Making Progress: Rethinking Enlightenment

1st Jul 2009; 18:00

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Distinguished moral philosopher Susan Neiman visits the RSA to ask: how do we talk responsibly about good and evil? Why are irony, detachment and pessimism the favoured modes of supposed sophisticates? How can it be that "moral clarity" has come to be a catchphrase of conservatives while eliciting the knowing sneers of liberals?

In her new book Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists SusanNeiman shows how the terrain vacated by the contemporary left’s aversion toward moralising and morality has been filled by the political right. Moral Clarity is her sustained defence of a set of values that she sees are neglected or threatened.

In her RSA lecture Neiman will show how the resources of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (David Hume, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant) can help to reconstruct a progressive politics. Neiman believes that a progressive political outlook depends on a return to a robust Enlightenment, whose values are not merely the negative ones of tolerance and fairness, but the more substantive demands for happiness, reason, reverence and hope.

In her fierce commitment to politics as a moral endeavour, Neiman makes it possible to believe that the Enlightenment is not yet exhausted and that we are free to join it if we wish.

Speaker: Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum and author of Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists

Suggested hashtag for Twitter users: #rsaclarity

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