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Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists | 
 enlarge | Author: Susan Neiman
Publisher: Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $27.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 8661
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 0151011974
Dewey Decimal Number: 170
EAN: 9780151011971
ASIN: 0151011974
Publication Date: May 5, 2008
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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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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 Bait and switch July 29, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I bought the book after reading Simon Blackburn's misleading review in the NYT. Instead of a book on how to think about morality as the title suggests, the book is a polemic again current American foreign policy. You will not know this from Blackburn's review. The Globe and Mail's review and Kehler's review below are more accurate. Strange behavior by two moral philosophers, the author and Blackburn.
 Moral Clarity is absolutely and utterly wonderful July 26, 2008
9 out of 12 found this review helpful
I couldn't put it down, in every sense that matters. Lots of writing makes us want to be smarter, but it's the rare and precious writing that makes us want to be wiser, more interesting and more worthy, to pay better attention, to rise more often to the occasion, as we surely must in this day and age.
Wherever we may be on the political spectrum, we not only owe it to ourselves, but to those around us who live with our choices, to act with all the moral clarity we can muster. The perspective Susan Neiman offers us in Moral Clarity, with breathtaking depth and style, helps us immeasurably in the process: to size up the moral task at hand, and the surprising wealth of tools at our disposal, and to move forward together to meet it.
Everyone, in other words, bar none, should read and reread this book!
The Values of Enlightenment July 25, 2008
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book is not only about why we should value the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment, but also about what values this tradition proposes for our individual and social moral life, e.g. happiness, reason, reverence and hope. It is a timely reminder that religious fundamentalism and neo-con liberalism are false gods that seem to offer moral clarity in a confused and conflicted era, but subvert rather than support social progress. The author is not so much interested in bashing enemies such as God, Bush etc. - these are less "burning"issues than the question of how we can work toward realizing our ideals in a society that invites and seduces us toward moral relativism and political cynicism. The "Enlightenment heroes" presented here are not just a bunch of Great Dead White Men - apart from the hero of antiquity Odysseus, an unusual choice, which Neiman argues convincingly and with poetic sensibility - but everyday people of our own age who set us examples we need to consider in the light of our own endeavours to make moral sense of our world. Highly recommended,thoughtful and still a really good read!
A good insight into Islamist fundamentalism June 30, 2008
16 out of 19 found this review helpful
I have not finished Neiman's book yet, but want to make a point about her insight into Islamist fundamentalism, found in chapter 3. I lived in the Muslim world for four years and maintain strong ties with it, and I believe Neiman's take on a motivation for devoting one's life to fundamentalist ideas is right. Neiman claims that a desire for both transcendence and freedom (self-determination) underlies much fundamentalism. Moreover, this desire arises against the backdrop of a materialistic world where transcendence is watered down and distorted not only by hedonistic and status-seeking consumption but by the cynicism of both mass media and much intellectual culture. Moreover, contrary to some explanations of fundamentalism -including, one suspects Obama's in Pennsylavania of this year- which paint religion as an escape from oppression or economic depression, the turn to a fundamentally religious life appears as an affirmation of one's power to choose something you take to be noble over base desires and a deadeningly materialistic world. I think this is a very good insight into why smart, middle class, Muslim adults choose Islamic fundamentalism, as far as I can tell (for a good number of the Jihadists are smart, middle class adults). And, although Neiman didn't state this point, it might explain further why the World Trade Center was attacked, why, that is, Islamic fundamentalism is a particularly violent response to globalization, a violent anti-globalization movement of its own.
As a side note, it's interesting that Obama appeals to the core ideas of Neiman's book: Englightenment universalism, hope, the power to make the world better out of idealism -- even though he did draw on the cynical interpretation of idealism in Pennsylvania earlier this year. Neiman is right that that cynical interpretation is both condescending and mistaken. Americans are idealists in their very Constitution, and when things suck it's no surprise that Americans become idealistic in a way that is familiar to us. The challenge for citizens of the world now -- I agree with Neiman-- should be to articulate familiar and accessible ideals that give people the kind of noble outlook the Founding Fathers, suffragettes, and Civil Rights activists had. Here Obama is right on.
Philosophy as good as it gets June 29, 2008
11 out of 13 found this review helpful
Susan Neiman's newest book, Moral Clarity--A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, finds itself in the noblest tradition of philosophy, offering not ready-made answers, but clear and rational guidelines in the use of our own critical judgment in a never-ending attempt to achieve goodness within, through, and despite the human condition. And the book couldn't have appeared at a more critical moment in US history.
Much as Kant examined the role of reason in effecting human progress, Neiman points to our capacity to form clear notions of a just society and to act in accordance with our ideas and standards of what could and ought to be. In the process, she has investigated the Left and the Right for both common ground and points of departure. She chides the Right for its warped priorities on "matters like who gets married rather than who gets tortured," while taking the Left to task for dismissing ethical questions as nothing more than epiphenomenal/idealist outcroppings reflective of underlying socioeconomic conditions that are often deemed more primary and hence "real".
Central to her undertaking is a justifiable reliance on the greatest moral philosophers of the Enlightenment. Neiman reminds us that ideas can change the world in truly fundamental ways, and she gives sound support for all those who hope for a more equitable and just world, echoing again in part Kant's reasoning on the events surrounding the French Revolution, that even though specific aspects of the Revolution might well fail, THE IDEAS themselves would not fade, and once awakened, could not be stilled. In fact, the cornerstone of American independence was founded on "truths" the Founding Fathers held to be "self-evident" ideals: "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." As Neiman so aptly points out, these guiding tenets were, in fact, neither true, nor self-evident. Rather, through a long and painful social-political and educational process we have been striving to make these ideals our reality. Attesting to the power of these noble convictions is the fact that despite the historical crabwalk of progress and setbacks, the General Will in the USA abhors racism and injustice, and has indeed taken great strides in overcoming barriers that were once impossibly divisive.
Neiman has beautifully validated a key point driven home by her friend and former instructor, Margherita von Brentano, that "philosophy is not now, nor has it ever been concerned solely with itself." The book is also a wake-up call for Americans to change the direction the country has taken over the last eight years, and she gives us the tools of sound reasoning in the best tradition to support our efforts.
Is Neiman to be admired more for the profundity of her thinking or for the sheer beauty of her mellifluous prose? She wins on both counts. Like her previous work, Moral Clarity should occupy a top slot in every thinking person's must-have reading list. This is philosophy made real and as good as it gets.
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