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The Human Condition
The Human Condition is a response to the growing disenchantment in the Western world with contemporary life. John Kekes provides rationally justified answers to questions about the meaning of life, the basis of morality, the contingencies of human lives, the prevalence of evil, the nature and extent of human responsibility, and the sources of values we prize. He offers a realistic view of the human condition that rejects both facile optimism and gloomy pessimism; acknowledges that we are vulnerable to contingencies we cannot fully control; defends a humanistic understanding of our condition; recognizes that the values worth pursuing are plural, often conflicting, and that there are many reas...
Nomocratic Pluralism
This book is a contribution to the ongoing conversation about value pluralism and its relation to political life. Its uniqueness lies in its insistence that the acceptance of value pluralism involves placing certain limitations on what is an acceptable form of government and what functions governments ought to be legitimately performing. In a new approach coined “nomocratic pluralism,” this volume argues that liberty under the rule of law, which is not merely liberty where the law is silent, is a key concept of liberty and cannot be subsumed by the other primary implications of the acceptance of value pluralism: that political communities must reject positive liberty as a political value, and place a high, but not absolute, priority on negative liberty as a political value. The concept of liberty under the rule of law is particularly suited to accommodate a great variety of individual and group conceptions of value and the moral good, and thus, along with negative liberty, should be a primary value for those who accept value pluralism.
Encountering Cruelty: The Fracture of the Human Heart
Interest in recent years in reconciliation and conflict transformation has witnessed a great deal of attention to building a future through forgiveness and preventative measures in order to impede egregious wrongdoing. This effort for a reconciled future is absent reflection on the nature of cruelty. Cruelty has always been apparent in massive acts of wrongdoing and yet is repeatedly concealed in our assessment of the acts themselves. This book is a theologically honest and deep-structure exploration of cruelty in its personal, communal and institutional encounters in human life. Drawing on Nietzsche's challenge of cruelty to the western tradition, the work offers a comprehensive study of how cruelty undermines care, trust, respect and justice – all those elements of human reciprocity that mark our lives as interdependent beings. The work concludes with a tightly written Epilogue on interpreting the theological meaning and accessibility of reconciliation today.
Irreparable Evil
What was distinctive about the evil of the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery? In what ways can the present seek to rectify such historical wrongs, even while recognizing that they lie beyond repair? Irreparable Evil explores the legacy of slavery and its moral and political implications, offering a nuanced intervention into debates over reparations. David Scott reconsiders the story of New World slavery in a series of interconnected essays that focus on Jamaica and the Anglophone Caribbean. Slavery, he emphasizes, involved not only scarcely imaginable brutality on a mass scale but also the irreversible devastation of the ways of life and cultural worlds from which enslaved peop...
Ecoviolence and the Law: Supranational Normative Foundation of Ecocrime
Exploring such acts of environmental violence as "ecocrimes," the author builds the case that the international law principles of jus cogens and erga omnes justify characterizing ecocrime as a "just crime" requiring action to curb their occurrence and punishment to deter them. The book discusses the obstacles that defining environmental assaults as "ecocrimes" will face both in national and international circumstances. The author concludes by proposing the creation of an International Environmental Court that would adjudicate "ecocrime" issues. This forward thinking work will be of great interest to all involved in the human rights issues of environmental threats. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.
Enjoyment
In this book John Kekes examines the indispensable role enjoyment plays in a good life. The key to it is the development of a style of life that combines an attitude and a manner of living and acting that jointly express one's deepest concerns. Since such styles vary with characters and circumstances, a reasonable understanding of them requires attending to the particular and concrete details of individual lives. Reflection on works of literature is a better guide to this kind of understanding than the futile search for general theories and principles that preoccupies much of contemporary moral thought. Enjoyment proceeds by the detailed examination of particular cases, shows how this kind o...
In Defense of Liberal-Pluralism
This book takes a critical view of Kantian and Neo-Kantian moral philosophers’ preference of universalism, the unity of morality, moral impartiality, consensus, and common morality. The central claim of the book is if the human condition is treated as complex and infested with irreducible choices and alternatives, then moral rightness and wrongness ought to operate beyond these binaries; giving epistemic status to Pluralism’s multiple rationalities. Redefining liberal-pluralism, the book also argues that moral reasoning is necessarily bound by paradoxes and contradictions, seen in our choices of life-projects, in the conflict between individual morality and common morality, and in justif...
Moral Wisdom and Good Lives
1. What Is Liberalism? -- 2. The Prevalence of Evil -- 3. Individual Responsibility -- 4. Collective Responsibility -- 5. The Errors of Egalitarianism -- 6. Justice and Desert -- 7. Justice without the Liberal Faith -- 8. Pluralism versus Liberalism -- 9. The Sentimentalism of Benevolence -- 10. What Is Wrong with Liberalism?
Poetic Ethics in Proverbs
This study explores the sophisticated understanding of the formation of the moral self that emerges in the poetry of Proverbs, which many have wrongly dismissed as simplistic. Anne W. Stewart analyzes images and metaphors to illuminate the Book's views on the role of emotions and desires in shaping moral imaginations.
Ethical Theory - Second Edition
This first-rate introduction to ethical theory contains sections on various forms of ethical theory, such as egoism, virtue ethics, divine command theory, and consequentialism. Each section includes two or three of the most important contributions to the field, together with brief introductions by the editors. The second edition contains an improved approach to applied ethics. Each chapter on moral theories now includes a selection that deals with a moral problem, such as human cloning, abortion, and global warming. The selection illustrates how the relevant theoretical approach is put to use. There is therefore a much tighter integration between theory and practice than before. The new edition also contains an improved section on feminist ethical theory.
