Introduction

the phenomenological tradition and moral philosophy

pp. 1-13

in: John Drummond, Lester Embree, Phenomenological approaches to moral philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2002

Abstract

Ethics as a philosophical discipline is back in vogue in the English-speaking world. Ever since the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice ¹ moral philosophy has undergone a remarkable resurgence. One need only to review job advertisements over the last several years to note how great is the percentage of available positions in philosophy devoted to ethics. Courses in ethics and a concentration on "values" have been revived as centerpieces of liberal education. This development was spurred not only by Rawls and his successors, but by our need to respond to the various ethical issues posed by the technological explosion of the last century. Indeed, we have seen the rise of whole new fields of "applied ethics," such as bioethics and environmental ethics. Against the background of this revival, one of the central aims of this handbook is to show the great fertility of the phenomenological tradition for the study of ethics by collecting a set of papers on the contributions to ethical thought by major phenomenological thinkers. Most of the chapters in the book, therefore, sketch the thought of the major ethical thinkers in previous generations of the phenomenological tradition and direct the reader toward the most relevant primary and secondary materials. Other chapters sketch more recent developments in various parts of the world, and three chapters explore the relations between phenomenology and the dominant normative approaches in contemporary moral philosophy.