The Birth of Ethics - Philip (L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Pettit - Bog

To know the nature of any phenomenon or practice, it is often a good idea to learn about how it might have emerged or might have been constructed. The Birth of Ethics offers an account of how morality might have emerged, without any planning, in a society with language but without any properly ethical concepts or practices. The conjectural history that it documents serves a philosophical purpose, for it directs us the role that morality plays in human lifeand the nature of morality that enables it to play that role.