Stuck With Virtue

Peter Augustine Lawler

ISBN 10: 1932236848 / ISBN 13: 9781932236842

Published by Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2005

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G1932236848I4N00

Synopsis:

Cloning, gene therapy, stem-cell harvesting—are we on the path to a Huxley-like Brave New World? Not really, argues political philosopher and Kass Commission member Peter Augustine Lawler inStuck with Virtue: The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future, even as he admits that we will likely become more obsessive and anxious and will be subjected to new forms of tyranny. Rather, he contends, human nature is such that the biotechnological world to come, despite the best efforts of its proponents, will still fail to make it possible to feel good without being good. It will be harder, Lawler warns, to be virtuous in the future, because we will be more detached than ever from the natural sources of happiness. But we may take some solace in the fact that virtue will still be the best way to live well with what we really know.

With irony and wit, Lawler delivers the good news about the future of the American individual: We’re going to remain free, because the modern effort to make increasingly individualistic human beings at home with themselves and their environments through technological progress cannot succeed. That is the truth and promise, concludes Lawler, of a genuinely postmodern conservatism.

About the Author:

Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor and Chair of the Department of Government and International Studies at Berry College and executive editor of the quarterly journalPerspectives on Political Science. A member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, he has written on the intersection of politics, religion, and biotechnology for theWeekly Standard, the New Atlantis, National Review, and Society,among many other leading periodicals. Among his books are Postmodernism Rightly Understood: The Return to Realism in American Thoughtand Aliens in America: The Strange Truth about Our Souls, also published by ISI Books.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Stuck With Virtue
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Publication Date: 2005
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket