Contemporary causes for philosophical reflection
And yet nowadays it has become ordinary, but hardly mundane, that we encounter numerous moral challenges that increasingly require our taking extra-ordinary steps toward their solutions — issues concerning death and dying with dignity, torture and corporal punishment, peace, war, and human rights, challenges to justice because of social inequalities, and a multiplicity of environmental concerns. For us in the US these moral challenges arise within a pluralistic societal arena where finding universal rights and wrongs seems especially elusive and bends us toward cultural and social relativisms. Sometimes we as a people become terribly fragmented and imagine ourselves in a moral morass. Moreover, we are especially beset by a long history of racial and gender disparities compounded more recently by increasing poverty and an erosion of our quality of life. We are poignantly concerned to reconcile the interests of the individual with those of the larger community of which we are a part. Matters are complicated by the plethora of arguments and argumentations from diverse quarters aiming to persuade us toward or dissuade us from one or another answer to difficult problems. And while these concerns will require our special concerted efforts to establish enduring solutions, these same concerns have challenged human beings from ancient times. Indeed, both the problems and the search for their solutions have especially distinguished what it is to be human.