A Common Humanity

1st Edition - Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice

By: Raimond Gaita

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Paperback | 15 September 2025 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

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386 Pages

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19.5 x 13.5 x 2.5

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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.

About the Author

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: an Absolute Conception are both available from Routledge.

Industry Reviews

'An exploration of how people make moral and ethical judgments by a controversial Australian moral philosopher. Raimond Gaita's insights are original and his prose is as eloquent as it is affecting.' - The Economist, Books of the Year, 2000

'Gaita's genius ... is his ability to weigh the soul on a scale, and to show how goodness and justice might yet prevail.' - The Scotsman

'Profound and original ... his humane and wise book offers a view on life which deserves to be taken seriously.' —The Times Literary Supplement

'Gaita's gait bedazzles. In both writing and content, there appear sensitivity, significance and feeling ... Wittgenstein advises "Take your time". I advise such with the issues of this book.' —The Philosophers' Magazine

'A striking and revelatory read ... I warmly recommend it.' —Sophie Grace Chappell, Mind

'Even now, fifty years after the holocaust, it is still rare to find a philosopher prepared to engage deeply with the question of serious evil, and indeed of serious goodness … [Gaita's essays] are large and elegant constructions … illuminated by a sensitive and patient scrutiny, and inspired by a passionate intensity. Moral philosophy is at last beginning to recover its centre.' —E.M. Atkins, New Blackfriars

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