The present enquiry is oriented first of all by a provocation, or, perhaps really, by a cri de coeur: a cri to restore the validity of a certain weightiness of our factical concerns for the study of philosophical ethics. This weight concerns the urgency of our factical questions about who we are, about who we believe we need to be in response to the demands of individual situations, and about how to develop our abilities to live and to act well. The present enquiry can therefore be grasped with Gadamer as a ‘rehabilitation’. By ‘rehabilitation’, Gadamer has in mind the restoration of the validity of questions (as well as the concepts used to address such questions) that have fallen into forgetfulness, whether because they have succumbed to the conflagration of history or because they remain so effective that they have become lost in a familiar obviousness. Gadamer does not himself carry out an extended rehabilitation of the validity of the weight of our factical concerns for ethical life per se. In Truth and Method, he introduces the notion of rehabilitation principally in order to restore the validity of authority and tradition against attempts made in the Enlightenment era to discredit the notion of prejudice.1 Still, as Gadamer develops the notion of rehabilitation, it may be used to describe any attempt to restore the validity of questions (and concepts) passed down from tradition whose effectiveness has fallen out of focus. And, as I wish to implore in this ‘Preface’, even a cursory survey of the current milieu of philosophical ethics suggests the need for a rehabilitation of the weight I mention.

Thus, my cri begins: The more that professional philosophers adhere to the orientation of current debate – that is, the more they attempt to contribute to the edifice of abstract ethical systems and to define, justify and refine abstract ethical problems and principles – the more they at the same time confront us with what the novelist and essayist Milan Kundera describes as ‘the unbearable lightness of being’.