Living Together: Inventing Moral Science

Schmidtz, David

ISBN 10: 0197658504 / ISBN 13: 9780197658505

Published by Oxford University Press, 2023

Pages are clean and are not marred by notes or folds of any kind. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0197658504I2N00

Synopsis:

Is moral philosophy more foundational than political theory? It is often assumed to be. David Schmidtz argues that the reverse is true: the question of how to live in a community is more fundamental than questions about how to live. This book questions whether we are getting to the foundations of human morality when we ignore contingent features of communities in which political animals live.

Schmidtz disputes the idea that reflection on how to live needs to begin with timeless axioms. Rather, theorizing about how to live together should take its cue from contemporary moral philosophy's attempts to go beyond formal theory, and ask which principles have a history of demonstrably being organizing principles of actual thriving communities at their best. Ideals emerging from such research should be a distillation of social scientific insight from observable histories of successful community building. What emerges from ongoing testing in the crucible of life experience will be path-dependent in detail even if not in general outline, partly because any way of life is a response to challenges that are themselves contingent, path dependent, and in flux.

Building on this view, Schmidtz argues that justice evolved as a device for grounding peace in the mutual recognition that everyone has their own life to live, and everyone has the right and the responsibility to decide for themselves what to want. Justice, he says, evolved as a device for conveying our mutual intention not to be in each other's way, and beyond that, our mutual intention to build places for ourselves as contributors to a community. Any understanding of justice should thus rely not on untestable intuitions but should instead be grounded in observable fact.

About the Author: David Schmidtz is Presidential Chair of Moral Science at West Virginia University's Chambers College of Business and Economics. Before that, he was Kendrick Professor of Philosophy and Eller Chair of Service-Dominant Logic at the University of Arizona. While there, he founded and served as Head of the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science. He also was founding Director of the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom. Since 2012, he has been Editor of Social Philosophy & Policy.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Living Together: Inventing Moral Science
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: 2023
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: As New
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket