Ethical norms, particular cases /

Wallace (Univ. of Illinois, Chicago-Urbana), author of Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict (CH, May'89) and Virtues and Vices (CH, Feb'79), presents a view of morality as a kind of practical knowledge. He holds that morality is derived from people's life experience rather than from some scientific, supernatural, or Platonic source. Ethical norms, in this view, are human instruments. His view is a thoroughly naturalistic one and contrasts with accounts that fail to recognize morality as a human creation. Wallace claims that moral knowledge is empirical; it is based on experience and can be supported by reason and argument. He stresses the importance of examining moral problems in their context (rather than considering abstract principles). People devise solutions to problems, solutions that take a variety of values into account; they do not discover some preexisting solution or some one overriding supervalue. The book makes reference to classical philosophers such as Dewey and Aristotle and contemporary thinkers such as Dworkin and MacIntyre, but the book is not historical; rather, it is a genuine effort to come to grips with the nature of morality. Undergraduate; graduate; faculty; general. S. Satris Clemson University