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Soc (2011) 48:186188DOI 10.1007/s12115-010-9401-8
BOOK REVIEW
Andreas Kinneging, The Geography of Good and Evil: Philosophical Investigations
Trans. Ineke Hardy. Ed. Jonathan Price. Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2009. 285 pp. $20.00. ISBN-10:1935191047; ISBN-13:978-1935191049
Molly Brigid Flynn
Published online: 14 January 2011# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
A map draws lines, provides labels, and illustrates important contours of geographical reality. The moral realm as a reality independent of our wishes calls for similar treatment. Kinnegings titleThe Geography of Good and Evilcaptures well the principal thesis of the book: there is an objective moral order that we (personally and as a society) in order to get on well in life must know.
The title also justifies his primary methodology: distinction making, cataloguing, and describing the terrain of the moral life. In some of the best of the book, Kinneging describes virtues and vices, focusing especially on the seven capital sins (pride, greed, lust, wrath, gluttony, envy, sloth), and later on the four cardinal virtues (prudence, courage, temperance, and justice), and adds in analyses of tolerance and loyalty. He further details the terrain by explaining how other virtues and vices (their daughters) flow from these springs.
The race was not born yesterday, so the geography of the good human life and its many obstacles has largely been mapped for us already by the great tradition. Kinnegings descriptive method involves recapitulating this tradition, but he does more than dust off an old map. He draws a new map, incorporating the moral territory explored in the past few centuries. Modernity does seem to discover a new moral world, one based on an atomic notion the person. Perhaps, by emphasizing the individual and justice, Modernitys new moral map emphasizes features of the good life underemphasized by the tradition, such as authenticity and freedom. Nevertheless, much of this new territory is, as Kinnegings lamentations suggest, a wasteland
falsely labeled as progress. Even worse, in these newer maps the land already charted by the tradition is largely forgotten or misrepresented by our self-congratulatory moral rhetoric. Thus, the book does more than list elements of the moral life. The book places Kinnegings illuminating descriptions of virtues and vices within several helpful contexts: the context of contemporary cultures principles, maladies, and needs; the context of...