About the Book
Human beings seek to transcend limits. This is part of our potential greatness, since it is how we can realize what is best in our humanity. However, the limit-transcending feature of human life is also part of our potential downfall, as it can lead to dehumanization and failure to attain important human goods and to prevent human evils. Exploring the place of limits within a well-lived human life this work develops and defends an original account of limiting virtues, which are concerned with recognizing proper limits in human life. The limiting virtues that are the focus are humility, reverence, moderation, contentment, neighborliness, and loyalty, and they are explored in relation to four kinds of limits: existential limits, moral limits, political limits, and economic limits. These virtues have been underexplored in discussions about virtue ethics, and when they have been explored it has not been with regard to the general issue of the place of limits within a well-lived human life. The account of the limiting virtues provided here, however, is intended as a counter to other prominent approaches to ethics: namely, autonomy-centered approaches and consequentialist (or maximizing) approaches. This account is also used to address a number of important contemporary issues such as genetic engineering, distributive justice, cosmopolitanism vs. patriotism, and the ethical status of growth-based economics.
About the Author :
David McPherson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University. He works in the areas of ethics (especially virtue ethics), political philosophy, meaning in life, and philosophy of religion. He is the author of Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and editor of Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is President of Philosophers in Jesuit Education, and he is also a co-founder of The Heartland Virtue Ethics Network.
Review :
McPherson's book calls us to recognize the importance of an objective view of the good, one that deserves our recognition and respect and that imposes limits on the ways in which we navigate the world. As such, it is a contribution to an important strand of ethical thought.
Perhaps McPherson's simplest yet most profound message is that limits, although often expressed in negative terms ("thou shalt not"), are not just negations. On the contrary, they exist to protect things that are positively, intrinsically good...By teaching this lesson, The Virtues of Limits also serves as a warning. If limits are not just negations, then the lack of limits is not, contrary to what many seem to think, necessarily a form of liberation. On the contrary, a lack of limits can in fact limit us-limit our moral capacities and therefore stunt the development of our very being.
An original contribution to the field of virtue ethics, [McPherson's] book offers a compelling image of a humane society in which people embrace limits (existential, moral, political, economic), are rooted in their communities, and are not adrift in life without anchor...The Virtues of Limits is a powerful rebuttal of the modern drive to mastery and self-creation that often leads to nihilism and self-destruction.
The Virtues of Limits is written in a way that is accessible to the non-philosopher and will be of interest to many. It will provide much food for reflection...for any reader engaged in the grander questions of our moral, economic and political life.
David McPherson enables us to see the deep human need for limits, and how it runs through our life. This is a book of great importance in the face of contemporary understandings of ethics and the great challenges that human beings confront.
If philosophy is about how one should live one's life, McPherson's The Virtues of Limits is exemplary. It shows how human flourishing, individual and collective, depends on accepting our limits, and on cultivating the virtues associated with this attitude, such as humility, reverence, neighbourliness, and loyalty. McPherson writes without jargon or undue technicality, while at the same time arguing with due academic rigour, and with a fair-minded engagement with those contemporary philosophers who follow in Nietzsche's footsteps in wishing to remove limits from our striving, whether those limits be genetic, individual, political, or economic. This book is of great appeal in showing the life-affirming but often unremarked and under-stated appeal of a life lived within its proper limits.
This fluent and ambitious study articulates an integrated vision of the good life that ranges over both the individual and the socio-political dimensions of morality. Its unifying idea, that of 'limiting virtues', yields a species of virtue theory that is genuinely original both as regards the specific virtues that are highlighted, and as regards the rationale for their selection and their role in securing human flourishing.
In The Virtues of Limits, David McPherson offers us an historically rich and philosophically robust defence of the idea that humans flourish only when and insofar as they recognize and abide by certain well-founded constraints. What is particularly valuable about his treatment is that it demonstrates how the importance of such constraints is evidenced across different domains: existential, moral, political, and economic. The cogency of this demonstration is matched only by its timeliness, given that our time is one that finds constraints as such increasingly hard to rationalize.
This is an excellent book, both clear and concise. It is not overburdened with references, but engages sufficiently with the relevant literature, allowing an interested reader to explore further. And at a time when so much of our culture regards any limits as abhorrent, and keeps telling us that we can "have it all," it is also a very timely work.
