Moral Laboratories Family Peril & The Struggle For A Good Life

"With her extraordinarily sharp analytic sensibilities and deep command of relevant philosophical traditions, Cheryl Mattingly has given us one of the first truly distinct and fully articulated positions in the booming anthropology of ethics. The synthesis of the phenomenological and Aristotelian traditions that she calls first person virtue ethics, together with the allied notion of everyday life as the setting for ongoing moral experimentation, light up ethnographic materials in strikingly new ways. This crucial book will transform the way anthropologists think about everyday ethics from the moment it appears."—Joel Robbins, Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

"In this extraordinary book about moral action and the power of the ordinary, Cheryl Mattingly weaves together a luminous, unflinching ethnography of tragedy and possibility with a clear and incisive argument concerning the value of virtue ethics. Stunning and indispensable."—Michael Lambek, University of Toronto

"This book is one of those rare pieces of scholarship that has the potential to mark a generation of thinkers. In advocating the significance of taking a first-person perspective on moral life, Mattingly forcefully shows the limits of third-person renderings and deals with a complex history of philosophical and anthropological thinking on morality and ethics (particularly virtue ethics) in an accessible and immediately relevant way."—C. Jason Throop, University of California, Los Angeles

Moral Laboratories is an engaging ethnography and a groundbreaking foray into the anthropology of morality. It takes us on a journey into the lives of African American families caring for children with serious chronic medical conditions, and it foregrounds the uncertainty that affects their struggles for a good life. Challenging depictions of moral transformation as possible only in moments of breakdown or in radical breaches from the ordinary, it offers a compelling portrait of the transformative powers embedded in day-to-day existence. From soccer fields to dinner tables, the everyday emerges as a moral laboratory for reshaping moral life. Cheryl Mattingly offers vivid and heart-wrenching stories to elaborate a first-person ethical framework, forcefully showing the limits of third-person renderings of morality. 

Cheryl Mattingly is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Division of Occupational Science at the University of Southern California. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She is the award-winning author of The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland and Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience and coeditor, with Linda Garro, of Narrative and Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing, among other books.

Acknowledgments  

Prologue  

Part One. First Person Virtue Ethics

1. Experimental Soccer and the Good Life  

2. First Person Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality  

Part Two. Moral Becoming and the Everyday

3. Home Experiments: Scenes from the Moral Ordinary  

4. Luck, Friendship, and the Narrative Self  

5. Moral Tragedy: The Perils of a Superstrong Black Mother  

6. The Flight of the Blue Balloons: Narrative Suspense and the Play of Possible Selves  

Part Three. Moral Pluralism as Cultural Possibility

7. Rival Moral Traditions and the Miracle Baby  

8. Dueling Confessions: Revolution in the First Person  

9. Tragedy, Possibility, and Philosophical Anthropology  

Bibliography  

Index