After having completed a work on political philosophy, our hope was to do a work on ethics. In thinking the matter through, however, we found it was not so easy to simply begin a discussion of ethics. We discovered that although everyone pays lip service to the notion that ethics and politics are distinct, understanding how and why they are so is not so easily accomplished. Indeed, it turns out that the structure of typical ethical arguments today is integrally like the structure of most normative political arguments. Both tend to culminate in what we call a juridical form of normativity. The sort of ethical theory we desire to advocate, by contrast, takes on a different structure. We were thus required to say more about political theory in order to find a space for ethics. In our work on political theory, Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), we link politics largely to what we call “metanorms”—or norms that provide a context for the exercise of actions in accordance with ethical norms. Such norms do take a juridical form. But how to move from metanorms to norms? That, we argue, requires a fuller appreciation of the nature of a perfectionist ethics. To make that turn, it was necessary to traverse still more political theory, because rather than taking its cue from ethics, almost the reverse seems true today: ethics is taking its cues from the political.

Hence, besides laying out our framework, much of the early part of this book is involved in showing how what we term “individualistic perfectionism” can be employed as both an alternative ethical theory and as a basis for criticism of other political and ethical approaches. By contrasting our individualistic form of ethical perfectionism with some currently predominant frameworks, we can expose the doubtable assumptions and implications of these other approaches to ethics and politics while making room for our own approach.

In the second half of this book we attempt to defend the foundations we have employed in the first half and to give some indication of their meaning in practice.