Principles of right and wrong guide the lives of almost all
human beings, but we often see them as external to ourselves,
outside our own control. In a revolutionary approach to the
problems of moral philosophy, Philip Kitcher makes a provocative
proposal: Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine
revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should
see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of
years, as members of our species have worked out how to live
together and prosper. Elaborating this radical new vision, Kitcher
shows how the limited altruistic tendencies of our ancestors
enabled a fragile social life, how our forebears learned to
regulate their interactions with one another, and how human
societies eventually grew into forms of previously unimaginable
complexity. The most successful of the many millennia-old
experiments in how to live, he contends, survive in our values
today.
Drawing on natural science, social science, and philosophy to
develop an approach he calls "pragmatic naturalism," Kitcher
reveals the power of an evolving ethics built around a few core
principles-including justice and cooperation-but leaving room for a
diversity of communities and modes of self-expression. Ethics
emerges as a beautifully human phenomenon-permanently unfinished,
collectively refined and distorted generation by generation. Our
human values, Kitcher shows, can be understood not as a final
system but as a project-the ethical project-in which our species
has engaged for most of its history, and which has been central to
who we are.
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