Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists

by Susan Neiman

Book Overview

An inspiring and jargon-free look at how morals guide and inform our lives Moral philosopher Susan Neiman makes the tools of her trade relevant to real life in Moral Clarity , steering us clear of political dogma to offer instead a framework for forming clear opinions and taking responsible action on today's urgent political and social questions. Neiman reaches back to the classic virtues--happiness, reason, reverence, and hope--that were held high...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151011974
• ISBN13: 9780151011971
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.61 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The world can be improved

I will try to be as clear as the title: this book has as central thesis that the world we live in can and should be improved. There is abundant evidence showing that this has happened many times but there are no guarantees that we will continue to improve. There is always the risk that the world we live in will get worse. Given these circumstances, all human beings are called to give their small, medium or large contribution for the improvement of the world. The thesis may seem relatively trivial but there are many philosophers which adopted an extreme pessimism and do not subscribe it. We also hear very frequent references to the immutability of "human nature", and the subsequent call for resignation. The author is an American philosopher born in Atlanta with an entry in Wikipedia and a Web site. She has other books, namely the "Evil in Modern Thought" published in 2002. The author has a great fascination for the Enlightenment thought and is strongly influenced by Kant. The "Evil in Modern Thought" owes somehow its genesis to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, to the heated philosophical discussions caused by this event and to the difficulty of reconciling the existence of a kind God, constantly intervening in the world, with the occurrence of a disaster of the magnitude of the earthquake, in a Catholic country often called "Much Faithful Nation" by the Vatican. The excellent reception of the book has encouraged the author to move to this new one, in which the philosophy, by enabling us to better understand the world in which we live, gives us the tools to transform it. The title of the book "Moral Clarity" is an American expression dear to the political right. The author believes that the left unduly allowed the right to own the concept of Moral Clarity and even fears that the lies and corruption of the Bush administration ultimately discredit a concept which is essential for building a more just society. After an introduction with an extraordinary text that is accessible at the author's web site - http://www.susan-neiman.de/docs/moralclarity_content.html (and whose reading I strongly recommend) and after establishing the distinction between what is and what should be, the author visits the virtues of the Enlightenment, including Happiness, Reason, Reverence and Hope. The book ends with references to Odyssey, featuring Ulysses as the hero with the qualities of the Enlightenment, to the tools that allow us to identify the evil, to the people of today who may be considered heroes and closes encouraging the reader not to accept unjust situations. The author has not yet found any simple way to define evil and is convinced that any simple definition will fail the task. The identification of evil is a laborious task of interpretation and discussion of nuances and details.

Inspiring and Timely

Susan Neiman is a most unusual philosopher. Whereas most academic philosophers produce inaccessible archaic meditations, she addresses the central social and ethical issues that define the human search for meaning and truth. And she does so in a jargon free and lively style that invites readers to consider her profound insights. Moral Clarity reclaims the discourse of values and ethics for the liberal left. Drawing on her expertise in Kant and the Enlightenment, Neiman demands that the liberal left reclaim the language of nobility and virtue. Moral Clarity is an inspiring work that provides the intellectual foundations for the new generation of progressives.

Timely and poignant discussion of morals in politics

For years I have sat and watched while the right wing and evangelical movement has "captured" the concept of "values". It is wonderful to finally read an eloquent discussion of politics that says that morals does not belong to the right wing! It is well worth the read for a different look into the very issues that voters today are facing.

Obama and Enlightenment

This book doesn't actually mention any presidential candidates (except John McCain) by name, but even without Cornel West's rave endorsement on the cover, it's easy to read between the lines. The author is a progressive with a new twist: she thinks the left has failed by not taking ordinary moral values seriously, and she's not afraid to call them on it - sometimes in very funny ways. Normally, it's conservatives who tell you to go back to the classics, but she makes a good argument that progressives need them more; contrary to what a lot of us learned, the Enlightenment was the home of progressive politics. A great read. The Wall Street Journal called it a reading list for democrats, and it provides a lot of material for those of us who support the senator from Illinois.

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.