In line with his research published in 2011 under the title Calcul Moral (Moral Calculation) and his articles published in the Revue française d’Éthique appliquée and Ethics, Medicine and Public Health, Jean-Pierre Cléro here deepens the critical inquiry he has made into a few traditional categories of ethics, such as ‘person’ or ‘dignity’. The author wonders what categories could be substituted for those that are no longer appropriate, reserving here the benefit of the notion of ‘intimacy’. The originality of this book lies in the fact that a Francophone author speaks in English to an Anglophone public for whom utilitarianism is an obvious possibility of ethics: is it to show this audience aspects of Francophone ethics that are most often missed and on which it could draw to enrich its analyses? Or is it to convince Francophone researchers who read English that they could make more use of classical, modern, and contemporary Anglophone authors, a less Kantian or post-Kantian turn? It is in any case on the border between these two questions that each chapter of this sharp and stimulating book has been written.

Jean-Pierre Cléro is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Rouen (France). Interested in psychoanalysis, he has written several books on Lacan.