I was reading the Normative Ethics volume in the great "5 Questions" series from Automatic Press, and was struck by this passage from the conclusion of the interview with Jeff McMahan (Rutgers):
I am highly optimistic about the prospects in normative ethics. It is evident to me that great progress has already been made since I entered the field in the early 1980s. Unlike many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, which in recent years were seduced by bad French philosophy into a lot of silly "post-modern" theorizing that exposed them to derision and reduced them to irrelevance, analytic philosophy is flourishing. Part of the reason why analytic philosophy generally is in such a healthy state is that, as Jerry Fodor observed in a recent book review, philosophers no longer tend to have philosophies. We no longer devote our lives to developing comprehensive philospohical or ethical systems. We are individually narrower and more specialized, which enables us to focus more carefully and minutely on the problems we study, and as a consequence to produce work that is more rigorous and detailed. The results is that philosophy has become more of a collective endeavour than it was in the past, in the sense that different people are focusing selectively on problems that are elements or aspects of larger problems. When the results of the individual efforts are combined, we may achieve a collective product that exceeds in depth, intracacy, and sophistication what any individual could have produced by working on the larger problem in isolation.
Comments from readers? What are the areas of progress since the 1980s? Signed comments preferred, but, at a minimum, you must include an actual e-mail address (which will not appear).
