Experiments in Ethics

“Astronomers have stars, geologists have rocks, but what do moral theorists have to work with?”

In a field that is full of abstraction, Appiah brings you what you rarely get in a philosophy classroom: a collision with real world research on applied ethics. The thrust of this book is not so much the Appiah is championing contemporary experiments so much as he's exploring how such works complicate the ivory tower normative systems that we've used from Aristotle, to Kant to Rawls.

This is not the sort of book you read to tie up your moral theories in a bow, which not by accident, is also why it's such an interesting work no matter where you fall in between deontological, consequentialist or virtue approaches to moral reasoning.