EPILOGUE

Abstract

AbstractThe epilogue responds to common questions about the book. In a view of morality as a set of practices in real time in actual communities, moral philosophers' claims about morality are inescapably shaped by their social positions within particular forms of moral-social life and their claims require critical scrutiny for that reason. The naturalized and socially critical epistemology of the book is not relativism, however, and supports robust and transformative moral criticism and moral change. Questions on the authority of morality, the normative question, can only ever be answered from within some moral perspective. Transparency testing is not a criterion of right and wrong, but is a method of putting pressure on the credibility of certain moral understandings which in turn include criteria of justification. The chapter takes up briefly relations to communitarianism, moral universalism as a culturally situated view, moral relations to animals, and the value of moral theory.