Jonathan Sacks’ radio series Morality in the 21st Century is a useful introduction to the subject, with some good contributions from world-renowned experts, but it’s rather one-sided. Almost all of these world-renowned experts (such as Jordan Peterson, Robert Putnam, David Brooks) share his approach. There is not much airing of other views, or questioning of basic assumptions.
The series is another blast on the communitarian trumpet. Communitarianism is the view that individualism has gone too far, that secular liberalism has descended into selfishness, that a shared moral code has got lost. It has been a major intellectual movement since the mid 1980s. One of its central metaphors is thinness and thickness. Western society has moved towards a problematically thin idea of morality – meaning that it is very abstract, not rooted in shared social practices.
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