By David Schmidtz
New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Pp. xv, 274. $35 hardcover.
The two-part title of David Schmidtz’s new book, Living Together: Inventing Moral Science, indicates a pair of methodological shifts he both advocates and undertakes; pursuing the implications of these shifts constitutes the thematic unity of the twentythree short essays that comprise the text.
The first half of the title, “living together,” expresses a rejection of the priority of moral to political philosophy. Schmidtz asks in the introduction: “Is ‘how to live?’ more fundamental than ‘how to live together?’ I was taught to assume as much, but there was never any reason to believe it” (p. xiii). So Schmidtz initiates an investigation into our social nature and common life. But how is that investigation to be carried out?
Here, the second part of the title, “inventing moral science,” comes into focus. For Schmidtz, investigation into our social life is an investigation into , and that inquiry should be, to
