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.