Descriptive Ethics

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

   PDF

2. Introduction—or What Does Moral Philosophy Know about Morality?

   • Nora Hämäläinen

   Pages 1-6

3. Moral Philosophy Today

   • Nora Hämäläinen

   Pages 7-14

4. Morality as Known by Moral Philosophers

   • Nora Hämäläinen

   Pages 15-25

5. The Foundational Project of Ethics and a Different Way of Going Below the Surface

   • Nora Hämäläinen

   Pages 27-35

6. The Challenge from X-phi

   • Nora Hämäläinen

   Pages 37-47

7. Dewey’s Empirical Ethics

   • Nora Hämäläinen

   Pages 49-57

8. Wittgensteinian Applications

   • Nora Hämäläinen

   Pages 59-71

9. Foucault’s Archeology and Genealogy of the Self

   • Nora Hämäläinen

   Pages 73-89

10. Charles Taylor’s Affirmation of the Modern Self

    • Nora Hämäläinen

    Pages 91-106

11. The “Merely Descriptive” and the “Empirical” Revisited

    • Nora Hämäläinen

    Pages 107-116

12. Descriptive Ethics and the Philosopher

    • Nora Hämäläinen

    Pages 117-128

13. Back Matter

    Pages 129-138

    PDF

This book is an investigation into the descriptive task of moral philosophy. Nora Hämäläinen explores the challenge of providing rich and accurate pictures of the moral conditions, values, virtues, and norms under which people live and have lived, along with relevant knowledge about the human animal and human nature. While modern moral philosophy has focused its energies on normative and metaethical theory, the task of describing, uncovering, and inquiring into moral frameworks and moral practices has mainly been left to social scientists and historians.  Nora Hämäläinen argues that this division of labour has detrimental consequences for moral philosophy and that a reorientation toward descriptive work is needed in moral philosophy. She traces resources for a descriptive philosophical ethics in the work of four prominent philosophers of the twentieth century: John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, and Charles Taylor, while also calling on thinkers inspired by them. 

• analytic philosophy
• ethics
• moral
• moral philosophy
• morality
• philosophy
• Descriptive ethics
• anti-theory in ethics
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• John Dewey
• Michel Foucault
• Charles Taylor

• University of Helsinki , Helsinki, Finland

  Nora Hämäläinen

Nora Hämäläinen is a docent (affiliated senior researcher) at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a research fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala, Sweden, 2016-2017. She is the author of Literature and Moral Theory and has co-edited the volume Language, Ethics and Animal Life — Wittgenstein and Beyond (with Niklas Forsberg and Mikel Burley).

Policies and ethics