The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge

The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge (Routledge, 2018) is the philosophical book Dallas Willard was writing at his death. Three of his former graduate students, Steven L. Porter, Aaron Preston and Gregg A. Ten Elshof, edited it and completed chapters six to eight from his plans and notes. Willard argues that over the last century moral knowledge was pushed out of the fields recognised as knowledge, so that it is no longer reliably available from the universities and other institutions once expected to provide it, and that this shift came from social forces rather than good reasons. The book surveys ethical theory from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century and closes by considering what personal and communal life guided by publicly accessible moral knowledge might look like. The electronic edition is open access under a Creative Commons licence.