Newsletter of the Concerned Philosophers for Peace, Vol. 26.2 (Fall 2006)
Moral Vision: How Everyday Life Shapes Ethical Thinking by Duane L. Cady Rowman & Littlefield $21.95 paper ISBN 0-7425-4494-X May, 2005 134pp
“A deeply felt, wonderfully clear and heartening book. MORAL VISION reflects decades of writing and teaching about theories of war by a philosopher actively engaged in nonviolent projects, waging peace. Duane Cady’s revisionary moral concepts enable us to think against violence, to see nonviolence as reason’s dream.” * Sara Ruddick, author of MATERNAL THINKING: Toward a Politics of Peace
What is moral reasoning? Are we being reasonable when we make moral decisions if we cannot supply compelling arguments, criteria, necessary and sufficient conditions, decisive empirical evidence and the like?
In MORAL VISION, Duane L. Cady critiques the contemporary inclination to model reason after textbook natural science, noting that our values are not conclusions of proofs or derivations but frameworks in which such reasoning may take place, frameworks that we struggle to understand and explain. Cady goes on to suggest a rich conception of reason beyond that of stereotypical science, one that reflects aesthetic, historical, experiential, and pluralistic aspects of moral thinking, one that widens and deepens descriptions of how moral thinking typically happens.
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