Overview

A lucid and inspiring consideration of the challenges we and our world now face, and a proposal for a way to overcome them Can we human beings agree on a set of values which will allow us to confront the numerous threats that we and our planet face? Or will we continue our disagreements, rivalries, and antipathies, even as we collectively approach what, in the not-impossible extreme, might be extinction? To answer these questions, A. C. Grayling considers the three most pressing challenges facing the world: climate change, technology, and justice, acknowledging that there is no worldwide set of values that can be invoked to underwrite agreements about what to do and not do in the interests of humanity and the planet in all these respects. As extreme weather events increase in frequency, advances in AI and military technology accelerate, and inequities deepen everywhere, the question of how to confront the world's various problems becomes even more urgent. If there is to be a chance of finding ways to generate universal agreement, the underlying question of values (together with the problem of relativism) has to be addressed. One part of the answer may lie in toleration and convivencia--the basis of coexistence among Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Iberian peninsula between the ninth and fifteenth centuries CE.

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An enthusiastic thinker who embraces humor, common sense, and lucidity. -- Independent (London), praise for the author Grayling is particularly good at illuminating the knottiness of moral discourse. -- Sunday Times (London), praise for the author

Author Information

A.C. Grayling is the Founder and Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and its Professor of Philosophy. Among his many books are The God Argument, Democracy and Its Crisis, The History of Philosophy, The Good State, and The Frontiers of Knowledge. He has been a regular contributor to The Times, Financial Times, Independent on Sunday, Economist, New Statesman, Prospect, and New European, and was for a number of years a columnist on the Guardian. He has contributed to BBC Radios 4, 3 and the World Service, and has appeared on BBC2 Newsnight and CNN News. He has twice been a judge of the Booker Prize, in 2014 serving as the Chair of the judging panel. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Vice President of Humanists UK, and a Patron of Dignity in Dying. He is a popular speaker at festivals and debates. He lives in London. Mike Cooper is a British voice artist based in the United States. In addition to a wide variety of voice-over work he has narrated audiobooks including The Divine Spark, The Magician's Way, and The Last Shaman.

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