Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2018) XX/2

In this essay I try to identify a viable starting point towards a philosophical theory of applied ethics. My aim is to explore the conditions under which a unitary enquiry concerning the essence of applied ethics, their distinctive constructs, their novelty, and their relevance in face of traditional moral thinking may be carried out. Since a similar approach is yet to be fully worked out, a preliminary analysis concerning its very possibility and starting point seems to be necessary. After a general introduction (§1), I discuss the terminological problem raised by the many labels through which applied ethics, as they are commonly called, are known (§2). Secondly, I review the debate on how the relations between different branches of applied ethics, their scientific contexts, and moral philosophy are to be understood (§3). Finally, I try and show that these issues originate from a common source, i.e., the tension of theory and practice in moral experience and the problem of moral application. My thesis is that the experience of the gap between ethical theory and moral practice, i.e., the problem of moral application, can be pinpointed as the unifying and fundamental content of applied ethics in all its plurality. At the same time, this shows the true philosophical nature of applied ethics. In my opinion, approaching applied ethics in such terms will not only help shed light on their status, but also offer moral thinking a new and interesting perspective from which to reconsider some of its traditional issues.

In the present article we define death as "the loss of the duality", for a human being is composed of two heterogeneous elements: the mental one and the bodily one, which are equally important according to life and death. Death, indeed, occurs when the two elements are separated. We investigate bioethical and philosophical scenarios ("brain death survivors" documented by D.A. Shewmon, and the thought experiment called "brain in a vat"). Our approach outlines the role played by the body regarding life of human being: the Cartesian perspective is indeed no longer valid.

With the scientific and technological development and the refinement of new reproductive technologies it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish a somatic cell from an embryo. We already have new reproductive technologies, such as nuclear cloning, which demonstrate the ability of somatic cells to produce new individuals (we have not only animals but also human embryos produced by cloning). In the coming decades we may have other reproductive technologies that can further confirm the totipotentiality of our somatic cells. Some of these could be used by those who want to have a child, others seem less interesting from this point of view, but could still be used to produce human embryos to be used for research and experimentation purposes. This new scenario has important consequences at a moral level and, in particular, for the bioethical debate on issues concerning the relevance of the embryo. Since the fertilized egg cells (zygotes) and somatic cells have the same potential (in the presence of the right conditions, that is, they can become new human beings), one cannot attribute moral relevance to embryos and deny moral relevance to somatic cells.

References to moral exemplars run deep into the history of philosophy, as we find them featured in rather disparate context and approaches which span from virtue ethics to moral perfectionism, from existentialism to moral particularism. In the varied and growing contemporary literature on moral exemplarism, we find a number of options that can be brought down to the two rather broad yet distinctive categories of theoretical and antitheoretical approaches. In the paper, I showcase and contrast these two varieties by taking the views of Zagzebski and Rorty as representative of, respectively, the reference to exemplars as most perfect beings to aspire to and get guidance from, and the use of them as next yet foreign beings to experiment with and get provocation from. Finally, I will draw some consequences for a conception of moral education hinged on unsettlement and transformation rather than on imitation and reproduction.

Almost two centuries have passed since the young Karl Marx proclaimed the completion of the critique of religion, adding that such criticism was in fact the “prerequisite of all criticism”. One could say that critique‟s future, unlike that of religion, seemed particularly bright in 1844. From our present point of view, it is difficult not to be struck by two contemporary phenomena that seem to turn this dictum upside down, namely “the return of the religious” and the “crisis of critique”. Drawing on various discrepant accounts of and conflicting attempts to solve the latter, we note that they are nonetheless informed by a common set of historical accounts of critique. Have these accounts contributed to critique‟s current conundrum and, if so, in what way? Given its privileged position, we have turned to Michel Foucault‟s genealogy of critique in order to tackle this question. After examining its main theses, we observe that despite it‟s astonishing insights concerning the religious origins of critique it fails to draw the necessary consequences of this fact for contemporary critical practices, a failure which not only immobilizes the latter but also puts into question the viability of genealogy itself. We conclude by proposing that critique seems destined to remain a formal enterprise so long as it continues to oppose itself to religion instead of specifying and fully assuming its own fundamental religiosity.

The aim of the paper is to reassess the theory of emotions held by exemplarism, in order to clarify the epistemic burden assigned to admiration. I will show that the emotion of admiration is understood in three different meanings, (i) admiration as a kind of moral sense, (ii) admiration as a reflective disposition with an emotional component, (iii) admiration as a proper emotion, understood as a direct perception of moral excellence. Then, I will discuss the main strength and weakness of the perceptual analogy as for the epistemic role of emotions. I will conclude by claiming that the three notions of admiration can hardly be accommodated in the same theoretical framework, and that exemplarism would greatly benefit by discriminating between them in order to define with more accuracy the epistemic role played by the emotion of admiration.

This article demonstrates that the genesis of the concept of Civil Society, explained by social sciences as part of the Greek democracy and the consolidation of liberal democracy, in fact, it has been linked to the ideas of freedom and individual trade by the Scottish Enlightenment. We will analyze how this eighteenth-century school defines the Civil Society as the convergence of private interests of individuals who participate in productive activities in order to get material comfort, in a kind of market of the recognition, and achieve some kind of social scale reference. This approach will be presented by exploring the reflections of Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and David Hume on the thinking of the Austrian economists Karl Menguer, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich August von Hayek.

This paper explores the educational potential of epistemic exemplars, namely those individuals who possess intellectual virtues to an exceptional degree. It purports to do so by applying the exemplarist framework proposed by Linda Zagzebski in her Exemplarist Moral Theory (2017) to the domain of intellectual virtues. After a brief summary of the main features of her view, I explain how the exemplarist dynamics can apply to the intellectual domain. Then, I introduce the basics of an exemplar-based account of education and explain how it can be employed to educate the young to intellectual virtues. Finally, I attempt to show how this model can accommodate several objections and, in particular, how it addresses the charge of indoctrinating the students raised by proponents of a critical thinking approach to education.

Although there seems to be a consensus among Croatian and international education theorists alike when it comes to the issue of values being an integral part of upbringing almost to the same extent as upbringing is considered a part of education, discord ensues as soon as implementation of specific values is attempted through official curricula. There is discord when it comes to specific values, but also when teaching methods are concerned. In this paper, we will argue that this issue could be resolved by applying Rawls's theory of justice to the prevalent practices in upbringing and education, with some minor adjustments. We argue that, since the political and familial domains share three crucial characteristics, it is legitimate to expand the application of the public reason as the main principle of political domain, so as to govern both parental and educational conduct, which could in turn result in considerable changes in the ways upbringing is traditionally viewed. By analysing the main principles of Rawls's liberal theory of justice, and applying these to parental practices at home, as well as to institutionalized educational conduct by the teachers at schools, we will try to offer an outlook on the proper educational and parental conduct from the liberal perspective. In the final chapter, we will defend the idea of cosmopolitanism as the right way to go at the crossroads of deciding on the appropriate educational policies in the liberal, democratic, constitutional regimes, the kind that most of the contemporary (Western) societies, declaratively, strive to be, but often seem to fail in this endeavour. This is confirmed in the light of numerous crises we are faced with lately.

In this paper, I develop an account of Nietzschean exemplarism. Drawing on my previous work, I argue that an agent’s instincts and other drives constitute her psychological type. In this framework, a drive counts as a virtue to the extent that it is well-calibrated with the rest of the agent’s psychic economy and meets with sentiments of approbation from the agent’s community. Different virtues are fitting for different types, and different types elicit different discrete emotions in people with fine-tuned affective sensitivity, making Nietzsche’s exemplarism doubly pluralistic. Exemplars show us how a type is expressed in different social and cultural contexts. Some live up to the full potential of their type, while others are stymied and demonstrate how pernicious influences can wreck a person’s psychology. While some exemplars inspire admiration that leads to emulation, others elicit a range of other emotions, such as envy, contempt, and disgust. If this is right, then Nietzschean exemplarism offers a richer, more evaluatively and motivationally nuanced moral psychology than the monochrome admire-and-emulate model currently popular.

In this article I examine the position of R. Mordacci in his book 'The neomodern condition'. While I am in substantial agreement with many of the analyzes expressed about postmodernism, I think that the target is sometime overrated. However, Mordacci's volume remains an example of a civil intervention of philosophy and an attempt to introduce it into public debate.

The Social Contract 's penultimate chapter, devoted to the idea of a civil religion, continues to be the object of discussion. In this article we refer to the contemporary use of the concept of social religion in the social sciences, and we take into account the two main readings that have been advanced in political philosophy. We defend the idea that a new interpretation of this chapter allows to deviate from the contractualist tradition. We place Rousseau’s critical gesture in a debate that deals with the theoretical possibility of recovering the social representations revealed by ancient religious transformations. These social representations are to be found in the way Christian faith poses the question of piety.

This paper offers an historical analysis of the role of moral exemplarity in Thomas Aquinas‟ thought, in order to contribute to the current discussion on moral Exemplarism. First, I will argue that, by combining Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism, Aquinas‟ ethics amounts to a peculiar exemplarist theory of the virtues. The Aristotelian emphasis on the phronimos, combined with the Neoplatonic exitus -reditus conceptual schema, results – I will argue – in an account of the degrees of virtue which grounds a form of theological exemplarism. Then, I will claim that, in order to make sense of Aristotle‟s own ethical dynamism, an understanding of the development of virtue by degrees is needed. By means of such an understanding, I will show that the distance separating Aquinas‟ and Aristotle‟s account of virtue development significantly reduces. Thanks to this analysis, I will finally support a model of virtue development grounded both in moral exemplarity and in an ideal of dynamic unity of the virtues.

A brief critical reflection on the reception of my books The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians (Princeton, 2017) and Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe (Cambridge, 2004). The clarifications and rejoinders offered are, I believe, important for understanding how these works reflect both a sympathetic, complex reconstruction of the classical utilitarian legacy and an approach to the history of philosophy prioritizing diversity and inclusion.

On the subject of moral exemplarism, Immanuel Kant is perhaps best known for his warnings about the futility as well as the potential dangers of trying to base morality on examples or on the imitation of exemplars. This has led many scholars to conclude that Kant leaves no room for exemplars in his moral philosophy. However, as the work of Onora O‟Neill and Robert Louden has shown, Kant‟s position on the subject is in fact more ambiguous than it appears at first glance. Kant writes both of the need for a kind of archetype [Urbild] that can “make the law intuitive,” and of a positive role for examples and exemplars in the sharpening of moral judgment. Yet, O‟Neill and Louden disagree about the exact role and the stage of moral development where they come into play. O‟Neill claims that examples only play a role at a stage of moral development prior to the agent‟s assimilation of the moral law, and they never play a role in moral deliberation per se, while Louden sees a role for examples in moral deliberation subsequent to the assimilation of the moral law. Neither scholar specifies whether they play a role with regard to some specific duties or with regard to all duties indiscriminately. In this paper, I address these disagreements arguing that the key to their resolution and to gaining a correct understanding of Kant‟s position lies in a closer examination of Kant‟s taxonomy of duties, especially his distinction between „perfect‟ and „imperfect‟ duties. Such an examination, leads to the conclusion that is precisely in the fulfillment of imperfect duties, such as the obligation to perfect our talents and capacities and the obligation to aid the happiness of others, that Kant sees a necessary role for moral exemplars.

After having first interpreted Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy as a paradigmatic example of a questionable individualistic humanism, Louis Althusser saw it as a prefiguration of the alternative materialist approach, grounded on contingency, which he developed in the last part of his work as a new reading of the Marxist tradition. The paper reconstructs and assesses this late retrospective appropriation of Hobbes’ political philosophy. Focusing on the central thesis according to which society is not an organism, but an encounter, it offers a symptomatic reading of it, by showing that it reveals a deeper aporia of Althusser’s “aleatory materialism” itself. Indeed, the recourse to epicurean atomism prevents Althusser from maintaining his original and more fundamental thesis about the social formation as a complex overdetermined whole.

In which way can we support, theoretically and practically, a dynamic and nomadic ethics that favours affirmative processes of subjectification? Who can help us, from a genealogical point of view, to overcome the concept of the rational subject, self-reliant and selfsufficient? To what extent can we think and practice a materialist ethic that enhances the affirmative subjectivities, as well as new models of participation and shared responsibility? To address those questions, this essay traces the rediscovery of Spinoza’s thought in many contemporary thinkers: Genevieve Lloyd, Rosi Braidotti, and Gilles Deleuze. The reason why those thinkers return to Spinoza lies in the affirmative power of his philosophy. Spinoza innovates materialism not only because he brings it back to monism, but mostly because he connects, in the Ethics , the cognitive, imaginative and affective human powers to the power of the whole subjectivity. In conclusion the essay focuses on the political ontology provided by Braidotti and Deleuze, as a perspective that enables us to be affirmative starting from our bodies.

This essay proposes an interpretation of the Christian theological discourse developed in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan in order to show: 1) its theoretical-systematic value in the definition of the political form, that is, of the conceptual articulation that sustains the sovereignty device; 2) its complementarity to the performative trait of the Hobbesian anthropological discourse, that is, to the determination of the profile of a specific form of life, adapted to the sovereign order because capable of reproducing industriously within it and which is, at the same time, the primary product of that order. This interpretation shows that the Christian Commonwealth is the complete realization of the Hobbes’s anthropological-political project.