Abstract

There is something paradoxical and possibly misleading in the title of this book. It has the form ‘X on y’, yet one of Diamond’s great contributions is her illumination of the idea that ethics has no particular subject matter; rather, it is ‘an attitude to the world and life, [which] can penetrate any thought or talk’. Unlike what happens in traditional moral theory, ethics in Diamond’s work is not demarcated with reference to certain concepts that are supposedly distinctively moral, like goodness, right, duty, obligation, virtue. This would make it difficult to demarcate in Diamond’s work a part of it that focuses on ethics; rather we could say that Diamond’s work bears on ethics as a whole insofar as it aims to clarify what possibilities our forms of life open for us, the complexity of our lives with concepts, what arises as significant therein. In Diamond’s work, the look that passes between two people, how one responds to music, how we disagree, how we relate to the concept of a gift or that of a stranger can very much be part of ethics.