Imogen Choi. The Epic Mirror. Poetry, Conflict Ethics and Political Community in Colonial Peru

Reseña de Imogen Choi. The Epic Mirror. Poetry, Conflict Ethics and Political Community in Colonial Peru, Woodbridge, Tamesis Books, 2022, 229 pp.ISBN 978-1-85566-347-3

The epic mirror: poetry, conflict ethics and political community in colonial Peru

The concept of ethics in social work is the practical knowledge based on professional experience. To understand ethics in macro social work, first, ethics and morals will be described broadly as well their relevance to social work identity. Then, codes of ethics, standards, and ethics committees are presented as components of integrity systems. In the same way, professional principles and values together with their relation to macro–social work definitions are reviewed. These account for procedures that display autonomy, reciprocity, reflexivity, and conflict acceptance to arrive at prudent and fair decisions. As an applied ethics, social work ethics is concerned with the systematic analysis of ethical issues in practical contexts. In this sense, the work is focused on decision-making in macro social work, bringing out the challenges that professionals face and how they address these challenges. This analysis will be done considering the moral dilemmas that might arise for social workers in practice with/in communities, organizations, and the public policy arena. Finally, to argue decisions and actions in professional practice, some philosophical approaches are presented, which are selected according to their relevance to macro social work. Summarizing, communicative ethics, the ethics of conflict, the ethics of recognition and moral offense, and intercultural ethics are reviewed in order to avoid all kinds of fundamentalism and relativity in professional action.

The past two decades have seen an increased emphasis placed on the relationship between communication and ethics, a subject that philosophers have debated for centuries. An analysis of textbooks as disciplinary artifacts reveals that students enrolled in communication courses across the university are often presented with conflicting or contradictory ethics instruction. Commonly, business and technical communication textbooks advocate a foundational approach toward the subject, whereas interpersonal communication textbooks, as taught within the liberal arts, support a nonfoundational view. Rather than bolstering students’ understanding of the importance of ethical communication, such broad-based contradictions might lead to an overall ambivalence toward the subject. A critical pedagogy—one that acknowledges and explores this tacit disciplinary debate on ethics—would provide students a more comprehensive philosophical and historical basis for determining their own perspectives on ethical communication.

In Religion, Kant claims that the ethical community cannot be brought into existence if there is not a political community at its basis (RGV 6: 94). My aim in this paper is to understand the origins and the consequences of this claim. My hypothesis is that the political community is a precondition to the establishment of an ethical community because the passage to a civil state can guarantee the minimal conditions for the ethical community to exist.

Multicultural societies are notable for the high degree of ethnic, cultural, ideological, and social differentiation within them, presenting social groups that are not always able to harmonize with the values and principles promoted by the political community, generally represented by the historically major group in that context. Tolerance between groups is a starting point for functional living, insofar as it depends on the capacity for conflict management and dialectic, but still insufficient to effect effective political participation aimed at the development of society as a whole. Multicultural society, in order to realize the interests of different groups and to promote the common good, must stimulate a sense of ethical community among its members, but this is only possible through the establishment of dialectic of recognition based on human dignity. The ethical community in multicultural societies is possible insofar as the individual recognizes himself in the other as active members of a society, open to ethnic and cultural differences, but harmonious in the defense of common principles and values that guarantee functional and intelligent coexistence in the various dialectics. The aim of this article is to present the dialectic of recognition based on human dignity as an effective condition of the ethical community in multicultural societies. Therefore, the research problem is: can the dialectic of recognition based on human dignity serve as a condition of the ethical community's effectiveness in multicultural societies? The method used is the inductive, by means of bibliographical research

This paper deals with an incursion into the philosophical thought of Henrique Claudio de Lima Vaz to reveal the ethical foundation of the political community to reestablish the essential relationship between ethics and politics. We, thus adopted his philosophical Ethics, when he unfolds the subjective, the intersubjectivity and the objective structures of the ethical act and life. Therefore, we intend to understand the category intersubjectivity that establishes human sociability through the promotion of the ethical community recognition and consensus among men, and where the ethos ensures the group state solidity. In the end, we seek to have demonstrated that Lima Vaz necessarily conceives a political community as an ethical community, based on an objective ethos that is created by people, and guided by the transcendent good. As a result, a path is indicated to restore the essential relation between ethics and politics in which Lima Vaz seeks to overcome the ethical crisis that overwhelm the modern man, individualistic and atomized, in order to secure the achievement of his ethical essence in the political community, hence ensuring the ethical-state building solidity.

En el presente trabajo se ofrece una lectura de Religión dentro de los límites de la mera razón que busca esclarecer el origen y el objetivo de la comunidad ética, y con ello comprender cuál es la función que tiene la comunidad ética en relación a la teoría del mal radical, del bien supremo y de la analogía con la comunidad política. Para dicho propósito, primero argumentaré que aquello que hace necesaria la comunidad ética es el mal radical. En segundo lugar, argumentaré que el objetivo compartido por todos los miembros de la comunidad ética es el bien supremo. En tercer lugar, mostraré que el bien supremo social de la Religión no es el bien supremo de la Primera Crítica. Por último, destacaré algunas diferencias entre la comunidad ética y la comunidad política y daré algunas conclusiones respecto de la analogía política.

Kant’s doctrine of moral theology is mainly explored, though not exclusively, in the “Doctrine of the method” in the Critique of Judgment, concerning the faculty of teleological judgment. This doctrine is closely related to his concept of final end <Endweck>. According to Kant, only the human being is considered final end, an “end that requires no other end as a condition of its possibility” (KU, §84, AA 05: 396). In order to things can exist in conformity with this end, Kant introduces in this context the admission, not only of an intelligent being as the author of the world, but also a moral being who is both regent and moral legislator. Many questions have arisen in the contemporary debate on these topics, such as the parallelism between Kant’s approach of the final end in the second part of the Critique of Judgment and Religion, the collective character of the concepts of God and highest good, the relationship between the concept of final end - related to the concepts of moral world, kingdom of ends, ethical community – and political community, or the questions that arise from the cosmopolitan conception of the human nature.
 Recebido / Received: 17.11.2019.Aprovado / Approved: 2.12.2019.

Liberal democracy has been experiencing a crisis of representation over the last decade, as a disconnect has emerged from some of the foundational principles of liberalism such as personal freedom and equality. In this article, I argue that in the third part of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason we can find resources to better understand and counteract this crisis of liberal democracy. Kant gives a powerful argument to include an invisible ethical community under a political community, and this ethical community has to take the form of a church. Kant argues then that any political system, and so also liberal democracy, requires religion to ally citizens in a foundational way with the general principles of that system. This would commit liberal nations to having their foundational principles buoyed by religion. Towards the close of the essay, I attend to how this might impact on liberalism’s commitment to religious and ideological pluralism.

This chapter examines the concept of community through its different facets and far-reaching implications in Kant’s philosophy. It first addresses the concept of community as one of the twelves categories in the Critique of Pure Reason, showing its synthetizing role for the categories of substance and causality. It argues that Kant’s concept of the phenomenal world assumes a communalistic unity in reference to which individual objects acquire their identities. The main part of the chapter then focuses on Kant’s practical philosophy, in which the notion of community plays an even more significant role, even though Kant’s concept of autonomy and the theory of the categorical imperative may seem to be founded on an individualistic conception of morality. Not only does the formula of humanity presuppose the intersubjective endorsability of moral maxims in a community of rational agents, but more importantly the realization of the highest good in the unity of morality and happiness requires the idea of a kingdom of ends in which every autonomous agent can be considered a law-giving member. In the earthly world, the kingdom of ends has to be realized by the establishment of a political and an ethical community, to which the last two sections of the chapter are devoted. While a political community is concerned with the external freedom of rational agents to protect everyone as free and equal, an ethical community aims at cultivating the virtue of rational agents towards holiness.

Este artigo pretende pensar o que Rancière chama de “giro ético da estética e da política” (le tournant éthique), isto é, a eticização contemporânea desses campos. Em Malaise dans l’esthétique o filósofo francês pretende mostrar como a palavra “estética” suscita atualmente sempre um certo incômodo, certa animosidade, tomada como um discurso capcioso pelo qual uma certa filosofia teria desviado em benefício próprio os sentidos das obras de arte e dos julgamentos de gosto. Em oposição a isso é que se teriam lançado alguns autores que denunciam certa “confusão” estética e tentam “consertá-la”, como Bourdieu, Badiou e Lyotard. É esse conserto que tende a uma eticização da estética e, com ela, da política. Acusa-se a estética de ser culpada de abrigar o ‘não importa que’ dos objetos de uso e das imagens da vida profana; e, também, de se ter extraviado em promessas falaciosas de um absoluto filosófico e de uma revolução social. Num tempo da arte pós-utópica, portanto, a única salvação, o único Deus disposto a nos salvar, estaria a cargo de uma ética, de uma arte marcada pelas categorias do consenso, isto é, disposta a restaurar o sentido perdido de um mundo comum ou reparar as falhas do laço social. O conceito de comunidade é aqui central para se pensar como a comunidade política é transformada em uma comunidade ética. Se para alguns autores a relação entre essas duas comunidades é de continuidade, para Rancière elas revelam diferenças significativas, regidas pela oposição entre povo e população. Para a investigação que desenvolvo sobre o lugar da educação como questão filosófico-política o “giro ético da estética e da política” é um passo importante para se pensar nas formas contemporâneas de subsunção do espaço político e nas consequências desse processo para a educação.

Hegel, who pioneers presuppositionless, foundation-free autonomous reason in his Science of Logic and the ethics of self-determination in his Philosophy of Right, might be expected to follow parallel itineraries in both works. Hegel develops logical determinacy into the three successive domains of the contrastive determinacy of the Logic of Being, the determined determinacy of the Logic of Essence, and the self-determined determinacy of the Logic of the Concept. On the other hand, he develops self-determined conduct as a self-ordered system of intersubjective structures of rights, falling into three domains: Abstract Right, Morality, and Ethical Community, dividing Ethical Community itself into the three spheres of family, social, and political ethical community. This chapter examines whether the division of the Philosophy of Right has an intrinsic necessity and completeness and whether that necessity and completeness can be confirmed through any correlation with the categorial division of the Science of Logic.

This article examines the narrative strategies through which Polish migrants in the UK challenge the formal rights of political membership and attempt to redefine the boundaries of 'citizenship' along notions of deservedness. The analysed qualitative data originate from an online survey conducted in the months before the 2016 EU referendum, and the narratives emerge from the open-text answers to two survey questions concerning attitudes towards the referendum and the exclusion of resident EU nationals from the electoral process. The analysis identifies and describes three narrative strategies in reaction to the public discourses surrounding the EU referendum - namely discursive complicity, intergroup hostility and defensive assertiveness - which attempt to redefine the conditions of membership in Britain's 'ethical community' in respect to welfare practices. Examining these processes simultaneously 'from below' and 'from outside' the national political community, the paper argues, can reveal more of the transformation taking place in conceptions of citizenship at the sociological level, and the article aims to identify the contours of a 'neoliberal communitarian citizenship' as internalized by mobile EU citizens.

This chapter argues that practice theory draws our attention to the fact that ideas, even normatively potent ones, derive their social power from the manner in which they are embedded in social relations, embodied and embrained by social actors, and inthinged in social technologies and artefacts. As a consequence, practice theory provides a fruitful approach to sociologically thickening conceptions of human rights. Reviewing a number of sociological contributions, Lopez discusses the explanatory potential and pitfalls associated with mobilizing practice theory to do so. Drawing on the work of Fuyuki Kurasawa and Kate Nash, he argues that human rights can be understood as a political imaginary where ethico-political practice is geared towards making receivable the normative claims of distant and/or excluded others in an imagined ethical and political community.