RAIMOND GAITA

Raimond Gaita begins his engaging text with touching and hilarious memories of the remarkable animals he has owned over the years, but goes on from there to consider a selection of ethical questions pertaining to animals. What makes the bond between humans and animals? How can non-vegetarian animal lovers reconcile their priorities? Do animals have feelings that we should respect? (And what about insects?) Gaita, a professor of philosophy at the University of London, writes with an admirable lack of sentimentality about how the love we feel for our pets can be the source of a wise morality that harbors respect for all living things.

From where will we draw the moral energy to stay true to justice? For more than three decades the incomparable voice of Raimond Gaita has been summoning us to new conversations that deepen our understanding of what matters most to human life and awaken the sense of our common humanity. For Gaita, we are never more fully alive than when we are fully present to one another in conversation. In a time when modes of communication tend to superficiality and self-promotion, when political debates are increasingly inured to lies and even violence, and the moral demands of dialogue give way to a torrent of competing monologues, Gaitas invitation to rediscover what genuine conversation requires of us could not be more timely. These collected writings at once invite us into that conversation and enact its severe demands. Gaita asks us to confront the distinctive evil of genocide, to examine the true cost of the War on Terror, to interrogate what justice requires in response to Australias dispossession of its First Peoples, to understand our need for truth in politics, especially during war, to see what is at stake in the decline of the universities, to grasp what was lost during the Black Summer bushfires, and to reckon with the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic-when we learned, he writes, how much we needed to touch and hold other people. Gaitas astonishing range of concerns is held together by the consistency and unrelenting tenderness of his moral vision. To see the world through Gaitas eyes is to discover, once again, what it means to love the world and to remain faithful to it. He tells us that an unconditional love of the world is the deepest form of hope and the truest source of our energies to honour the demands of justice. This is how we learn to be human.