Summary Of The Book Humanity

Summary
“Ethics Without The Moral Law”

This is an eminently readable yet profound book. Jonathan Glover is a philosopher and professor of ethics on the faculty of King's College, London.Predictably, therefore, the underlying questions of his analysis are philosophical and ethical. But unlike much philosophical literature, Glover's is not an abstract treatment of issues but instead onedeeply grounded in historical and political realities.
Much of the book is descriptive of how people can be motivated to behave well and badly in specific historical events. Although one "knows" thesethings, there is a great power in reading detailed descriptions of some of the major military and political events of the 20th century back to back. It was, after all, a century in which more than ahundred people died from war alone on average every single hour of the century. When one is reminded within the scope of a single volume of, Hiroshima, the stupidity that allowed the slide into World WarI, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Stalin's deliberate and almost casual destruction of millions of his own citizens, the moral horrors of Nazism, and the attemptedgenocide in Rwanda, one is tempted to despair of the species capable of so many such things in a single century.
But Glover's interest in this litany of horror is far deeper than a simple reminder ofthe depths of human depravity. His philosophical questions are: "How can human beings be convinced to do such things?" "What levers of the human mind and heart must leaders manipulate to convinceordinary human beings to cooperate in such endeavors?" To his great credit, Glover delves into each of these events in depth, avoiding at all cost simplicity and reductionism to a single overarchingexplanation. How was Stalin able to sustain his purges for year after year, depending as it did on the cooperation of tens of thousands for its execution?
The analysis is not only of glaring moral...