Steven Lukes, The Diversity of Morals

In August I was a discussant on a panel about Steven Luke’s recent book, The Diversity of Morals. Here’s an extended version of what I said. A PDF version is available as well. The Diversity of Morals asks the questions philosophers ask about morality: what is “the moral”? How wide and deep is its diversity? Is there a standpoint from which we can make our judgments? It then refuses to answer them by philosophical methods alone. Instead, it draws on the resources of both social theory and the social sciences, from primatology and anthropology to sociology and political science, in an effort to construct a defensible answer. I do not think it quite succeeds. But I am also unsure of what success would look like. Before any critique, let me state the argument as I understand it. I confess that I found it a little tricky to reconstruct because of the way the book lays things out. The text is dense with quotations, sometimes quite lengthy, and prefers to proceed by picking out…