The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge

The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge (full pdf here) by Dallas Willard was published posthumously in 2020. Willard had died in 2013 with it about 90% finished and considered it his most important work. It was completed by three of his many doctoral students at USC, where he taught philosophy for many years. He may have had too many irons in the fire.  He was a busy man, writing many books, monographs and chapters, both in philosophy and Christian living. 

A friend who is active in Renovare assures me that it is hard to get even those acolytes interested in studying the book, despite its reputation as Willard's favorite, even masterwork. Yet I can understand this, as it requires a great deal of knowledge about philosophy and philosophers, from the Greeks to Rawls and McIntyre to even get a foothold. Many of Willard's devotees come solely from the spiritual formation side, with less interest in Ethics than in practical programs for sustained growth. I am much that way myself. 

Willard traces moral thinking from the early 19th C to the early 21st, with continual reference back to the earlier foundations (it is clear he is partial to the ancients in many ways).  About a century ago, he claims, there was a great reversal, so that now there is not only no science of ethics now, but most serious thinkers today would deny that such a science is even possible. He thinks this is terribly wrong and sets out to make a detailed historical and philosophical case that moral knowledge is both possible and necessary.

It is not easy to imagine that all the older writers, from Socrates and Plato, and on through the centuries to G. E. Moore and his fellow twentieth-century “Intuitionists,” were so intellectually limited that they simply got it wrong about the possibility of systematic moral knowledge and something like a “science of ethics.” That would have been a huge intellectual blunder, to say the least. Not that it would have been strictly impossible; indeed, radical “revolutions,” which presupposed that such a massive blunder had actually occurred, were announced for philosophy and for ethical theory 4 in the first part of the twentieth century. But surely anyone who seriously thinks that the older thinkers and writers, through all those centuries, made such a huge mistake owes us some plausible account of exactly what the mistake was and of how they were led into it. None has been forthcoming.

I did not finish it.  Not my jam and I finish few books these days.  I read almost a quarter, then skipped about, trying to catch up at the end and see if I could get the Best Part on the cheap. I doubt that I did.