EBS 동영상도 추천해요

다 읽고 나시면 왜 도덕인가? 도 읽어보세요.

내용 전개나 중간 중간 예로 든 부분들은 약간 겹치기도 하고 이야기의 흐름도 비슷합니다.

정의란 무엇인가?

왜 도덕인가?

이 두권을 읽으면서 그런 생각이 들었습니다.

이런 주제에 대해 진지하게 고민해야 할 때가 되었구나.

의미있는 주제, 가장 기본적인 원칙에 대해 우리도 조금은 더 고민해야 할 때가 되었구나.

암튼, 책 읽으면서 여러모로 고민하고 한 편으로는 즐거웠던 경험이었습니다.

Moral Dilemmas 부분만 쳐봤습니다.

제가 가지고 있는 것은 영국판(?) 페이퍼백입니다.

전 늦게 주문해서 하드커버를 못구했는데, 당시 하드커버와 페이퍼백간 가격차이가 적어서 아쉬었습니다.

Moral Dilemmas

Few of us face choices as fateful as those that confronted the soldiers on the mountain or the witness to the runaway trolley. But wrestling with their dilemmas sheds light on the way moral argument can proceed, in our personal lives and in the public square.

 Life in democratic societies is rife with disagreement about right and wrong, justice and injustice. Some people favor abortion rights, and others consider abortion to be murder. Some believe fairness requires taxing the rich to help the poor, while others believe it is unfair to tax away money people have earned through their own efforts. Some defend affirmative action in college admissions as a way of righting past wrongs, whereas others consider it an unfair form of reverse discrimination against people who deserve admission on their merits. Some people reject the torture of terror suspects as a moral abomination unworthy of a free society, while others defend it as a last resort to prevent a terrorist attack.

 Elections are won and lost on these disagreements. The so-called culture wars are fought over them. Given the passion and intensity with which we debate moral questions in public life, we might be tempted to think that our moral convictions are fixed once and for all, by upbringing or faith, beyond the reach of reason.

 But if this were true, moral persuasion would be inconceivable, and what we take to be public debate about justice and rights would be nothing more than a volley of dogmatic assertions, and ideological food fight.

 At its worst, our politics comes close to this condition. But it need not be this way. Sometimes, an argument can change our minds.

 How, then, can we reason our way through the contested terrain of justice and injustice, equality and inequality, individual rights and the common good? This book tries to answer that question.

 One way to begin is to notice how moral reflection emerges naturally from an encounter with a hard moral question. We start with an opinion, or a conviction, about the right thing to do: "Turn the trolley onto the side track." Then we reflect on the reason for our conviction, and seek out the principle on which it is based: "Better to sacrifice one life to avoid the death of many." Then, confronted with a situation that confounds the principle, we are pitched into confusion: "I thought it was always right to save as many lives as possible, and yet it seems wrong to push the man off the bridge (or to kill the unarmed goatherds)." Feeling the force of that confusion, and the pressure to sort it out, is the impulse to philosophy.

 Confronted with this tension, we may revise our judgment about the right thing to do, or rethink the principle we initially espoused. As we encounter new situations, we move back and forth between our judgments and our principles, revising each in light of the other. This turning of mind, from the world of action to the realm of reasons and back again, is what moral reflection consists in.

 This way of conceiving moral argument, as a dialectic between our judgments about particular situations and the principles we affirms on reflection, has a long tradition. It goes back to the dialogues of Socrates and the moral philosophy of Aristotle. But notwithstanding its ancient lineage, it is open to the following challenge:

 If moral reflection consists in seeking a fit between the judgments we make and the principles we affirm, how can such reflection lead us to justice, or moral truth? Even if we succeed, over a lifetime, in bringing our moral intuitions and principled commitments into alignment, what confidence can we have that the result is anything more than a self-consistent skein of prejudice?

 The answer is that moral reflection is not a solitary pursuit but a public endeavor. It requires an interlocutor―a friend, a neighbor, a comrade, a fellow citizen. Sometimes the interlocutor can be imagined rather than real, as when we argue with ourselves. But we cannot discover the meaning of justice or the best way to live through introspection alone.

 In Plato's Republics, Socrates compares ordinary citizens to a group of prisoners confined in a cave. All they ever see is the play of shadows on the wall, a reflection of objects they can never apprehend. Only the philosopher, in this account, is able to ascend from the cave to the bright light of day, where he sees things as they really are. Socrates suggests that, having glimpsed the sun, only the philosopher is fit to rule the cave dwellers, if he can somehow be coaxed back into the darkness where they live.

 Plato's point is that to grasp the meaning of justice and the nature of the good life, we must rise above the prejudices and routines of everyday life. He is right, I think, but only in part. The claims of the cave must be given their due. If moral reflections is dialectical―if it moves back and forth between the judgments we make in concrete situations and the principles that inform those judgments―it needs opinions and convictions, however partial and untutored, as ground and grist. A philosophy untouched by the shadows on the wall can only yield a sterile utopia.

 When moral reflection turns political, when it asks what laws should govern our collective life, it needs some engagement with the tumult of the city, with the arguments and incidents that roil the public mind. Debates over bailouts and price gouging, income inequality and affirmative action, military service and same-sex marriage, are the stuff of political philosophy. They prompt us to articulate and justify our moral and political convictions, not only among family and friends but also in the demanding company of our fellow citizens.

 More demanding still is the company of political philosophers, ancient and modern, who thought through, in sometimes radical and surprising ways, the ideas that animate civic life―justice and rights, obligation and consent, honor and virtue, morality and law. Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls all figure in these pages. But their order of appearance is not chronological. This book is not a history of ideas, but a journey in moral and political reflection. Its goal is not to show who influenced whom in the history of political thought, but to invite readers to subject their own views about justice to critical examination―to figure out what they think, and why.