The Human Condition
Language: English
Pages: 286
ISBN: 019968748X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Human Condition is a response to the growing disenchantment in the Western world with contemporary life. John Kekes provides rationally justified answers to questions about the meaning of life, the basis of morality, the contingencies of human lives, the prevalence of evil, the nature and extent of human responsibility, and the sources of values we prize. He offers a realistic view of the human condition that rejects both facile optimism and gloomy pessimism; acknowledges that we are vulnerable to contingencies we cannot fully control; defends a humanistic understanding of our condition; recognizes that the values worth pursuing are plural, often conflicting, and that there are many reasonable conceptions of well-being. Kekes emphasizes the importance of facing the fact that man's inhumanity to man is widespread. He rejects as simple-minded both the view that human nature is basically good and that it is basically bad, and argues that our well-being depends on coping with the complex truth that human nature is basically complicated. Finally, Kekes argues that the scheme of things is indifferent to our fortunes and that we can rely only on our own resources to make what we can of our lives.
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Application to the real world. For our caring may be just an illusion we nourish to avoid the unpleasantness of facing the futility of caring about anything. The truth may be that it is our caring that is senseless, not the world. Our beliefs about facts and things may be true, but our beliefs about values may be false. If this were so, I would have clarified a little Euripides’ question, but would not have avoided his answer that it is an illusion to suppose that being guided by reason and values.
Accordance with their ghastly vision. They become mass murderers in order to destroy whoever stands in their way. Moral monsters undoubtedly exist, and they account for some evil actions, but the vast majority of evil we are familiar with cannot be attributed to them. First of all, moral monsters are bound to be rare, because it is very difficult to be one. It requires great strength of character, self-reliance, and the capacity to live without love, friendship, and trust; the willingness to.
Their comforting faith. But their faith is an enemy of well-being. It leads those who hold it to ignore the most serious threat to well-being: the psychological dispositions of human beings to inflict grievous harm on innocent victims, malevolently, deliberately, and without moral justification. The secular problem of evil is to explain why people act on these dispositions rather than on ones that protect the conditions on which well-being, including their own, depends. 6.4. Toward an Adequate.
What they actually do. That is why their victims cannot be innocent; why they have to be killed; why evil-doers can claim to act on motives that have the highest moral credentials; and why their mass murders are in fact the morally justified killings of the most dangerous enemies of human well-being.¹⁴ The third step is to explain how these grotesquely mistaken beliefs could be held by normally intelligent people who are the accomplices of moral monsters, and who believe themselves to be committed.
Stangl said, ‘‘The undressing barracks . . . I avoided it from my innermost being; I couldn’t confront them; I could not lie to them; I avoided at any price talking to those who were about to die: I could not stand it’’ (203). He agreed with Sereny that he ‘‘had acknowledged . . . that what was being committed here [at Treblinka] was a crime’’ (163). How could he have done what he wanted to avoid at any price, from his innermost being? The answer is that he erected a protective shield between his.