The persistence of deep moral disagreements across cultures as well as within them has created widespread scepticism about the objectivity of morality. Moral relativism, moral pessimism, and the denigration of ethics in comparison with science are the results. This book challenges the misconceptions about morality, culture, and objectivity that support these scepticisms, to show that we can take moral disagreement seriously and yet retain our aspirations for moral objectivity. Michele Moody-Adams critically scrutinizes the anthropological evidence commonly used to support moral relativism. Drawing on the relevant anthropological literature, she dismantles the mystical conceptions of culture that underwrite relativism. She demonstrates that cultures are not hermetically sealed from each other, but are rather the product of eclectic mixtures and borrowings rich with contradictions and possibilities for change. The internal complexity of cultures is not only crucial for cultural survival, but will always thwart relativist efforts to confine moral judgments to a single culture.
The book aims to change the way we think about relativism and force anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and philosophers alike to reconsider many of their theoretical presuppositions. Moody-Adams also challenges the notion that ethics is methodologically deficient because it does not meet standards set by natural science. She contends that ethics is an interpretive enterprise, not a failed naturalistic one: genuine ethical inquiry, including philosophical ethics, is a species of interpretive ethnography. We have reason for moral optimism, Moody-Adams argues. Even the most serious moral disagreements take place against a background of moral agreement, and thus genuine ethical inquiry will be fieldwork in familiar places. Philosophers can contribute to this enterprise, she believes, if they return to a Socratic conception of themselves as members of a community of moral inquirers.
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Für Beruf und Forschung
Maße
Höhe: 240 mm
Breite: 162 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-674-29953-5 (9780674299535)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Part 1 Taking disagreement seriously: mapping the relativist domain; relativism, ethnocentrism and the decline of moral confidence; the empirical underdetermination of descriptive cultural relativism; cultural authority, cultural complexity, and the doctrine of cultural integration; the perspicuous 'other' - relativism 'grown tame and sleek'. Part 2 The use and abuse of history: history, ethnography, and the blurring of cultural boundaries; relativism as a 'kind of historiography? moral debate, conceptual space, and the relativism of distance; plus ca change... - the myths of moral invention and discovery. Part 3 Morality and its discontents: on the supposed inevitability of rationally irresolvable moral conflicts; pluralism, conflicts, and choice; on the alleged methodological infirmity of moral inquiry; does pessimism about moral conflict rest on a mistake? Part 4 Moral inquiry and the moral life: moral inquiry as an interpretive enterprise; the interpretive turn and the challenge of 'anti-theory'; a pyrrhic victory? objectivity and the aspirations of moral inquiry. Part 5 Morality and culture through thick and thin: the need for thick descriptions of moral inquiry; moral conflict, moral confidence, and moral openness toward the future; critical pluralism, cultural difference, and the boundaries of cross-cultural respect; the strange carrer of 'culture'.
