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Title: Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists
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Manufacturer: Harcourt
List Price: $27.00
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| Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists by Harcourt It's Not Easy, But It's Worth the Effort | Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity asks a lot of the reader, but returns the investment many fold. The issue here is how it came to be that the political right managed to usurp the "embarrassing" Enlightenment values like hope, reverence, and reason, ones that the political left prefers to avoid for fear of what? Offending? Taking a clear stand? Sounding sappy or unsophisticated?
To my mind, the key here, as in Evil in Modern Thought, is her gift in articulating a philosophy that does not come easily: Kantian or perhaps Jewish transcendentalism, in which we acknowledge that there are moral imperatives accessible to us by our reason, which imperatives or values are very real, yet not objective in the sense that they can be proved. The left reviles the religious certainty of the Bush and the neo-conservatives - morality there is real and a matter of truth; the right reviles the left's post-modern rejection of moral imperative as having any reality at all. How do you challenge God? How do you manage the paradox of radical uncertainty about the source of moral clarity, but the sense, on the other hand, that there are some clear answers (as least from time to time)?
Ranging from Abraham's confrontation with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, to a defense of the Enlightenment thinkers, to a retelling of the lessons of Odysseus's journey home from Troy, Susan Neiman proposes a method for approaching moral clarity. There are no easy answers, and we need not necessarily agree in our conclusions (an irony about moral clarity), but, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. | | Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists by Harcourt Product Description | Susan Neiman is a moral philosopher committed to making the tools of her trade relevant to real life. In Moral Clarity, she shows how resurrecting a moral vocabulary—good and evil, heroism and nobility—can steer us clear of the dogmas of the right and the helpless pragmatism of the left. In search of a framework for forming clear opinions and taking responsible action on today’s urgent political and social questions, Neiman reaches back to the eighteenth century, retrieving a set of virtues—happiness, reason, reverence, and hope—that were held high by every Enlightenment thinker. She shows that the pursuit of moral clarity is not a matter of religious faith but is open to all who are committed to these ideals, believers and nonbelievers alike. And she draws on literature, evolutionarytheory, and other contemporary research to show why, by keeping before us the distinction between the real and the possible, these ideals continue to guide and inspire. |
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