@article{10.4159/harvard.9780674063075,
      recid = {456209},
      author = {Kitcher, Philip,},
      title = {The ethical project [electronic resource] /},
      publisher = {Harvard University Press,},
      address = {Cambridge, Mass. :},
      number = {10.4159/harvard.9780674063075},
      pages = {1 online resource (ix, 422 p.)},
      year = {2011},
      abstract = {Principles of right and wrong guide the lives of almost  all human beings, but we often see them as external to  ourselves, outside our own control. In a revolutionary  approach to the problems of moral philosophy, Philip  Kitcher makes a provocative proposal: Instead of conceiving  ethical commands as divine revelations or as the  discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our  ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of  years, as members of our species have worked out how to  live together and prosper. Elaborating this radical new  vision, Kitcher shows how the limited altruistic tendencies  of our ancestors enabled a fragile social life, how our  forebears learned to regulate their interactions with one  another, and how human societies eventually grew into forms  of previously unimaginable complexity. The most successful  of the many millennia-old experiments in how to live, he  contends, survive in our values today.Drawing on natural  science, social science, and philosophy to develop an  approach he calls 0pragmatic naturalism,0 Kitcher reveals  the power of an evolving ethics built around a few core  principles-including justice and cooperation-but leaving  room for a diversity of communities and modes of  self-expression. Ethics emerges as a beautifully human  phenomenon-permanently unfinished, collectively refined and  distorted generation by generation. Our human values,  Kitcher shows, can be understood not as a final system but  as a project-the ethical project-in which our species has  engaged for most of its history, and which has been central  to who we are.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/456209},
}