Moral Laboratories

"Moral Laboratories is at once engaging ethnography and a groundbreaking foray in 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, foregrounding the uncertainty of their struggles for a "good life." Challenging depictions of moral transformation as only possible in moments of breakdown or exceptional limit experience, it offers a compelling portrait of the transformative powers embedded in ordinary existence. From soccer fields to dinner tables, the everyday emerges as a potential "moral laboratory" for reshaping moral life. Mattingly offers vivid and heart-wrenching case stories to elaborate a first person ethical framework, forcefully showing the limits of third-person renderings of morality. In so doing, she deals with a complex history of philosophical and anthropological thinking on ethics in an accessible and immediately relevant way"--