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Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy

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Michele Moody-Adams is an African American philosopher and academic administrator. In 2009, she became the Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education at Columbia University. She is the first woman and first African American to hold the post.

She states in the Introduction to this 1997 book, "This book seeks to provide a plausible conception of moral objectivity and to defend a cautious optimism that moral philosophy can be an aid in serious, everyday moral inquiry. It thus sets itself against two important and mutually reinforcing developments in twentieth-century thought that have seemed to render such efforts quixotic... Ultimately, I urge that moral philosophy, if it is to take moral disagreement seriously, may itself need to undertake fieldwork in familar places."

Here are some quotations from the book:

"More recent efforts to demonize homosexuals, or feminists, or even (in the American context) 'liberals,' are likewise not terribly far removed from Zande beliefs in witchcraft." (Pg. 65)
"These considerations, taken together, help show why some people who suffer oppression do not need the 'language of the oppressor' (or indeed any linguistic structures at all) to be able to express their pain and suffering." (Pg. 94-95)
"To be sure, ending slavery required far more than a rearrangement of the details of moral reflection. It is nonetheless important to understand that anti-slavery arguments embodied a fundamental reimagining and reinterpretation of the moral world." (Pg. 106)
"Yet the limited pluralism that I expect to be the whole truth about morality must also be distinguished from Berlin's influential moral pluralism..." (Pg. 202)
"I have argued that moral reflection is capable of transcending cultural and historical boundaries to enrich moral imagination in extraordinary ways." (Pg. 222)