Books by John Kekes

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.

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...

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...