Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2023) XXV/3

This article is part of a study dedicated to the many senses in which Iris Murdoch appeals to reality and realism within her philosophical reflection. In particular, the epistemological significance of her thesis that a good ethical theory must seek to be realist, in the sense of being faithful to the complexities of the reality of moral life, is explored here.

The essay aims to analyze some difficulties in thinking ethics and politics for the future starting from the characteristics of the temporal and historical discourse order of Modernity. The starting point is the analysis of the name/concept of Anthropocene, a new geological era in which the human becomes a geological force, and the specific temporality that it shows: the need to think beyond the division between “human history” and “natural history”. In order to define the limits of the order of temporal and historical discourse in Modernity, I questioned Reinhart Koselleck’s reflection and Michel Foucault. If it is true that, reasoning with and beyond Koselleck, Modernity seems structurally incapable of thinking the future as radically different from an extension of the present; it is equally true that Modernity itself, thought of as ethos and not as epoch, can point the way to a form of critique of all existent reality as an ontology of actuality and a dimension of care towards exploited human living, non-human living, and Earth system.

In this article, I examine the problem of the ordering of preferences and the neutrality we should have with respect to their temporal location if we are to maintain a largely impartial position in ethical deliberation. I show how some difficulties may arise if we understand the ethical stance not only as a propensity towards impartiality, but also as a way of constructing our own personal ethical narrative

The point of this paper is to indicate that liberal secularist frameworks are not very useful to address the de-democratising phenomena that neoconservatism and religious right-wing actors are causing today. Taking the Argentinian context as object of philosophical analysis, I defend two intertwined theses that have bearing on the way left-wing politics and activism deal with the revitalisation of the political participation of right-wing and neoconservative churches and religious actors. The first one is that although the secularisation thesis cannot explain today’s religious political revitalisation, at the same time the reconfiguration of the way Christian churches participate in politics is confined to the political ideology of secularism. The second thesis is an explanation as to why this is so: secularism is enacted within an agonistic-deliberative political field in which fully legitimised and polarised agents shape each other’s agency, and that at the same time delegitimises those subjectivities and collectives that do not adjust to its homogenising polarisations. In sum, debating about secularism and religion is still needed, but today the focus of the discussions should be put in the way the liberal state and the hegemonic church authorities collaborate to marginalise several collectives from political participation.

This paper examines some of the central philosophical positions concerning temporality to find trends in philosophical approaches to this issue. The theories of François Hartog and Thomas Macho on time will then be presented, highlighting their strengths and critical points and comparing them. The comparison aims to show how the two authors' approach to the problem of temporality makes it possible to find conceptual cores starting from the analysis of concrete forms of time measurement, rituals that have to do with time, and philosophical debates that have developed on this concept.