Conrad, R: Conceptual Structures of Moral Experience

This book argues that the substance of many of the theoretical issues and debates of contemporary Western ethics have questionable relevance toward answering Socrates question, How shall we live? or as this book engages the question, By what values shall we live? ,for the complex dynamism of the modern world. This problem arises as a consequence of an overly abstract disengagement from empirical considerations that is argued to be the result of a Western conception of moral rationality in which moral justification must meet the conditions of objectivity and universalizability. The specific empirical considerations that are mostly absent in Western moral inquiry are non-Western conceptions of morality and contemporary research in the Cognitive Sciences and particularly empirical moral psychology. When many of the traditional abstract debates of contemporary Western ethics are analyzed in the light of the foregoing empirical considerations, the introduction of those empirical considerations has a powerful effect on the shape and substantive claims at issue in those debates.