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Book Review: Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy. By Michele M. Moody-Adams
Feleppa, Robert
Feleppa, Robert
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Book review
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2000-04
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Abstract
In this ambitious book, Moody-Adams aims to establish, as she says, “a
plausible conception of moral objectivity” and to defend “a cautious optimism
that moral philosophy can be an aid in serious, everyday moral
inquiry” (1). This requires defeating an unjustified skepticism about the
objectivity of moral theory engendered by, first, fundamental misunderstandings
of the structure and purpose of ethical theory and, second, unjustified
acceptance of various forms of moral relativism. The
misunderstanding of ethical theory she attributes in large part to a “pervasive
deference to natural science,” which inclines philosophers to mistakenly
fault ethical theory for failing to meet epistemological standards
appropriate to science and not to ethics (1). Meanwhile, relativism’s unjustified
and harmful influence she attributes primarily to a notion of
“culture” as a self-contained system that is resistant to the criticism and
understanding of outsiders. The notion is not supported, she argues, by a
consideration of ethnographic practice and, moreover, makes the very
possibility of ethnography inexplicable. Her own position, which she terms
“critical pluralism,” views ethics as primarily concerned with self-scrutiny
and burdens the moral philosopher with gaining an interpretive understanding
of our culturally informed self-conceptions. Thus moral philosophy
must draw more than it typically does on a finer-grained analysis – or
“thick description” (following Clifford Geertz and Michael Walzer) – of
the social contexts in which ethical issues arise. Moral philosophy is less
akin to science and more akin to “fieldwork in familiar places.” Her book
exemplifies this analysis in that she engages “in what can be called ‘fieldwork’
in the complex intellectual culture from which all these misconceptions
emerge: a scrutiny of the shared beliefs, assumptions, and methods of
argument that underwrite contemporary skepticism about moral objectivity
and moral inquiry” (2). She takes on an impressively large array of
divergent viewpoints in moral theory and argues for a kind of middle way:
while she views the kind of moral theory done by many influential professional
philosophers as both wrong-headed and irrelevant to the concerns of
the broader community of moral inquirers, she is quite adamant in rejecting
the “antitheory” extreme as well. She finds the core of truth in the
antitheory position to be the rejection of certain predominant views of philosophical theorizing, not the rejection of philosophical theorizing tout
court.
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Wiley-Blackwell
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METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 31, No. 3, April 2000;
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0026-1068