Doing the Right Thing: Cultivating Your Moral Intelligence

Imagine a real-life dilemma: your spouse gets diagnosed with a serious mental illness. Soon afterward your only parent develops incurable cancer. No one else is available to share caregiver duties. You can't hire assistance. What do you do?I was reading Aaron Hass's Doing the Right Thing when that happened to me. Three lives were helped.A gem like this often goes underappreciated because it defies categorization. It has no pretensions to academic debate and it doesn't promote the author's particular moral views. Hass begins from the assumption that no ethicist can anticipate all the problems ordinary people face. So he offers a practical framework for the reader to make ethical choices in difficult and unexpected situations. Hass accomplishes this goal with admirable deftness. Although himself a rabbi, he writes for people of all beliefs. An entire chapter develops his argument that ethics require no religious basis. Careful readers find Aristotle's ethics behind Jane Austen's comedies. A similarly disarming accessibility here cloaks Spinoza, Kant, and Russell.Later sections move beyond theory to conditions where real human beings make ethical choices. Hass notes what circumstances are most likely to lead people into actions that go against their stated beliefs. Sidestepping technical discussions of cognitive dissonance, he accepts these phenomena as human nature and offers useful guidelines for minimizing them. The most original discussion handles circumstances where conflicting ethical obligations compete.This is the rare book about morality that respects the reader and acknowledges the complexity of real life. Doing the Right Thing: Cultivating Your Moral Intelligence won't tell you what your values should be. It won't assume that all moral systems are equally valid either. If that sounds intriguing and almost contradictory then give it a closer look. You'll be well rewarded.

i have read many books about ethics and morality. Donig The Right Thing is simply the best and most useful of them all. Although it is very intelligently written, the book does not address abstract philosophical issues. Instead, it deals with everyday relationships and quandaries. I found it absolutely relevant to my own life. The book is filled with warmth and compassion. (The author is not reluctant to describe his own shortcomings along the way.) Despite trying to lead the reader onto a more just path Dr. Hass never preaches. Nor is he judgmental. He simply wants us to do a little better, and be a little better. Doing The Right Thing is filled with extraordinary insights, interesting real life stories and examples, as well as very practical suggestions. I wholeheartedly recommend the book to all!