Introduction

Why do people care about things? Why do things matter to them? In particular, why do they have ethical concerns about how people treat one another, and perhaps other species too, and concerns about how their social world is organized? Or, to put it more formally, what is it about people that makes them both ethical subjects and objects of ethical concern? Some sociologists might be tempted to say that it's norms or discourses that make people do these things, not their human nature, and hence that all these things are socially constructed. But while norms and discourses are important they don't seem to work on non-humans – on lumps of rock or plants – so there must be something about humans that makes them susceptible to such norms and discourses. Some of the answers to these questions are already implicit in the last two chapters; here I shall make them explicit.