Moral Laboratories

With her extraordinarily sharp analytic sensibilities and deep command of relevant philosophical traditions, Cheryl Mattingly has given us one of the first truly distinct and fully articulated positions in the booming anthropology of ethics. The synthesis of the phenomenological and Aristotelian traditions that she calls first person virtue ethics, together with the allied notion of everyday life as the setting for ongoing moral experimentation, light up ethnographic materials in strikingly new ways. This crucial book will transform the way anthropologists think about everyday ethics from the moment it appears.-Joel Robbins, Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge In this extraordinary book about moral action and the power of the ordinary, Cheryl Mattingly weaves together a luminous, unflinching ethnography of tragedy and possibility with a clear and incisive argument concerning the value of virtue ethics. Stunning and indispensable.-Michael Lambek, University of Toronto This book is one of those rare pieces of scholarship that has the potential to mark a generation of thinkers. In advocating the significance of taking a first-person perspective on moral life, Mattingly forcefully shows the limits of third-person renderings and deals with a complex history of philosophical and anthropological thinking on morality and ethics (particularly virtue ethics) in an accessible and immediately relevant way.-C. Jason Throop, University of California, Los Angeles