Eco-ethica

The social and political problem of immigration forces us to reflect on ethical issues such as the relation of responding and bonding across sharp differences, the role that moral values play in relating to the other, and the possibility of solidarity as a way of being responsible for the others with whom we do not have any ready-made social bond. I take Levinas's notion of the ethical relation with the other as a primal society from which the third is not excluded, as a starting point for thinking of social bond as solidarity. I argue that it allows for ethical social bond making in situations determined by bio-power; even in situations in which people are depersonalized and deprived of their right to rights, and of their ethical agency. I propose that the bond of solidarity with the immigrant can be a model for the ethical social bond.

This paper takes its point of departure from a prior reflection on John Rawls’ argument for a two-stage model which shelters the political from immediate contestation. I turn to an examination of populism first from an historical and then from a normative perspective. Historically, populism can be traced to early Roman times, while from a normative point of view, as the literature shows, populism lacks a clear definition. In my view this is derived from its essentially parasitical function in relationship to democracy. In the end, populism, which claims to be grounded on the immediacy of conflict, is exposed as a remnant of a pre-democratic past which does not and cannot accommodate itself to the ‘fact of pluralism’ that characterizes our contemporary democratic situation.

The problem of interdependence is crucial for understanding the climate, with its interactions between land, water and atmosphere, as well as with human activities, past and future. The concept of interdependence expresses two types of relationship, that of causality and that of responsibility. For the problems of climate governance as understood as a statistical average in the Conferences of the parties (COP), causal dependence is impossible to reconstruct precisely, notably because of the complexity of these phenomenons. However, dependence does not only concern the domain of being, falling within the natural sciences and social sciences and human descriptivo-predictive. It also concerns the ought-to-be and therefore the normative sciences (ethics, political thery, law and normative economy). Here interdependence is much more problematic since it is opposed to freedom. The article discusses the various interdependencies and political solutions that are offered to take care of this needs, architectures for discussing climate change politically: systems (N. Luhmann) and deliberation (J. Habermas). He proposes then another solution, that of the moral and political consediration.

Fundamentally, ethics may be understood as having to do with what and who acting persons are. Persons, however, act variously. Some persons are basically individualists. They characteristically act as if they are as wholly independent as possible from other persons. Other persons are collectivists. They act as if they are as much a dependent part of some larger community of persons as possible. Accordingly, one cardinal issue for any philosophical ethics is whether almost all persons are, fundamentally, independent entities. That is, are almost all persons independent entities, or are almost all persons dependent ones? The idea I pursue here briefly is that, fundamentally, persons are neither independent nor dependent entities but interdependent ones. They are so in the senses of not being essentially prior to, or not being ontologically more basic than, or not having their ontological identity apart from other persons.

The conflict between traditional ethics posed by contemporary technology is especially acute in the case of artificial intelligence. This is because the conception of nothingness or vacuum developed by both Laotse and Zuang-zi is resisted by artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence with its incorporation of inter-subjectivity and inter-objectivity cannot be a vacuum.

By entering positive law, human rights reveal not only internal contradictions, but also external conflicts between the practical reasons which inspire them. These contradictions and conflicts could pull us in the doldrums (Pot au noir), this mythical place where ships, caught in violent storms and world winds, could shipwreck.

This article discusses the ethical interdependence and political practice in the age of the Anthropocene. The article presents the work on this topic by Bruno Latour in his discussions of social constructivism in relation to the political philosophy of the Anthropocene. With Latour we can perceive the emergence of a new form of geopolitics where the earth and its nature has become a field of politics. Politics has become climate change politics and the political hypermodernity is forced to integrate nature in the ethics and politics of our time. Therefore the age of the Anthropocene implies the emergence of a new form of international governance. Resilience politics in the age of the Anthropocene opens for a new responsibility for climate change that moves beyond the technological understandings of modernity because humanity is situated in the center of the earth in interdependence with nature and culture.

The now widespread notion of environmental racism, coined around 1990 and still important in its place, was never intended to do justice to the full range of issues raised by the Anthropocene. To meet this challenge I propose the introduction of a new concept, that of “anthropocentric racism.” This concept is an extension of what some have referred to as systemic racism, but because the Anthropocene challenges the distinction between nature and culture championed by the Boasian school of anthropology as a way to attack racism, the Anthropocene obliges us to look at racism differently. I propose an extension of the dialectical approach to racism championed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon and will illustrate that approach by examining climate change as a form of antipraxis.

The question is: how shall we conceive the idea of justice in the world of violence of our time? It takes up the old symbol of justice: the scales that symbolise an equilibrium between different ambitions. The author traces this idea in Western philosophy since Plato and Aristotle through Kant to Rawls, Ricoeur and Delmas-Marty for whom it becomes the symbol of global justice. By using the wind rose as another symbol, Delmas-Marty expresses the ethical necessity of a global justice between the philosophical, legal, social and political ambitions that blow across our whole world. All these winds have their rights in globalization, but none of them have the right to dominate the others.

Enquiring the sources and the legitimacy of Derrida’s statement “Law {droit) is not justice” from his essay “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’ ” (1990), the paper analyses the three notions of “justice”, “equity” and “concordantia” (in Cusanus). Part I explains historically how the difference between the limited and changing human laws and the eternal justice of God was gradually being perceived and acknowledged in Antiquity. Part II illustrates how the virtue of equity was called upon to compensate for the insufficiencies and contradictions of human laws, mainly by Aristotle. Part III explores the conditions how and argues for the possibility that the notion of “concordantia” as developed by Nicolaus Cusanus for the Council of Basle could work as a mediating principle of legislation among conflicting interests and thus provide for temporary justice by means of an equitable procedure of legislation.

Emmanuel Levinas can be read as challenging the legal principle that everybody must be treated in the same way without fear of favor, no matter who they are or what status they hold. He did so by highlighting the private suffering that goes unnoticed if justice is blind, as is suggested by the image of Iustitia wearing a blindfold. What this unspeakable suffering means for justice is explored through a reading of Jean Améry’s At the Mind's Limit and Jill Stauffer’s Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard.

This article discusses the concept of globalization in relation to global justice with the aim of developing a cosmopolitan spirit as the basis for international justice. Globalization was in the beginning an economic concept but with the emergence of global problems of global poverty, environmental degradation, climate change and global social and political interdependence we need to rethink the concept of justice for the international community at a cosmopolitan level. The article considers that it is the task of political philosophy to reflect on this other concept of globalization, not only as a utopia but also as a real alternative for the global community. The dream of another globalization includes overcoming the misery of the world in the struggle for democracy and hope for cosmopolitan justice in the age of hypermodemity.

This article focuses on the problem of political legitimacy: first, by finding it to be the driving force in the Rawlsian paradigm moving from a focus on the moral to one on the political; second, with the help of a consideration of multiple- modernities theory, by arguing for a version of political liberalism freed of its western framework; and third, by applying that framework to current debates over the meaning of democracy in a Confucian context.

Dworkin invented a fictional character: Hercules. Super-judge he has the capacity to reveal the hidden structure of judgments. In his famous judgment Solomon’s wisdom is recognized as divine. It is no longer sufficient for a secularized philosophical reflection. However, Dworkin’s Hercules is endowed with a capacity of unconventional coherence, which allows him to overcome the judge’s instinct. It is somehow in the position of a god. Salomon, who is called wise, has undoubtedly invented an unexpected resolution in his judgment, which is tested here in the light of the richness of the meaning of responsibility. For Salomon, as for Dworkin, responsibility is a rock. - This chapter examines in-depth his latest book, Justice for Hedgehogs, from a moral realism perspective, in order to critically analyse his narrow conception of moral realism and the various opponents of this meta-ethical theory as powerful as it is diverse.

Ethics has to do basically with what and who acting persons are. Persons however act variously. Some persons are basically individualists. They characteristically act as if they are as wholly independent as possible from other persons. Other persons are collectivists. They act as if they are as much a dependent part of some larger community of persons as possible. - Accordingly, one cardinal issue for any philosophical ethics like eco-ethics is whether almost all persons are, fundamentally, independent entities. That is, are almost all persons independent entities, or are almost all persons dependent ones? - The idea I try to pursue here briefly is that, fundamentally, persons are neither independent nor dependent entities but interdependent ones. They are so in the senses of not being essentially prior to, or ontologically more basic than, or having their ontological identity apart from other persons.

This paper explores the idea of justice in the prophetic strand of the Jewish and Christian traditions. First, a brief description is given of the context in which the prophetic idea of justice first evolves. Second, focussing on the historical and prophetic literature Hebrew Bible, an analysis of the defining characteristics of this idea of justice is undertaken. Third and finally, the relevance of this prophetic tradition for our contemporary politico-philosophical debates on justice is discussed in relation to the discourse on law and justice initiated by Jacques Derrida in the 1990s and followed up by Giorgio Agamben during the last decades.

La question de la justice est partout présente dans l’oeuvre de Rousseau. S’il aborde tout d’abord la question du juste et de l’injuste en rapport avec la loi de nature, la justice n’est cependant pas seulement pour Rousseau un problème de droit. S’interroger sur la justice, c’est poser la question de l’homme et de son rapport au monde. Pour autant, l’idée rousseauiste de justice ne se déduit pas d’une philosophie « compréhensive » du monde et des affaires humaines. La théorie rousseauiste de la justice est en elle-même une théorie compréhensive. C’est une philosophie des rapports humains et de la manière dont ils s’inscrivent dans Tordre du monde. Ce chapitre s’efforce de rendre compte des différentes dimensions de cette théorie. Il commence par montrer comment Rousseau traite de la justice dans le cadre du droit naturel. Puis, il traite successivement du principe intersubjectif de la justice et de la justice comme principe d’un ordre « objectif » du monde, de la société et de l’État.