Nora Hämäläinen 
Descriptive Ethics 
What does Moral Philosophy Know about Morality?

This book is an investigation into the descriptive task of moral philosophy. Nora Hämäläinen explores the challenge of providing rich and accurate pictures of the moral conditions, values, virtues, and norms under which people live and have lived, along with relevant knowledge about the human animal and human nature. While modern moral philosophy has focused its energies on normative and metaethical theory, the task of describing, uncovering, and inquiring into moral frameworks and moral practices has mainly been left to social scientists and historians. Nora Hämäläinen argues that this division of labour has detrimental consequences for moral philosophy and that a reorientation toward descriptive work is needed in moral philosophy. She traces resources for a descriptive philosophical ethics in the work of four prominent philosophers of the twentieth century: John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, and Charles Taylor, while also calling on thinkers inspired by them.

Table of Content

Introduction – What Does Moral Philosophy Know About Morality?


1.  Moral Philosophy Today




2. Morality as Known by Moral Philosophers




3. The Foundational Project of Ethics and a Different Way of going Below the Surface




4. The Challenge from X-phi?




5. Dewey’s Empirical Ethics




6. Wittgensteinian Applications




7. Foucault’s Archeology and Genealogy of the Self




8. Charles Taylor’s Modern Self




9. The Descriptive and the Empirical




10. Descriptive Ethics and the Philosopher

About the author

Nora Hämäläinen is a docent (affiliated senior researcher) at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a research fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala, Sweden, 2016-2017. She is the author of Literature and Moral Theory and has co-edited the volume Language, Ethics and Animal Life — Wittgenstein and Beyond (with Niklas Forsberg and Mikel Burley).