Description

This book argues that the substance of many of the
theoretical issues and debates of contemporary
Western ethics have questionable relevance toward
answering Socrates question, How shall we
live? or as this book engages the question, By what
values shall we live? ,for the complex dynamism of
the modern world. This problem arises as a
consequence of an overly abstract disengagement from
empirical considerations that is argued to be the
result of a Western conception of moral rationality
in which moral justification must meet the conditions
of objectivity and universalizability. The specific
empirical considerations that are mostly absent in
Western moral inquiry are non-Western conceptions of
morality and contemporary research in the Cognitive
Sciences and particularly empirical moral psychology.
When many of the traditional abstract debates of
contemporary Western ethics are analyzed in the light
of the foregoing empirical considerations, the
introduction of those empirical considerations has a
powerful effect on the shape and substantive claims
at issue in those debates.