Bøker av Mara van der Lugt

Why "hopeful pessimism" is not a contradiction in terms but a powerful source of moral and political commitment The climate debate is rife with calls for optimism. While temperatures rise and disasters intensify, we are asked to maintain optimism and hope, as if the real threat is pessimism and despair. In this erudite and engaging book, Mara van der Lugt argues that this is a mistake: crude optimism can no longer be a virtue in a breaking world, and may well prove to be our besetting vice. In an age of climate change and ecological devastation, the virtue we need is hopeful pessimism. Drawing on thinkers that range from J.R.R .Tolkien and Mary Shelley to Albert Camus and Jonathan Lear, van der Lugt invites us to rethink what we thought we knew about optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, activism and grief. She shows that pessimism is closely linked to a tradition of moral and political activism, and offers a different way to think about pessimism: not as synonymous with despair but as compatible with hope. Gently yet fiercely, van der Lugt argues that what we need to avoid is not pessimism but fatalism or self-serving resignation. Pessimism does not imply the loss of courage or the lack of a desire to strive for a better world: on the contrary, these are the very gifts that pessimism can bestow. What Hopeful Pessimism asks instead is that we strive for change without certainties, without expecting anything from our efforts other than the knowledge that we have done what we are called upon to do as moral agents in a time of change.

An investigation of what it means to have children--morally, philosophically and emotionally "Do you want to have children?" is a question we routinely ask each other. But what does it mean to create a child? Is this decision always justified? Does anyone really have the moral right to create another person? In Begetting, Mara van der Lugt attempts to fill in the moral background of procreation. Drawing on both philosophy and popular culture, van der Lugt does not provide a definitive answer on the morality of having a child; instead, she helps us find the right questions to ask. Most of the time, when we talk about whether to have children, what we are really talking about is whether we want to have children. Van der Lugt shows why this is not enough. To consider having children, she argues, is to interrogate our own responsibility and commitments, morally and philosophically and also personally. What does it mean to bring a new creature into the world, to decide to perform an act of creation? What does it mean to make the decision that life is worth living on behalf of a person who cannot be consulted? These questions are part of a conversation we should have started long ago. Van der Lugt does not ignore the problematic aspects of procreation--ethical, environmental and otherwise. But she also acknowledges the depth and complexity of the intensely human desire to have a child of our own blood and our own making.