The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition (Volume 1) - Hardcover

Fleming, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826215092 ISBN 13: 9780826215093

Publisher: University of Missouri, 2004

Synopsis

In TheMorality of Everyday Life, Thomas Fleming offers an alternative to the enlightened liberalism espoused by thinkers as different as Kant, Mill, Rand, and Rawls. Philosophers in the liberal tradition, although they disagree on many important questions, agree that moral and political problems should be looked at from an objective point of view and a decision made from a rational perspective that is universally applied to all comparable cases.

Fleming instead places importance on the particular, the local, and moral complexity.  He advocates a return to premodern traditions, such as those exemplified in the texts of Aristotle, the Talmud, and the folk wisdom in ancient Greek literature, for a solution to ethical predicaments. In his view, liberalism and postmodernism ignore the fact that human beings by their very nature refuse to live in a world of universal abstractions.

While such modern philosophers as Kant and Kohlberg have regarded a mother’s self-sacrificing love for her children as beneath their level of morality, folk wisdom tells us it is nearly the highest morality, taking precedence over the duties of citizenship or the claims of humanity. Fleming believes that a modern type of “casuistry” should be applied to these moral conflicts in which the line between right and wrong is rarely clear.

This volume will appeal to students of ethics and classics, as well as the general educated reader, who will appreciate Fleming’s jargon-free prose. Teachers will find this text useful because each chapter is a self-contained essay that could be used as the basis for classroom discussion.   

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Fleming holds a doctorate in classics and is the editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, published by the Rockford Institute in Rockford, Illinois. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including The Politics of Human Nature and The Conservative Movement.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* For at least 50 years, one rallying cry of reform has been for politics, economics, and so forth on a "human scale," by which is meant a politics, economics, and so forth responsive to ordinary peoples' concerns in their families, neighborhoods, churches, clubs, and workplaces. Fleming perhaps sympathizes with the sentiment, but he points to the stumbling block to realizing it--the set of "hallmarks of the modern (that is, since the seventeenth century) ethical tradition" that constitutes what he calls liberalism. Modern liberalism and modern conservatism alike use those hallmarks--universality, rationality, individualism, objectivity, and abstract idealism--to determine what is ethical. He subjects those hallmarks to scrutiny, arguing that each has contributed to the common person's loss of effectiveness and the trivialization of common concerns and associations. Exalting objectivity, for instance, derogates the importance of such subjective interests as love, friendship, and personal and familial survival. The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Jews mostly understood that survival, the family, the community, and the material world--natural things rooted in concrete existence--must be the bases of ethics, and that human beings were limited creatures incapable of the perfections dreamed of by philosophical system builders. Writing much more accessibly and knowledgeably than most modern, professional philosophers, Fleming revivifies the body of thought with which civilization was created and without which it is disintegrating. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0826215092
• ISBN 13: 9780826215093
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280