Eco-ethica

The intent of this paper is to derive an understanding of social justice from Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s San Min Chu I, The Three Principles of the People. Sun Yat- sen, the founder of modem China, gave a series of lectures in 1924, setting the goals of the revolution against the Qin dynasty and the foundation of a modem China. The word “justice” is mentioned only once in the lectures and it is paired with “faithfulness,” or trust referring to the ancient moral character or virtue. And yet underlying the whole programme is a notion of justice that is not interpersonal but social. The first part of the paper gives a summary of the meaning of the three principles: nationalism, democracy and people’s livelihood. The second part attempts to draw the meaning of social justice from the three principles, hopefully showing the relevance of Sun Yat-sen’s ideas to our time.

The Confucian concept of Jhongyong corresponds to the Western idea of metaphysical justice, and encompasses similar ideals to the Aristotelian golden mean. Herein is an approach to this Confucian concept from the perspective of comparative philosophy, its aim being triple: to expound on the central or representative position that the concept of Jhongyong takes in Confucian philosophy, to analyze various semantic spectrums of this Confucian concept, and to clarify the complex relationship it has with other Confucian ideas and principles.

In the case of Japan, we accepted the Chinese philosophy of morality when we received the Chinese character Yi: it means responsibility to Heaven (vertical) and, at the same time, responsibility to community (horizontal). An act having this structure might be our responsibility as human beings: yi means “justice”, keeping balance between Heaven and Earth. The Japanese people had such a balance until the Edo era. In 1868, when the Meiji Restoration occurred, the Japanese government tried to accept Western ideas. Cyoumin Nakae introduced the Western philosophy of law and the constitutional system. He translated Rousseau’s The Social Contract into Japanese and gave a series of lectures on the social contract. The fundament of his thought is concentrated in the “rights of Liberty”. He emphasized transcendental liberty beyond personal, phenomenal liberty and found the same structure in Mencius. His idea of ft suggests the way of justice. Unfortunately, this idea was crushed with the death of his talented disciple in prison. After the book of Bushido, ft was only translated as “duty” for the community (horizontal), and we lost the vertical perspective: transcendental liberty.

Chez Paul Ricoeur, on découvre une appréciation de l’indignation, dont la valeur tient d’abord à la nature, celle d’un authentique sentiment. Certes, ce derniern’est pas raison. Pourtant, Ricoeur Ta amplement montré, les raisons d’agir se nourrissent de motifs, et ceux-ci ont généralement la couleur, voire la chaleur, de nos sentiments. - Parce qu’il la considère comme l’expression du « sentiment d’injustice », il tient l’indignation pour l’entrée, déjà réflexive, dans le monde éthique. À ses yeux, cette expérience est décisive pour tout enfant et elle reste fondamentale pour l’adulte, dont les capacités critiques lui doivent beaucoup, même si, souvent, ces dernières contribuent à leur tour à en redéfinir les premières cibles. - Ricoeur n’a pas manqué de mettre un accent tout particulier sur la tradition prophétique biblique dans lequel il arrive que l’indignation contre l’injustice devienne accusation et condamnation irrémédiable contre l’injuste, à savoir Israël lui-même ! Mais que penser de « la colère de Dieu » ? Quant à lui, Ricoeur nous invite, tout à la fois, à justifier l’indignation, éthiquement, mais à en limiter la portée ontologique et théologique.

This article elaborates upon how memory and justice are connected within the philosophical project of Paul Ricoeur, and thus it aims to explore the broader context and meaning of his intriguing term “a just allotment of memory.” First, the concept of justice will be contextualized within the framework of Ricceur’s philosophical anthropology in general, and second, more specifically, with respect to his "little ethics.” Thereafter, issues relating to the manner in which memory generates questions of justice, and, indeed, why memory needs history in order to be just, will be explored. Finally, some crucial questions about the limits of justice, and the challenges associated with the presence of justice and injustices in limit-situations will briefly be raised.

This essay explores the personalism underlying the ethical dimension of Ricceur’s discussion of the institutional justice. According to Ricoeur, “public justice” refers to civil society’s critical response to the judicial acts of justice, with reference to ethical values as negotiating or mediating between the principles of justice and concrete practices, i.e., how things are done in the world, the existing state of affairs. Public justice can force institutional justice to function when it is not functioning well because of political interference and manipulation. In case the public justice is obstructed, for instance in a totalitarian regime, which intimidates the public debate, all we are left with is “personal justice,” a virtue in the Aristotelian sense that exceeds justice in the institutional sense. If institutional justice collapses and public discussion is silenced, personal justice is the only remaining relation to the third, which is irreducible to friendship.

This paper tries to show that, in our criticism of society today, it is not enough to presuppose an idea of utopia but also to integrate an idea of dystopia into our reflections. The first two parts consider two documents that analyze the socio- environmental crisis of our world today: (1) the fifth assessment report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2014, and (2) the Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis on Care of Our Common Home, which argues that there are not two different crises but one single socio-environmental crisis that threatens all life on our planet, and calls for a new ethics. The next two parts confront two philosophers, Ernst Bloch and Hans Jonas. Bloch has provided a strong defense of the utopian thinking but in a Marxist context, whereas Jonas has rejected all utopian thinking and replaced it with the idea of responsibility for the present world. Both thinkers need a more fundamental idea of hope.

The 21st International Climate Conference (COP21) demonstrated that a global consensus is possible among 195 countries. For this reason, we could say that climate change is a chance (perhaps the last) for humanity.It is indeed the only area where worldly governance now seems possible, although it also is needed to fight, for example, against global terrorism or to regulate international migration. - Through the ongoing experience concerning climate policy, a triple dynamic, which would establish a genuine global governance, can be drawn: recognizing interdependencies, regulating contradictions, making actors aware of their responsibilities. It is therefore urgent we learn the lessons of the COP 21.

Nature doesn’t need our care, the environment does. “Our” environment is a relational term implying surroundings that are inhabitable, allowing us not only to survive but to live good lives. For ages our “natural” environment was understood as that part of our environment that was given by nature and, therefore, not accessible to human actions as are our cultural and social environments. We had to accept it and adapt to it. Nowadays we are faced with the fact that more and more parts of our natural environment can be and are altered or prevented from altering by human manipulations. So ethical responsibility is extending beyond the traditional fields of social and cultural environmental conditions. We will have to find answers to the new question of what kind of nature we want to preserve, to cultivate, and to build, and for whom and to whom we are responsible.

This paper demonstrates the importance of the concept of responsibility as the foundation of an ethics of the environment, in particular in the fields of politics and economics in the modem civilization marked by globalization and technological progress. We can indeed observe a moralization of responsibility going beyond a strict legal definition in the development of an ethics of the environment. Accordingly, the concept of responsibility for the environment and for sustainability is the key notion of international development in order to understand the ethical duty of a modem technological civilization.

This paper is a modest attempt to derive an environmental ethics of Teaism from Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea and Daisetz T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture, for as both authors assert, Teaism is not just aestheticism but also religion and ethics with regards to the whole point of view about man and nature. The first part presents the main features of the Teaism, its brief history, the tea room and tea ceremony, and the philosophies behind it. The second part applies Max Scheler’s axiological ethics, particularly his notion of love as a movement towards the enhancement of the value inherent in the beloved to the love of Nature expressed in the tea ceremony. An environmental ethics from Teaism would then mean developing a habit of harmonizing, revering, purifying and being joyful in poverty before the ephemeral, the ever-changing and self- forgetfulness of Nature, including our human nature.

This paper deals with the relationships between ethics and the environment in Rousseau’s thought. The concept of environment is understood in its various dimensions. What is at stake is the natural, as well as the social and political, environment of human beings. The notion of ethics is also understood in a broad sense. We do not set ethics, understood as the search for happiness (or for the good life) against morality, understood as the fulfillment of duty. However, we take up two main questions. The first question concerns the influence of the environment, both natural and social, upon the ethical development of human beings. The second question concerns the responsibility of human beings towards nature. We examine what Rousseau teaches us regarding these two questions. Finally, we envisage liberty from the point of view of the relationships between nature and the political order. Human liberty is a matter of rights. It depends upon the republican nature of the state. However, liberty is also a sentiment that is intimately related to the living experience of nature. In order to understand what Rousseau means by liberty, we must grasp this intimate relationship between nature and politics.

Environmental ethic depends on technological ethics. We must therefore think of the technique with all its virtualities and not merely as an instrument. Heidegger’s approach to technique avoids this reduction. Brought closer to the language it questions its essence. With modem technology that essence does not advance production but provocation, by which nature is ordered to deliver an energy that can be extracted for maximum utilization and lower costs. The way of producing poetry remains open yet. This article reads again this difficult text, indicates some limitations, and tries to take the better of its wealth for contemporary debate crossing environmental and technological ethics.

The characteristic feature of modernized systematic environment is realized by one little, thin box named a smart phone or iPhone. By touching the surface, it can open various kinds of technologically magnified internet environment, and bring us into so-called world-wide information society. Our surrounding world is changed to a “technologically developed imaginary world”, virtual reality, where we can live and enjoy. Through this instrument we will be an “anonymous person” for helping people but we may hurt another person’s dignity. It is possible to hide one’s own “self’ behind the technological tool. People always look at the surface of smart phone and concentrate upon outer world without consciousness. It is the crisis of “self’, because of a lack of thinking. Unfortunately, dehumanization will occur. But for solving transnational problems, for example global warming, refugees, etc., we must change our ethical attitude from nosism without any responsibility to an awakening consciousness or living together as “world citizens”.

Moral naturalism in Europe and elsewhere today is the view that only the natural sciences can satisfactorily analyze the ethical value of persons. Many thoughtful people appear still to believe that the natural sciences can “reduce” the distinctive ethical value of persons ultimately to microphysical terms. Such an apparently widespread belief in part of the EU cultural environment today, however, raises serious questions. - In this EU context and in the Symposium contexts of Tomonobu Imamichi’s (1922-2012) eco-ethical concerns about “a new ethics for our new times,” I would like to offer here two sets of critical observations in support of non-naturalistic accounts of the ethical value of persons. The first group comprises reasons why even some impressive contemporary forms of scientific ethical naturalisms of the person continue to be surprising. And the second, briefer set comprises several elements only of what a non- naturalistic ethics of the person might require.

If Emmanuel Lévinas does not develop a criticism of audiovisual technologies, sometimes even granting them hermeneutical virtues, he remains mindful of the risks incurred by societies that are increasingly determined by these technologies. In this article we want to underline the fact that, for Lévinas, considerable distraction can be generated by information technology, which risks neutralizing the experience of living speech. Compared to these risks, a certain ethical urgency must serve as a reminder that, if the responsibility is not just a figure of speech, it demands we question the way in which we understand images in our societies that may be fully configured by the flow of information, and the way we understand how the other is revealed to us through screens.