The Moral Imagination: Confronting the Ethical Issues of Our Day

It's very difficult to write a book about some of the toughest political and moral issues of our day, and come out pleasing many people. I like this book for the intelligent approach it takes to examining the historical facts of an issue, making an honest attempt to see different perspectives on it, and then showing how the disagreement itself can be helpful. Surely, even the most sophisticated moral reasoning tends to reflect temperamental biases, emotional needs, and background more than it brings us to any sort of universal agreement. However, at least taking stock of the different sides of an issue and the priorities they reflect helps us understand our own position better. I appreciate that a previous reviewer found this book bascially a rehash of predictable left-wing arguments that reflect the author's politics. It is interesting that this was the basis for such a terrible rating, since the author's predictable left-wing opinions actually are a very small part of the content and message of the book, and seem to serve more an example than anything else. Presumably all that background information on each issue is viewed either as trivial or overly biased, and I didn't find either to be true. Ironically, the fact that many people will have such a strong knee-jerk reaction to opinions that differ with their own is part of the rationale for the way the book is organized; to show how sometimes examining the disagreement itself is useful rather than just choosing a side because it coincides with our previous thinking. Especially with such important and emotionally charged issues as these.