A Common Humanity

A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice is a beautifully written and profound book about how the humanity of our fellow human beings is sometimes not fully visible to us. Drawing on the examples of the Holocaust, the David Irving Affair, the case of Mary Bell and the taking of children of mixed blood from Aboriginal parents in Australia, Raimand Gaita examines the reasons for this. Amonst them, he argues, is a narrow conception of morality that runs deep in our culture and also an impoverished notion of reason and understanding. Both encourage a false opposition between moral judgement and compassion and between the head and heart. Turning on its head the way we are inclined to think about evil, Gaita argues for an understanding of it that is inseparable from the sense of preciousness of each human being. Only this conception of evil can safeguard us against the temptation to treat some evil-doers as subhuman. That sense of the preciousness of each individual, he argues, is founded on and revealed in the works of love—the love of parents for children, the love of lovers for their beloved and the love of saints for people whom most of us cannot love. Far from blinding us to the more formal ways in which we acknowledge our common humanity, by means of concepts like justice, rights and obligations, Raimond Gaita shows how love can make the structure of these concepts more visible to us. An essential and compelling reading for anyone interested in what makes an ethical society, A Common Humanity shows how philosophy can illuminate the pressing moral issues none of us can afford to ignore.