Charles Taylor’s Affirmation of the Modern Self

Abstract

Taylor’s work offers itself as a vantage point to descriptive ethics, which seems close to the concerns of contemporary mainstream Anglophone moral philosophy. He places himself in explicit dialogue with contemporary Anglophone ethics and social philosophy, and his manner of coining concepts is amenable to Anglophone moral philosophers. But his work is constructed in a way which defies the demands of mainstream moral theory. His most influential book Sources of the Self is not just a history of ethics or moral personhood. It is also an essay on moral genealogy, as well as an exercise in moral and evaluative self-knowledge. Not suggesting a “rational grounding” and theoretical basis for given values and norms, but rather investigating certain aspects of our own evaluative framework, Taylor’s project is close to Foucault’s. But in contrast to Foucault he argues that an affirmative articulation of one’s own normative commitments is essential for a consistent descriptive moral philosophy.