Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2020) XXII/1

This paper offers a critical analysis of the current debate in vice theory. Its main aim is to pro-vide the reader with the conceptual and methodological tools to navigate the discussion among reliabilist, responsibilist, and obstructivist approaches to moral and epistemic vices. After a brief exploration of the reasons underlying the recent flourishing of vice theories (§2), the re-sponsibilist account is introduced (§3) and several critical remarks are offered to ensure that this view can accommodate the cases of malevolent and indifferent individuals (§4). The two following sections are devoted to a critical discussion of vice-reliabilism (§5) and Quassim Cas-sam’s obstructivism (§6). The conclusive section (§7) provides reasons to favor vice-responsibilism over vice-reliabilism and Heather Battaly’s pluralist approach, and sheds light on the innovative features of an obstructivist reading.

The article aims at analysing the relevant presence of juridical categories in Levinas’s Philosophy and at reconducting them to their phenomenological premises. The essay is divided in four parts: 1. justice, right and law; 2. the collapse of the law; 3. explanation thanks to the biblical figure of Ritzpa Bath Ajà; 4. conclusions about the levinasian contribution to the studies on vulnerability. For Levinas, vulnerability represents the phenomenological premise to think the collapse of the law, when right is exposed to what it cannot contain, to the significance of the justice.

The moral evaluation of actions that disregard climate change, in individual as well as public ethics, is complex. A clear moral judgment itself is difficult to reach in both contexts, as we are far from paradigm moral cases where specific people provoke harm to easily identifiable others. However, for people to seriously engage in climate change mitigation, it has to be clear why it is wrong not to do so. There is therefore a need to frame moral responsibility for anti-environmen-tal behavior using language and concepts that are understandable to a broad public. This paper will argue that the concept of selfishness, properly construed, is the most appropriate tool for describing and morally evaluating human behavior that disregards climate change. A specific consequentialist definition of selfishness will be provided to this purpose. Some objections to framing the environmental decision in this way will be raised in public as well as individual ethics. In the public sphere, moral deliberations are complicated by the conflict between the rights of the present generation and those of future ones. In individual ethics, the inconsequentiality of individual emissions calls into question the very existence of a moral imperative to act pro-envi-ronmentally. The paper will thus investigate the grounds on which we can hold accountable pol-icy makers who refuse to take action on climate change, focusing on the concept of future dis-counting. With regard to the individual dimension, a proposal will be advanced on the basis of a non-superfluous causal contribution to collective-impact cases. In both contexts, the paper will eventually argue that anti-environmental actions can be defined as selfish according to the defini-tion provided.

Many authors, although they express very different positions on the use of public property in defending common goods, in any case consider juridical rationality to be a fundamental tool in pursuing this aim. Therefore, they undervalue the supremacy that economic rationality is exer-cising today both on juridical rationality and the predominant ways of dwelling in the world. In this regard, it is not simply a question of replacing common goods as things with the common as a political principle. Indeed, the movements that claim the collective or public ownership of certain “things” also shed light on the crucial crisis of our dwelling relationship with the common world, first of all as a material world. Main reference authors: Settis, Marella, Ostrom, Dardot, Laval, Arendt, Mattei.