Morality and Public Policy

With an increasingly bitter secular religious divide, there is a messy, defective relationship between the state and morality in the UK. In response, Morality and Public Policy puts forward proposals to enhance the capacity of public policy to respond more effectively to morality and associated shifts in social mores in different cultural settings. Spanning religion, moral philosophy and scientific understanding of the human condition, this unique book draws together and adds to the latest thinking on morality, its causes, mutations, tensions and common features. It challenges misplaced concepts of moral progress and the supremacy of empathy, and puts forward the management of the full span of human impulses - some complementary, some conflicting - as the function of morality with major implications for the interface between morality and public policy.