ABSTRACT
Making sense and making the world are not distinguishable activities for Nick Onuf, and it is in embracing this premise that Onuf comes into conflict most directly with the orthodoxy of modern Realism. If the very sorts of human activity that make sense of the world are also world changing, then no positivist demarcation between knowing subject and worldly object is possible. The shared norms and institutions of a moral community constitute the human “nest” that makes moral communities beneficial in an evolutionary sense. The synthesis of moral psychology with evolutionary arguments makes it seem that ethical systems rest on building blocks. The psychological proponents of Moral Foundations Theory appear to make just such an argument. The evolutionary approach of moral psychologists hints at the “virtue of virtue”: societies with effective ethical systems do better than those without. As a matter of moral psychology, people converge in certain fairly typical ways of thinking –and feeling–about moral problems.
