Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2022) XXIV/2

Monographica. Political Correctness - Symposium I. Pierpaolo Cesaroni, La vita dei concetti. Hegel, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Quodlibt, Macerata 2020 - Symposium II. Rosaria Caldarone, La filosofia in fiamme. Saggio su Pascal, Morcelliana, Brescia 2020 - Symposium III. Fabio Ciaramelli, L’ordine simbolico della legge e il problema del metodo, Giappichelli, Torino 2021. Varia

Genetic engineering technologies are a subclass of the biotechnology family, and are concerned with the use of laboratory-based technologies to intervene with a given organism at the genetic level, i.e., the level of its DNA. This class of technologies could feasibly be used to treat diseases and disabilities, create disease-resistant crops, or even be used to enhance humans to make them more resistant to certain environmental conditions. However, both therapeutic and enhancement applications of genetic engineering raise serious ethical concerns. This paper examines various objections to genetic engineering (as applied to humans) which have been raised in the literature, and presents a new way to frame these issues, and to look for solutions. Specifically, this paper frames genetic engineering technologies within the ‘design turn in applied ethics’ lens and thus situates these technologies as covarying with societal forces. The value sensitive design (VSD) approach to technology design is then appropriated as the conceptual framework in which genetic engineering technologies can be considered so that they can be designed for important human values. By doing so, this paper brings further nuance to the scholarship on genetic engineering technologies by discussing the sociotechnicity of genetic engineering systems rather than framing them as value-neutral tools that either support or constrain values based on how they are used.

The work of both the philosophers of Western modernity and modern African(a) philosophers is premised on a fundamental reimagining of the foundations of the discipline. In both cases this has, and for African(a) philosophers continues to assume, the form of an appeal to First Philosophy. The shared interest in First Philosophy leaves the two canons irrevocably intertwined and invites the African(a) scholar to be creative when it comes to engaging Western theorists such as Hobbes whose reimagining of the social contract has been foundational to the contemporary world order: its universalist assumptions must be negated but not at the cost of dispensing with what is valuable about the particular, Western insight into the human condition. In this article I argue that the reasoning deployed by African(a) philosophers can ironically be represented in terms of the very “constitutive causes” introduced by Hobbes. First, I discuss Hobbes’s appeal to First Philosophy and how this yielded the notion of “constitutive causes”. I then show how decolonial theorists radicalized the appeal to First Philosophy in order to expose the universalist assumptions at work in Western philosophy before I outline what I consider to be “constitutive causes” of both colonial and decolonial reasoning.

In recent years, vulnerability has acquired an increasingly relevant political-moral significance. Its renewed interest is due to the idea that if you focus the attention on what constitutes the ideal capable of making people's lives truly "human", a theme like the one of vulnerability represents more an obstacle to be removed in respect to a condition of perfection than a normative resource. This does not mean that you cannot approach an ethic of vulnerability without caution and some reservations. Summarising: the category of vulnerability can be used as a strategic resource of critical value able to foster transformation of the unjust social situation, or is it inevitably associated with a relationship of domination and subordination, or even of violence? The thesis of the present paper is that it is twofold. However, if included in the conceptual framework of the theory of recognition, vulnerability is not necessarily a limiting condition; rather it is an ontological feature that can help recover the intrinsic social dimension typical of the human condition.

This article aims, based on the historical case of the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Vietnamese independentists in French Indochina in 1908 and in 1913, as well as on the ethics of war as defined through Michael Walzer's classical stance as well as the recent challenge posed to that stance by Jeff McMahan, to research the ethical aspects of "terrorism". We will first try to find if there is an objective concept covered by this controversial term of "terrorism", then research if and when "terrorism" can be ethically justified, to finally bring our theory to the test through our historical example, thus replacing "terrorism" as a legitimate object of the ethics of war.