After nearly forty years of weighing humanity’s deepest dilemmas - working in settings ranging from university and school classrooms to corporate offices and hospitals - best selling author, philosopher and religious scholar, Jacob Needleman, presents the most urgent, deeply felt and widely accessible work of his career. In Why Can’t We Be Good? , Needleman identifies the core problem that therapists and social philosophers fail to see. He depicts the individual human as a being who knows what is good, yet who remains mysteriously helpless to adopt inwardly the ethical, moral and religious ideas that are bequeathed to him.