Showing Solidarity as an Ethical Response to Displaced and Weak Persons

Abstract

In this paper the limits and possibilities of showing solidarity with displaced persons are being discussed. There is a limit to showing solidarity, because displaced persons don’t know given historically grown, socially established and culturally conventionalized forms of expressing demands for help and complaints about suffering. Regarding this limitation, it may be cast doubt on the possibility of claiming that showing solidarity is related to universal morality. This is a genuine practical-ethical problem, as an actual understanding of universal ethical claims is confronted with a reality that contradicts them, because there are people with ethically relevant needs and sufferings who cannot be addressed within a given understanding of the order of ethical life. In response to this problem, a way of responding ethically to demands for help and complaints about suffering by displaced persons is developed, which can only be understood independently of historical, cultural, and social institutions and practices. In a first step, a negative reflection on the possibility of showing solidarity with displaced persons is provided, in order to disclose sources of possible ignorance immanent to instrumental practical thought and immanent to the learned competences of participation in social practices. Furthermore, it will be shown that conceiving solidarity on the basis of universal, formal conditions of discourse leads to a new form of ignorance towards those who are too weak to meet such conditions and are in consequence repressed. Finally, showing solidarity will be presented as a local relation in which the displaced persons’ demands and complaints are recognized as new moral facts.