Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2024) XXVI/2

This paper is the first attempt to systematically apply Value Sensitive Design to social media. Moving from the claim that social media are morally relevant technologies, the paper aims to demonstrate their interactional nature and to provide a working definition of them as “communicative environments that allow a scalable sociality.” Both anthropological and ontological evidence are provided to support this purpose. The interactional stance allows social media to be designed according to the principles of built-in values and the VSD approach. After stating the VSD principles, a deeper investigation of its moral foundations is conducted. It is observed that while VSD sustains universal values, it does not give a sufficient rationale for them. The paper aims to provide a more robust foundation by integrating VSD with the moral imagination theo ry. This also permits revising the overall conceptual investigation of VSD and developing some specific tools for social media design. Finally, the moral relevance of social media is reconfirmed, given that they are conceived as imaginative technologies with a moral impact on their users’ lives.

Because of its great influence on later treatises on economic morality, the present study will offer a systematic exposition of the doctrine of usury that Pedro Olivi (13th Century) develops in his famous De contractibus. Our purpose is to identify the ultimate foundations of a condemnation that may be difficult to understand from contemporary economic assumptions and yet was persistent among scholastic theologians and jurists. We will defend the thesis according to which the condemnation of usury is based on a well-defined utilitarian criterion. According to this criterion, the malice of this practice lies in the fact that, by its nature, it makes it impossible for the lender to generate a profit for the borrower. Therefore, usury would be a practice unable of generating value that contributes to the common good. On the contrary, it would only be apt to generate an exploitative relationship between the lender and the borrower. By the application of this criterion, it will be explained why other practices that externally have the appearance of a loan with interest are considered legitimate, for which one of the most interesting aspects of the Franciscan's text will be exposed, namely, his doctrine on capital.

The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the philosophical and political significance of a meaningful love analogy that Merleau-Ponty establishes between a certain way of understanding history and the institution of a feeling of love: just as all love takes place through an encounter and is the expression of a sensitive idea and the reactivation of a tradition, which may certainly be motivated by the individual’s past but which each time carries with it more than it originally promised, so politics must be understood as the capacity to create meaning, to overwrite the sedimented past. In doing so, we will analyse the concept of the institution as a fundamental mode of time – a particular way of inhabiting time – in order to draw from it a lesson about hi story and politics. Politics will then emerge as the theatre of contingency, and Merleau-Ponty’s reflections will be seen to shape not so much a philosophy of history as a philosophy of freedom and contingency.

This paper intends to address, from a mainly socio-cultural point of view, the issue of eco-anxiety. With this term, coined only recently by psychology, we mean the state of agitation and arousal caused in the individual by global and personal threats related to climate change and environmental disasters in general. This phenomenon will be reread here both from the point of view of the relationship between the individual and society, i.e. how the first perceives it differently from the second, and from the cultural and generational point of view, in order to understand its motivations, removals and collective effects. We will first proceed with the analysis of the issue in qualitative and quantitative terms, also in relation to the public diffusion of the problem relating to mental health, up to extreme cases of suicides, and then proceed to contextualize eco-anxiety in the socio-political scenario as much as more contemporary, outlined by crisis, pandemic and war. At the end, a reflection will be proposed which, although not conclusive, will try to understand the phenomenon in cultural and at times existential terms, through the question of “arousal”.

The paper deals with the received view, shared by many social scientists, of expected utility theory as a descriptive and prescriptive vision both of right action and of right procedure of thought. It states that in the classical formulation of the theory there are scarce hints for such a monistic interpretation, which does not pay justice to the pluralistic reality of the reason for action.