Kyklos Paros presents The Tango of Ethics
Book Presentation and Discussion
Wednesday, June 21st at 20:00
At the Paros Public Library Yiannis Gikas
In his new book The Tango of Ethics: Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering, published in January 2023 by Imprint Academic and partly written during stays at the House of Literature in Lefkes, Jonathan Leighton proposes a deep, rigorous reassessment of how we think about ethics. A key paradigm is the conflict and interplay between two fundamentally different ways of seeing and being in the world — that of the intuitive human being who wants to lead a meaningful life and thrive, and that of the detached, rational agent who wants to prevent unbearable suffering from occurring.
Jonathan Leighton, PhD, is a writer, ethics strategist and social change advocate, and a leading proponent of a contemporary approach to ethics that focuses explicitly on the prevention and alleviation of suffering. His first book, The Battle for Compassion: Ethics in an Apathetic Universe, offers a sweeping overview of our situation as a species that methodically addresses the question “What matters?”
Jonathan is also the Executive Director of the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS), a think-and-do tank he founded to promote the application of compassionate ethics to societal decision-making. A molecular biologist by training, he grew up in Montreal, Canada and holds degrees from Harvard University and the University of Basel, Switzerland.
