Why this book?
- To become acquainted with applied ethics and its direct relationship with everyday life.
- To understand the role of beliefs, emotions, desires, speech, and actions in the betterment of life.
- To recognize the impact of untested beliefs, prejudice, and dogmatism on the moral life.
- To reflect on the authentic life and liberation from borrowed beliefs and conformity with the crowd.
- To examine the connection of truth, goodness, beauty, and love with a moral and flourishing life.
About the book
"A Second Life" is the product of six sessions from Mostafa Malekian's lecture series on applied ethics. The purpose of applied ethics in this book is to address the tangible and concrete life of the human being, not merely to examine ethical theories, systems, and schools. Hence, the book strives to elevate moral teaching beyond the level of mere recommendation and to pay attention to the psychological grounds for acting or not acting upon it.
One of the book's central axes is the distinction of the five domains of human personality and character: beliefs, feelings and emotions, desires, speech, and actions. This distinction allows Malekian to examine the problem of life betterment at various levels and to show that moral change is not achieved merely by recommending correct behavior, but that a person's inner beliefs and states are also involved.
In discussing beliefs, Malekian emphasizes the importance of life-related beliefs, testing one's opinions, and separating one's personal identity from one's beliefs. From this perspective, identifying oneself with one's opinions can pave the way for dogmatism, fanaticism, prejudice, and intolerance. He also contrasts the authentic life with the borrowed life; a life in which the individual has not merely inherited their beliefs from tradition, public opinion, or intellectual fashions, but has tested them.
Another part of the discussion is dedicated to hasty generalizations and our expectations of the world. Malekian emphasizes the instability of the world and the necessity of harmonizing beliefs with reality, showing how unjustified expectations of the stability of people and situations can add to human suffering and unease.
Truth, goodness, and beauty are also presented in these lectures as ideals for a flourishing life. Subsequently, love is examined from the perspective of transitioning from self-preference to other-preference and is considered as a force for reducing self-centeredness and cultivating certain moral virtues.
"A Second Life" is suitable for readers interested in moral philosophy, moral psychology, and Mostafa Malekian's intellectual project on individual betterment, who wish to contemplate the reasons for and psychological obstacles to living morally, rather than encountering a collection of moral exhortations.
In the series of lectures that provide the text of this book, some of the most important topics of practical normative ethics are presented in an accessible language, with a view to their psychological explanation and justification. Therefore, instead of recommending adherence to moral propositions and teachings, an effort has been made to state, for each moral proposition and teaching, firstly, why one should adhere to it, and secondly, why some people do not adhere to it. In answering these two questions, emphasis has been placed on distinguishing the five domains of human personality and character. And this emphasis is made for the first time in a book belonging to the field of moral philosophy and moral psychology: an unprecedented and eye-opening endeavor.
From the table of contents
- 1Life-Building Beliefs
- 2The Authentic Life
- 3Hasty Generalizations
- 4Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
- 5Love and Other-Preference