Moral Science: What Is It?

Abstract

David Schmidtz's new book, Living Together, does not give a definition of moral science. Instead, each section of this book, in instructively different ways, points to and demonstrates what moral science was, is, and could be. It is clearly a call for moral philosophers to be much more engaged with empirical social science -- and indeed there is something eccentric about the fact that we are not. Living Together contains philosophy profundity, but it does not lay out a philosophical system. It is by design (so to speak) nonsystematic. Moral science, as Schmidtz argues, does not need to be systemtic -- at least, not interms of building a deductively sound theory that is necessarily true, to be applied to all and everywhere, owing to the merits of its systematicity. Schmidtz indicates that this project is still a work in progress and one that contains gaps that he hopes will be seen as invitations for creative sympathizers to fill. As a sympathetic reader, I accept the invitation. In this essay I will offer an interpretation of what moral science is. I will then attempt to shed light on the nature of its normative import and ask to what extent it requires a prior commitment to liberalism.

Keywords: Non-ideal theory, Philosophy of social science, Political economy, David Hume, Adam Smith