Abstract

The Lesser Good represents a timely meditation on the incapacity of mere laws and state politics to adequately address the ethical exigencies that arise in human life. Through the philosophies of Plato and post-Holocaust phenomenologist, Emmanual Levinas, Hamblet demonstrates that state models of justice strive for the lesser good of ordered continuity of their forms, rather than promoting citizen internalization, of the "higher goods" of ethics—humility, self-overcoming, and compassion for the weak and suffering