On the usual account of moral reasoning, social science is often seen as able to provide “just the facts,” while philosophy attends to moral values and conceptual clarity and builds formally valid arguments. Yet disciplines are informed by epistemic values—and bioethics might do well to see social scientific practices and their attendant normative understandings about what is humanly important as a significant part of ethics generally.

Moral philosophy is the study of what morality is and what it requires of us. As Socrates said, it's about "how we ought to live"-and why. It would be helpful if we could begin with a simple, uncontroversial definition of what morality is. Unfortunately, we cannot. There are many rival theories, each expounding a different conception of what it means to live morally, and any definition that goes beyond Socrates's simple formula-tion is bound to offend at least one of them. (...) This should make us cautious, but it need not paralyze us. In this chapter, I will describe the "minimum conception" of morality. (shrink)