Moral valuing has long posed a special challenge to philosophers because it purports to establish objectively sustainable claims -- despite their apparent grounding in merely human sentiment. In a series of sometimes personal and, at other times, fairly technical philosophical essays, novelist Stuart W. Mirsky here considers the implications of a sentiment-based moral faculty in light of our modern tendency to embrace relativism and moral nihilism -- a tendency which must finally undermine the role we expect our moral judgments to play. Exploring how we value things in general, to place moral claims in a broader context, Mirsky painstakingly develops a picture that lays bare the cognitive dimension of moral claims. In so doing, he manages to rediscover and re-emphasize the essential role of the subject, the aware self, in our moral calculus.
About the Author: Stuart W. Mirsky, a former bureaucrat and current author, has written an historical novel about Norsemen in North America circa the eleventh century (The King of Vinland's Saga), a tale of Holocaust survival during World War II (A Raft on the River) and a book of social and political commentary (Irregularities: Tidal Flows and Politics Along the Rockaway Shore). His most recent, Choice and Action, is a series of essays focused on ethical and metaethical questions as encountered in the modern Western philosophical tradition. Conceived initially as a response to a series of questions from a young man in India seeking more information about the work and thought of the Western philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the essays in Choice and Action quickly moved beyond their initial focus to address broader philosophical concerns including questions about consciousness, epistemology and belief as well as how we make our moral choices in a world of diverse cultures and belief systems. In Choice and Action, Mirsky explores the problems raised for ethics, as these present to the Western philosophical mind, analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches that have characterized modern philosophy and finally offering his own explanatory strategy for breaking the logjam of contemporary Western ethical thought. Novelist, journalist and philosopher, Stuart W. Mirsky always brings a fresh perspective to the issues of the day. He blogs at Serious Philosophy, a website dedicated to exploring the role, value and influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein on contemporary philosophy: http: //ludwig.squarespace.com/volume-15/