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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the Elementary forms of religious life , Durkheim notoriously addresses modern philosophy from the perspective of his twofold path, opposing rationalism and empiricism. In this contribution, I intend to show how another alternative is at work in the text, the one that confronts Spinoza’s naturalism and Kant’s transcendentalism. Spinozism and Kantianism are here understood as the two main intellectual options in order to think the autonomy of human reason and its relation to religion and critique in the Enlightenment tradition. The article suggests that Durkheim’s reflection on the social origins of human knowledge and his criticism of an aprioristic account of the categories push his reflection toward a Spinozist standpoint. Nonetheless, his denial of the possibility to treat the positivity of religious life via the Enlightenment’s opposition between reason and belief entails – thanks to his theory of totemism - a criticism of Spinoza’s naturalism alike. In particular, what is at stake in his book is the possibility to give a sociological account of the notion of totality and, in this way, to radically revise our understanding of the autonomy of human reason by means of a socio-historical account of religious life. In this perspective, Durkheim’s argument not only stages a main alternative of modern philosophy, but also suggests that the task of sociology is to overcome it.

Following the hermeneutic tradition inaugurated by Emile Durkheim’s reading of Jean- Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract , the article offers a sociological interpretation of the enigmatic figure of the legislator seeing it as the royal road to the unconscious of the people. After examining the dilemmas that affect the cardinal concept of general will and that undermine its standard liberal-republican understanding, it thus proceeds to a progressive exploration of those pre-contractual conditions of the social contract which constitute so many historical layers making up the people, well beyond its explicit political expression in constitutional laws. In the perspective of the legislator, the self-instituting people therefore appears as well as an already instituted society whose internal unity goes back, in the subsoil of customs, to the religion of a founder. Taking up Durkheim’s sociological thesis on the internal relation between society and religion through the sacred, as presented in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, it ends by trying to answer the question that this other Rousseau addresses us: who has tried to embody, in political modernity, that strategic role of the great legislator that the Social Contract already saw as a necessary condition for the emergence of a free people likely to act as the protagonist of its own history.

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.

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.

One aim of education is the transmission of knowledge. The present paper argues that in order to achieve this aim teachers should be exemplars of reasoning for their students. The contents of education are typically propositions or theories that cannot be accepted without understanding how the related beliefs are justified through inferences from given premises. If a belief is inferentially justified, however, in order to understand how it is justified, one has to follow the reasoning that leads to a particular conclusion. For this reason, in their classes, teachers should not be expected to provide a kind of testimony but rather a kind of argumentation. The students cannot simply believe what they are told because the teacher said it; rather, they have to understand the arguments that support the teacher’s claim. When a teacher presents an argument to them, the students will follow it with the attention required to grasp it themselves if they see the teacher’s reasoning as a successful practice in which they want to be involved.

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.

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.

Are ordinary moral agents able to follow the moral lead of heroes and saints? In her Exemplarist Moral Theory Linda Zagzebski provided an exemplarist account to morality grounded on admiration. She focused her research on three possible kinds of exemplar: the saint, the hero and the sage. In this paper, I hold that there are at least two possible ways of following an exemplar (inference and strict emulation). Furthermore, I will try to show that when we take morally exceptional agents (in particular heroes and saints) as exemplars to be emulated, some theoretical and normative problems arise. In particular, I will outline the Feasibility Problem, the Non-motivating Admiration Problem and the Distortion of Duty. Given these issues, I suggest an account of supererogation for this moral approach. I argue that this will provide some theoretical advantages for exemplarism, together with a new attention for extraordinary moral acts. The admiration of praiseworthy deeds, similarly to exemplars, can provide valuable moral guidance.

The relations between the human beeing and other animals are and keep on beeing marked by instrumentality and violence. The development of a new animal paradigm is necessary not only for ethical reasons but also from a scientific perspective. With other recent texts, Gianfranco Momino’s, Raffaella Colombo’s and Benedetta Piazzesi’s book Dalla predazione al dominio. La guerra contro gli altri animali offers an important contribution of clarity and theoretical rigour for the construction of such a paradigm.