Can philosophy tell us how to live? Should we let it? If not, what is the point of moral philosophy or ethics? Why, and how, should we think about how we live? These are the questions that guide Christensen’s book. Her work brings together ideas and arguments from various philosophers, mostly from recent years but going back as far as Aristotle. She combines them to create a capacious and attractive account of what moral philosophy should be, and how it can relate to our moral lives. 

Her goal, which is in some ways more modest than her title might suggest, is “to present a suggestion for a renewed conception of moral philosophy that is valuable in its own right and may also influence debates about the role of moral theories and moral philosophy in relation to our moral lives.” (p. 3, her emphasis) What her book is responding to, without necessarily claiming to provide a complete response, is: “The challenge […] to present a substantial alternative that can replace the twentieth-century view of moral philosophy as a theory-developing science.” (p. 6)

Instead of telling us what to do, or providing some sort of mechanism for producing such instruction, moral philosophy should be descriptive, she argues. This might seem disappointingly unhelpful, but she offers a nice description of how moral philosophy could be useful even while being purely descriptive and (in some sense) leaving everything as it is: 

philosophy works on our attention, to give us a clearer view of moral life but also to bring us to notice what we tend to overlook, or what we have never before noticed as being of moral importance. Moral philosophy aids our orientation in moral life in a way that is somewhat similar to the way that for example maps, roads signs, aerial photographs and written descriptions may help our orientation in a landscape, and a descriptive approach is in this way meant to enable an understanding of moral life that reveals its many different features and their vital importance to us. (p. 10)

Later she says that “there are at least three ways in which descriptive moral philosophy is practical, namely in furthering our moral orientation, our moral attention, and our moral development” (p. 201) Such description is not neutral. It is itself a moral task, requiring a sense of what matters to moral thinking and moral life. 

Her argument for rejecting the idea of moral philosophy as (nothing but) normative theory begins with the fact that both Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe posed serious challenges to this conception of moral philosophy in the 1950s (specifically Murdoch’s “Vision and Choice” in 1956 and Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” in 1958). Summarizing what she sees as the key points of these papers, at least as far as her immediate project goes, Christensen notes that:

both Murdoch and Anscombe criticise contemporary moral philosophers for being unduly generalising, for reacting to the lack of an authoritative moral framework by seeking a foundation where no foundation is available and for simply dressing up their own favourite moral prejudices and conventions as moral theories. These criticisms have resounded through moral philosophy since the two pioneering articles were published (p. 19)

The fact that criticisms have been made does not mean much on its own, of course, but the response has not been very impressive. 

The strongest pro-theory kind of view “allows theory to require revisions in our moral understanding if such an understanding does not correspond to the theory’s requirements” (p. 37) Against this view, Christensen draws on the work of Bernard Williams, who:

opposes the strong view of the authority of moral theory on the grounds that we cannot provide a universally justified foundation of theory that would authorise a revision of our moral convictions, to which he adds the stronger point that the aim of moral thought is not to live up to certain theoretical requirements, for example that of internal consistency, but to allow us to build a framework for a liveable life. (p. 37)

She has more to say about general moral principles later in the book: “Even if general principles play a role in coming to the right moral understanding of a situation and thus to the right moral decision, the application of moral principles will always rely on some form of judgement of the particular case at hand.” (p. 77) It is clear that she does not at all deny that general principles have a role to play. Her point is much more that they alone are not enough.

Most of her argument is presented by way of other people’s views, carefully explained and quoted, (she even presents some of her own ideas by way of a discussion of Oskari Kuusela’s similar thinking), but she also offers criticisms of her own of people she largely disagrees with (such as Onora O’Neill and Martha Nussbaum on theory) and people she mostly agrees with (e.g. Margaret Urban Walker).

Christensen says at the end of the book that she feels unable to summarize what she has done in it, and I sympathize. It is a very careful thinking through of a large body of already very thoughtful work, a thinking through that combines synthesis, criticism, and construction. It is very hard to disagree with any of it (although advocates of moral theory will surely find ways to do so), but it also is not really the kind of thing you can just agree with and then leave behind. It is a work that delivers not results so much (proven theories, say) as a clearer vision of what moral philosophy ought to be, what it means to live a moral life, and how the two relate to each other. Agreeing with it means not just reading it and saying Yes, but henceforth going on in a certain kind of way when one does ethics and attempts to live ethically. 

Duncan Richter teaches philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, USA. https://vmi.academia.edu/DuncanRichter