Living Together: Inventing Moral Science

Is moral philosophy more foundational than political theory? It is often assumed to be. David Schmidtz argues that the reverse is true: the question of how to live in a community is more fundamental than questions about how to live. This book questions whether we are getting to the foundations of human morality when we ignore contingent features of communities in which political animals live.

Schmidtz disputes the idea that reflection on how to live needs to begin with timeless axioms. Rathe...