scholarly journals Once again: On the relationship between morality and ethical life

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-551
Author(s):  
Jürgen Habermas
Author(s):  
Moshe Halbertal

The idea and practice of sacrifice play a profound role in religion, ethics, and politics. This book explores the meaning and implications of sacrifice, developing a theory of sacrifice as an offering and examining the relationship between sacrifice, ritual, violence, and love. The book also looks at the place of self-sacrifice within ethical life and at the complex role of sacrifice as both a noble and destructive political ideal. In the religious domain, Halbertal argues, sacrifice is an offering, a gift given in the context of a hierarchical relationship. As such it is vulnerable to rejection, a trauma at the root of both ritual and violence. An offering is also an ambiguous gesture torn between a genuine expression of gratitude and love and an instrument of exchange, a tension that haunts the practice of sacrifice. In the moral and political domains, sacrifice is tied to the idea of self-transcendence, in which an individual sacrifices his or her self-interest for the sake of higher values and commitments. While self-sacrifice has great potential moral value, it can also be used to justify the most brutal acts. The book attempts to unravel the relationship between self-sacrifice and violence, arguing that misguided self-sacrifice is far more problematic than exaggerated self-love. Through the book's exploration of the positive and negative dimensions of self-sacrifice, it also addresses the role of past sacrifice in obligating future generations and in creating a bond for political associations, and considers the function of the modern state as a sacrificial community.


Author(s):  
Weigang Chen

The increasing salience of cultural conflicts in the post-Cold War era brings the problem of peripheral justice, defined as the equal attainment of social justice, to the center of current debates on globalization. Specifically, they force us to directly confront the toughest challenge posed by the Weberian tradition: If the principles of justice and equality are beyond the peculiarity of the Occidental civilization, how then may we give a full explanation as to why in the West-and only in the West-the ideal of public reasoning by private people has been materialized? The present study seeks to address this fundamental challenge by drawing on the Marxist tradition of public hegemony developed by Confucian Marxists and Gramsci. I argue that at the core of the problem of peripheral justice is an intrinsic linkage between Eurocentricism and the liberal paradigm of "civil society." The prospect of equal justice, therefore, hinges on the development of a new conception of the "social" that reverses the liberal interpretation of the relationship between bourgeois subjectivity and the "social" and derives from the primacy of the ethical life for social formation.


2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (113) ◽  
pp. 361
Author(s):  
Erick C. de Lima

A freqüência com que a crítica hegeliana ao suposto formalismo da ética kantiana tem retornado em diversas ramificações da discussão éticopolítica contemporânea, em especial a partir da década de 1970, cria um ensejo oportuno para um reexame da primeira tentativa de Hegel de “superar” a filosofia prática de Kant: o programa arquitetado em Frankfurt, baseado no conceito de amor e que, graças a este embasamento, realça o sentido “comunitário” da Aufhebung do ponto de vista moral na “eticidade”. Pretende-se aqui, primeiramente, resgatar aspectos gerais da relação entre as investigações do jovem Hegel e a crítica ao idealismo kantiano-fichteano. Em seguida, partido do arcabouço geral da interpretação hegeliana do cristianismo, a intenção é interpretar a crítica da moral deontológica a partir do conceito de amor em Geist des Christentums.Abstract: With the profound renewal of political philosophy that happened since the 1970s, the objection of “empty formalism” directed by Hegel against Kant’s moral theory has been returning to the contemporary philosophical debate over the moral foundations of the political community. This fact raises interest in Hegel’s first attempt to overcome Kant’s practical philosophy: the project of a radical critique of deontological ethics that he planned in Frankfurt and was based on the concept of love, whose inherently intersubjective character underlines the social significance of what Hegel later conceived as the Aufhebung of the moral point of view in ethical life. Firstly, this paper aims to outline Hegel’s early critique of the Kantian-Fichtean idealism in the light of his historical philosophical investigations in Tübingen, Bern and Frankfurt. The second part is an attempt to reexamine the relationship between Hegel’s conception of love and his critique of deontological morality, as it is presented in Geist des Christentums.


2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kostas Amiridis

ABSTRACT:This article explores how the idea of tragedy can highlight some of the complex and paradoxical aspects of the relationship between ethics and leadership. First, it offers a comparative analysis of the way in which questions of leadership are addressed as a practical and theoretical concern when leaders are confronted with situations of moral crisis. The context is provided by a critical reading of the MBA oath, a student-led pledge that tries to establish a higher moral standard for leaders, and by Norman Bowie’s attempt to develop a Kantian theory of leadership. Second, it introduces a novel philosophical approach based upon Hegel’s interpretation of tragedy and ethical life developed in his theory of aesthetics. Through the idea of tragedy, the concept of ethical leadership could also encompass those ambiguous situations when good conflicts with good and when a possible reconciliation of a moral conflict might require the sacrifice of otherwise legitimate ends.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-157
Author(s):  
Nolen Gertz ◽  

While the mediational theories of Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek have helped to uncover the role that technologies play in ethical life, the role that technologies play in political life has received far less attention. In order to fill in this gap, I turn to the mediational theory of Hegel. Hegel shows how understanding the mediated nature of experience is vital to understanding the development of political life. Through examples found in the military, in particular concerning the relationship between explosive ordnance detonation (EOD) soldiers and robots, I illustrate how Hegel’s analysis of the “struggle for recognition” can be used to understand human-technology relations from a political perspective. This political perspective can consequently help us to appreciate how technologies come to have a role in political life through our ability to experience solidarity with technology. Solidarity is experienced by users due to the recognition of technologies as serving roles in society that I describe as functionally equivalent to the social roles of the user. The realization of this functional equivalence allows users to learn how they are perceived and respected by society through the experience of how functionally equivalent technologies are perceived and respected. I conclude by focusing on the importance of understanding functional equivalence in design, as well as in the case of the Dallas Police Department having turned an EOD robot from a life-saving to a life-taking device. These examples show why Hegel is necessary for helping us to understand the political significance of recognizing and of misrecognizing technologies.


Problemata ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 161-175
Author(s):  
Wécio Pinheiro Araújo

this article aims to present the first steps of a research developed in the scope of Hegelian thought, focused on the problem of how the relationship between labor and language occurs in the formation of consciousness, and how it is expressed in the tension established between the ethical substance (sittliche Substanz) and moral action. The emphasis on the relationship between labor and language is justified in the sense of carrying out a reading of Hegelian political philosophy, framed by its ontological conception of work as a maker of consciousness and, consequently, of the relationship between content and form resulting from this process, which it acquires practical expression in language, at the same time that it forms the subject who acts in social life as reality (Realität) in which ethos is manifested as an ethical substance and, therefore, effectiveness (Wirklichkeit) of ethical life (sittliche Leben). In this first moment, we will present this relationship as a warp between ontology and politics based on the exposition of the first approximations we made between the Phenomenology of the Spirit and the Philosophy of Law.


Author(s):  
Liz Disley

By means of an analysis of Hegelian and Hegelian-inspired notions of aspects of communal ethical life, this chapter aims to demonstrate that, far from requiring a non-metaphysical (version of) Hegel, his concept of an ethical community rests on his concepts of consciousness and self-consciousness from the beginnings of his system. It begins by describing the Hegelian account of intersubjectivity that demonstrates the incomplete, changing, and vulnerable nature of Hegelian personhood. It goes on to discuss the Hegelian view of autonomy as seen in the account of civil society in the Philosophy of Right. Finally, it examines further the tension between these accounts and how they interact with the relationship between Hegel’s method and its practical corollaries.


2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-491
Author(s):  
Arthur Bueno

This paper discusses the relationship between Axel Honneth?s intersubjective theory of recognition and his political theory of democratic ethical life by addressing the potentials and difficulties attached to the notion of social pathology. Taking into account the diverse uses of this concept throughout Honneth?s oeuvre, it focuses initially on two of its formulations: first, the more recent discussions presented in ?The Diseases of Society?, some of which can be read in continuity with arguments presented in Freedom?s Right; second, an implicit conception of social pathology that can be found in Struggle for Recognition. These formulations involve contrastingly different premises with regard to phenomenological, methodological, social-ontological and etiological matters. I argue that such differences can be better grasped if one bears in mind two distinctive ways of understanding the fundamental intuition at the basis of the notion of social pathology: either as an analogy or as a homology. By disclosing the actual or potential discrepancies between both conceptions, the aim is to outline the grounds on which they could be brought together within the framework of a comprehensive concept. With this purpose, I then critically examine a third conception of social pathology which was first presented in Suffering from Indeterminacy and later developed, with some restrictions, in Freedom?s Right. Finally, a definition of social pathology is suggested which can bring together the different contributions of each conception while avoiding their pitfalls.


Author(s):  
Justin Williams

This chapter explores the relationship between environmental thought and geographic spatial theory. Both lines of thought problematize the role of non-humans in political and ethical life. Although both environmental and spatial thinkers argue for a dynamic exchange between humans and nature, the environment, the built environment, or their non-human surroundings, they tend to focus on different elements of those non-human surroundings and deploy different conceptual frameworks to analyze them. Additionally, environmental thinkers attend more to the ability of the non-human world to thwart, interfere with, or otherwise constitute social action, a trend that, when combined with spatial thinkers’ broad understanding of non-humans and developed conceptual categories, such as place and scale, can produce richer, fuller accounts of how non-humans figure into political life.


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