This chapter shows the limits and ambiguities of the concept of moral clarity even when it is applied with good intentions. Using concrete examples from contemporary politics, it warns that quite often claims invoking moral clarity are an expression of reductionist thinking and tend to overrreach.

Chapter 6 shows how Cicero establishes a normative framework for the writing of literary history. Across the dialogue and through the various speakers he offers a sustained critique of literary historiography. Several fundamental tensions and conflicts emerge: absolute versus relative criteria in assessing literature and building canons; presentism and antiquarianism; formalism and historicism; and the recognition that all literary histories are subject to their crafters’ emphases and agendas.

This chapter compares and contrasts the thought of three philosophers – Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum – who developed influential and idiosyncratic ways of reforming Anglo-American moral philosophy. Their positions substantially overlap inasmuch as they hold that the goods of human life are necessarily multiple and persistently in conflict, which has implications for the structure and content of ethical life everywhere. All three are of interest to anthropology because they hold that history, culture, social relations, and biographical experience make a difference to the goods and values that inform human life, and therefore that moral philosophy needs to be, to at least a very large degree, an empirical, descriptive, and comparative discipline. The different, sometimes even rival, ways in which they pursue that project offer anthropologists of ethics the chance to reflect on how and why they might develop an anthropology that would fulfil these authors’ different visions of moral philosophy.

This chapter describes some of the main areas of interaction, overlap, or mutual concern between the disciplines of anthropology and philosophy, primarily as these are reflected in contemporary moral and political philosophy in the Anglophone tradition. The discussion is focussed on three broad themes, each falling under one of the main branches of moral and political philosophy as conventionally understood, namely ‘moral theory’, ‘applied ethics’, and ‘metaethics’. Under the heading of ‘moral theory’, the focus of discussion is the relationship between ideas of the good, the right, and the virtuous. Under the heading of ‘applied ethics’, the focus is on ideas of equality, justice, and cosmopolitan ideals. Under the heading of ‘metaethics’, the focus is on debates about interpretation, difference, and relativism. In each case, an attempt is made to connect some of the most influential literature in recent moral and political philosophy with relevant work in social anthropology.

The Introduction begins with an attempt to understand the concept of nihilism itself. Six different aspects of the concept are identified and briefly explored. While nihilism is usually associated with twentieth-century schools, it is argued that in fact the true origins of modern nihilism can be found in the rapid development of the sciences in the Enlightenment. The scientific perspective revealed the seemingly insignificant role of humans in the universe and led to a struggle with nihilism, which became an important topic for many thinkers in the nineteenth century. Five theses are outlined: (1) the problem of modern nihilism arose in the wake of the scientific development of the Enlightenment; (2) nihilism was not a local issue confined only to a specific place or country, but instead was something central to the general Zeitgeist of the entire nineteenth century in Europe and the West; (3) nihilism was not a problem confined to philosophy, but it received detailed treatment in works of poetry, drama, and other forms of literature; (4) the problem of nihilism is more widespread than has been acknowledged; and (5) the discussions of nihilism in the nineteenth century anticipate the key topics of the existentialist movement.

The chapter outlines a mentalist theory of ethics and law. It clarifies its background in the cognitive revolution of the twentieth century. It discusses mayor conceptual elements like the distinction of competence/performance, performance errors and experimental design and the poverty of stimulus argument. It outlines a detailed descriptive account of principles of moral cognition generating richly structured moral judgments. The content of justice, duties to care for others and respect for human beings are specified. New findings from child psychology indicate that children in early, preverbal states of development operate with normative principles. Approaches like the social intuitionist model and recent theories of moral ontogeny are considered, including models of statistical learning. The epistemology of ethics is a central concern of this chapter, particularly the epistemological merits of universalist accounts of human rights. The argument shows that epistemological universalism does not exclude the possibility of a legitimate pluralism of concrete attempts to bring to life the imperfectly understood (at least by this author) meaning of justice, solidarity and dignity.

This overview chapter introduces philosophical tools that can be used to aid managers in making decisions in situations which go beyond simple cost/benefit analyses. Value terms such as right, wrong, fair, justice, beneficence, responsibility, eco-consciousness, and discrimination are discussed and illustrated using real-world examples. Starting with the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, India and the contemporary aftermath, it examines the complexities such situations present and assesses the usefulness of creating a theoretical framework that can lead to principled and defensible policies and actions. The challenges of exclusive self-interest and ethical relativism are examined, where morality simply echoes personal preference. Immediate profit maximization is compared to a more subtle long-term and more encompassing stakeholder approach. Reliance on the law is shown to be an insufficient ethical guide, while principle-based approaches that can be applied across a wide range of cases are more successful in working out what we should do in novel and difficult situations.

This chapter introduces the concepts of convergence and fragmentation in international human rights law (IHRL) by providing and discussing their definitions and meanings. Building on the conclusion of the 2006 ILC Report on Fragmentation in international law and drawing on existing literature on the matter, the chapter assesses the extent of normative fragmentation and proposes a new definition of judicial fragmentation in IHRL. Moreover, this chapter also engages in a discussion of how convergence and fragmentation relate to the concepts of universality and relativism, key for any comparative discussion on human rights.

This chapter discusses whether Heidegger’s holism – roughly, the view that the meaning of the parts (entities) depends on the whole (the world) – entails a vicious relativism. I argue that Heidegger is a holist because he is committed to both object externalism (the view that intentional states depend on environmental objects) and social externalism (the view that intentional states depend on other people). Whether his holism entails relativism depends on how we understand these two commitments. Discussing recent interpretations of Heidegger’s holism (Lafont, Dreyfus, Okrent, Carman), I argue that Heidegger’s holism entails a form of relativism only if we take his social externalism to be a function of social conventions. I then go on to challenge that this is the case by arguing that Heidegger is an open-ended social externalist according to whom intentional states do not depend solely on our relation to social conventions (or any other particular social formation such as language or tradition) but on our on-going social interaction broadly construed.

We examine a previously undiscussed interaction between tense and predicates of personal taste (PPTs). While disagreements involving delicious or fun are generally considered faultless – they have no clear fact of the matter – we observe that, in joint oral narratives, this faultlessness varies with tense: if the narrative is told in the historical present, disagreements involving a PPT are not faultless. Drawing on narrative research in psychology and discourse analysis, we propose that this contrast reflects a pragmatic convention of the narrative genre that participants construct a consensus version of what happened from a unitary perspective. To link this pragmatics with the semantics, we adopt a bicontextual semantics, where the perspectival parameters for both PPTs and tense are located in a context of assessment (and not context of utterance). We show that when these contextual parameters are constrained by the unitary perspective of narratives, the present tense leads to nonfaultless disagreements, as its semantics tightly binds the temporal location of an event to the parameter relevant for appraisal. The past tense, by contrast, enables both faultless and nonfaultless disagreements. We derive this flexibility by revising the existing semantics for past tense, engendering a new perspective on crosslinguistic variation in tense usage.

In order to understand the key questions and issues surrounding BHR, a basic understanding of human rights more generally is necessary. Since BHR is an interdisciplinary field, it is important to gain an understanding both of the legal and non-legal dimensions of human rights. This chapter first provides a brief introduction to the philosophy of human rights and some of the key discussions that derive from this. Among them are the disputes between universalism and relativism and between foundationalist and non-foundationalist accounts of human rights. The chapter then takes a look at the main human rights bodies that institutionalize human rights in the international and regional context, paying particular attention to the United Nations’ human rights system. Finally, the chapter provides a brief introduction to international human rights law, outlining some of its key principles and instruments.

The next debate to emerge concerned the idea of relativism. This was central to the Boasian vision of anthropology. Franz Boas believed that no culture is superior to any other, and his anthropology emphasized this. This idea was taken up by his students, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Opposing this we have Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who believed that some cultures are superior to others. Another key figure was Benjamin Lee Whorf. His linguistic relativism sought to explain that languages classify differently. This is also apparent in kinship, where different categorizations might imply different ways of thinking.

This chapter examines the early critical responses of philosophers to Kuhn's SSR. I analyze how Kuhn responded to these criticisms.

Chapter 6 shows how Cicero establishes a normative framework for the writing of literary history. Across the dialogue and through the various speakers he offers a sustained critique of literary historiography. Several fundamental tensions and conflicts emerge: absolute versus relative criteria in assessing literature and building canons; presentism and antiquarianism; formalism and historicism; and the recognition that all literary histories are subject to their crafters’ emphases and agendas.

Our methodology is a version of the method of reflective equilibrium that is widely used in philosophy and bioethics. This methodology gives a prominent place to our considered judgments about ethics and to the demands of maintaining a coherent overall set of beliefs. We describe some methodologies for normative theorizing in bioethics that are often advanced as alternatives to reflective equilibrium. Some, such as casuistry, we think are better understood as versions of the method of reflective equilibrium, at least as they are typically practiced. Others, such as particularism and foundationalism, we reject. We defend the method of reflective equilibrium against some prominent criticisms, including skeptical reactions about the use of intuitions motivated by recent work in experimental philosophy. Finally, we turn to metaethics and clarify what we are, and are not, assuming about the nature and foundation of ethics. Although we make no specific assumptions about the foundations of ethics, we assume that people’s beliefs about ethical matters, especially upon reflection and when informed about relevant facts, provide the appropriate starting point for ethical inquiry.