INTRODUCTION

American moral life is in process of revising itself. Briefly, Americans decreasingly speak in the language of morality. This is not to say that American discourse is necessarily less moral, that it necessarily lacks a moral basis, or that there are not moral reasons for eschewing moral discourse. Quite obviously, much of this change can be defended in quite conventional moral terms – as an expression, for instance, of various standard liberal views. My point, rather, is that the terms we use in explaining (and presumably in thinking about) our lives are decreasingly drawn from the vocabulary of morals and are increasingly drawn from the discourse of therapy, economics, psychology, public-policy studies, rights, and assorted other modes of thinking. Thus the language of morals is being displaced by other discourses or even by silence.

Obviously, these alternative discourses may, and even must, have a moral component, if only because each of them has some sort of moral justification ready at hand. But language matters (to recite what is now an idea familiar to the point of cliché). Different discourses use different verbal and conceptual vocabularies, and those different vocabularies affect what we think, say, and do. What is more, they affect how we are understood. By studying our languages, we better see how we reason, how we act, what we seek, and what we find.