The world saw a fussy photo last week of a young man dressed neatly in a designer T-shirt, with a turquoise backpack slung around his shoulder.

His dark, bangy hair was evenly cut across his forehead so that it almost resembled a Beatles-like mop. But instead of a guitar or some piece of athletic gear he was toting an automatic weapon.

One of the Mumbai attackers at the Chatrapathi Sivaji railway station on Wed., Nov. 26, 2008. (Mumbai Mirror, Sebastian D'souza/Associated Press)

The news photo made him look grimly determined but there was still the hint of a smile. To kill, as he did, the gunman must have fortified himself with a certain "moral clarity."

As of this writing, I know nothing about this young man. I do not know what grievances prompted him to do what he did and attack unsuspecting inhabitants and visitors in Mumbai. I do not know whether he was brainwashed, whatever that means in the current context.

More to the point, I do not know what drives people to banish their humanity and send their conscience into exile.

A guide for idealists

This is one of the questions Susan Neiman asks us to ponder in her book, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists.

Neiman is an American philosopher who runs an international think tank in Germany called The Einstein Forum. She is used to asking big questions.

As part of her job, she wants to make the tools of her academic discipline relevant to the average, thinking citizen. So she asks: How are morality and religion connected? How do we talk responsibly about good and evil?

Atlanta-born Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum. (Susan Neiman)

Neiman has tackled the problem of evil before. Her last book was called Evil in Modern Thought. She identifies herself as a person of the left and abhors fundamentalist thinking of all stripes, political or religious.

In Moral Clarity, she takes on the possible ambiguity surrounding moral codes, the kinds that are handed down in religious teachings.

A moral code can be starkly simple. You follow the guidelines, the commandments.

People around the world take consolation from the certainty they find in their religions, political, social and legal arrangements.

Such certainty becomes a matter of habit. It saves the psychic energy of having to think too much about things, even while it can tempt us into intolerance.

But, as Neiman argues, the moral landscape really has two distinct poles. On one hand, there is absolute certainty; on the other what is often called moral relativism, in which no absolutes exist and all morality becomes a matter of context, history and political circumstance.

Finding your way between them is what moral clarity is all about.

Bargaining with God

The job of today's idealists, according to Neiman, is to ask tough questions in order to break through moral logjams. Nothing and no one are exempt from this process, not even God.

Moral clarity doesn't mean easy formulas. It requires hard work with the brain the Creator (if you believe) gave you.

Neiman uses Biblical stories, among others, for a hard look at the concept of morality. The two stories of the patriarch Abraham in the book of Genesis particularly appeal to her. Both figure prominently in the moral imagination of the West.

Neiman's favourite is the story of God's punishment of the sinful city of Sodom.

God wants to destroy Sodom and its debauched inhabitants. They are a thoroughly unwholesome lot. Abraham, who has a pipeline to God, is informed of His plans.

But then Abraham does something utterly remarkable. He begins to bargain with God.

"What if there are 50 innocent people among the sinners? The judge of all the earth cannot be so unjust to let the innocent and guilty suffer alike," writes Neiman in her retelling of the story. "If there are 50 righteous people in Sodom, will He leave the city alone?" Abraham asks of the Lord.

A lesson for God

Now, it must be said, Abraham has chutzpah. He continues to bargain with the Almighty, as if they were playing some almighty poker game. Eventually, God settles on 10. If He can find 10 good souls in Sodom, He won't destroy the city.

Unfortunately, He can't find that many. He can find only one (Lot). So the city is destroyed. But that's not what interests Neiman. What does is that His servant Abraham is giving God a lesson in ethics.

What is required from God in this instance is not absolute certainty and ferocious judgment but a negotiated settlement.

"Moral judgment is not a matter of decisions made once and for all, but keeping your eyes on distinctions," writes Neiman. "Abraham's tone may be that of a merchant, but his mind is the mind of a moralist. If he can make God stop and think about small differences, none of us is ever exempt" from doing the same.

"With all due respects to God," says Neiman at another point, "morality must come before the harsh edicts of religion." And Abraham has to remind God of that.

Then God said to Abraham

Now, there is a second Abraham story that Neiman doesn't like as much. But it's also iconic and as Neiman says, "The Old Testament is magnificently equivocal."

We are speaking now of God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

Abraham does not bargain here. He sets out to do God's grim bidding and offer up his son to the knife and the altar.

In the end, God stays Abraham's hand. But the tale is nourishment to religious believers, especially fundamentalists. If God commands, you do what you are told. Even if you think it's repugnant.

These are the two religious paradigms, says Neiman: Abraham the bargainer and Abraham the resigned killer.

You can speculate all you want about the sublime nature of faith in a mysterious God whose goodness is unknowable. But as a scholar and a child of the European Enlightenment, Neiman wants to employ reason to secure human freedom and possibility. It is not an easy task.

Where does morality come from?

Now, I acknowledge, after reading and listening to Neiman, there are matters that she doesn't completely answer. Most importantly, where exactly does morality, the sense of right or wrong, come from?

Religious believers say it is natural law, implanted from above. Evolutionary biologists argue it is a strategy for group survival.

Also, are there no absolutes we can follow? If, as Neiman writes, "moral judgments are slow, specific and seldom absolute," that would seem to put the bulk of them on the moral relativism side of the scale.

Paul Kennedy, the host of Ideas, asked Neiman whether she had anything that might resemble an absolute for her, personally. She hesitated and then, almost whispering, uttered the word "love."

Clearly, her reason is tempered by compassion and deep, human feeling.

But go back to the image that started us on this moral journey.

If only that well-groomed gunman could have asked a few hard questions to his God before he set out on his lethal mission. If only a curious moral clarity had replaced his apparently lethal certainty.

Abraham the bargainer may sound like a street merchant when he dickers with God. But he has a moral lesson for us now.