The Ethical Project

by Philip Kitcher

Overview

Principles of right and wrong guide the lives of almost all human beings, but we often see them as external to ourselves, outside our own control. In a revolutionary approach to the problems of moral philosophy, Philip Kitcher makes a provocative proposal: Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Elaborating this radical new vision, Kitcher shows how the limited altruistic tendencies of our ancestors enabled a fragile social life, how our forebears learned to regulate their interactions with one another, and how human societies eventually grew into forms of previously unimaginable complexity. The most successful of the many millennia-old experiments in how to live, he contends, survive in our values today.

Drawing on natural science, social science, and philosophy to develop an approach he calls "pragmatic naturalism," Kitcher reveals the power of an evolving ethics built around a few core principles-including justice and cooperation-but leaving room for a diversity of communities and modes of self-expression. Ethics emerges as a beautifully human phenomenon-permanently unfinished, collectively refined and distorted generation by generation. Our human values, Kitcher shows, can be understood not as a final system but as a project-the ethical project-in which our species has engaged for most of its history, and which has been central to who we are.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674284289
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/31/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Philip Kitcher is John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

§1 The Shape of Things to Come 1

§2 Methodological Preliminaries 9

I An Analytical History

1 The Springs of Sympathy 17

§3 Psychological Altruism: Basics 17

§4 The Varieties of Altruistic Reactions 25

§5 Some Dimensions of Altruism 31

§6 Maternal Concern 35

§7 Broader Forms of Altruism? 42

§8 Possibilities of Evolutionary Explanation 47

§9 The Coalition Game 57

2 Normative Guidance 67

§10 The Limits of Altruism 67

§11 Following Orders 74

§12 Punishment 87

§13 Conscience 92

§14 Social Embedding 96

3 Experiments of Living 104

§15 From There to Here 104

§16 Cultural Competition 107

§17 The Unseen Enforcer 111

§18 Some Dots to Be Connected 115

§19 Divisions of Labor 122

§20 Roles, Rules, and Institutions 125

§21 Altruism Expanded 131

4 One Thing after Another? 138

§22 Mere Change? 138

§23 Three Ancient Examples 140

§24 Second-Sex Citizens 145

§25 Repudiating Chattel Slavery 153

§26 The Withering of Vice 162

§27 The Divine Commander 166

II A Metaethical Perspective

5 Troubles with Truth 173

§28 Taking Stock 173

§29 Prima Facie Problems 178

§30 Truth, Realism and Constructivism 186

§31 The Sources of the Troubles 193

6 Possibilities of Progress 209

§32 The Centrality of Ethical Progress 209

§33 Generalizations from History 213

§34 Problems, Functions and Progress 218

§35 Modes of Refinement 229

§36 Functional Generation 237

§37 Local and Global Progress 242

§38 Ethical Truth Revisited 245

§39 Residual Concerns 249

7 Naturalistic Fallacies? 253

§40 Hume's Challenge 253

§41 Authority Undermined? 263

§42 Troublesome Characters 269

§43 Settling Disputes 280

III A Normative Stance

8 Progress, Equality, and the Good 285

§44 Two Visions of Normative Ethics 285

§45 Dynamic Consequentialism 288

§46 Failures and Successes 294

§47 From the Local Community to the Human Population 302

§48 Equality and the Good Life 311

§49 Population Size 318

§50 Aspects of the Good Life 324

9 Method in Ethics 330

§51 Varieties of Ethical Change 330

§52 Method and the Good 338

§53 Mutual Engagement 342

§54 Ethical Debate 349

§55 Dissent and the Limits of Tolerance 355

§56 The Challenger Revisited 360

10 Renewing the Project 370

§57 Philosophical Midwifery 370

§58 Scarce Resources 374

§59 Habits and Their Limits 381

§60 Conflicting Roles 385

§61 Ethically Insulated Spheres 391

§62 Maintaining Equality 396

§63 The Challenges of Technology 401

Conclusion 409

§64 Summing Up 409

Acknowledgments 411

Index 417

Editorial Reviews

Humans live in a world of norms as well as facts, and most recent attempts to understand why that is so have been deeply skeptical. Kitcher combines a historical, naturalist understanding of the origin and dynamism of norms with the idea that objective improvement of normative thought is possible. Kitcher takes seriously the metaphor that norms are a tool, a collective technology for self-management, and like other technologies, we can have better technologies and worse ones. Whether Kitcher’s ethical project succeeds or not, it is certainly the most challenging, original, and reconstructive attempt of recent years.

Kim Sterelny

Kitcher offers bold suggestions, with illustrations, for making improvements in the methods we use in moral deliberation and in established morality itself. But, he holds, no final results are possible. We must be falliblists about morality as we are about science. Kitcher’s reading of an evolutionary understanding of morality, far from undercutting it, shows more clearly than any other approach why it has been and remains essential. This is by far the best treatment to date of morality as a product of evolution.

J. B. Schneewind

This magnificent book promises to be a heavyweight contribution to the field of moral philosophy. Kitcher is one of the most elegant writers in the business; his thinking is subtle and profound.

Richard Joyce

Morality challenges us with three tasks: setting out the evolutionary genealogy of morals, developing the metaethics of obligation and value, and providing guidance in moral choice. It has become increasingly clear that answering the genealogical question is indispensable to the other two tasks. But it is not sufficient. Metaethics cannot dodge Hume’s problem, and the most powerful solution to it would be one that gives us an accurate moral compass. In The Ethical Project, Kitcher does all three of these things, bringing together the understanding of the relevant science, the analytical rigor required to refute the skeptic, and the humanity needed to deal with the last and hardest of three tasks.

Alex Rosenberg

Few philosophers bridge the natural sciences and moral philosophy as easily and elegantly as Kitcher, navigating around both the naturalistic fallacy and the ‘norm’ of normative ethics. His account of how and why humans evolved into a moral species is both refreshing and respectful towards other approaches.

Frans de Waal

Kitcher has created a wonderfully nuanced picture of how ethical standards arise and what they are like in small, stable communities. Taking the best of biology and philosophy, he points to the ways in which, even on a global scale, humans could generate explicit rules to regulate conduct. This is a brilliant and profoundly humane book.

Patrick Bateson

In a stunning synthesis of evolutionary biology, ethical philosophy, and contemporary life, and the histories of each of those domains, Kitcher offers not only an account of how we humans came to be ethical animals, but how the past of the ethical project could help guide the future. Every page is insightful and thought-provoking.

Michael D. Gordin

Though some difficult questions remain, this book is philosophy of science at its most philosophically ambitious, using a broadly scientific worldview to engage big questions as to how we can make sense of moral reality and moral progress against the broad background of things we know about human natural history and human nature. Working through it offers readers an impressive account that is (in its aspirations at least) a refreshing alternative to the recent, seemingly unrelenting linkage of naturalism with varieties of moral skepticism.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews - Ron Mallon

Kitcher elaborates a comprehensive vision of the evolution of human morality… For serious students of ethics, this is the indispensable book.

Choice - H. C. Byerly

[A] valuable contribution to contemporary theological thought. I recommend [it].

New Yorker - James Wood

[A] valuable contribution to contemporary theological thought. I recommend [it].
— James Wood New Yorker

Though some difficult questions remain, this book is philosophy of science at its most philosophically ambitious, using a broadly scientific worldview to engage big questions as to how we can make sense of moral reality and moral progress against the broad background of things we know about human natural history and human nature. Working through it offers readers an impressive account that is (in its aspirations at least) a refreshing alternative to the recent, seemingly unrelenting linkage of naturalism with varieties of moral skepticism.
— Ron Mallon Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Kitcher elaborates a comprehensive vision of the evolution of human morality… For serious students of ethics, this is the indispensable book.
— H. C. Byerly Choice

Kitcher has created a wonderfully nuanced picture of how ethical standards arise and what they are like in small, stable communities. Taking the best of biology and philosophy, he points to the ways in which, even on a global scale, humans could generate explicit rules to regulate conduct. This is a brilliant and profoundly humane book.
— Patrick Bateson, University of Cambridge

Few philosophers bridge the natural sciences and moral philosophy as easily and elegantly as Kitcher, navigating around both the naturalistic fallacy and the ‘norm’ of normative ethics. His account of how and why humans evolved into a moral species is both refreshing and respectful towards other approaches.
— Frans de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy and Our Inner Ape

In a stunning synthesis of evolutionary biology, ethical philosophy, and contemporary life, and the histories of each of those domains, Kitcher offers not only an account of how we humans came to be ethical animals, but how the past of the ethical project could help guide the future. Every page is insightful and thought-provoking.
— Michael D. Gordin, Princeton University

This magnificent book promises to be a heavyweight contribution to the field of moral philosophy. Kitcher is one of the most elegant writers in the business; his thinking is subtle and profound.
— Richard Joyce, Victoria University of Wellington

Morality challenges us with three tasks: setting out the evolutionary genealogy of morals, developing the metaethics of obligation and value, and providing guidance in moral choice. It has become increasingly clear that answering the genealogical question is indispensable to the other two tasks. But it is not sufficient. Metaethics cannot dodge Hume’s problem, and the most powerful solution to it would be one that gives us an accurate moral compass. In The Ethical Project, Kitcher does all three of these things, bringing together the understanding of the relevant science, the analytical rigor required to refute the skeptic, and the humanity needed to deal with the last and hardest of three tasks.
— Alex Rosenberg, Duke University

Kitcher offers bold suggestions, with illustrations, for making improvements in the methods we use in moral deliberation and in established morality itself. But, he holds, no final results are possible. We must be falliblists about morality as we are about science. Kitcher’s reading of an evolutionary understanding of morality, far from undercutting it, shows more clearly than any other approach why it has been and remains essential. This is by far the best treatment to date of morality as a product of evolution.
— J. B. Schneewind, Johns Hopkins Universityand New York University

Humans live in a world of norms as well as facts, and most recent attempts to understand why that is so have been deeply skeptical. Kitcher combines a historical, naturalist understanding of the origin and dynamism of norms with the idea that objective improvement of normative thought is possible. Kitcher takes seriously the metaphor that norms are a tool, a collective technology for self-management, and like other technologies, we can have better technologies and worse ones. Whether Kitcher’s ethical project succeeds or not, it is certainly the most challenging, original, and reconstructive attempt of recent years.
— Kim Sterelny, Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University

From the Publisher

Few philosophers bridge the natural sciences and moral philosophy as easily and elegantly as Kitcher, navigating around both the naturalistic fallacy and the "norm" of normative ethics. His account of how and why humans evolved into a moral species is both refreshing and respectful towards other approaches.

Frans De Waal

Kitcher elaborates a comprehensive vision of the evolution of human morality...For serious students of ethics, this is the indispensable book.
— H. C. Byerly

Choice

[A] valuable contribution to contemporary theological thought. I recommend [it].
— James Wood

New Yorker