Books by John Kekes

Liberalism is doomed to failure, John Kekes argues in this penetrating criticism of its basic assumptions. Liberals favor individual autonomy, a wide plurality of choices, and equal rights and resources, seeing them as essential for good lives. They oppose such evils as selfishness, intolerance, cruelty, and greed. Yet the more autonomy...

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. This book argues that ideal theories are abstractions from the realities of everyday life and its problems.

Arguing that the prevalence of evil presents a fundamental problem for our secular sensibility, the author shows that the main sources of evil are habitual, unchosen actions produced by our character defects and that we can increase our control over the evil we cause by cultivating a reflective temper.

Controversies about abortion, the environment, pornography, AIDS, and similar issues naturally lead to the question of whether there are any values that can be ultimately justified, or whether values are simply conventional. John Kekes argues that the present moral and political uncertainties are due to a deep change in our society from a dogmatic to a pluralistic view of values. Dogmatism is committed to there being only one justifiable system of values. Pluralism recognizes many such systems, and yet it avoids a chaotic relativism according to which all values are in the end arbitrary. Maintaining that good lives must be reasonable, but denying that they must conform to one true pattern, Kekes develops and justifies a pluralistic account of good lives and values, and works out its political, moral, and personal implications.

Develops the view that good lives depend on maintaining a balance between one's moral tradition and individuality. Addressing general readers as well as scholars, this two-part work concentrates on social morality, establishing the conditions all good lives must meet; and discusses personal morality, the sphere of individuality.

John Kekes proposes a new way of understanding the nature of philosophical problems, and defends a pluralist approach towards coping with them. He argues that the recurrence of such problems is not a defect, but a consequence of the richness of our modes of understanding that enlarges the range of possibilities by which we might choose to live.

In this profound and yet accessible book, John Kekes discusses moral wisdom: a virtue essential to living a morally good and personally satisfying life. He advances a broad, nontechnical argument that considers the adversities inherent in the human condition and assists in the achievement of good lives.The possession of moral wisdom, Kekes...

Moral imagination, according to John Kekes, is indispensable to a fulfilling and responsible life. By correcting a parochial view of the possibilities available to us and overcoming mistaken assumptions about our limitations, moral imagination...

Evil is the most serious of our moral problems.

In this systematic and scathing attack on the dominant contemporary version of liberalism, John Kekes challenges political assumptions shared by the majority of people in Western societies. Egalitarianism, as it's widely known, holds that a government...

"That the art of life is creative, imaginative, and individual does not mean... that it cannot be taught and learned or that individuals cannot improve their mastery of it. Teaching it proceeds by way of exemplary lives, and learning it consists in...

This original and ambitious book aims to change how we think about good lives. The perennial debates about good lives-the disagreements caused by conflicts between scientific, religious, moral, historical, aesthetic, and subjective modes of...

In his recent book Against Liberalism, philosopher John Kekes argued that liberalism as a political system is doomed to failure by its internal inconsistencies. In this companion volume, he makes a compelling case for conservatism as the best...