Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2025) XXVII/1

The aim we propose in this essay is to start research on an inaugural moment – the Montaigne’s Essays – in which the ontological and ethical status of the human, and its (supposed) metaphysical centrality is questioned. The notion of «nature» that would derive from that statute, in the modern epistemology is conceived in an anthropocentric sense. Montaigne, especially in the “Apology of Raymond Sebond”, represents a significant counterpoint to the objectifying paradigm that is called into question today, the onset of another modernity compared to the one that (starting from the 17th Century) has defined the ethical and epistemological coordinates of relationship between human and non-human. Thus, the question that today questions that paradigm, which claimed to express the rationality and universality of modern knowledge on «human» and «non-human», could find a sharp conceptual tool precisely in Montaigne’s anti-anthropocentric thought.

The sphere of moral action is plagued by paradoxes. Bruno Celano considers some traditional moral paradoxes related to recursive moral norms and tragic choices. This article extends Cel-ano's analysis to other paradoxes discussed in recent decades in the context of the debates on population ethics and the Trolley Problem. The prospect that there is no moral theory capable of respecting our moral intuitions can be seen as a threat to moral realism. This idea was recently developed by Christopher Cowie in his original defence of the moral error theory. A distinctive feature of Cowie's view is the connection between normative ethics and metaethics. This article proposes a second way of using the problem of moral paradoxes to connect normative enquiry and metaethics, the structure of which is opposite to Cowie's: not “from ethics to metaethics”, but “from metaethics to ethics”.

The paper discusses the so-called neo-Stoic theory of emotions as presented in Martha Nussbaum’s Upheveals of Thought. The thesis I argue is that her theory has only superfi-cial connections with Stoic theory and engages in a series of truisms that by no means make it a new theory, as the author claims.

In this article, I will analyze Nozick's theory of justice, particularly his basic arguments, that of fair distribution in favor of Wilt Chamberlain, that of forced labor, that Kantian, to show the difficul-ties of such a libertarian conception, which I consider unacceptable. Next, I will show, on the basis of six arguments why a liberal-egalitarian conception is preferable, a welfare of fundamental rights, liberty and social rights, as provided in many Western constitutions. Finally, I will conclude by saying how some forms of unequal distribution of wealth can be justified, based on four argu-ments.

‘Transformative justice’ is advocated as a superior, forward-looking as well as backward-looking, alternative to ‘transnational justice’ for repairing deep-rooted social injustice. The present article offers, especially, an ethical critique of proposals to employ transformative justice, comple-mented by ‘transformative reparations’, for the purpose of repairing a more distant past of slavery or colonialism. The article develops two arguments for why such attempts are ethically unjusti-fied. First, the proposals suggest an uncritical endorsement of (victim-descendant) activists’ his-torical ‘structural injustice’ claims regarding the impact of colonialism and slavery on present communities and relationships, when the empirical and moral foundations of such claims appear mostly weak or contestable. Second, the proposals’ appeal to forward-looking distributive justice fails, because this inclusion entails a flawed usurpation of distributive justice as well as a misjudg-ment of backward-looking corrective justice as arguably the core foundation for reparations. That the proposals thereby blur the different rationales of corrective justice and distributive justice signals the incoherence of the very concept of transformative reparations. The article concludes that transformative justice entails no acceptable concept of just reparation to which present-day descendants of victims of slavery or colonialism are typically entitled, and that the very approach of transformative justice has serious shortcomings.