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Overview
Sabina Lovibond invites her readers to see how the "practical reason view of ethics" can survive challenges from within philosophy and from the antirationalist postmodern critique of reason.
She elaborates and defends a modern practical-reason view of ethics by focusing on virtue or ideal states of character that involve sensitivity to the objective reasons circumstances bring into play. At the heart of her argument is the Aristotelian idea of the formation of character through upbringing; these ancient ideas can be made contemporary if one understands them in a naturalized way. She then explores the implications that arise from the naturalization of the classical view, weaving into her theory ideas of Jacques Derrida and J. L. Austin. The book also discusses two modes of resistance to an existing ethical culture—one committed to the critical employment of shared norms of rationality, the other aspiring to a more radical attitude, grounded in hostility to the "universal." Lovibond tries to determine what may be correct in this second, admittedly paradoxical, tendency.
This is a timely and valuable effort to connect the most advanced forms of thinking in the analytic tradition and in the Continental tradition, and to extend our understanding of the intimacies and resistances between these two prominent strands of contemporary philosophy.
Synopsis
From the book
To my mind the most striking development in ethical theory since the 1970s has been an attempt to reactivate the Platonic-Aristotelian ethical tradition and to provide an updated account of its leading idea—namely, that moral virtue is the outcome of a successful process of formation...The notion of form can be replaced by that of order, the kind of order that we try to impose on our own behavior insofar as we take ourselves to be answerable to norms of correctness; and this change of perspective can open up our conception of the virtuous person to the influence of modern discussions about norm-governed practices, thus helping us to a more complete acceptance of the phenomenon of morality as "part of our natural history."
John Cottingham - Times Literary Supplement
This is an intricate and stimulating book...an argument that is impressive in its coherence and subtlety, and in the insightful way it engages with issues that are right at the centre of contemporary philosophical debate.