Moral powers and the moral community: Comment on Richardson

Abstract

First paragraph: Morality is clearly in some sense a human creation. The difficulty is: in what sense? Richardson's Articulating the Moral Community offers a partial answer to this question. He argues that the moral community can exercise a power to create moral changes: refinements of current moral principles can be generated through this power. Richardson uses the term ‘articulation’ in the engineer's sense, referring to a body that ‘has parts that move with some partial independence from each other, allowing greater overall flexibility in movement’ (p. 13). His book focuses on explaining how the moral community can build new parts for morality when needed.