In recent years, there have been reports about increased religious discrimination in schools. As a way of acknowledging the importance of religion and faith communities in the public sphere and to propose a solution to the exclusion of religious citizens, the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas suggests an act of translation for which both secular and religious citizens are mutually responsible. What gets lost in Habermas’s translation, this paper argues, is the condition that makes translation both necessary and (im)possible. Drawing on (...) Walter Benjamin’s notion of the mysterious untranslatable and the task of the translator, the paper approaches translation as an ethical process involving risk, asymmetry and uncertainty. Not knowing where this risk will lead, the paper takes the ethical ambivalence at play in Jacques Derrida’s notion of the untranslatable and explores this in relation to religious difference in education. It argues that the untranslatable needs to be acknowledged in terms of a respect for difference and a limit to narration, if students with religious convictions are not to be further violated in schools. (shrink)

This article attempts to chart a course beyond the 'impasse of the political' in Derridean deconstruction that avoids both the ontologization of ethics in Levinas and the recourse to morality in Habermasian discourse ethics. Instead, it presents an account of the decision in a terrain of undecidability through the concept of affinity. This mode of ethico-political activity, when combined with Foucault's analytics of power and Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis, provides the outlines of a project of radical social transformation that could (...) achieve greater nuance with regard to 'actually existing' democracy and justice than has so far been achieved within deconstructive political theory. At the level of social structure, such a project is commensurate with a move away from subject positions associated with the system of liberal-capitalist nation-states, in favour of identifications produced by a locus of 'coming' communities. Key Words: affinity • Critchley • deconstruction • Deleuze and Guattari • Derrida • ethics • Foucault • Laclau and Mouffe • politics. (shrink)

This article tries to bring out the implication of Cavell’s critical comments on Derrida, clustered around Cavell’s charge that deconstruction entails a flight from the ordinary. Cavell’s and Derrida’s different readings of Austin’s ordinary language philosophy provide a common ground for elaborating their respective positions. Their writings are at once the closest but also the most divergent when addressing the moral implication of speech, or more precisely, when addressing their understanding of responsibility and voice. Employing Derrida’s so-called ‘double reading’ as (...) a leitmotif will not only shed light on the moral dimension of deconstruction, but also bring the central target of Cavell’s critique into the open. (shrink)

The controversial case of Terri Schiavo came to a close on March 31, 2005, with her death following the removal of a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube. This event followed years of controversy and social upheaval. Voices from across the entire political and cultural spectrums filled the airwaves and op-ed pages of major newspapers. Protests ensued outside of Ms. Schiavo’s care facility. Ms. Schiavo’s parents published videos of their daughter on the internet in an effort to prove that she was not (...) in a vegetative state and could potentially recover. There is a certain mystery to the entire controversy given the fact that, legally, it was largely a matter of settled law. Precedent cases and legal statutes clearly set out the proper procedures and decisions to be followed in this case. Nonetheless, powerful challenges and virulent opposition to these standards arose. Through an investigation of this case as well as a comparative study of the case of Dax Cowart (in particular, the documentary depictions of Dax Cowart’s case) and of a photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin, I plan to investigate the source of these social upheavals and hypothesize that they were largely the result of a phenomenological reaction to the human face. (shrink)

This paper explores, from a phenomenological perspective, the conditions necessary for the possession of intentional content, i.e., for being intentionally directed toward the world. It argues that Levinas's concept of ethics as first philosophy makes an important contribution to this task. Intentional directedness, as understood here, is normatively structured. Levinas's ‘ethics’ can be understood as a phenomenological account of how our experience of the other subject as another subject takes place in the recognition of the normative force of a command. (...) This supplies a condition that—as the paper shows by examining Husserl and Sartre on how our experience of the Other constitutes an ‘objective’ world—earlier phenomenologists have misunderstood, because they have treated ethical experience as ‘founded’ on a prior theory of representation (‘ontology’ in Levinas's language). Ethics is first philosophy because it is only by acknowledging the command in the ‘face’ of the Other that we can account for the sensitivity to the normative distinctions that structure intentional content. Throughout, the paper shows how Levinas's analyses, in Totality and Infinity, draw upon and develop the analyses of Husserl and Sartre. (shrink)

According to Emmanuel Levinas, the individual bears an infinite obligation to the other person. In the Talmudic reading “Judaism and revolution,” Levinas suggests that we move from the ethical encounter to social relationships using contracts—both particular contracts and the social contract. So social relationships are created by limiting obligation, and as a result these relationships can only be practically acceptable, not ethical. Jewish religious practice for Levinas should also be understood as a set of negotiated limits to our infinite obligation.

This article examines a peculiarity dating from Classical times, namely, that democracy may be achieved, in practice, independently of and prior to its articulation as theory. This peculiarity has implications for the way in which the history of democratic theory is understood, and also for the place of the democratic theorist in society. Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, Chantal Mouffe and John Keane are theorists of democracy, but they all depart, first, from the commitment to the universal truth‐claims that underpin other (...) schools of democratic thought, and, second, from the concomitant belief in the priority of theory over practice. In doing so, they make it difficult to theorise how democracy might be brought about, except, circularly, where it already exists. On the one side, Feyerabend, Rorty and, to a lesser extent, Keane, assume that ‘democracy’ already exists, so that its realisation requires no theory. On the other, Mouffe argues that ‘democracy’ does not yet exist in practice, but her attempts to theorise its realisation are not convincing. (shrink)

Recent debates among scholars in Literature education have led to polarizing views about the aims of the subject. The debate reignites ancient quarrels about the aesthetic and political values of literary study and relatedly, the different pedagogical approaches to teaching. In the first part of this paper, I explore the aesthetic-political divide in Literature education paying particular attention to how this was reinforced by New Criticism and Poststructuralist Criticism as these were key movements that have had a significant influence on (...) the teaching of Literature in schools. More importantly, I argue that such a divide exemplified the different goals of the West, in which Literature education originated as a platform for the cultivation of taste, and Postcolonial countries, in which the subject was utilized as a political tool for colonization resulting in acts of mimicry and subversion among colonized subjects. In the second part of the paper, I apply third space theory to disrupt the aesthetic-political divide. I discuss the need to create third spaces in Literature classrooms that are critical, inclusive, negotiated and ethical allowing students to engage with aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions of literature. (shrink)

Education has long been charged with the taskof forming and shaping subjectivity andidentity. However, the prevailing view ofeducation as a project of producing rationalautonomous subjects has been challenged bypostmodern and poststructuralist critiques ofsubstantial subjectivity. In a similar vein,Emmanuel Levinas inverts the traditionalconception of subjectivity, claiming that weare constituted as subjects only in respondingto the other. In other words, subjectivity isderivative of an existentially priorresponsibility to and for the other. Hisconception of ethical responsibility is thusalso a radical departure from the prevailingview (...) of what it means to be a responsible moralagent. In this paper, I use jazz improvisationas a metaphor to focus on three interrelatedaspects of ethical responsibility on Levinas'saccount: passivity, heteronomy, andinescapability. I then point toward some waysin which reframing responsibility andsubjectivity along this line might offer newpossibilities for conceiving subjectivity andmoral agency in education. (shrink)

Nuestro propósito en el presente artículo será investigar el modo en que Jacques Derrida dirige la cuestión de la “responsabilidad ética” y de la “decisión política” en su propia obra a través de la lectura de Martin Heidegger en Del espíritu. Para ello, en primer lugar, analizaremos la noción de “promesa” que permite cuestionar el privilegio de la pregunta en Heidegger e ilustrar el acontecimiento ético desde la propia lectura. En segundo lugar, nos adentraremos en la dimensión política de la (...) deconstrucción desde la noción de “indecidibilidad” que hace posible la justicia de la decisión precisamente por realizarse en ausencia de un fundamento racional. Por último, trataremos de pensar aquello a partir de lo que la adhesión de Heidegger al nazismo fue posible desde la lógica textual de discursos en ocasiones antagónicos, que se profieren en nombre del “espíritu”, así como la necesidad de “pensar” y no solo “condenar” el nazismo. (shrink)

: This essay examines Irigaray's analysis of politics and the political implications of her critique of sacrificial orders that repress difference/matter. I suggest that her descriptions of a fluid "feminine" can be read as an alternative symbolic not dependent on repression. This idea is politically promising in opening a possibility for justice and a nonantagonistic intersubjectivity. I conclude by assessing Irigaray's concrete proposals for sexuate rights and a civil identity for women.

This essay examines Irigaray's analysis of politics and the political implications of her critique of sacrificial orders that repress difference/matter. I suggest that her descriptions of a fluid “feminine” can be read as an alternative symbolic not dependent on repression. This idea is politically promising in opening a possibility for justice and a nonantagonistic intersubjectivity. I conclude by assessing Irigaray's concrete proposals for sexuate rights and a civil identity for women.

This article is an attempt to understand ethical theory not just as a set of well-developed philosophical perspectives but as a range of moral capacities that human beings more or less grow into over the course of their lives. To this end, we explore the connection between formal ethical theories and stage developmental psychologies, showing how individuals mature morally, regarding their duties, responsibilities, ideals, goals, values, and interests. The primary method is to extract from the writings of Kohlberg and his (...) students the cues that help to flesh out a developmental picture of a wide range of ethical perspectives. Thus, developmental psychology benefits from gaining a broader understanding of “morality” and “ethics,” and ethical theory benefits from a richer understanding of how moral maturity arises from youthful beginnings in juvenile and adolescent thinking. Results of this study offer insight into the difficulty of teaching ethics and a refined ability to assess moral maturity in business activity. (shrink)

The moral philosophy of Levinas offers a stark prospectus of impossibility for corporate ethics. It differs from most traditional ethical theories in that, for Levinas, the ethical develops in a personal meeting of one with the Other, rather than residing in some internal deliberation of the moral subject. Levinasian ethics emphasizes an infinite personal responsibility arising for each of us in the face of the Other and in the presence of the Third. It stresses the imperious demand we experience to (...) be open to, prepared for and impassioned with that which we may not know, or recognize, about ourselves or about the Other. Such a demand transcends our intellectual and/or rational potential; it involves us in a carnal and somatic bodily experience of otherness. If we are to speak of Levinasian ethics in a business context, it cannot be a matter of corporate ethics but only a matter of individual managerial ethics. What such an ethics would be like is yet to be outlined. This paper proposes a series of questions and suggestions that will explicate some key terms of a practice organized around a Levinasian vocabulary of otherness, responsibility, proximity, diachrony and justice. (shrink)

The moral philosophy of Levinas offers a stark prospectus of impossibility for corporate ethics. It differs from most traditional ethical theories in that, for Levinas, the ethical develops in a personal meeting of one with the Other, rather than residing in some internal deliberation of the moral subject. Levinasian ethics emphasises an infinite personal responsibility arising for each of us in the face of the Other and in the presence of the Third. It stresses the imperious demand we experience to (...) be open to, prepared for and impassioned with that which we may not know, or recognise, about ourselves or about the Other. Such a demand transcends our intellectual and/or rational potential; it involves us in a carnal and somatic bodily experience of otherness. If we are to speak of Levinasian ethics in a business context, it cannot be a matter of corporate ethics but only a matter of individual managerial ethics. What such an ethics would be like is yet to be outlined. This paper proposes a series of questions and suggestions that will explicate some key terms of a practice organised around a Levinasian vocabulary of otherness, responsibility, proximity, diachrony and justice. (shrink)

To date, film scholars have found the films of Jim Jarmusch to be tantamount to works of postmodern philosophy. For as intriguing and productive as such interpretations of Jarmusch’s films have been, I submit that the postmodern framework occludes a crucial aspect of Jarmusch’s film-philosophy, namely, his investment in the ordinary. From this perspective, I intend to show the availability of Jarmusch’s films to Wittgensteinian interpretation. More specifically, I plan to situate Jarmusch’s arthouse action film Ghost Dog: The Way of (...) the Samurai (1999) between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida in order to demonstrate the profound affinities between Jarmusch’s film-philosophy and Wittgenstein’s conception of ordinary language. Through a consideration of character dialogue, I will demonstrate the extent to which Jarmusch rejects the private language argument – which, by extension, amounts to a rejection of linguistic relativism as an instance, or species, of skepticism – in favor of ordinary conceptions of language, expressiveness, knowledge, and responsibility. (shrink)

This article argues that, propaedeutic to the construction of an Objectivist aesthetics, scholars must refute the irrational/immoral philosophical premises that have been destroying the philosophy of art. Due to the troubling combination of its contemporaneity, extremism, and considerable influence, poststructuralism, which, since the 1960s, has served as the default philosophical foundation for philosophers of art, is the target of this article. This article contends that the road to an Objectivist aesthetics must first be cleared of philosophical debris like poststructuralism before (...) we can hope to go back to the world of art. (shrink)

In this paper I seek to critically examine UCT’s and CCT’s and consider how a Levinasian ethics might offer normative guidelines to evaluate such aid programmes. Such an analysis will serve to both critique and supplement the traditional utilitarian analyses of such programmes. In so doing, this paper also hopes to contribute to the business ethics literature in which a Levinasian ethics may be brought to bear on real world problems. I proceed by enlisting Jordaan who argues that a Levinasian (...) ethical politics can be instantiated in institutional designs by allowing a more complex representation of the other’s alterity. Two UCT programmes are interrogated in light of this finding – the first, a UCT programme in a community in Vietnam; the second, a joint CCT/UCT programme targeting adolescent girls in Malawi, designed to test the efficacy of conditionality to achieve certain. (shrink)

The article centres on the notion of responsibility in Tom Stoppard’s Darkside (2013). While Pink Floyd’s original album, which inspired the playwright, thematises its connection to ethics in a spectral and hauntological manner, through the use of field recording sound snippets interwoven in the music, the radio play explores the notion of responsibility through what is called “thought experiments.” The article identifies the subversive function of these narrative examples and, following Emanuel Levinas’ suggestions concerning the instability of the link between (...) the philosophical discourse and that of examples, shows the latter’s insolent and disruptive nature. The notion of responsibility is further linked to its discussion by Jacques Derrida in his Gift of Death (1995) which consequently makes it possible to view the relation between responsibility and responding from a subversive, hauntological and undecidable perspective. (shrink)

This investigation concerns first what Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricœur consider to be «the question of writing» in Plato’s Phaedrus, and then whether their conception of a general philosophical problem of writing finds support in the dialogue. By contrast to their attempts to «determine» the «status» of writing as the general condition of knowledge, my investigation has two objections. (1) To show that Plato’s concern is not to define writing, but to reflect on what is involved in honest and dishonest (...) inquiry. (2) To argue that Derrida’s and Ricœur’s determination of the instrumental (epistemic and moral) «status» of writing, overlooks crucial difficulties of dishonest writing that Plato’s discussion of the pharmakon reveals. The argument proposed is that honest and dishonest inquiry is not tied to the moral status that writing, as an invention or instrument, unconditionally involves, but to the moral quality of what a human being does when inquiring. (shrink)

Recent years have seen educationalists turning to Emmanuel Levinas when considering the relationship between ethics and education. While it is true that Levinas never speaks of ethics in relation to the practice of classroom education, nonetheless, for Levinas, ethics is a teaching, and learning can only take place in the presence of the Other. This book considers how, within the constraints of the Irish primary school education system, teachers can develop a Levinasian approach to teaching, that affords both them and (...) the children they teach multiple opportunities throughout the school day to take up their ethical responsibility for each other as Other. Beginning from a Levinasian understanding of learning and teaching as constituting primordially relational and ethical events, and weaving the philosophies of Levinas, and the educationalists he inspires, into the approaches of philosophy with children, restorative practice, and PAX, this book suggests a unique approach to ethics in Irish primary school classrooms. The focus of this thesis, then, is on both the philosophical underpinnings that anchor teaching as a Levinasian, and a consideration of what practical approaches could be employed by the Levinasian teacher. (shrink)

_Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory._.

Challenges the accepted model, and builds a politically sensitive notion of generosity.

Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory.

. Time and the event. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 223-242.

Most readers believe that it is difficult, verging on the impossible, to extract concrete prescriptions from the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Although this view is largely correct, Levinas’ philosophy can, with some assistance, generate specific duties on the part of legal actors. In this paper, I argue that the fundamental premises of Levinas’ theory of justice can be used to construct a prohibition against capital punishment. After analyzing Levinas’ concepts of justice, responsibility, and interruption, I turn toward his scattered remarks (...) on legal institutions, arguing that they enable a sense of interruption specific to the legal domain. It is here that we find the conceptual resources most important to my Levinasian abolition. I argue that the interruption of legal justice by responsibility implies what I call the principle of revisability. The principle of revisability states a necessary condition of just legal institutions: To be just, legal institutions must ensure the possibility of revising any and all of their rules, principles, and judgments. From this, the argument against capital punishment easily follows. Execution is a legal act, perhaps the only legal act, that cannot be undone. An application of the principle of revisability to this fact leads to the conclusion that legal institutions cannot justly impose capital punishment. After defending these points at length, I conclude with some observations on the consequences of the principle of revisability for law more generally. (shrink)

Early on in Specters of Marx, the first sentence in Exordium reads: ‘Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live finally’. In the last paragraph of the last chapter, Derrida gives the injunction: ‘If he loves justice at least, the “scholar” of the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost’. The ghost is the gift Derrida leaves us, yet, what can ghosts teach us about justice and how may (...) we (dare we) learn from them? Derrida invokes Levinas's name for the only time in Specters of Marx, with the line ‘The relation to others – that is to say, justice, writes Levinas’. From ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ to ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’, the spectral relation between Derrida and Levinas already performs spectral justice. How do we say ‘J'accepte’ to spectral justice – justice that we cannot rightly possess? The figure and logic of the ghost serve not merely rhetorical purposes but, in its non-presence and presence, the ghost becomes the trace of the justice that we can neither own nor disown, but need to learn to live with, even if, in politics and in life, the fear of ghosts remains. (shrink)

Challenging a long-standing assumption of the separation of ethical from poetic activity, this essay develops the basis for a theory of moral life as inherently and radically creative. A range of contemporary post-Kantian ethicists--including Ricoeur, Nussbaum, Kearney, and Gutiérrez--are employed to make the argument that moral practice requires a fundamental capability for creative transformation, imagination, and social renewal. In addition, this poetic moral capability can finally be understood only from the primordial religious point of view of the mystery of Creation (...) as such. Humanity as an image of its Creator is called to the endless impossible possibility of the re-creation of its own complex, plural, and fallen social world. Such a perspective is opposed to views of moral life as the application of law-like principles or the recovery of past moral histories. Without a better understanding of moral life's radically creative imperative, we miss a vital element of social relations' distinctive humanity. (shrink)

In this article, I combine political philosophy and film to examine the problematic of the ‘mystical’ foundation of authority and democracy as represented in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Ford’s filmic vision is interpretable as a parable of the passage from the state of nature to the modern republic and the deconstruction of American democratic progressivism. To analyse it, I proceed in two steps: first, I defend a middle-way critical Enlightenment perspective between the democratic-progressivist and the deconstructive approach to (...) the question of foundations. Second, in dialogue with this critical Enlightenment perspective, I argue that Ford’s cinematic vision of the foundation remains ambivalent, given that its deconstruction of the mythology of American democratic progressivism is premised on the nostalgic mythologizing of the pre-democratic age. Moreover, I take issue with Robert Pippin’s interpretation of the movie as a cautionary tale against Enlightenment rationalism, and which poses at its center the key psychological role of myths in politics (2011). In contrast, I argue that Ford’s cinematic vision cautions against decoupling the socio-political and personal life from the vital connection to truth and acting upon truth. From this standpoint, a “politics of truth” is, against Pippin’s interpretation of Ford’s vision, compatible with taking into account the constitutive role of narratives in building political legitimacy and authority. (shrink)

In his 2012 work, Faith of the Faithless, the philosopher Simon Critchley presented an ‘atheistic’ formulation of faith as an ‘experiment’ in ‘political theology.’ This work, as part of the so-called ‘turn to religion’ in continental political philosophy, gave an account of what Critchley had formerly articulated as ‘atheistic transcendence.’ Tracing the genesis of the latter and then linking to his notion of the supreme fiction, the paper seeks to account for Critchley’s ‘a/theological’ shift. Through a close reading, the paper (...) argues that Critchley’s ‘faith of the faithless’ depends on the Christian hermeneutic tradition – or radical theology – for its articulation. Finally, using John D. Caputo’s radical theology as the principal proponent in this regard, the paper demonstrates a necessary symmetry with Critchley’s faith of the faithless. Such a claim leads to the conclusion that while symmetrical, Critchley and Caputo are also inversely related. That is: a Critchlean radical politics nourished by radical theology opens up the possibility for a Caputoian radical political theology nourished by Critchlean radical politics. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the literature on Derrida’s philosophical formation, the name of Eugen Fink is usually forgotten. When it is recalled, it is most often because of his 1930s articles on phenomenology. In this paper, I claim on the contrary that Fink’s writings exerted a lasting influence on Derrida’s thought, well beyond his early phenomenological works. More specifically, I focus on a 1957 paper presented at a conference on Husserl’s thought where Fink formulates an important distinction between operative and thematic concepts. By (...) adopting both historical and theoretical perspectives, I show how this couple of notions can help to understand Derrida’s singular way of reading philosophical texts. In particular, I present the Derridean concept of supplement as a reworking of Fink’s notion of operative concept. I conclude by suggesting that deconstruction can be understood in part as a radicalization of Fink’s theses. (shrink)

This paper explores how educators might intervene in canonized texts of the human subject on which a particular and exclusive kind of humanism rests. In imagining possible interventions educators might make, I turn to and trace Jacques Derrida's on‐going deconstruction of the philosophical texts of subjectivity. In his body of work, Derrida destabilizes fixed notions of the human subject and the institutions it founds . From Derrida's points of destabilization and through a differing but similar deconstructive stance, I also consider (...) Gayatri Spivak's suggestive question ‘Who is not the subject of humanism?’ to provide another possible trajectory for intervention that educators might take. Departing from knowledge‐based conceptions of human subjectivity, Spivak urges educators to respond to their students in meaningful encounter with the ‘Other’ while Derrida suggests human beings might begin the difficult and complex task of re‐envisioning an altered humanism, a humanism founded on the call of the Other in institutional sites like education. By an engaged rereading of the texts of human subjectivity upon which human beings are written and by turning to respond to the face of the human beings in and outside their classrooms as a means of encountering the Other's humanity, I suggest that educators be the catalyst for changing what it means to be human and education the means by which we approach a humanism yet to be. (shrink)

This paper explores how educators might intervene in canonized texts of the human subject on which a particular and exclusive kind of humanism rests. In imagining possible interventions educators might make, I turn to and trace Jacques Derrida's on‐going deconstruction of the philosophical texts of subjectivity. In his body of work, Derrida destabilizes fixed notions of the human subject and the institutions it founds (like philosophy and education). From Derrida's points of destabilization and through a differing but similar deconstructive stance, (...) I also consider Gayatri Spivak's suggestive question ‘Who is not the subject of humanism?’ to provide another possible trajectory for intervention that educators might take. Departing from knowledge‐based conceptions of human subjectivity, Spivak urges educators to respond to their students in meaningful encounter with the ‘Other’ while Derrida suggests human beings might begin the difficult and complex task of re‐envisioning an altered humanism, a humanism founded on the call of the Other in institutional sites like education. By an engaged rereading of the texts of human subjectivity upon which human beings are written and by turning to respond to the face of the human beings in and outside their classrooms as a means of encountering the Other's humanity, I suggest that educators be the catalyst for changing what it means to be human and education the means by which we approach a humanism yet to be. (shrink)

In this paper we present a theoretical hybrid framework for ethical decision making, drawing upon Emmanuel Levinas’ view on ethics as “first philosophy”, as an inherent infinite responsibility for the other. The pivotal concept in this framework is an appeal to a heightened sense of personal responsibility of the moral actor to provide the ethical context within which conventional approaches to applied business ethics could be engaged. Max Weber’s method of reconciling absolutism and relativism in ethical decision making is adopted (...) to provide the synergy between personal responsibility and contextual realities, forging a coherent framework. The paper concludes by discussing ways that business could make way for the flourishing of ethics of responsibility in individuals. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw on Hannah Arendt’s notion of ‘banality of evil’ to argue that as long as AI systems are designed to follow codes of ethics or particular normative ethical theories chosen by us and programmed in them, they are Eichmanns destined to commit evil. Since intelligence alone is not sufficient for ethical decision making, rather than strive to program AI to determine the right ethical decision based on some ethical theory or criteria, AI should be concerned with (...) avoiding making the wrong decisions, and this requires hardwiring the thinking activity as a prerequisite for decision making. (shrink)

Despite their many similarities, one apparent difference between the ethics of K.E. Løgstrup and Emmanuel Levinas concerns trust: Levinas does not analyse trust as a morally significant phenomenon, whereas Løgstrup makes it a central component of his moral phenomenology. This paper argues that an analysis of Løgstrupian trust nonetheless reveals at least three important commonalities between Levinas and Løgstrup’s moral projects: an understanding of war and ethics as metaphysical opposites; an emphasis on openness to the other as something that transcends (...) the prudential order of norms and laws; and a view of the ethical as that which breaks into and disrupts the order of human instrumental calculation. (shrink)

Contemporary design practices, such as participatory design, human-centered design, and codesign, have inherent ethical qualities, which often remain implicit and unexamined. Three design projects in the high-tech industry were studied using three ethical traditions as lenses. Virtue ethics helped to understand cooperation, curiosity, creativity, and empowerment as virtues that people in PD need to cultivate, so that they can engage, for example, in mutual learning and collaborative prototyping. Ethics of alterity helped to understand human-centered design as a fragile encounter between (...) project team members and prospective users, and foregrounds the ethics in these encounters: our tendencies to “grasp the other” and to “program invention.” And pragmatist ethics helped to understand codesign as a process of joint inquiry and imagination, involving the organization of iterative processes of problem setting and solution finding, with moral qualities. When we open the “black boxes” of design practices, we find them filled with ethics. Moreover, it is proposed that design practitioners need to make explicit their practices’ inherent ethical qualities and that they can do that by embracing reflexivity. (shrink)

In this article I will look into Corporate Legal Responsibility taking into account Levinas’s notion of infinite responsibility, as well as his understanding of ethical language. My account of Levinas’s philosophy will show that it challenges – breaking down – deeply entrenched distinctions in the dominant strands of moral philosophy, within which the theory of individual responsibility is embedded, such as between:(1) duty to others on the one hand and supererogation on the other; (2) perfect duty to others on the (...) one hand and imperfect duties to others on the other; (3) insiders and outsiders; kith and kin on the one hand and strangers on the other; Levinas’s moral vision is an inclusive one which embraces all of humanity (at least of those present today) irrespective of historical, linguistic, cultural differences and diversities. In other words, each has responsibilities for and duties towards all others. Of course, one might say that there is nothing new about a universalising ethics – after all Kantianism, liberalism as well as utilitarianism are well known instances. However, more crucially, all these traditional moral philosophies uphold the theory of individual responsibility, which is rooted in the philosophy of individualism. Such a philosophy can make sense only of the concept of individual moral/legal agency but not corporate agency. Therefore, in this article I will attempt to show that the Levinasian vision is able to help us change our view with respect to corporate responsibility. (shrink)

In this paper, it is argued that the criticism of the Enlightenment project in education and the disappearance in the philosophy of education discourse of particular educational problems which confront practitioners has resulted in a philosophy of education which — as a kind of Spielerei — begs the question. To revitalize itself, philosophy of education must take up anew its perennial mission, one near to specific educational problems. In explaining how the “I” of the educator can be conceived after postmodernism, (...) this study elaborates the concepts of “integrity” and “particularity” as relevant for education. Education itself is conceived as a personal relation with a real person that aids in developing individuality. It is concluded that this answer is an authoritative and authentic response from one individual to another within a particular situation. (shrink)

This article is designed to explore ideas in the recent sociology of morality about the conjunction of ethics and embodiment in everyday life. While it draws on an interpretation of the ethical encounter as a relation of moral proximity, it extends this conception of ethics beyond the dyad to include a discussion of gift giving and generosity in the present context. This is done in order to analyse a concrete empirical event in terms of the web of moral and social (...) codes that inform it. The event in question is a well-known New Zealand breastfeeding case in which a woman breastfed another woman's baby `without her consent'. As well as drawing attention to the ethical risks in encounters between strangers and others in contemporary social life, this particular breastfeeding case also brings to the fore the invisibility of breastfeeding as an embodied ethical practice. (shrink)

In recent years, the concept of a ‘prohibition against representation’ and its ethical andpolitical implications for artistic practices past, present and future have been subjected torenewed critical scrutiny. While this interdiction derives from the Second Commandmentgiven by God to Moses, forbidding the creation of graven images or idols, it hasfrequently been invoked in secular contexts, and has acquired special resonance inongoing debates about the difficulty of adequately representing the event which hasbeen called the Holocaust or Shoah. The persistent claim that (...) the Nazis’ persecution ofthe Jews and other communities remains beyond or unsusceptible to representation,and more specifically the assertion that it cannot or should not be recuperated withinimages, are often informed by a particular understanding of the Bilderverbot . However, certain survivors and scholarshave queried whether it is legitimate or helpful to reactivate this injunction in theaftermath of such atrocities. Jorge Semprun, Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy andothers have variously criticised this move, along with associated rhetorics of ‘ineffability’,as confused and obscurantist, politically misleading and morally suspect.1Nancy, theauthor of one of the most forceful critiques in this vein, warns that the allegation thatrepresentation of the Holocaust is illegitimate rests on a misunderstanding ormisapplication of the original religious prohibition which he seeks to correct;‘“representation of the Shoah”’, he concludes, ‘is not only possible and licit, but in fact also necessary and imperative’. (shrink)

This paper examines the relation or, more precisely, tension between postmodern deconstruction and ethics by elaborating upon the ethico-political dimensions of deconstructionism. It embarks on a critical assessment of postmodern discourse on ethics in view of its political implications by analyzing Jacques Derrida''s and Richard Rorty''s arguments with an assumption that their positions represent a certain logic in the postmodern discourse on ethics. Postmodern ethics is based on incredulity with regard to traditional metanarratives, and it defines ethics in terms of (...) sensitivity or responsibility to otherness and difference. Its proponents believe that the negation of modern metanarratives opens a way to the Other which has been marginalized and suppressed both in thought and in social practice. Derrida and Rorty represent this position with their emphasis on the ethical nature of deconstruction and the need to elaborate new languages for ethics. Despite postmodern appeal to ethics of this sort, however, postmodern thinking shows its limits in dealing with most ethical-political matters in the contemporary world. The postmodern approach to ethics, being restricted within the perspective of the individual, does not provide any determinate framework for deciding how to adjudicate conflicting ethical claims or how to link the unconditional affirmation of emancipatory ideals, enlightened social criticism, and democratic accountability in determinate political terms. In the main, this paper contends that philosophical deconstruction and responsibility to otherness undermine each other in the public sphere. (shrink)

Based on the reception of Emmanuel Levinas philosophy in the English-speaking world, the paper highlights some tendencies in reading and commenting on classical philosophical works that have been the focus of attention for a long time. The author makes a suggestion that we can find persistent but nonetheless dynamic, patterns of commenting and interpreting. The first wave of Levinas studies was apologetic and laudatory. Its main task was to introduce new concepts, i.e. to paraphrase. The second wave was much more (...) appropriative and critical. In this period, the scholars tried to apply the philosophy of the Other to existing problems or they tried to resolve the paradoxes that were the products of apologetic readings. The today’s third wave recreates and readjusts interpretive strategies inherent to the first and second wave. To explain this dynamics of reading, the paper introduces a normative scheme that consists of three regulative principles – “faithfully”, “truthfully”, and “ethically”. Due to this tripartite opposition, in which “faithfully” refers to fidelity to an original, “truthfully” refers to the search for universal truth, and “ethically” refers to the inaccessibility for an ego to grab hold of a text of another person, commenting grows intensive. In addition, the opposition of “faithfully” and “truthfully” demonstrates some liberty in such, to some extent, involuntary practice as commenting. This reflexion helps identify the current phase of commenting on classical texts and the intentions of readers and commentators. What is more, it provides justifications for innovative readings of Levinas’ oeuvre as well as the texts of other great philosophers. (shrink)

In the early and often ignored 1934 essay ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism’, Levinas identifies a historically dominant form of politics rooted in the ontological reduction of the other to the same that provides intellectual justification for physical violence against the other. The ethical relation aims to overcome this political violence by thinking from the alterity of the other. The turn away from the political to the ethical does, however, lead to a problem – the third – that cannot (...) be resolved by the ethical relation and so necessitates a return to the political. The political returned to is not the same as that left, but privileges the ethical relation and involves decisions about how to realize a prior norm: justice. This has given rise to debate in the literature regarding the relationship between the ethical and political that pits an oppositional account against an entwined one. I defend the latter, but argue that it depends upon two issues that are problematic for Levinas’s attempted overcoming of ontological forms of violence. Specifically, his claim that this form of politics entails a ‘good’ form of violence, and insistence that the political decision required to realize the ethically inspired conception of politics is compatible with his theory of substitution. I argue that the former undermines his claim that an ethically inspired politics is fundamentally different to an ontologically inspired one, while the political decision upon which his ethically inspired politics depends is incompatible with his notion of substitution. (shrink)

Belgian law on child euthanasia uses the concept of discernment to bestow the right to die to minors. Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of oppositional logic grasps the ambiguity of this use of discernment and generally challenges the alleged force of a textual sign meaningfully to differentiate itself from its different and meaningless else. This alleged ability to discern the presence of discernment impinges the truth-value of the distinction between worthy/unworthy lives. The resulting undecidability morally suggests the respect for otherness and promotes (...) the moral value of the suspension of arbitrary judgment and, in so doing, de facto converges towards the praxis of the doctrine of the sanctity of life that embraces the ‘life is always quality’ argument. (shrink)