Introduction

There was once a catastrophe so destructive that it led several human tribes to abandon the face of the earth for an interlocking set of caves that ran for miles just underneath the planet's crust. According to the anti-theorist narrative, modernity was the heyday of moral theory with Kantians and Utilitarian sparring to establish who had produced the best universal, rational decision procedure to determine moral action. Whether it was the categorical imperative or the principle of utility, moral judgments were to be derived from the "top-down." Deontic moral theories aim at the epistemic good of understanding; grasping not only the parts of, for instance, just-war thinking but an account of the whole. In short, prudence has been marginalized, instrumentalized, and at times relegated to the realm of the occult. The meanings of basic moral terms like good, evil, means, ends, prudence, and duty shift depending on which of these moral theories is deployed.