In this book Charles Larmore aims to recover three fundamental and pervasive forms of moral complexity that have too often been neglected by moral and political philosophers. The arguments presented here do not attack the possibility of moral theory. But in addressing some of the central issue of moral and political thinking today they attempt to restore to that thinking greater flexibility and a necessary sensitivity to our common experience.

In The Autonomy of Morality, Charles Larmore challenges two ideas that have shaped the modern mind. The world, he argues, is not a realm of value-neutral fact, nor is reason our capacity to impose principles of our own devising on an alien reality. Rather, reason consists in being responsive to reasons for thought and action that arise from the world itself. In particular, Larmore shows that the moral good has an authority that speaks for itself. Only in this light does the true basis of a liberal political order come into view, as well as the role of unexpected goods in the makeup of a life...