There’s a nice book review of Tessman’s book. This paragraph really grabbed me and it inclined me to read the book when I get a chance:
Tessman’s thesis is that there are some things that morality requires us to do but that we just cannot do. Morality is fundamentally tragic. That parent in the drawing is trying to protect her kids, but there are some harms from which you simply cannot protect your kids. Yet you still have to. The purpose of this book is not to explain away these troubling binds, but rather to embrace them, in a kind of clear-eyed moral pessimism. If Tessman is right, life is marked by “unavoidable moral failures from which there can be no recovery and in which there is no redeeming value” (p. 3).
Check out the rest of the review here.
Shaun Miller's Ideas 