So how do we sustain our ideals and our hopes, in the face of a world that is often bleakly hostile to our efforts? Neiman draws once more on Kant, in many ways the book's hero, and reminds us of his luminous first principle of morality: treat people as ends, and never only as means. This encapsulates an ideal of human dignity that is, Neiman plausibly argues, a "major source of progressive politics". But then the "is/ought" barrier once again comes crashing down: "All too often we experience a world in which dignity is wanting and self-respect destroyed [and hence] the idea of human dignity is a demand on the world, not a fact about it" (emphasis added).

Here, it seems to me, we come up against the fundamental problem with the book's argument. Although Neiman asserts that our current predicament can be understood by invoking "Kant's metaphysics", the Kantian moral imperative, construed in wholly secular terms, is precisely not grounded in any metaphysical vision of a transcendent or ultimate source of goodness, but comes down, in the end, to a mere injunction or "imperative", which we ourselves decide to issue. Neiman puts it this way: "When you're in doubt about a moral decision, Kant tells you to resolve it by playing God. [It is] an invitation to imagine yourself at the Creation. Every time you act morally, you have the chance to begin a bit of the world afresh." Yet although she describes this as "the result not of arrogance but of logic", the idea of the self-legislating will, which, in Kant's phrase, is selbstgesetzgebend ("giving the law to itself"), arguably paves the way for that fantasy of "total autonomy" or "self-authorship", which the critics of the Enlightenment have seen as its most dangerous legacy. For if I can imagine myself as "creator" in this way, there seems nothing to stop the Nazis doing likewise, or someone with an equally malign vision of how to "begin the world afresh". 

Neiman might concede such risks, acknowledging, as she does in several places, that there are no guarantees that humans will make the right choices, or that the future will turn out in the way her liberal ideals require. She does, however, offer certain "signposts" as grounds for hope, citing three major achievements since the Enlightenment: the abolition of public execution by torture, the ending of slavery and the emancipation of women. Unfortunately, however, it is not clear how much mileage can be gained from this type of argument by example, since it is hard to deny the existence of ample evidence, even from recent history, pointing in the other direction, towards the view that human nature remains as prone to evil as it has ever been. 

What emerges by the end of this rich and wide-ranging study is a courageous and uplifting attempt to articulate a progressivist vision of how humanity might move closer to a world where justice and equal respect flourish. The book ends, as it begins, with the author's reflections on the story of Job in the Hebrew Bible, perhaps the most vivid exploration in all of literature of the problem which the existence of undeserved and terrible suffering poses for any providentialist worldview, such as Judaism or Christianity.

The "moral clarity" of the book's title emerges here as a readiness to tell the story as it is — not to fudge it either by tacking on the "kitsch" of a happy ending or by offering the fatuous interpretation of some of Job's "friends" (that he is being "tested" or that he must have done something to "deserve" it).