Everyday Morality
reviewed by Preston Jones
Books by John Kekes:
Moral Tradition and Individuality
Princeton University Press, 1989
(264 pages; $20.00, paper)
Facing Evil
Princeton University Press, 1990
(264 pages; $22.00, paper)
The Morality of Pluralism
Princeton University Press, 1993
(238 pages; $20.00, paper)
Moral Wisdom and Good Lives
Cornell University Press, 1995
(272 pages; $18.95, paper)
Against Liberalism
Cornell University Press, 1997
(256 pages; $17.95, paper)
A Case for Conservatism
Cornell University Press, 1998
(256 pages; $16.95, paper)
Pluralism in Philosophy: Changing the Subject
Cornell University Press, 2000
(256 pages; $32.50, cloth)
A refreshing thing about the moral philosopher John Kekes is his unwavering focus on real life. Ordinary life, Kekes says, should be faced, accurately assessed, and attended to because, barring the contingencies that conspire to defeat a person’s life projects, that is how good lives can be lived—or at least approximated. “Most of our lives are spent in familiar activities,” Kekes writes in Pluralism in Philosophy. “We sleep, wash, dress, eat, go to work, work, shop, relax, balance the checkbook, clean house, do the laundry, have the car serviced, chat, pay bills, worry about this or that, and take small pleasure in small things.” Of course, Kekes’s point is obvious; no sane person would dispute that, in his words, “Life is mostly everyday.”
And yet it seems equally obvious that many people do not want to face reality; even in this supposedly sober post-September 11 world, Americans grasp for the latest in popular psychology, ignore plain statistics about the destructiveness of moral selfishness, set aside clear evidence that heavy television viewing is wrecking children’s minds, and promote forms of Christianity that in fact repudiate that faith’s central beliefs and traditions.
Preston Jones teaches history at John Brown University.
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