Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2024) XXVI/1

Large Language Models (LLMs) are generative AI systems capable of producing original texts based on inputs about topic and style provided in the form of prompts or questions. The introduction of the outputs of these systems into human discursive practices poses unprecedented moral and political questions. The article articulates an analysis of the moral status of these systems and their interactions with human interlocutors based on the Habermasian theory of communicative action. The analysis explores, among other things, Habermas’s inquiries into the analogy between human minds and computers, and into the status of atypical participants in the linguistic community such as genetically modified subjects and animals. Major conclusions are the LLMs seem to qualify as authors that originally participate in discursive practices but do display only a structurally derivative form of communicative competence and fail to meet the status of communicative agents. In this sense, while the contribution of AI writing systems in public discourse and deliberation can support the process of mutual understanding within the community of speakers, the human actors involved in the development, use, and diffusion of these systems share a collective responsibility for the disclosure of AI authorship and verification and adjudication of validity claims.

Theorists of transitional justice regard official apologies as one major instrument for countries to take responsibility for historical wrongs. One such wrong is the slavery past of western countries, for which Afro-descendant activists have requested official apologies yet countries have been reluctant to apologize officially. Should there be official national apologies for past slavery? One prominent philosopher who has criticized others’ pro-arguments yet has defended an affirmative answer, notably in the U.S. slavery past case, is Janna Thompson (2020). This article takes a critical stance towards contemporary slavery apologies, through an analysis of various moral arguments against apologizing for slavery as well as Thompson’s defenses of it, with illustrations from the Dutch and U.S. slavery past cases. It will present four reasons for why post-slavery governments cannot properly apologize for their nations’ slavery past, and three reasons for why descendants of enslaved people cannot properly be recipients of slavery apologies. Essentially, contemporary official slavery apologies are questionable due to a morally unbridgeable gap between contemporary post-slavery society and the slavery past itself. Thus, this article suggests that restorative transitional justice may only work within a historically restricted timeframe.

The collection of essays The time of secularization, published in 1970, highlights the far sightedness of its author, the Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto del Noce. A philosopher of uncommon analytical depth, Augusto del Noce had foreseen half a century in advance not only the future of Catholicism in a secularized society – avoiding calling it “secularist” – but also a theory of human, political and social changes, which are particularly evident today. This essay aims to explore and summarize some crucial aspects of Del Noce’s work, which seem to mirror contemporary times: the separation between traditionalists and progressives, the effects of a kind of “new” enlightenment; the celebration of apathetic Nihilism.

The paper discusses the recognition theory elaborated by Lucio Cortella in his book: L’ethos del riconoscimento. Starting from the criticalities identified in that theory, the paper offers the outlines of an alternative theory. For Cortella, a good theory of the recognition relationship cannot conceive it as a simple intersubjective relationship: between the interacting subjects, a third instance must be introduced to act as a mediator. For Cortella, however, this third instance is reduced to a minimal ethics of a transcendental nature. After criticising this thesis, another is defended and developed. According to this other thesis, the third instance between interacting subjects must be conceived as a thick ethical background, which includes norms, customs, traditions, forms of relationships and institutions. The conclusion is that a good theory of recognition must be inscribed in a more complex theory of society in which the latter is not reduced to a multiplicity of interactions.

This paper explores the implications of cognitive disability on deliberative democracy and proposes possible solutions to ensure that people with cognitive disabilities participate meaningfully in democratic decision making. Although deliberative democracy is considered a cognitive process, people with cognitive disabilities may lack the capacity to participate. The paper explores a joint-effort model of deliberation that includes people with cognitive disabilities as equal participants, using bodily communication as a source of information. However, we argue that it is too ambitious to include individuals with severe cognitive impairments who are unable to fully understand their position, critically analyze others' perspectives, and modify their opinions based on the epistemic contributions of other members. Therefore, we propose a model that recognizes the epistemic significance of individuals who do not meet the criteria for deliberators but can contribute as a useful source of information. The proposed model avoids epistemic and political injustices during deliberative processes and advocates proceduralist justification of deliberated outcomes. The paper highlights the need for inclusive deliberative processes that recognize the contributions of individuals with cognitive disabilities.

Contemporary technologies renew and broaden the definition of communication far beyond the dichotomy of strategy-agreement, utility and the establishment of a common horizon of mutual understanding. Today, the relational pattern itself is made up of communication and information mediated by technologies. The living habitat of the human is not only the dimension of survival, but also a natural and cultural, social, urban landscape structured not for communicative exchange, but by the communication itself. In these profound transformations of human history, the relationship that human beings have with the world, with other subjects and with themselves is involved. The very meaning of ethics is therefore in question, since the living environment in which human beings constitute themselves and act has changed. In particular, one of the most interesting ethical proposal of the twentieth century, the discourse ethics by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, must be rethought, since the communicative environment has deeply changed.

Cortella's book is highly appreciated as it investigates the originality and normative nature of mutual recognition. Some doubts are expressed about the conclusions, which entrust human ethics with a thaumaturgical power not justified by historical experience.

The paper attempts to respond to the objections that have been formulated in reference to the book The Ethos of Recognition (Laterza, Roma-Bari 2023). The answers are divided into 16 thematic points. The author defends his idea of recognition not as an intersubjective but as an objective relationship, in which an ethos acts, the ethos of recognition. This can be reconstructed and founded through a transcendental refutation on the model of the famous Aristotelian elenchos of Metaphysics fourth book. This ethos has a natural genesis and has its roots in the natural history of humankind. However, it manifests itself with the characteristics of transcendental structures, that is, as unavoidable and unassailable. The foundation of our normativity and freedom consists in it. Between this ethos and its historical realizations, that is, the concretely existing forms of ethical life, there exists a transcendental difference that prevents them from being identified. A renewed critical theory of society is rooted in this difference.

In this essay, I analyze the normative problems that Honneth, in his latest book Der arbeitende Souverän, identifies in today’s sphere of work. After outlining and highlighting the positive elements of Honneth’s conception (1), I draw attention to what I consider an excess of formality in the way he enunciates the objectives of his normative theory of work, as well as to the indeterminacy of the interventions needed to pursue these objectives (2). Then, I consider the diagnosis that Honneth draws about the state of protests and social struggles in the current sphere of labor (3): it is here, in my view, that we can discern the origin of the problems encountered; I therefore advance the hypothesis that a different interpretation about the current state of social protests would allow the formulation of more determinate normative measures.

This article raises some questions with respect to the pattern of Lucio Cortella's L'ethos del riconoscimento: what relationship is there between the reciprocity of intersubjective Anerkennung and self-recognition in the labouring activity? How does the political dimension of recognition command a rethinking of the state, reconnecting the institutional dimension of ethical relations to the elaboration of more advanced forms of democracy? What philosophical thought can conceive the horizon of such processes, articulating the originality of recognition at the nexus of nature and history? The conclusion of the article is that it is around these topics that Cortella's work urges the development of a new and constructive Hegelianism that rehabilitates the dialectical potential of contemporary critical theory.

The article addresses Habermas’s recent critique of the digital age, and in particular the risks digital technologies pose to the systemic interaction between speakers within a democratic public sphere. For Habermas, a virtual bubble that exposes the citizens to unstable communication and post-truth narratives has been created. The article also discusses the architecture of discourse ethics by analyzing diverging foundational claims advanced by Apel’s and Habermas’s readings. In specific, these divergences regard: the notion of truth within a consensualist paradigm; the relationship between universal and contextual aspects; the question of justification from an epistemic perspective. The article argues that these divergences test the validity of the discursive approach in relation to the dematerialization of intersubjective relationships, as well as the communication with non-human entities.

The paper to present how the current dynamics of global neoliberalism, in its eagerness to remain a hegemonic system, tends to reconcile with some of its opponents, in this case conservatism. This is done specifically from the political philosophy of Wendy Brown, which allows to dazzle how this new logic of what is called here the neoliberal global right is given. To achieve this objective, three moments are proposed; the first, which seeks to expose how the neoliberal subject is understood as a homo œconomicus that is entrepreneurs of himself and a human capital; the second, which works the conservatism-neoliberalism alliance from the concepts of resentment, nihilism and Nation-family and finally, it is exposed how the result of this coalition produces an internal crisis within democracies today.

The paper discusses Lucio Cortella's theses in his volume Ethos del riconoscimento (ethos of recognition,2023). The question of the origin of recognition and the source of its normativity is at the centre of the analysis. In particular, the paper discusses some of the more complex aspects of theories of recognition, from Hegel to Honneth, starting with Cortella's thesis that the ethos of recognition is a transcendental element that makes human beings “human”.

In the present work we propose a partial application of the Belmont Report to animal research, based on a meaning of beneficence according to which the right to life must be guaranteed to animals undergoing experimentation, even once this has ended. We will also analyze what role captivity can play in animal research, referring in particular to the involvement of non-human primates.

Is the emergence of artificial subjectivities endowed with a certain autonomy compatible with Habermas’ theory of discourse? To answer this question, it is necessary, preliminarily, to address the question of the Habermasian subject. In doing so, one observes how machines stand as potential interlocutors. As interlocutors, like the other protagonists in Habermasian discourse, they must aim at understanding and must have a legitimate interest. This opens the field to two orders of problems: (a) are machines capable of understanding? (b) can machines have an interest? Arguments borrowed from the Chinese Room debate show how, in principle, there are no obstacles to the entry of machines into discourse. If machines can participate in discourse, then in what language do they talk to humans? To communicate, humans and machines must resort to translation techniques, known as natural language processing. Translation already places itself outside language, deferring to a shared idea of reality in which to root universal meanings. By placing communication outside language, the entry of machines into discourse seems to checkmate Habermasian theory. However, two further arguments – “the Others mind reply” and the private language argument – make the case that communication between humans and machines poses no different problems than communication between humans alone.

The article analyzes the theory of recognition proposed by Lucio Cortella in the volume L'ethos del riconoscimento, which is examined above all in his relations with the theories of Hegel, Apel and Habermas. Regarding Cortella’s theory, the article raises two issues in particular: firstly, Petrucciani proposes a greater appreciation of Apel’s perspective, which is criticized by Cortella. Secondly, Petrucciani proposes to think differently the relationship between Sittlichkeit and morality, avoiding to confer a strong primacy to the first term

The problem with open communication today does not stem from the condition of post totalitarian censorship of information, but from the fact that every technological advance with so called social networks always means a breakthrough of ethical-political boundaries in understanding the Other. If information constitutes the essence of cybernetics, then its acceleration, dissemination, and storage aim beyond the limits of communicative irrationality, to twist Habermas' famous formulation about public consensus as the basis of liberal democracy. Instead of a metaphysical grand narrative about the rule of the principle of identity and a sufficient reason for explaining phenomena in the world, we encounter a cybernetic turn. The videological turn indicates the breaking of ethical boundaries. Instead of restricting freedoms, it is much more significant to go beyond the borders of the global society of control as the first and last station on the way to a new technological singularity.