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Abstract
[...]of their violation of the Love Laws, Velutha was slain brutally by the police; Ammu was separated from her children and banished by her family. Roy's novel is a rich narrative of a complex moral and social world, in which people and their responsibilities are understood along lines of caste and gender, to the ornamental accompaniment of egalitarian stories about selves and worth that conceal and protect the existing forms of social life. Against this model, she sketches morality as a set of practices inextricably intertwined with enormously complex ways of living, in which we find the resources for understanding ourselves, understanding to whom and for what we are responsible, and how and with what possibilities of success responsibilities can be claimed, assigned, redirected, deflected or renegotiated Walker insists throughout on the deep importance of seeing morality embedded in this way, as a real-time set of social practices that serves a crucial function in helping to keep safe the rich assortment of things that people most care about, that make their forms of life habitable. The constructive program of this book, putting into play an alternative template, the "expressive-collaborative view of morality" and moral thinking, develops in many directions, and should touch off considerable general interest 573BOOK REVIEW among philosophers working in ethics (p. 51).