Fieldwork in Familiar Places

by Moody-Adams, Michele M.

• ISBN13: 9780674007949
• ISBN10: 0674007948
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-05-31
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

The persistence of deep moral disagreements--across cultures as well as within them--has created widespread skepticism about the objectivity of morality. Moral relativism, moral pessimism, and the denigration of ethics in comparison with science are the results. Fieldwork in Familiar Places challenges the misconceptions about morality, culture, and objectivity that support these skepticisms, to show that we can take moral disagreement seriously and yet retain our aspirations for moral objectivity. Michele Moody-Adams critically scrutinizes the anthropological evidence commonly used to support moral relativism. Drawing on extensive knowledge of the relevant anthropological literature, she dismantles the mystical conceptions of "culture" that underwrite relativism. She demonstrates that cultures are not hermetically sealed from each other, but are rather the product of eclectic mixtures and borrowings rich with contradictions and possibilities for change. The internal complexity of cultures is not only crucial for cultural survival, but will always thwart relativist efforts to confine moral judgments to a single culture. Fieldwork in Familiar Places will forever change the way we think about relativism: anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and philosophers alike will be forced to reconsider many of their theoretical presuppositions. Moody-Adams also challenges the notion that ethics is methodologically deficient because it does not meet standards set by natural science. She contends that ethics is an interpretive enterprise, not a failed naturalistic one: genuine ethical inquiry, including philosophical ethics, is a species of interpretive ethnography. We have reason for moral optimism, Moody-Adams argues. Even the most serious moral disagreements take place against a background of moral agreement, and thus genuine ethical inquiry will be fieldwork in familiar places. Philosophers can contribute to this enterprise, she believes, if they return to a Socratic conception of themselves as members of a rich and complex community of moral inquirers.

Author Biography

Michele M. Moody-Adams is Director of the Cornell Program on Ethics and Public Life and Hutchinson Professor of Ethics and Public Life

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(12)
Taking Disagreement Seriously	13	(48)
Mapping the Relativist Domain	13	(9)
Relativism, Ethnocentrism, and the Decline of Moral Confidence	22	(7)
The Empirical Underdetermination of Descriptive Cultural Relativism	29	(14)
Cultural Authority, Cultural Complexity, and the Doctrine of Cultural Integration	43	(13)
The Perspicuous ``Other'': Relativism ``Grown Tame and Sleek''	56	(5)
The Use and Abuse of History	61	(46)
History, Ethnography, and the Blurring of Cultural Boundaries	61	(10)
Relativism as a ``Kind of Historiography''?	71	(14)
Moral Debate, Conceptual Space, and the Relativism of Distance	85	(18)
Plus ca change...: The Myths of Moral Invention and Discovery	103	(4)
Morality and Its Discontents	107	(39)
On the Supposed Inevitability of Rationally Irresolvable Moral Conflict	107	(14)
Pluralism, Conflict, and Choice	121	(9)
On the Alleged Methodological Infirmity of Moral Inquiry	130	(12)
Does Pessimism about Moral Conflict Rest on a Mistake?	142	(4)
Moral Inquiry and the Moral Life	146	(41)
Moral Inquiry as an Interpretive Enterprise	146	(14)
The Interpretive Turn and the Challenge of ``Anti-Theory''	160	(9)
A Pyrrhic Victory?	169	(8)
Objectivity and the Aspirations of Moral Inquiry	177	(10)
Morality and Culture through Thick and Thin	187	(35)
The Need for Thick Descriptions of Moral Inquiry	187	(7)
Moral Conflict, Moral Confidence, and Moral Openness toward the Future	194	(10)
Critical Pluralism, Cultural Difference, and the Boundaries of Cross-Cultural Respect	204	(10)
The Strange Career of ``Culture''	214	(8)
Epilogue	222	(3)
Notes	225	(15)
Works Cited	240	(15)
Index	255