Reconstructing Morality

Abstract

Ethics requires people not just to be moved by relatively altruistic feelings to perform relatively altruisic actions, but to be moved in this way by considerations that they conceptualize in ethical terms or concepts. Those concepts come in many forms, but two important families cluster around, first, the idea of desirable options and, second, the idea of agents who are fit to be held responsible for taking or not taking such options. The aim of this book is to explain the emergence of ethical concepts and practices in a naturalistic manner that vindicates realism. Such a story of emergence would help to make sense of ethics, directing us to the sorts of properties predicated in talk of desirability and responsibility. But in order to do so, it would have to start from a naturalistically intelligible, pre-moral starting point—ground zero—and explain in naturalistic terms how people in that society would be likely to make a cascading series of adjustments that would eventually lead them into ethical space. The project of developing such a story is akin to various approaches taken in other branches of philosophy, embodying a conceptual genealogy, and employing something like the method of creature-construction, but has not been undertaken before for ethics, at least not in the way it is undertaken here.