Complex ethics according to Edgar Morin: on hope and redemption

Abstract

The present work consists of a bibliographic study carried out around the work of Edgar Morin and his developments referred to by him called complex ethics. It is fundamentally based on the contributions of volume VI of The Method (2016), with the aim of highlighting the ideas and relationships that were most disruptive and innovative precisely because they are the closest to the Human Condition. In his writing, the author distinguishes ethics from moral and begins with the strength of the idea that indicates that tolerance, by refusing intimidation, prohibition, anathema, gives primacy and opens the way to argument, reasoning, already the demonstration. And this is how Morin initially positions himself in this writing. While non-complex morality obeys a good-bad, fair-unfair binary code; complex ethics conceives that the good can contain an evil, the evil a good, the just the unjust and vice versa, and in recursion. It is an ethic that integrates contradictions and antagonisms and is never univocal. It moves away from the categorical Kantian imperatives and opens the possibility of a human ethics of uncertainty and of what it calls "ethical bet" to demonstrate how sometimes there must be a decision-making between ethical imperatives that enter into contradiction. It refers then to an objective understanding, a subjective one, and a complex one that integrates the previous ones.