The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. James Laidlaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 258 pp (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom
2013
1. Beyond the science of unfreedom 2. Virtue ethics: philosophy with an ethnographic stance? 3. Foucault's genealogy and the undefined work of freedom 4. The 'question of freedom' in anthropology 5. Taking responsibility seriously 6. Endnote: the reluctant cannibal.
Current debates and critiques on moral anthropology
Anthropology Journal, 2020
Cultural anthropology shows a significant interest in the study of morality and ethics with its aim to understand the local contexts and human narratives. Actions and practices pertaining to the domain of morality create not only questions for cultural anthropologists to take into consideration but also immensely construct the social worlds in which the individual subjects for our anthropological inquiry are shaped. Considering how distinct cultural localities result in various ways in which morality is manifested and experienced, this article is concerned with current debates and critiques of moral anthropology as well as the essential function of cultural values within the anthropological study of morality.
Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives
Student Anthropologist, 2020
Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives, written by Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane, is a collaboration of essays related to recent developments in the anthropology of ethics. Containing similar themes on ethical relations and interpretations in historical, social, and cultural contexts, the included essays do not represent a single voice for understanding ethics in everyday life. Instead, the authors offer new discoveries of how people render the world intelligible through ethical evaluation and hermeneutical processes. These discoveries present “the ethical” as a framework for further anthropological studies by pointing to how ethics intersects with every facet of human life, and also provide anthropologists with a theoretical heuristic for social analysis.
New Directions in the Anthropology of Morality
2014
In this article we seek to develop a common theoretical language and stake out particular positions on key issues in the growing debates about the anthropological study of morality. First, we advocate for a pluralistic stance in approaches to moral variation – one that maintains the possibility of moral realism and at times even argues explicitly for it. Second, we work to define the domain of morality in more detail, especially in its relation to other domains of experience, including personhood, emotion, and life course. Third, we argue for a new approach to the issues of freedom and moral action. Together, these arguments articulate key conceptual areas of concern for anthropologists interested in morality, and we suggest some theoretical stances on each of them.
It seems that nowadays everybody is talking about morality, using words and images relating to it. Didier Fassin and Samuel Lézé provide their readers with the opportunity to dwell on the topic of moral anthropology with their anthology ranging from works dating to previous centuries and up to very recent papers. In this reader, anthropological and philosophical engagements with morality are combined, in which philosophy is crucial as a discipline that has long been reflecting on the topic and which has inspired many anthropological works. With their anthology, Fassin and Lézé attempt a critique of moral anthropology while simultaneously demonstrating how intensively morality emerges in the field of anthropology. Despite targeting a mainly scientific audience, the book is also relevant to a general audience interested in moral or ethical questions.
Moral psychology: an anthropological perspective
Moral psychology: a multidisciplinary guide, 2018
It is in many ways the traditional task of anthropology to point out exceptions to rules. Provide us with a generalisation about human behaviour and we will describe to you a far corner of the world in which it does not hold. This has to a large extent been true of our dealings with moral psychology, as I detail below, and it will come as no surprise to many readers that relativism, or at least rhetorical invocations of it, has long been a staple of anthropological approaches to morality. But as this chapter will describe, recent developments in the anthropological study of ethics have led many anthropologists interested in the subject to reconfigure their understandings of the universal and the particular in relation to morality. It remains a matter of empirical fact that people across the world think differently about what constitutes right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and vice, and anthropologists continue to document that variety. But it is equally a matter of empirical fact that people across the world do indeed think about such things -that they exercise judgement and reflection about courses of action, ways of attributing responsibility, consequences, behavioural norms, and the like. As I outline below, for us to be able to account seriously and scrupulously for the differences between how people think about ethics, many anthropologists have come to believe that we must possess a coherent vision of what ethics actually means, and an explanation for how it is that people do all seem to think about how they ought to live, even though they do so differently.
Moral Philosophy and the 'Ethical Turn' in Anthropology
Journal of Ethics and Moral Philosophy, 2019
Moral philosophy continues to be enriched by an ongoing empirical turn, mainly through contributions from neuroscience, biology, and psychology. Thus far, cultural anthropology has largely been missing. A recent and rapidly growing 'ethical turn' within cultural anthropology now explicitly and systematically studies morality. This research report aims to introduce to an audience in moral philosophy several notable works within the ethical turn. It does so by critically discussing the ethical turn's contributions to four topics: the definition of morality, the nature of moral change and progress, the truth of moral relativism, and attempts to debunk morality. The ethical turn uncovers a richer picture of moral phenomena on the intersubjective level, one akin to a virtue theoretic focus on moral character, with striking similarities of moral phenomena across cultures. Perennial debates are not settled but the ethical turn strengthens moral philosophy's empirical turn and it rewards serious attention from philosophers.
A Companion to Moral Anthropology edited by Didier Fassin
The Blackwell Companions to Anthropology offers a series of comprehensive syntheses of the traditional subdisciplines, primary subjects, and geographic areas of inquiry for the field. Taken together, the series represents both a contemporary survey of anthropology and a cutting edge guide to the emerging research and intellectual trends in the field as a whole.