Robert Kane - Through the Moral Maze: Searching for Absolute Values in a Pluralistic World

Robert Kane

First published 1996 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kane, Robert, 1938

Through the moral maze : searching for absolute values in a pluralistic world / Robert Kane.

p. cm.

A North castle book.

Originally published: New York : Paragon House, 1994.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-56324-866-2 (paperback : alk. paper)

1. Ethics. 2. Values. 3. Respect for persons. 4. Absolute, The. 5. Pluralism. I. Title.

[BJ1012.K274 1996]

170dc20 96-4562

CIP

ISBN 13: 9781563248665 (pbk)

This book is written for readers of all ages and backgrounds troubled by conflicting points of view on moral and spiritual matters, who may wonder as a consequence about the truth of their own beliefs and ask what values can be believed and passed on to their children in the face of the unprecedented challenges of modern life. The book results from my own struggles with these issues over a period of twenty-five years and from attempts to pass on what I learned to university honors students and, through lectures, to adult audiences in various parts of the country, who were as deeply troubled, it turned out, by the moral malaise of the times as I was. No special background in philosophy or other academic subjects is required to read the book; the background is supplied as we go along. But neither do I talk down to readers. They are challenged to do some careful thinking about important issues and about the bases of their own beliefs. General issues about ethics and values are discussed in to current controversies about social ethics, public policy, private versus public morality, politics, religion, the environment, feminism, multiculturalism, the teaching of values, and other topics.

The book should also be of interest to philosophers and other academics, as well as ordinary readers, since it offers novel approaches to old questions. It could serve as a text along with other works in many college courses in which current controversies about values and ethics arise, not only in ethics courses themselves, but in courses that deal with current debates about the objectivity of values, political rights, standards of excellence (for example, in art or literature), or debates generated by postmodernist writings or by popular works like Bellah and colleagues Habits of the Heart, Blooms The Closing of the American Mind, MacIntyres After Virtue, or Hunters Culture Wars. The book could also be recommended to students in any courses who are troubled about foundational questions of ethics (including the Why be moral? question) and unsatisfied by the familiar answers to such questions, whether utilitarian, Kantian, or whatever. In applied ethics courses, it could be used as a background text addressing foundational issues that usually cannot be given enough treatment in applied courses to satisfy many students. The book defends a so-called respect for persons morality (akin to Kants idea of treating all persons as ends and not means), which would fit nicely into many applied ethics courses. What is different here is the way the idea is grounded. While traditional ethical theories have much to teach us, as I try to show (whether they be Kantian, utilitarian, contractarian, natural law, virtue ethicist, or whatever), I do not think they can do the job by themselves.

I have accumulated many debts while writing this book, first, to a host of contemporary philosophers and other scholars who have influenced my thinkingtoo many of them to mention, though the works of a substantial number are cited in the footnotes. My special thanks for encouragement and input are owed to Frank Richardson, George Graham, John Moskop, David Braybrooke, John Post, Noah Lemos, Robert Audi, Huston Smith, Thomas Seung, Peter Coveney, and the late Edmund Pincoffs; also to my colleagues in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and to various audiences around the country, including faculty and students at Vanderbilt University, Fordham University in New York City, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; the meeting of the Metaphysical Society of America held at Notre Dame, a National Teachers Convention held in Anchorage, the Texas Commission for the Twenty-first Century, the University Research Institute, and a generation of students in Plan II, the interdisciplinary honors program at the University of Texas. I wish to express thanks also to my agent, Lettie Lee of the Ann Elmo Agency, who believed in this project from the start, and to the editorial skills of Nick Street and the staff at Paragon House. Finally, my greatest debt is owed to the woman to whom this book is dedicated, Claudette Drennan Kane, whose wisdom, wide reading, and forceful arguments have left an imprint on every page.