Why read The Quest for a Moral Compass?

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?

Jurgen Brauer

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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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