, while also calling on thinkers inspired by them.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xiv
Introduction—or What Does Moral Philosophy Know about Morality?....Pages 1-6
Moral Philosophy Today....Pages 7-14
Morality as Known by Moral Philosophers....Pages 15-25
The Foundational Project of Ethics and a Different Way of Going Below the Surface....Pages 27-35
The Challenge from X-phi....Pages 37-47
Dewey’s Empirical Ethics....Pages 49-57
Wittgensteinian Applications....Pages 59-71
Foucault’s Archeology and Genealogy of the Self....Pages 73-89
Charles Taylor’s Affirmation of the Modern Self....Pages 91-106
The “Merely Descriptive” and the “Empirical” Revisited....Pages 107-116
Descriptive Ethics and the Philosopher....Pages 117-128
Back Matter....Pages 129-138

✦ Subjects

Ethics;Analytic Philosophy;Moral Philosophy