Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life by Peg Oconnor

Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life by Peg Oconnor

Moral philosophy, like much of philosophy generally, has been bedeviled by an obsession with seeking secure epistemological foundations and with dichotomies between mind and body, fact and value, subjectivity and objectivity, nature and normativity. These are still alive today in the realism-versus-antirealism debates in ethics. Peg O'Connor draws inspiration from the later Wittgenstein's philosophy to sidestep these pitfalls and develop a new approach to the grounding of ethics (i.e., metaethics) that looks to the interconnected nature of social practices, most especially those that Wittgenstein called language games. These language games provide structure and stability to our moral lives while they permit the flexibility to accommodate change in moral understandings and attitudes. To this end, O'Connor deploys new metaphors from architecture and knitting to describe her approach as felted stabilism, which locates morality in a large set of overlapping and crisscrossing language games such as engaging in moral inquiry, seeking justifications for our beliefs and actions, formulating reasons for actions, making judgments, disagreeing with other people or dissenting from dominant norms, manifesting moral understandings, and taking and assigning responsibility.

“Peg O’Connor offers a compelling Wittgensteinian alternative to the realist-versus-antirealist debates in metaethicsGrounded in ‘deep conventionalism,’ she argues that ‘our world is not one part natural and one part social, but rather is a shared world where these are intermingled and tangled, resulting in ways of acting and conventions that are inescapably bound together.’ In a field that remains paralyzed by whether there exist objective moral values, O’Connor’s work offers a breath of fresh air.”

—Wendy L. Lee, Bloomsburg University

“In this original work O’Connor develops a genuinely novel approach to metaethics. O’Connor’s views are radical, since she replaces both realism and antirealism with a Wittgensteinian approach that firmly relocates metaethics within the context of practical ongoing moral concerns. This is an exciting and important book.”

—Alessandra Tanesini, Cardiff University

Peg O’Connor is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program at Gustavus Adolphus College. She is the author of Oppression and Responsibility: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory (Penn State, 2002) and co-editor (with Naomi Scheman) of Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Penn State, 2002).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780271033808
ISBN 10	0271033800
Title	Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life
Author	Peg Oconnor
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Pennsylvania State University Press
Year published	2012-10-15
Number of pages	192
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.