Dallas Willard – Disappearance of Moral Knowledge [Excerpt]

[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”333″ identifier=”113858925X” locale=”US” src=”https://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/51AwncDRCL-1.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”218″]Dallas Willard’s unfinished masterpiece, was finished after his death by three of his students and is being published later this month.
 

The Disappearance
of Moral Knowledge
Dallas Willard
(Edited and Completed by Steven Porter, Aaron Preston, and Gregg Ten Elshof)

Hardback: Routledge, June 2018
Buy Now: [ [easyazon_link identifier=”113858925X” locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Amazon[/easyazon_link] ] 

This is a very expensive academic book (if you’re interested in it and cannot afford a copy, maybe your local public or university library can purchase a copy).

The publisher has graciously released a 99-page excerpt from the book to give readers a substantial taste for the book’s contents.

Here are a couple of snippets from the excerpt and a link where you can download it:

One hundred years ago, before and after the opening of the twentieth century, serious and learned men published essays and weighty volumes in which they elaborated what they and others took to be a science of ethics. Sometimes they called their enterprise a science of human conduct, but with that they had in mind a science of human conduct (or action) as guided and evaluated from a moral point of view. For them, conduct and moral character were treated together, as two inseparable dimensions of one subject. Their concern was always to understand the moral life as a whole. In their writings they took a thorough and systematic approach to the question of how to live rightly, and of how to become and be the  kind of person who would “naturally” do so. (1)

… and …

But now all is changed. In the early twenty-first century our serious and learned men and women write books and essays on the assumption that no “science” of ethics exists, and, for most of them, that none could exist. Some writings are designed to demonstrate that this is the case, and to show why it must be so. Others lament the fact and point out the unhappy consequences of it. Still others, fighting upstream, try to salvage a few shreds of moral knowledge, or to show that such knowledge is at least possible in a few cases. (That at least some “ought” can be deduced from some “is,” for example.) Even if we do not have any moral knowledge at present, they seem to think, something might be done to make progress toward it. But hardly anyone today would be able even to imagine a science of ethics: a systematic body of knowledge of the moral life. (3)

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C. Christopher Smith

C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com