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www.powells.com www.powells.com
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Philip Kitcher makes a provocative proposal: Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Elaborating this radical new vision, Kitcher shows how the limited altruistic tendencies of our ancestors enabled a fragile social life, how our forebears learned to regulate their interactions with one another, and how human societies eventually grew into forms of previously unimaginable complexity. The most successful of the many millennia-old experiments in how to live, he contends, survive in our values today.
pushes virtue ethics and natural law ethics aside for a more evolutionary view of ethics enabling societal conviviality it seems. I sense a link to Dennett's culture as evolution and speeding up evolution, and to networked agency. Perhaps also the Latour's ANT? Link w the relational ethics in AI work C did?
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an approach he calls "pragmatic naturalism," Kitcher reveals the power of an evolving ethics built around a few core principles
Author calls it this ethics to make evolutionary social groupings work 'pragmatic naturalism'. I get those terms at first glance, but if the functioning of social structures is its aim, a term closer to relationships focused ethics, and evolution might be more telling, next to the clearly involved pragmatism. This term sounds closer to a fork of natural law ethics, which it doesn't seem to be, to indicate its early origins and evolutionary past. evolutionaryrelationalethics?
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