1.One Sunday evening in early May, I went for a walk in one of Johannesburg’s prosperous suburban neighborhoods. The whitewashed stucco houses on well-tended lawns with hissing sprinklers and swimming pools, the twittering birds, the leaning jacaranda tree …

Moral philosophers, naturally enough, want to make ethics look good. They want to make people look capable and respectable as moral agents. But they are working with difficult material. Humans are not as tidy, as thoughtful, or as disciplined as the morali …