What is your highest ideal? What code do you live by? We all know
that these differ from person to person. Nonetheless philosophers
have long sought a single, overriding ideal that should guide
everyone, always, everywhere, and after centuries of debate we're
no closer to an answer. In How Should We Live?, John Kekes offers a
refreshing alternative, one in which we eschew absolute ideals and
instead consider our lives as they really are. Kekes argues that
ideal theories are abstractions from the realities of everyday life
and its problems. The well-known arenas where absolute ideals
conflict-dramatic moral controversies about complex problems
involved in abortion, euthanasia, plea bargaining, privacy, and
other hotly debated topics - should not be the primary concerns of
moral thinking. Instead, he focuses on the simpler problems of
ordinary lives in ordinary circumstances. In each chapter he
presents the conflicts that a real person - a schoolteacher,
lawyer, father, or nurse, for example - is likely to face. He then
uses their situations to shed light on the mundane issues we all
must deal with in everyday life, such as how we use our limited
time, energy, or money; how we balance short- and long-term
satisfactions; how we deal with conflicting loyalties; how we
control our emotions; how we deal with people we dislike; and so
on. Along the way he engages some of our most important theorists,
including Donald Davidson, Thomas Nagel, Christine Korsgaard, Harry
Frankfurt, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Bernard
Williams, ultimately showing that no ideal - whether autonomy,
love, duty, happiness, or truthfulness-trumps any other. Rather
than rejecting such ideals, How Should We Live? offers a way of
balancing them by a practical and pluralistic approach - rather
than a theory - that helps us cope with our problems and come
closer to what our lives should be.
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