UNESCO’s Activities in Ethics

UNESCO is an intergovernmental organization with 193 Member States. It is concerned with a broad range of issues regarding education, science and culture. It is the only UN organisation with a mandate in science. Since 1993 it is addressing ethics of science and technology, with special emphasis on bioethics. One major objective of the ethics programme is the development of international normative standards. This is particularly important since many Member States only have a limited infrastructure in bioethics, lacking expertise, educational programs, bioethics committees and legal frameworks. UNESCO has recently adopted the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. The focus of current activities is now on implementation of this Declaration. Three activities are discussed that aim at improving and reinforcing the ethics infrastructure in relation to science and technology: the Global Ethics Observatory, the Ethics Education Programme and the Assisting Bioethics Committees project.     

On Habermas’s Critique of Husserl

Over four decades, Habermas has put to paper many critical remarks on Husserl’s work as occasion has demanded. These scattered critical engagements nonetheless do add up to a coherent (if contestable) position regarding the project of transcendental phenomenology. This essay provides a comprehensive reconstruction of the arguments Habermas makes and offers a critical assessment of them. With an eye in particular to the theme of intersubjectivity (a theme of fundamental interest to both thinkers), it is argued that Habermas’s arguments do indeed show up deficiencies in Husserlian phenomenology and yet that they do not succeed in proving that we must abandon the methods and tasks of phenomenological research. On the contrary, it is argued that phenomenological methods may well be needed in order to investigate certain philosophical questions that Habermas’s theory of communication has thus far only partially addressed.     

Campbell’s Law and the Ethics of Immensurability

The paper examines “Campbell’s Law”: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” The examination of measurability leads to explaining the reason for existence of a class of unmeasurable phenomena. The author describes a kind of habitus in which a strong taboo against measuring must exist by necessity, not by choice. The taboo is, in effect, a result of degradation of a certain kind of habitus. And finally, the paper demonstrates under which conditions the Campbell’s law is in effect, and how we can mitigate its effects in social decision-making.     

Hursthouse’s Virtue Ethics and Abortion: Abortion Ethics without Metaphysics?

This essay explicates and evaluates the roles that fetal metaphysics and moral status play in Rosalind Hursthouse’s abortion ethics. It is motivated by Hursthouse’s puzzling claim in her widely anthologized paper “Virtue Ethics and Abortion” that fetal moral status and (by implication) its underlying metaphysics are “in a way, fundamentally irrelevant” to her position. The essay clarifies the roles that fetal ontology and moral status do in fact play in her abortion ethics. To this end, it presents and then develops her fetal metaphysics of the potential and actual human being, which she merely adumbrates in her more extensive treatment of abortion ethics in her book Beginning Lives. The essay then evaluates her fetal ontology in light of relevant research on fetal neural and psychological development. It concludes that her implied view that the late-stage fetus is an actual human being is defensible. The essay then turns to the analysis of late-stage abortions in her paper and argues that it is importantly incomplete.     

Exploring Habermas’s Critical Engagement with Chomsky

This article explores Jürgen Habermas’s critical employment of Noam Chomsky’s insights and the philosophical assumptions that motivate or justify Habermas’s early enrichment of his universal pragmatics with material drawn from generative linguistics. The investigation of the influence Chomsky’s theory has exerted on Habermas aims to clarify what Habermas means by universalism, reason embedded in language and the universal core of communicative competence—away from various misinterpretations of Habermas’s rationalist commitments and from reductive, conventionalist readings of his notion of consensus. Much against hasty and unexamined incriminations of Habermasian pragmatics, a turn to a neglected and scantly researched topic such as the philosophical affinity of some Chomskian and Habermasian themes (and to the philosophical justification of the points where Chomsky and Habermas part company) will retrieve the kind of depth and nuance that may lead us beyond facile and simplistic understandings of what discursively reaching consensus might mean from a Habermasian point of view.     

Floridi’s Fourth Revolution and the Demise of Ethics

Luciano Floridi has proposed that we are on the cusp of a fourth revolution in human self-understanding. The information revolution with its prospect of digitally enhancing human beings opens the door to engineering human nature. Floridi has emphasized the importance of making this transition as ethically smooth as possible. He is quite right to worry about ethics after the fourth revolution. The coming revolution, if it unfolds as he envisions, spells the demise of traditional ethical theorizing.     

On Luo Congyan’s Ethics

Luo Congyan put forward the idea that benevolence is the substance while righteousness is its function, which placed the intrinsic value of human beings on a more fundamental position and affirmed the unity of benevolent principle and universal norms from the perspective of the relationship between substance and function. The unity of benevolence and righteousness involves the connection between value and norms, and the latter relate to the relationship between morality and law in the broader sense. On the basis of the idea of using both benevolence and righteousness, Luo Congyan examined the relationship between morality and law. Corresponding to the emphasis on the role of both law and political power, Luo Congyan concerned himself with how to establish rational interpersonal relationships in various ways. Furthermore, Luo Congyan emphasized the significance of behavior in everyday life, while he affirmed that the universal principle should be followed. In this way, he developed the earlier Confucian thought. Translated from Studies in Ethics by Xiao Mo     

The New Rhetoric’s Inheritance. Argumentation and Discourse Analysis

This paper aims at showing how the New Rhetoric’s insights allow for an integration of argumentation studies in linguistic investigation, and more specifically in discourse analysis. Claiming that argumentativity is a constitutive feature of discourse, it endeavors to explore logos as both reason and language by analyzing patterns of reasoning in their discursive actualization. In this approach, the attempt at influencing the audience’s representations is analyzed in the complexity of a discourse explored in its formal and socio-institutional dimensions.

Husserl’s Discovery of Philosophical Discourse

Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenology is his first systematic attempt to show how phenomenology differs from natural science and in particular psychology. He does this by the phenomenological reduction. One of his achievements is to show that the formal structures of intentionality are more akin to logic than to psychology. I claim that Husserl’s argument can be made more intuitive if we consider phenomenology to be the study of truth rather than knowledge, and if we see the reduction as primarily a modification in our vocabulary and discourse and not as simply a change in attitude. I briefly compare Husserl’s concept of philosophy with those of Plato and Kant.

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An Existential Foundation for an Ethics of Care in Heidegger’s Being and Time

Martin Heidegger’s existential account of care in Being and Time (2010) provides us with an opportunity to reimagine what the proper theoretical grounding of an ethic of care might be. Heidegger’s account of care serves to deconstruct the two primary foundations that an ethic of care is often based upon. Namely, that we are inevitably interdependent upon one another and/or possess an innate disposition to care for fellow humans in need. Heidegger’s account reveals that both positions are founded upon an ontic (meaning factual existence), as opposed to an ontological (which refers to the nature of being), understanding of care. The distinctions between an ontic and ontological understanding of care are significant. Yet, I maintain that they are not completely incompatible. Both Heidegger and care ethicists contend that our existence with others is understood through a relational ontology. Furthermore, there are certain ontological structures from Heidegger which resonate with an ethic of care. Two key existential structures are leaping-ahead and being-guilty. These existential structures are latent in care ethics, and by explicitly revealing them I reinforce the connection between Heidegger’s account and care theory. Lastly, I develop the theoretical foundations of care ethics by proposing an existential ethic of care.

     

Science, Ethics and War: A Pacifist’s Perspective

This article considers the ethical aspects of the question: should a scientist engage in war-related research, particularly use-inspired or applied research directed at the development of the means for the better waging of war? Because scientists are simultaneously professionals, citizens of a particular country, and human beings, they are subject to conflicting moral and practical demands. There are three major philosophical views concerning the morality of war that are relevant to this discussion: realism, just war theory and pacifism. In addition, the requirements of professional codes of ethics and common morality contribute to an ethical analysis of the involvement of scientists and engineers in war-related research and technology. Because modern total warfare, which is facilitated by the work of scientists and engineers, results in the inevitable killing of innocents, it follows that most, if not all, war-related research should be considered at least as morally suspect and probably as morally prohibited.     

Assembling Agency: Expression,Action, and Ethics in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus

In response to several problems identified in the primary and secondary literature, this article advances an “expressive” conception of action and agency that (i) is consistent with the metaphysics of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, (ii) can underpin the ethical dimensions of this text, and (iii) meets some of the general requirements of a philosophy of action. This conception will be distinguished from standard theories in the philosophy of action, to the extent that these latter conceptualize and explain action with reference to intentions taken as psychological causes that are specifiable in advance and independently of the resultant activity. But it will also be distinguished from commentaries that, after rightly identifying the standard conception of intentional action as incompatible with Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphysics, fail to substitute a viable conception of action and agency in its stead. In short, drawing on a notion of expression, this article will advance a conception of intentions that does not treat them as prior and independently specifiable causes of action, but rather as “immanent” causes whose intelligible content is inseparable from—that is, dynamically assembled and specified within—the ecologically and socially situated, temporally extended and reality-transforming actions they animate.     

Traces of the Person: Max Scheler’s and Paul Ricoeur’s Attempts on Personal Ethics

To encounter a fellow-being does not mean only to see her face, to notice the color of her eyes, but to meet her eyes and to be addressed by her. Who one is irreducible to any objective property or value, and likewise cannot be comprehended through propositional statements in the manner of “talking about …” something. Rather, such comprehension demands an account of giving way to the appearance of the other as other. This account, prominently linked to E. Levinas’ “ethics as first philosophy,” has also been developed as phenomenological personalism. While Max Scheler developed his “Ethical Personalism” within his material Value Ethics, his Philosophy of Fellow-Feeling and in his late Philosophical Anthropology of human spirit, Paul Ricoeur develops his personalism through different approaches: from his early attempts on need and desire as the affective basis of our values to the perspective on the particular way we lead our lives in narratively constituting our personal identity, and finally to his concept of recognition. Reconstructing personalism as a philosophy of discovering the other person in her otherness and as a concept of social practice are the aims of this paper.