1 - Beyond the science of unfreedom

Summary

What is the place of the ethical in human life? It is not only academic philosophers who ask questions such as ‘How should one live?’, ‘What is a good life?’, or ‘What sort of person should one be?’. And it is not only religious preachers or political reformers either. Everywhere human conduct is pervaded by an ethical dimension – by questions of the rightness and wrongness of actions, of what we owe to each other, of the kind of persons we think we are or aspire to be – so it is an inescapable part of what anthropologists study. How then might anthropologists learn from what philosophers have had to say about ethics? And how might philosophical reflection on ethics be informed by anthropological analysis of the ways in which people in all parts of the world have variously ordered their affairs? What might be required for a dialogue between anthropology and moral philosophy to be developed, and with it a sustained empirical study of ethics that takes into account the widest possible range of human experience? How might social theory need to be rethought in order to make this possible, to enable it to address directly the ethical dimension of social life?