"The Idea of Justice" by Amartya Sen (2009)

In a wager similar to Pascal's, Amartya Sen bets on reason---as opposed to emotion and tradition. The ultimate virtue is in the ultimate reason. A merely better reasoner need not be more virtuous, however. This nonmonotonicity's undesirable consequences are mitigated if reasoning advances fast and uniformly across disciplines. Sen's book advocates a shortcut towards such an advancement. The shortcut is in the distributed computing power of democracy.

Stripped of science, short of literature, and shy of data, philosophy is a quaint after-dinner exercise in democracy that inspires after-breakfast progress. Now derivative, philosophy survives as an interdisciplinary conversation.