Contextual Ethics

Moral philosophy has traditionally strived towards abstraction and universalization, its claims tending to leave behind the specificity of bodies, individuals’ lives, situations, culture, and history. Yet there are ways of thinking and doing moral philosophy that do not leave context behind but make it their. This makes it a point, never to lose sight of context, to place it at the centre of ethical investigations. To present and defend the richness and validity of this approach to ethics his is, at any rate, the claim and the ambition of this volume. Placed in the new field of contextual ethics, the anthology presents articles that focus on issues ranging from the theoretical and the methodological – Does taking context into account imply relativism? Can the normative and the descriptive in ethics be separated? How does moral change occur in the thick of everyday life? – to applied issues in biomedical, animal, and environmental ethics. The volume opens with a programmatic chapter on contextual ethics that traces its historical roots, its most central themes and methodological issues, and its relation to different traditions in contemporary ethics.