The Quest for a Moral Compass

By Kenan Malik,

Book cover of The Quest for a Moral Compass

Book description

Accessible, fascinating, and thought-provoking, this is the groundbreaking story of the global search for moral truths

In this remarkable book, Kenan Malik explores the history of moral thought as it has developed over three millennia, from Homer’s Greece to Mao’s China, from ancient India to modern America. It tells the…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Quest for a Moral Compass as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

First published in 2014, Malik's book is an intellectual history of moral philosophy (ethics). It claims to be a global history but given the relative dearth of non-Western written material on which to draw, the "global" part inevitably is given short shrift and limited to a few chapters on Indian and Chinese thought. African and Latin American ethics are missing as well, as are the ethics of virtually all other "native" peoples. But this is a shortcoming less of Malik's book than that of the field of the history of ethics as a whole. That said, Malik provides a fairly…

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Who Is a Worthy Mother? By Rebecca Wellington,

I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…

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