Moral Dilemmas, Identity, and Our Moral Condition

Sound Bite

Moral dilemmas challenge ethical theories and lead us to look for moral grounding. I offer a new approach based on identity understood as a systematic web of roles that explains why we are dilemma-prone, allows us to countenance both ethical objectivity and pluralism, and opens up new avenues for ethical thought.

About the Book

Moral dilemmas are bedeviling situations in which incompatible actions appear to be morally required. Moral Dilemmas, Identity, and Our Moral Condition takes moral dilemmas seriously and uses them to structure ethical inquiry. Following Cicero and other ancient philosophers it views ethics in terms of the question of who and what sort of person one ought to be. Understanding our moral condition requires an ability to think productively about that question.

The book develops a novel way of thinking about our moral condition through moral dilemmas and by looking at how identity can serve to ground moral norms. Moral dilemmas lead us to look for grounding, but traditional approaches are wanting. Identity can provide grounding - facts about who we are can serve to ground norms.

The work develops an understanding of identity in terms of a complex web of roles and applies this approach to moral dilemmas and other ethical problems. In doing so it develops a framework for engaging in ethical thought that avoids reliance on any robust theories of the nature of things and finds a middle course between an ethical imperialism that cannot recognize a variety of good lives and an ethical insulation in which anything goes.

The book provides the reader with a critical, philosophical, and accessible approach to ethics. It is a guide for the ethically perplexed, developing a way to better understand our moral condition and a tool for readers to engage in ethical thought.

Currently most books in the area are written by scholars, for scholars, and are inaccessible to the philosophically-interested public; or they are written presupposing a detailed theory about the nature of things, whether religious or naturalist. One must immerse oneself in detailed theories, accept a particular view of reality and conduct ethics on that assumption, or forgo serious ethical thought altogether.

This book provides another option: a guide for the ethically perplexed. It takes the analytic, philosophical approach to ethics found in Michael J. Sandel's Justice: What's the Right Thing To Do? and Simon Blackburn's Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics—but instead of introducing the subject and informing the public about the philosophical terrain, it aims to articulate and motivate a novel and useful tool for engaging in ethical thought.

Instead of surveying the field, Moral Dilemmas, Identity, and Our Moral Condition develops a new and fruitful ethical framework.