Conflicts around sustainability decisions are driven by at least eight forces. The distribution of risks and benefits is uneven, creating winners and losers. Facts and values, while logically distinct, are often confused. Facts are uncertain. The value implications of emerging issues are not clear. Decisions bring about permanent, concrete changes making compromise difficult. Those disadvantaged by a decision often have little say in it and did not generate the problem, raising concerns about harm to innocents. The boundaries between what is public and what is private are often confused and contested. Competence about some aspects of decision-making, such as assessing facts, can be confused with competence about other aspects of decision-making, such as assessing values. In addition, major long-standing controversies about transforming political economies and ecosystems are part of the background to most sustainability decisions.

This chapter compares and contrasts the thought of three philosophers – Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum – who developed influential and idiosyncratic ways of reforming Anglo-American moral philosophy. Their positions substantially overlap inasmuch as they hold that the goods of human life are necessarily multiple and persistently in conflict, which has implications for the structure and content of ethical life everywhere. All three are of interest to anthropology because they hold that history, culture, social relations, and biographical experience make a difference to the goods and values that inform human life, and therefore that moral philosophy needs to be, to at least a very large degree, an empirical, descriptive, and comparative discipline. The different, sometimes even rival, ways in which they pursue that project offer anthropologists of ethics the chance to reflect on how and why they might develop an anthropology that would fulfil these authors’ different visions of moral philosophy.