Ethics and Experience presents a wide-ranging and thought-provoking introduction to the question, first posed by Socrates, "How is life to be lived?" It treats ethics as a single and broadly unified field of inquiry in which the abstract questions of metaethics and the real-world issues of applied ethics are immediately and directly connected.

Tim Chappell explores the connections and the tensions between happiness and virtue, reason and commitment, motivation and justification, and objectivity and personal significance. And he re-examines familiar theories in normative ethics such as utilitarianism, virtue ethics, Kantianism, and intuitionism from a fresh and revealing perspective. The book is an excellent primer for students taking courses on moral philosophy.