Description
Book SynopsisWere the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks freedom fighters or terrorist murderers? Eschewing the universal moral principles of traditional Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Joseph Margolis offers an alternative approach that accepts the lack of any neutral ground or privileged normative perspective for deciding moral disputes.
Trade Review“Margolis's book is a serious contribution to a new and valuable approach to moral philosophy. Rightly suspicious of approaches that attempt to ground morality in ultimate principles, Margolis seeks a way of understanding morality that heeds the data of the moral experience of individuals and groups of individuals. Focusing on intractable moral disputes, such as the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, Margolis provides a conceptual framework for a mode of moral reasoning that can move toward a modus vivendi, as opposed to a final moral judgment.”
—J. Kellenberger,California State University, Northridge
“This is a major contribution on many counts to the extant literature on morality and the ethical issues raised by globalization and the subsequent conflict of cultures. Although Margolis may be criticized for formulating a "second-best" morality that embraces values associated with the West's Enlightenment tradition, on his own account he has no alternative starting point. Those whose tradition provides them with a different starting point may balk, but Margolis counts on the fact that the desire to end conflict, violence, death, and destruction may prompt them to engage at least in dialectical discussion. Let us hope that this book will also be read by those most in need of it: those who hold positions of power, privilege, and influence in the West yet fail to see that their very own tradition commits them to the second-best morality that Margolis is formulating.”
—Joanne Waugh,University of South Florida
“The few details of his account reconstructed here are extracted from a rather more diffuse and free-ranging discussion, which alludes to the success of the argument more often than specifying it. This is perhaps a feature of Margolis’s intention to preserve the freshness with which the argument initially came to him, as he remarks in his preface. Still, there is more genuine freshness here, philosophically speaking, than merely in the lack of labored explication, and for this, the book deserves a recommendation.”
—George Williamson Philosophy in Review
Table of ContentsContents
Preface
Introduction
1. A Reasonable Morality for Partisans and Ideologues
2. Second-Best Moralities
3. The Moral and the Legal
4. Human Selves and Moral Agents
5. Humanity and Moral Diversity
Notes
Index
