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Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Revised Edition)

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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.

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.

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.

This is a well intentioned but muddled book. I'm sympathetic to the author's politics, ethical position, and her goals in writing this book but the analysis and quality of writing are relatively weak. This book is driven by Neiman's disgust with the Bush administration, the general conservative predominance in American life, and the unjustified assumption that religiosity confers an ethical advantage. Neiman advocates a secular, rational form of ethics. This book is divided into 3 sections. In the initial section, Neiman provides a diagnosis of the present problem. In her analysis, leftists/liberals have abdicated the moral high ground to conservatives because of failure to explicitly espouse moral values. Neiman argues that in this conflict of `ideas have consequences,' leftist/liberal intellectuals have become preoccupied with post-modernist relativism and on a practical level with narrow interest group politics. Neiman suggests also that the collapse of Marxism as a creditable doctrine deprived leftist intellectuals of an organizing framework. While this assessment contains some particles of truth, a lot is questionable. The impact of post-modernism is greatly exaggerated and Neiman overrates the impact of intellectuals in general. As for the collapse of Marxism, while she could be correct about Europe, Marxism was not a very potent doctrine in the USA. What is particularly striking about Neiman's analysis, however, is that it conforms closely to standard conservative critiques of liberalism. Virtually everything she writes has popped up, repeatedly, in conservative attacks on American liberalism. But is the conservative/Neiman assertion of the left/liberal retreat from moral language and moral assertion correct? Is such a retreat responsible for the decline in liberalism as a political success? Probably not. What has particularly hurt liberal politicians over the last 50 years is not the failure left/liberal assertion of moral positions but rather the relative success of some left/liberal moral positions. Policies such as opposition to the Vietnam War, opening access to abortion, and increased environmental regulations all detached significant fractions of previously liberal supporters. The oft cited (including by Neiman) moral apogee of liberalism, the Civil Rights movement, resulted in a racist backlash exploited by conservative/Republican politicians to detach a crucial fraction of the New Deal/liberal coalition, particularly in the South. A significant contributing factor to the problems of ontemporary left/liberalism is not failure to assert moral positions but complications of taking such positions.

In the second and best section of the book, Neiman sketches out a secular moral framework based on an assertion of Enlightenment values with a strongly Kantian orientation. Much of this is well done. Neiman makes a generally accessible case for her secular, rational ethics. She does well also at defending the Enlightenment from some of the crude caricatures presented by critics from both the right and the left. Unfortunately, this section also has both minor and major deficiencies. Neiman tends to jump around when writing and her defense of the Enlightenment could have been more coherent. Her use of terminology is sometimes confusing. For example, she uses the term metaphysics in different and sometimes conflicting senses. She makes some significant factual errors surprising in a well trained philosopher. Describing Hume as a conservative advocate of the status quo and emphasizing the skeptical aspects of his epistemology at the expense of his naturalism is misleading. Neiman's major error is the suggestion that the view of life she is presenting offers a vision of transcendence that can be usefully offered to the many who seek transcendence in traditional and especially radical religious ideologies. While I agree that than an ethical system along the lines she espouses could be inspiring, its unlikely to provide the kind of emotional rewards sought be people attracted to traditional religious (and some secular) ideologies. The emphasis on autonomy, individual choice, and humanity as a source of values are quite different from ideologies promising that the cosmos is taking a personal interest in you and promising rewards in the next life, if not in this one.

In the last section, Neiman has a discussion of heroism, something she thinks would be pedagogically important. There is a somewhat diffuse discussion of heroism and presentation of the lives of several admirable individuals she regards as heroic. I'm not sure this section adds much to her general thesis.

Neiman identified an important topic. Asserting, on rational grounds, a strong secular system of ethics in contrast to the dubious ethical claims of traditional theists is a laudable goal. It's a pity that Neiman hasn't written that book.

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.

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.

Although I have always counted myself as a member of the Left, I have for a long time felt uncomfortable with its ready-made formulas and its moral meekness. This book does nothing less than offer us a new vision for the Left. It is fiercly smart, funny, and often moving. A must-read for any thinking person.

-Eva Illouz

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.

Susan Neiman's book comes at a time when we need it most. In a period of indecision, her book gives great insight into present day politics and the moral and ethical problems one encounters as a citizen of the world. This is a must read for those interested in understanding the key issues of American politics or contemporary politics in general. Moral Clarity should be taken for what it is: a guide for those lost in the cesspool of politics and in search of the moral road to the future.

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!