ABSTRACT
Traditional sources of morality are being questioned at a time when we need morality’s direction the most. Research shows that moral direction is vital to our identities as well as our contentment, productivity, and relationships. Yet this research also documents a decline in the development and use of moral direction, especially among younger adults. The introductory chapter provides a brief explanation of hermeneutic moral realism—what the book’s authors will argue is our best hope for a twenty-first-century grounding for morality. A common moral situation is described in which many of the traditional resources for illuminating and resolving its moral issues are revealed to have significant, twenty-first-century problems. More specifically, the modern dualism of these traditional resources—their separation into subjective and objective approaches—has hampered them irreparably. Although these dualist approaches have frequently been helpful to understand morality, many are internally inconsistent and others fail to illuminate our fundamental experience of morality. Consequently, the authors of this volume offer a nondualist (hermeneutic) approach to this illustration that will serve to introduce their moral solution. The remainder of the book, then, fleshes out this solution by providing a conceptual understanding as well as particular applications of this understanding to psychotherapy, politics, research, bureaucracy, and anthropology.
