Recovering Our Knowledge of the Good Person

Have you wondered how your students or friends simultaneously deny moral facts yet accept the universal wrongness of bullying, sexual assault, or greed? Dallas Willard’s much anticipated final philosophical work offers an incisive analysis of and solution to this phenomenon. Here I provide a brief overview of Willard’s main argument for how moral knowledge disappeared and has thereby become publicly unavailable for teaching it to emerging generation. We first look at what caused this “disappearance” at a social level, and then consider how have contributed to the problem. Finally, we look at Willard’s proposal for how we might recover moral knowledge, and I offer three lingering questions that may provide a springboard for those interested in extending his important project.