“The Human Condition,” by Thomas Whitaker
Morality is the attempt to guide human conduct by rationally formulating and following principles or rules that reflect our basic personal and social commitments and our leading ideals and values. But this presupposes that our “human, all-too-human” lives actually do have some meaning that, in turn, captures our basic personal and social commitments, and our leading ideals and values. In Morality and The Human Condition, Robert Hanna proposes answers to two fundamental questions about morality and meaning: (1) “Is morality possible, and if so, then how ought we to live?” (the moral question), and (2) “Does life have meaning, and if so, then how can we live meaningful lives?” (the meaning question). In pursuit of answers to these questions, after the Introduction (chapter I), Hanna investigates the nature of morality and the standard conception of it (chapter II), three classical challenges to the standard conception (chapter III), morality and religion (chapter IV), three classical moral theories: Aristotelian virtue ethics, Millian utilitarianism, and Kant’s ethics of persons and principles (chapter V), Pascal’s optimism and Schopenhauer’s pessimism (chapter VI), existentialism, the absurd, and affirmation (chapter VII), the morality of authenticity (chapter VIII), the nature of death (chapter IX), and the (im)possibility of human immortality (chapter X).
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