John Kekes and the Predicament of the Secularist

Gerhart Niemeyer once began an essay on modernity’s loss of the knowledge of true goodness with the blunt observation that “There is an order of goodness in the universe, and human knowledge can attain to it. The proposition is made here as an assertion and an affirmation. In the context of the question raised by this paper it comes as a premise which, if we did not have it, would leave us without anything to talk about.”¹ Without a given order of goodness we could discuss the weather or the molecular structure of DNA or the design of computer software, but there would be no grounds on which we could seek the truth about moral and political order or the meaning of our existence, for we would know only our individual incommunicable worlds of private preferences and subjective sensations. It is just as if there were no objective order of numbers and mathematicians had, therefore, nothing to talk about other than to express their personal tastes in numerical arrangements. Although Niemeyer could readily diagnose modernity’s loss of consciousness of the true nature of good, as a remedy he could only hope for regenerative experiences that would re-awaken “the awe-filled love of truth and goodness,” the love that defines humanity and provides the foundation of meaningful discourse.

Now imagine the predicament of a reflective, morally sensitive man, well-versed in the philosophical and literary traditions, but also steeped in modernity, a man who has made it his life’s work to provide his fellow human beings with a detailed theoretical account of meaningful “good lives,” but who has not apparently been gifted with either spiritually regenerative experiences or even an awareness of a need for them, and, as a result, “does not share the assumption of the religious world view that a morally good order permeates the scheme of things.”² What can such a man have to talk about?

This is, I believe, the central issue in the work of John Kekes, who since 1976 has published thirteen books, most of which are concerned with proposing and defending his entirely secular interpretation of the meaning of “good lives.” With a substantial amount of repetition his books cover the moral, political, and, to some extent, psychological aspects that he deems essential to his understanding of human happiness, with entire books, or major parts of books, devoted, for instance, to subjects such as character, human nature, the basis of moral values, individuality, pluralism, moral traditions, evil, and “the art of life.” Since there is too much detail in Kekes’s books for adequate treatment in a relatively brief essay, I will concentrate on the core of his argument about good lives in his three most recent works, The Art of Life (2002), The Illusions of Egalitarianism (2003), and The Roots of Evil (2005), which essentially cover what he has had to say (although some topics are discussed at substantially greater length in earlier books).³

Let me say at the outset that there is much in Kekes’s efforts to promote the happiness of human beings that, as far as it goes, has, from my conservative perspective, a great deal of merit. Unlike many of our contemporaries he believes that the objective truth about a universal and unchanging human nature is the essential basis of morality. He understands the importance of individuality and the enormous harm done to human beings by stretching them on the Procrustean bed of some collectivist theory. Although secularists tend to be liberals, Kekes rejects liberalism, probably in large part because he recognizes that an inclination to evil is rooted in human nature. He is scornful of the not uncommon illusion that human beings are essentially good and the innocent victims of evils propagated by factors in the social and political environment, for he recognizes that proclivities for good and evil reside in every human heart. He eschews ideology and abstract theories remote from the actual circumstances of life, holding to the belief that reasoning must be grounded in concrete reality rather than abstract speculation, which is one reason why he often relies on works of literature to make his points. He possesses a very clear and incisive intellect that is quite effective in analyzing and exposing the flaws in theories such as egalitarianism. Even in the case of actions that, at the time of commission, were not entirely intentional, he stresses the importance of holding people accountable because he believes that human beings are responsible “for the readily foreseeable consequences of [their] actions.”⁴ And he clings to the old-fashioned idea that justice is based on desert rather than equality. Such positions would, on the whole, recommend him to conservatives, so it is not surprising that in 1998 he published A Case for Conservatism in which he argued that good lives are more likely to be enjoyed in a society governed by conservative rather than by liberal principles.

And yet, once we probe into the foundations of all these positions, which are the sum and substance of his conservatism, we find a modern man who, because he basically believes in nothing, must grapple with the modern predicament of how to fill a metaphysical void with entirely immanent concepts of human nature, consciousness, goodness, and happiness. Although for this reason I find his books and his arguments hollow at the core, I also think that his work is useful as an example of the capabilities and limitations of outwardly conservative principles in the absence of an order of goodness.

What does Kekes mean by “good lives,” a phrase that he uses so often that it is essentially his leitmotiv? To the heirs of two thousand years of Christianity the question might seem to have been definitively answered, but Kekes rejects all beliefs that the goodness of lives has any relationship to any reality beyond the human. Instead, he has set himself the task of analyzing and describing good lives in an Epicurean cosmos in which “there is no moral order in the scheme of things; there are only impersonal, unmotivated, purposeless, natural processes,” and “there is no convincing reason for supposing that the good is basic and evil is derivative and there is no more reason to think that evil is interference with the good than that good is interference with evil.”⁵ Therefore, in the scheme of things human well-being has no significance at all, “not because something else would matter more, but because nothing would matter.”⁶ While Kekes’s polemic is often directed toward theories that deny the objective reality of human nature or promote policies that conflict with the conditions he considers necessary for good lives, he also distances himself quite emphatically from any tendency to ground morality and the good in the metaphysical. “The basis of good lives…is not metaphysical; rather, it is the possession of a point of view, a perspective from which the world is judged. And that perspective is sub specie humanitatis.”⁷ Reality is as morally and metaphysically indifferent to good for Kekes as it was for Epicurus, and just as for Epicurus “good and evil are human values, human ways of judging whether our well-being is favorably or unfavorably affected.”⁸

This sort of judgment regarding human well-being inevitably comes down to pleasures and satisfactions versus pains and frustrations. To avoid an entirely subjective and relativist morality Kekes grounds it in the objective and unalterable facts of human nature (which is itself metaphysically groundless), a “moderate naturalist” position he defends against the historicist view that denies any such essential and immutable humanity. He points out, correctly, that there are necessary and universal physiological, psychological, and social human characteristics, which are, however, dealt with in various ways by different societies and cultures, for example, “eating habits, sexual mores, and attitudes to competition are variable.”⁹ Kekes’s moderate naturalism enables him to agree with naturalists that there is at least “a minimum content” of human nature that is objective, substantive, and universal, “a core of constant unchanging human nature,”¹⁰ while also agreeing with historicists that human beings are diverse. Thus he distinguishes between formal and substantive characteristics, the former being abstract and general, the latter concrete and particular. “That hunger must be at least minimally satisfied is a formal characteristic of human beings; that the satisfaction includes or excludes cannibalism or raw meat is a substantive characteristic.”¹¹ Custom is powerful, but not quite king.

It is on the basis of the objective facts of the world and universal human nature, as well as the human prerogative to choose the values that we think will promote our well-being, that Kekes proposes his central idea “that good lives depend on doing what we want,” more precisely, what we reasonably want, given what human nature is, and also what the world is, for we must adjust ourselves to fit the world by “self-direction.” More specifically, “our lives are subjectively good if we succeed in satisfying our most important wants in accordance with appropriate ideals, and they are subjectively good if reasonable observers agree with this appraisal.”¹² The critical words here, “subjectively good,” “most important wants,” “appropriate ideals,” and “reasonable observers,” all are both symptoms and masks of the essential meaninglessness of human “good lives.” What determines the goodness of our most important wants, our ideals, and the opinions of reasonable observers? Goodness seems to be whatever promotes human flourishing, but on what grounds beyond the biological do we determine what constitutes genuine human flourishing? Did Socrates live a (subjectively) good life simply because reasonable observers agreed that he satisfied his most important wants in agreement with appropriate ideals, that is, the ideals he had chosen by his own self-direction? Did Socrates want to live a good life or the good life? Who determines if Plato or Callicles is the reasonable observer?

In Moral Tradition and Individuality Kekes stipulated that lives can be called good “only if they are both personally satisfying and have moral merit.”¹³ In The Art of Life he is more explicit:

Lives are good if they are personally satisfying, morally acceptable, and free of cognitive, emotive, and motivational errors that vitiate the ideals of personal excellence and projects to which people have committed themselves. But since the ideals and projects that may give personal satisfaction, many of the moral rules that are to be followed, and the errors that are to be avoided are individually variable, no general account of good lives is possible. That, however, does not mean that the goodness of particular lives cannot be reasonably judged.¹⁴

Note that the first criterion for a good life that Kekes lists is that it be personally satisfying. This involves an individual’s own freely chosen commitments and ideals of personal excellence selected from the repertoire within a tradition or culture. Kekes does not, however, want to succumb to complete subjectivism, for that would leave him with nothing at all to talk about except a survey of personal preferences, hence the need for “objective” observers and judges. Nevertheless, in a cosmos completely lacking in any good moral order, in which the “scheme of things… is non-moral,” he sees no reason to believe that there is any universal standard that would bestow goodness on all the lives that in their individual ways conform to it. Therefore, he gives a central role to self-direction, which means that “one’s ideal of a good life is the standard that should guide decisions, inform the will, and provide purposes and reasons” and “the conception of a good life should be one’s own rather than the result of influences over which one has no control.”¹⁵ In short, in morality “we have no reason to rely on resources external to humanity.”¹⁶

This might sound like relativism, but that is a position Kekes claims to reject in favor of “pluralism” which maintains that there are many human values, such as peace, prosperity, order, security, civility, happiness, patriotism, and equality, no one of which can or should always dominate. In the complex actual circumstances of human life some of these values are usually incompatible and the best results do not always follow from giving dominance to the same value, so it is impossible to make one primary. “We believe, in our pluralistic age, that there are many moral truths, many fine moral traditions, and many reasonable ideals of a good life.”¹⁷ For example, at a time when contraception is unavailable or ineffective chastity is considered a moral good, but in our contraceptive age, with a different moral truth, chastity no longer need be considered a virtue.¹⁸ There is no universal moral truth, such as natural law, for example, that would hold for all human beings. Kekes does not deny the existence of moral authority, but he considers it an authority that evaluates the reasonableness of various pluralist values and the choice of values in complex situations rather than an authority that articulates the moral truth.¹⁹ Kekes accepts human moral authorities but no higher authority because morality is entirely a human affair. The only moral universality that Kekes recognizes is that of similar commitments. “There are many reasonable ideals of a good life, and people can accept or reject any of them without violating reason or objectivity. What cannot be done without the loss of reason and objectivity is to make a commitment to a particular ideal and then refuse to recognize it as a standard of moral evaluation that applies to all those who are similarly committed.”²⁰ For Kekes the choice of commitment is the decision to live in a particular moral universe inhabited by all those who have made the same commitment, and the moral standards that apply in one moral universe do not necessarily apply in others. A good life is one that avoids evil while consistently following the chosen moral ideal. But why is it better to do this rather than to follow Callicles’s advice and simply pursue the maximum amount of personal satisfaction?

Thus, the attempt to ground the goodness of lives in Kekes’s terms leaves us with fundamental questions. Consider, for example, Kekes’s samples, or “forms,” of good lives. One is a woman with great talent as a painter who devotes her life single-mindedly to studying great art and mastering the skills she needs to express her particular vision of the world. After many years of assiduous effort, refusing the temptations to compromise her vision to make money or even to teach, she is finally able to express her vision effortlessly. She is not distracted from her vision by all the money, fame, and appreciation that eventually come her way. “She continued to paint, and when she died she left many works of lasting value to posterity. She lived a good life whose guiding ideal was self-direction and whose project was painting.” The second is a historian who is persuaded to become an academic dean because people value his integrity and expect that he will remove politics and special interests from academic life. He emphasizes the traditional values of research and teaching and the quest for truth. “The ideal of this good life was moral authority, and its project was the much-maligned work of academic administration.” The third is a woman who lives an unremarkable life as a nurse, wife, and mother while endeavoring to do everything as well as she can. “She was a sensible, competent, level-headed, kind woman. Her life exemplified the ideal of decency, and her projects were those of the normal pursuits of a quiet life.” The fourth is an engineer who, after a series of family, financial, and professional misfortunes, winds up as a reflective auto mechanic. After extensive reading he finally comes to understand “the contingency of life, the human vulnerability to uncontrollable forces and accidents, the illusory nature of regarding the scheme of things as either benign or malign.” He recognizes that he was not responsible for his misfortunes and that he just had bad luck in an indifferent universe. The goodness of his life comes from the ideal of depth, and his project is to come to terms with the misfortunes that had derailed his life. The fifth is an honest and uncompromising politician who rejects the mutual favors of ordinary politics and eventually becomes respected as someone who could be trusted as “a principled man of his word.” His life was good because of his successful pursuit of the ideal of honor and his project was political reform.²¹

These are specimens of good lives. There are, of course, many others. What they have in common, according to Kekes, is the pursuit of worthy ideals and the engagement in personally chosen projects. Now, while most people would probably agree, on the basis of the given descriptions, that such lives seem to be good, it is not so clear that simply characterizing them as pursuing ideals and working out chosen projects adequately explains the goodness of these lives. Let me raise some questions.

What makes the painter’s vision good and worthy of choice? What if she single-mindedly devotes her life to pursuing a vision that never appeals to anyone else? Or it is her vision of sexual freedom or racial purity or religious fanaticism that resonates with many people in her society? Is single-minded dedication to any vision, or to any vision that pleases a certain minimum number of other people, sufficient to qualify a life as good?

What if the truth the historian-dean pursues with uncompromising integrity is the Communist understanding of truth? And why do people value integrity in the first place? Simply because it makes their own lives more pleasant? What if his uncompromising integrity simply annoys almost everyone else?

Why would it be good to conform completely to the conventional patterns of wife, mother, nurse, and neighbor rather than be independent and try to overthrow any or all of them, precisely because they are so conventional? Or is that commitment a different but equally good life?

Whence does the “depth” that enables someone to come to the conclusion that human beings live in a world that is devoid of goodness derive its goodness? That is, what is specifically good about believing that the nature of reality is not good? Is it good because it is (allegedly) true? But then truth would be a fundamental good. Is it good because it allows the individual to make “sense” of his life? But how can life make sense in a senseless universe? And in a universe in which everything is unmotivated, purposeless, and indifferent, how can there be “depth?”

Finally, what makes the politician’s honest way of engaging in politics better than the established practice of trading favors? Why would or should people respect this? What if his refusal to compromise makes him so ineffective in representing his constituents’ interests that they end up worse off?

I raise these questions to point out that for all Kekes’s talk of ideals and projects, values and moral traditions, in the absence of an order of goodness he can present these lives as good only to the extent to which they give people pleasures, or at least do not inflict harm, but as Socrates pointed out to Callicles, reducing the good to pleasure leads to untenable consequences. By eliminating transcendence Kekes has left the goodness of lives grounded in nothing more substantive than what human beings desire. Human desires and standards are certainly not irrelevant to good lives, but neither do they provide a sufficient account. Meaning requires giving ourselves to something greater than our own desires and standards.

Since Kekes believes that the moral acceptability of good lives means that individuals also refrain from unnecessarily, excessively, and undeservedly harming others, he has much to say about evil. The concept of evil seems to be one of universal application, regardless of individual moral commitments, that is, no one can reasonably be committed to a particular ideal that involves inflicting evil on others. But evil is a human judgment determined entirely by our assessments of the unfavorable effect of an action on our well-being. Kekes characterizes evil as “serious undeserved harm,”²² and since he believes that “morality must be committed to decreasing evil,”²³ he regards it as part of his own moral commitment to critique any moral theory, principle, or value that he believes actually contributes to the increase of evil. One such moral theory is egalitarianism, one of the widespread ideals of our pluralistic age, which he thoroughly critiques in The Illusions of Egalitarianism.

Kekes is not opposed to equality itself but only to the ideology that regards some interpretation of human equality as a moral absolute. His critique of egalitarianism is, on the whole, incisive, trenchant, and logical in its exposure of the denial of reality at the heart of the egalitarian ideology. His insistence that human nature is not, in reality, simply rational, beneficent, and just, but also contains inclinations to evil makes him a realist and is one of the main reasons why he strongly favors a conservative over a liberal society. Liberals of the egalitarian persuasion claim that the world would be a much better place if only the basic goodness of human nature were not denied and frustrated by evil inequalities in society. Different egalitarians argue in different ways that redesigning society to eliminate such evils would liberate human goodness. Not hampered by these illusions Kekes takes on in successive chapters eleven forms of egalitarian falsehood, and the thinkers who support them, pointing out in every case the logical inconsistencies and the inevitable increase, rather than reduction, in evil as a result of dogmas regarding equal property, equal freedom, equal compassion or consideration for all, and the equal moral worth of all human beings. He argues effectively that there are evildoers whose propensity to inflict serious undeserved harm on others is facilitated by social arrangements that promote equal freedom. After all, how much freedom, consideration, and compassion should a sane society afford pedophiles and terrorists?

Another of Kekes’s fundamental disagreements with egalitarianism concerns its claim that human beings bear responsibility only for those actions that are deliberately chosen. There are egalitarians who do not ascribe responsibility to evildoers whose actions were either unintentional or only partly intentional. Kekes does, albeit a diminished responsibility, but still one that deserves a degree of punishment according to the degree of responsibility. His position is that even if a person is not responsible for his character he is still responsible for the easily foreseeable consequences of actions. Kekes considers actions unintentional “if they are done by people who lack or cannot exercise the capacity to choose, understand, or evaluate their alternatives.”²⁴ Actions are partly intentional if the agents possess this capacity but fail to exercise it. Thus, in Kekes’s view, they are responsible for failing to do what they are capable of doing to prevent an increase of evil in the world, a welcome appraisal of moral responsibility in a climate of opinion in which we often hear that crime and terrorism are caused by poverty or social injustice, thus absolving the criminal and the terrorist of responsibility for their actions. His critique of egalitarianism is trenchant and thorough, but it still leaves us with the question of the ground of goodness.

Kekes’s most recent book, The Roots of Evil, is his most serious attempt to explore the human inclinations, dispositions, and passions that lead to evildoing. His thesis is that “the causes of evil are in us, not outside us, [and] in doing evil we express a deep part of our nature.”²⁵ Accordingly, Part One discusses six cases that exemplify what he considers the six roots of evil. The types of evil he surveys are all essentially “serious, excessive, malevolent, and inexcusable harm” inflicted through murder, mutilation, torture, genocide, and massacres. The cases begin with the thirteenth-century Albigensian Crusade against the heretical, Manichaean sect of Cathars, a crusade that was carried out by persecution, siege, massacre, mutilation, and autos-da-fé. Kekes acknowledges that the crusaders seriously believed that they were carrying out the will of God but argues that heresy could have been suppressed without mass murder, often of the innocent along with the guilty. So far Kekes seems to be on reasonably solid ground. However, when he takes up the justification of the violence on the grounds of faith he reveals a profound misunderstanding, stating that the justification of basic Christian belief is faith “which entitles one to hold these beliefs with absolute certainty.”²⁶ Kekes later qualified this assertion, acknowledging that faith may not, in fact, carry such complete certainty but goes on to argue that “all kinds of faith are liable to this threat [of doing evil while believing it to be good] because they go beyond reason,” that is, reason in the sense of the scientific power to draw logical conclusions from experiential evidence.²⁷ Be-cause faith has discarded reason it has no resources to protect itself against evil tendencies that “result from the very nature of faith.” Kekes does not think that faith necessarily leads to evil, but the “effort of will” required “to accept what to reason appears unacceptable”²⁸ renders faith constantly vulnerable to evil. It would be far better if faith was simply replaced by reason which can criticize motives. Therefore, the abandonment of reason, in the secular sense, is one root of evil. Kekes seems to assume that secular reason is an agent of good but it is precisely this type of reason, grounded only in satisfaction, that is used to justify abortion and euthanasia.

Another root of evil is ideology as exemplified by Robespierre and the Terror during the French Revolution, analyzed in gory detail in a chapter called “Perilous Dreams.” Robespierre had absorbed Rousseau’s theory of the Sovereign and the General Will and had evolved an ideology that justified eliminating opponents. Much of what Kekes has to say about ideologies is penetrating and he correctly perceives the egocentric nature of Robespierre’s ideology. “The aim of his politics was to make the world fit his passion, and he did not even try to make his passion fit the world.”²⁹ If Kekes thought metaphysically he could have said that the aim of Robespierre’s ideology was to impose a “second reality” or a dreamworld on the primary and true reality, that an ideology is a willful denial of reality in the name of power. He does see that those who do evil in the cause of the ideology while sincerely believing that they are doing good are, nonetheless, still responsible for the evil. Sincere belief in a theory that sanctions brutal murder makes Robespierre “more, not less, culpable.” Human beings are responsible for not recognizing that assassins in judicial robes are still murderers.

Kekes’s third example is Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp from early 1942 until the end of 1943.³⁰ Kekes is not particularly impressed by the argument that Stangl had a character so corrupted by ambition that he could not be held responsible for active participation in genocide. “Choice is not the pivot on which responsibility turns, not because the pivot is something else, but because there is no pivot….[T]he lack of choice does not preclude the assignment of responsibility.” Whether or not he consciously chose to engage in evil, “his character was such that in the circumstances of Nazi Germany he became a mass murderer. It is reasonable to hold him responsible for his actions, even though without the fatal fusion of his character and circumstances, he might not have done what he did.”³¹ According to Kekes, Stangl did not restrain his ambition because he managed to protect himself psychologically against the horror of his actions by, for example, thinking of his victims as less than human, by regarding his “work” as mere routine, and by deflecting his attention to other, innocuous, tasks, such as gardening. This psychological distancing enabled him to become a prime example of the banality of evil as “the best extermination camp Kommandant in Poland.”³²

The other examples of evil that Kekes considers are the Manson murders, which he attributes to the pride and envy of Charles Manson; the “dirty war” against leftists in Argentina between 1976 and 1983, in which numerous people were tortured and murdered by members of the military because, he says, the mindset of the killers did not allow them to perceive the evil of their actions; and the psychopathic career criminal John Allen who, Kekes believes, committed his crimes out of cruelty, aggressiveness, and self-centeredness, and a need for thrills to escape the boredom of everyday life. All of these cases he relates in detail and analyzes with some insight. The difficulties appear in his explanation of evil in the second half of the book.

Kekes analyzes theories of evil according to causes classified as internal or external, active or passive. These he combines into four types of explanation, all of which he considers failures. These are the external-passive, that is the roots of evil are outside persons and are “intrinsic to the scheme of things;” external-active, meaning that individuals are corrupted and led to perform evil actions because of external influences; internal passive, that is, because of malfunctioning psychological processes, wrongdoers are unable to grasp the evil of their actions; and internal-active, meaning that evil is caused by psychological processes that turn certain individuals into evildoers.³³ His own preference is for the mixed explanation that includes elements of all four to specify “the particular evil propensities and social conditions and the particular reasons for the failure of self-knowledge and limits involved in the evil actions of a particular evildoer.”³⁴ He is particularly concerned to point out that evildoers lack self-knowledge.

Kekes’s analysis of evil is one of the most substantive areas of his work, one to which he has clearly devoted considerable thought, yet even in his emphasis on a lack of self-knowledge he is completely oblivious to what Voegelin aptly called “the spirituality of evil,”³⁵ to evil as a spiritual disorder, to evil as rebellion, to the mystery of evil, because he specifically avoids any transcendent or religious overtones. It is indicative of Kekes’s level of analysis that nowhere in his detailed discussions of good and evil can I recall encountering the word “soul.” Instead Kekes speaks constantly of the self. Unlike the soul, which is a metaphysically rich concept, the self is rather poor in substance since, in this context at least, it refers to a consciousness of pleasures and satisfactions but not of participating in or responding to anything beyond the human.

The ultimate poverty of Kekes’s account of good and evil becomes apparent toward the end of the book when he has to explain why someone should make the rational choice to do good rather than evil, a poverty that becomes particularly apparent when this is compared with Plato’s account of the soul’s quest for the transcendent ineffable Good. When he asks why people should be moral, he gives “the honest answer…that they ought to do it only if they care about the well-being of others; wish to live in harmony with them; want to avoid a life likely to be solitary, nasty, brutish, and short; are moved by examples of good lives; and are repelled by examples of evil ones. Such people are the friends of humanity,”³⁶ whereas evildoers are not just people with vices but are the enemies of humanity because their actions cause “monstrous harm.”

But if we ask why we should care about the well-being of others or wish to live in harmony with them Kekes is at a loss. Since secular reason is not an ability to perceive the Good but merely a calculating faculty, Kekes is forced to admit that “reason alone does not require individuals to refrain from evildoing,”³⁷ although it does require societies to prohibit evil actions. All one can do is appeal to most people’s feeling of concern for the well-being of humanity, a sentiment that, fortunately, most people seem to possess at present. With his sincere and serious concern to show others the qualities of good lives Kekes is playing the role of Socrates, but because he is a modern Socrates who believes in nothing and thinks that good and evil are purely human categories he can only point to good and evil lives without being able to give substantive reasons why one is really better than the other, and not just the one that more people happen to have feelings that incline them to prefer. As a man Kekes is naturally moved by the profoundly human craving for good and horror of evil, but as a modern man he has forgotten why.

BOOKS REVIEWED

The Art of Life by John Kekes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).

The Illusions of Egalitarianism by John Kekes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

The Roots of Evil by John Kekes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

1. Gerhart Niemeyer, “What Price ‘Natural Law’?”, in Aftersight and Foresight: Selected Essays (Lanham, Md., 1988), 252.

2. John Kekes, The Roots of Evil (Ithaca, 2005), 5.

3. Kekes’s books are, in chronological order, A Justification of Rationality, State University of New York Press, 1976; The Nature of Philosophy, Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980; The Examined Life, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1988; Moral Tradition and Individuality, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989; Facing Evil, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990; The Morality of Pluralism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995; Against Liberalism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997; A Case of Conservatism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998; Pluralism in Philosophy: Changing the Subject, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000; The Art of Life, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002; The Illusions of Egalitarianism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003; and The Roots of Evil, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
4. The Roots of Evil, 213.
5. Ibid., 4-5.
6. Ibid., 5.
7. The Examined Life, 44.
8. The Roots of Evil, 5.
9. The Examined Life, 35.
10. Ibid., 36.
11. Ibid., 35.
12. Ibid., 18-19.
13. Moral Tradition and Individuality, 3.
14. The Art of Life, 9.
15. Ibid., 14-15.
16. The Roots of Evil, 7.
17. The Art of Life, 59.
18. In The Illusions of Egalitarianism, in his discussion of the ways in which we can be mistaken about the ascription of desert to someone, Kekes says that one way “is a mistake in thinking that the basis of desert warrants the benefits or harms that it is thought to warrant. This may result from a mistaken evaluation of the basis, such as thinking of chastity as a virtue.” (54) Later he says that “the ready availability of contraception…has surely changed for us…the moral status of chastity.” (178).
19. Kekes seems unaware that in the traditional understanding of natural law, a universal moral principle has to be applied to particular circumstances with a careful regard for the particularities of the case. Aquinas was certainly cognizant that one cannot simply blindly impose a moral rule, although he does also recognize that some principles, such as the prohibition of intentionally killing innocent human beings, have no exceptions.
20. The Art of Life, 57.
21. Ibid., 200-202.
22. The Illusions of Egalitarianism, 9.
23. Ibid., 36.
24. Ibid., 34.
25. The Roots of Evil, xii.
26. Ibid., 19.
27. Ibid., 22.
28. Ibid., 23.
29. Ibid., 42.
30. Here he relies heavily on Gita Serenyi’s book Into That Darkness, based on her interviews with Stangl, although he is critical of her argument that Stangl could have avoided an extermination camp assignment.
31. Ibid., 59.
32. Ibid., 64.
33. Ibid., 136.
34. Ibid., 193.
35. Eric Voegelin, Plato (Baton Rouge, 1966), 127.
36. The Roots of Evil, 197.
37. Ibid., 232.