To Live is to Devour Others

This paper studies how Ishida Sui’s Tokyo Ghoul creates its typical sense of “tragedy,” by stressing the injustice inherent in every act of eating, and by generalizing the model of nutrition to every ethically laden act. Ishida undermines the Kantian principle that “ought implies can,” depicting a twisted world which forces us into wrongdoing: we have to eat, but there is no Other we can eat with moral impunity. Still, his characters provide some ethical models which could be implemented in our everyday food ethics, given that the tragicality spotted by Ishida is not that alien to our food system: food aesthetics, nihilism, amor fati, living with the tragedy, and letting ourselves be eaten are the options Ishida offers to cope with the tragedy, to approach the devastation our need for food brings into the world in a more aware and charitable way. The examination of Ishida’s narrative device, conducted with the mediation of thinkers such as Lévinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, and other contemporary moral philosophers, shall turn the question: “how to become worthy of eating?” into the core problem for food ethics.

A Comparative Philosophical Analysis of the Kantian Principle of Moral Theory and the Utilitarian Theory: Applications and Critiques

There have been several notions about the Kantian perspective and the utilitarian theory from all walks of life in the academic space. Kant spoke widely on morality, rights and justice for all persons whereas Bentham and Mill spoke of an action being right if they are useful for the benefit of the majority. Kant admonished people to act as they would want all other people to act towards them. This paper, therefore, takes the step to critically compare the Kantian principle of moral theory to the Utilitarian theory as an important aspect in general philosophy and the social science philosophy in particular. This critical paper adopts a systematic review approach whereby scholarly articles from different authors and sources were drawn which served as secondary sources of literature for the discussion. This paper argues that the Categorical Imperative’ is a moral guideline devised to aid an individual in choosing to make the right decision and perform the right duties whereas the Utilitarian approach is an ethical system that proposes that the greatest useful goodness for the greatest number of people should be our guiding principle when making ethical decisions. This paper makes a case by imploring how the categorical imperative of Kantianism and the Utilitarian theory are applied in Social Science Research (SSR). It is therefore recommended that all life matters and persons should not be used as a means for one’s satisfaction and what is right in society must be enforced and what is beneficial to the larger society must also be encouraged.

O princípio misericórdia. Uma contribuição à questão dos princípios em bioética

Estuda-se aqui a contribuição do princípio misericórdia, formulado por Jon Sobrino em teologia e por nós colocado no contexto da questão dos princípios em Bioética. Em grande parte tributária ao principialismo norte-americano, a bioética carrega marcas do liberalismo reforçado pelo princípio kantiano da autonomia. O princípio misericórdia oferece um contraponto contundente que vem da vulnerabilidade dos pobres e da sua condição social nomeada por Sobrino como um “povo de crucificados”. Superando a formulação de uma misericórdia ingênua, soma-se a sua força espiritual com as exigências de uma responsabilidade capaz de torná-la transformadora. Desta forma, o princípio misericórdia vem reforçar tendências da bioética no Brasil que buscam superar o principialismo circunscrito aos âmbitos das relações de saúde, para se tornar uma bioética social de grande abrangência.Abstract: This study is about the principle of mercy formulated by Jon Sobrino in theology and put in the context of the principles in Bioethics. Mostly attributed to the North American principialism, bioethics hold marks from the liberalism reinforced by the Kantian principle of autonomy. The principle of mercy offers a crucial counterpoint which comes from the vulnerability of the poor and their social condition named by Sobrino as a “people of crucified ones”. Suppressing the formulation of a naïve mercy, its spiritual strength joins the demands of responsibility in order to be capable to change and to transform realities. So, the principle of mercy can reinforce the bioethical tendencies in Brazil in overlapping its circumscription to the principialism in the field of health relations, in order to reach a social bioethics with a broader inclusion of the poor.

The Badness of Death for Us, the Worth in Us, and Priorities in Saving Lives

Carl Tollef Solberg and Espen Gamlund suggest that in allocating scarce, life-saving resources we ought to consider how bad death would be for those who would die if left untreated. We have moral reason, they intimate, to prioritize persons for whom death would be worse, according to the Time-Relative Interest Account of the badness of death. In response, I try to show that an allocation principle that specifies minimizing the badness of death among those vying for a life-saving resource would fail to respect the worth of persons. Solberg and Gamlund mention several other allocation principles. But, I argue, even when these others also come into play, allocations can fail to respect persons’ worth. A principle of respect for the worth (or dignity) of persons should, I contend, be employed in the allocation of scarce, life-saving resources. I sketch and apply a Kantian principle in an effort to allay the common worries that such a principle will be too vague to be useful and implausibly disallow length of future life to be a deciding factor in choosing whom to save.

Beyond Borders

This chapter charts the growing capacity of the European Court to protect the rights of those who are not citizens of member states of the Council of Europe. The Court’s sustained commitment to robustly enforcing the right to life, the prohibition of torture and inhuman treatment, and the right to a court and judicial remedy facilitated the development of three strains of cosmopolitan jurisprudence. The first operationalizes the Kantian principle of hospitality, covering expulsion, extradition, and the treatment of refugees. The second extends protections to persons whose rights have been violated by states who are not parties to the Convention, or by state parties exercising jurisdiction outside of Convention territory. The third instantiates dialogues with other treaty-based regimes when it comes to overlapping obligations to protect rights. These dialogues suggest that constitutional pluralism is an emergent property of the structure of international law beyond Europe.

Deontological Grounds for the Principles of Administrative Justice

Section I invokes the ideal of the rule of law as another possible source of normative support or grounding for my principles of administrative justice for the management of legitimate expectations. Following on from this, Section II looks into the Kantian principle that agents ought to be treated never purely as means but always as ends in themselves. Section III turns to Ronald Dworkin’s idea that governments have a fundamental duty to treat citizens with equal concern and respect, as yet another potential normative ground for my principles of administrative justice. Finally, Section IV puts onto the table but ultimately rejects a possible objection to both the Liability Precept and the Secondary Duties Principle based on the deontological values of democratic majoritarianism and equality.