HOW GOOD PEOPLE MAKE TOUGH CHOICES Resolving the Dilemmas of Ethical Living

Abstract

The seeds of this book were sown when, one warm summer afternoon at her home in Cos Cob, Connecticut, in 1986, I had a quiet, long, and thoughtful conversation with Barbara Tuchman. A historian of what she called “the small facts, not the big Expla nation,” she had twice won the Pulitzer Prize—and earned high praise for such books as A Distant Mirror, which used the fourteenth century and its Black Plague as a “mirror” for the twentieth century’s con fusions and violence. As a columnist and staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor, I was interviewing her for a series of articles based on the ideas of twenty-two leading thinkers around the world. Ultimately published as An Agenda for the 21st Century (MIT Press, 1987), this series sought to discover the major, first-intensity, high-leverage issues that humanity would have to address in order to negotiate the coming century successfully. As we talked, I asked her how, if she were a twenty-first-century historian looking backward, she would characterize our century. “I would call it an Age of Disruption,” she said. She warned of the nuclear threat. She called attention to environmental problems. But her central concern, she said, lay in “the real disruption in public morality.” “There have always been times when people have acted immor ally,” she continued. But what was new, she felt, was “the extent of public immorality making itself so obvious to the average citizen.”