At the same time, Tessman traces many impossible moral demands to our loving relationships and our "sacred values". If that sounds dark, well, this is a dark book. If Tessman is right, life is marked by "unavoidable moral failures from which there can be no recovery and in which there is no redeeming value" (p. The purpose of this book is not to explain away these troubling binds, but rather to embrace them, in a kind of clear-eyed moral pessimism. That parent in the drawing is trying to protect her kids, but there are some harms from which you simply cannot protect your kids. Tessman's thesis is that there are some things that morality requires us to do but that we just cannot do.
It turns out that this bold, methodically argued book delivers fully on the promise of its threatening cover. What are these children hiding from? Are the demands of morality impossible? Are we all doomed to fail? Frankly, I was not sure I wanted to know. This book haunted me for weeks as it sat on my dining room table. (Most will see the parent as a mother, but it could easily be a father.) The title and subtitle are rendered in severe block letters, all caps - MORAL FAILURE - in raincloud gray set against a dreary matte blue. A square 1941 charcoal drawing by German artist Käthe Kollwitz depicts a scene of desperation: a parent huddling over three children to protect them from some unseen harm, her strong forearms and elbows jutting out defensively, their tiny heads burrowing into her clothing. The ominously beautiful cover of Lisa Tessman's book betrays the argument within. Sometimes you can't help but judge a book by its cover.
0 kommentar(er)
