University of California Press Moral Laboratories

Moral Laboratories is at once an 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 that affects their struggles for a good life. Challenging depictions of moral transformation as only possible in moments of breakdown or in radical breaches from the ordinary, 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.