Moral Philosophy and Modernity

The essays in this volume are devoted to exploring a single problem, the relation between moral philosophy and modernity. At bottom, this problem consists in defining the way distinctive forms of modern experience should orient our moral thinking. But it also gives rise to the further question of whether the dominant forms of modern philosophy have themselves been blind to important dimensions of the moral life. These are among the issues I took up in an earlier book, Patterns of Moral Complexity (1987), but though I have developed some of that material further, I have also had to branch out in new directions. Moreover, many of the present essays, while published before, appear here in a significantly revised and expanded form. Besides determining the claims that modern experience and philosophy should have on our moral self-understanding, this book also, I hope, gives some sense of the difficulty I have felt in finding my way through this subject to where my own convictions lie.

The meaning of the term “modernity” is far from obvious, of course. Though I trust my understanding of it emerges from the course of this book, I can help the reader by clearing away at the outset some possible misconceptions. First of all, I should emphasize that I am not principally interested here in modern culture and society as an object of moral evaluation.