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This one-year course may be taken by students in grade 7 to grade 12, but no earlier than 7th grade.
The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense by Mortimer J. Adler (Author)
Is it a good time to be alive? Is ours a good society to be alive in? Is it possible to have a good life in our time? And finally, does a good life consist of having a good time? Are happiness and a good life interchangeable? These are the questions that Mortimer Adler addresses himself to. The heart of the book lies in its conception of the good life for man, which provides the standard for measuring a century, a society, or a culture: for upon that turns the meaning of each man's primary moral right - his right to the pursuit of happiness. The moral philosophy that Dr. Adler expounds in terms of this conception he calls the ethics of common sense,because it is as a defense and development of the common-sense answer to the question can I really make a good life for myself?
What this book is, then, is a universally demonstrable ethics for all human beings. To the root of human nature, this book applies basic distinctions of value and of the meaning of human norms.
These distinctions lay the foundation for a tremendous edifice: From this book, we can develop a commonsense tradition of universal law that is at the base of the American Constitution and that is the basis for a framework of global governance in the future. From this book, we can express in normative and objectively true terms the basis of a well-lived life. From this book, we can defend commonsense virtue ethics against intellectual, naturalistic, and utilitarian views of ethics. (The nature of the defense, incidentally, is that the intellectual, naturalistic, utilitarian philosophers have failed to comprehend the full dimensions of a human well-lived life as a whole, as described by Aristotle.)These are astonishing claims! and the book delivers. Why is this book, given its profound relevance to law, ethics, governance, and the pursuit of happiness, so universally neglected, so rare and hard to find, and also so little discussed? This is the only book you need to read to understand how to live a good life. Adler brings the Nichomachean Ethics to modern day life. It is rigorous philosophy, but easy to understand. It is by no means a cheap life advice book.
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