A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice

Holocaust denial, racism, genocide of indigenous peoples and the long-lasting harms inflicted by colonialism pose deep challenges to any idea of a common humanity. How can we include these and countless other examples of evil within our vision of a shared morality? These painful human incongruities are precisely what Raimond Gaita boldly harmonises in A Common Humanity. He discusses the complex and often fraught relations between hatred and forgiveness, evil and love, suffering and compassion, the mundane and the precious.

Gaita asserts that our conception of humanity cannot be based upon the thin language of individual rights when it is our shared feelings of grief, hope, love, guilt, shame and remorse that offer a more potent foundation for common understanding.

Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Primo Levi and Iris Murdoch, amongst others, Gaita creates a beautifully written and provocative new picture of our common humanity.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface and a substantial Afterword by the author, in which he revisits some of the main themes of A Common Humanity and engages with responses to it since it was first published.

Raimond Gaita is an Australian philosopher and writer. He is Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Law School and Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, and Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy, King’s College London. His books The Philosopher’s Dog and Beyond Good and Evil are both available from Routledge.