Ethical Horizon Research Articles

In Defense of Narrative Identity

Over the past few decades, a number of philosophers, psychologists, and other scholars have used the concept of narrative as a basis for thinking about personal identity and ethical responsibility. It has been argued that, ethically, we should strive to achieve the unity that we discover in creating narratives about our lives. More recently, critical reactions to narrative theories have taken the form of a specific anti-narrative discourse. This article presents arguments in defense of the theory of narrative identity, based on the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, in whose thinking narrative is a central concept. The presented study defends the thesis that narrative identity is not an arbitrary contingent mental construct, but is necessarily present in human existence and is associated with the hermeneutic understanding of man as a temporary being capable of reflexive activity, constructing meanings, assessments, and goals. It is argued that narrative identity theory successfully addresses the problem of personal identity and the related question of the ethical responsibility of the subject by creating a narrative unity of the life project of an individual, in which the interrelationship between the concepts of personal identity, narration and evaluation is built. Section 1 analyses MacIntyre's concept of narrative and explains its significance for solving the problem of personal identity. Section 2 explicates the key characteristics of narrative identity: holisticity, intelligibility, teleology and the principle of self-care; it also provides responses to the criticisms of opponents who oppose the narrative concept of personal identity. Section 3 presents arguments in defence of Taylor's assertion that the ethical horizon of our existence presupposes the desire for narrative unity of the individual.

Matrix for understanding perinatal psychic processes mediated by assisted reproductive technology

This writing is the product of more than fifteen years of clinical work with patients who attend to medically assisted reproduction treatments, including our own clinical cases and those of other colleagues. Some of them compiled in the book “Wishes, children, technologies”, others developed in writings of my authorship in recent years. This clinical material has allowed me to develop a matrix of understanding of the psychological processes that women undergo throughout reproductive treatments, which includes a series of losses that are added to the psychic processing that occurs in natural pregnancies. This general matrix serves as a compass to guide us around some common elements that usually appear in reproductive treatments that last years. Having an ethical horizon of promotion and protection of the right to mental health of women facing reproductive treatments, we propose an interdisciplinary approach to medically assisted reproduction processes with a privileged heeding to singularity

Unveiling Ethical Horizons: a Contemporary Analysis of Mba Students’ Perceptions on Business Ethics in Nepal

Unveiling Ethical Horizons: a Contemporary Analysis of Mba Students’ Perceptions on Business Ethics in Nepal

Navigating Ethical Horizons: Frameworks for Responsible AI Governance in Malaysian Businesses

Navigating Ethical Horizons: Frameworks for Responsible AI Governance in Malaysian Businesses

Unveiling Ethical Horizons: A Contemporary Analysis of MBA Students' Perceptions on Business Ethics in Nepal

Unveiling Ethical Horizons: A Contemporary Analysis of MBA Students' Perceptions on Business Ethics in Nepal

Proleptic Logics in Media Coverage of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report

The rhetorical figure of speech called prolepsis, describing a presaging of time and events to come, commonly appears in environmental communication and importantly frames the possibilities for action. Prolepsis is a figure employed in communication about climate change that demands attention in its various deployments, configurations, and, importantly, rhetorical inducements. Such inducements may rely upon feelings of hope or fear, and this study investigates the rhetorical and ethical conditions prolepsis may generate. A considerable literature studying the concept of hope offers great insights into climate change perceptions and behavior concerning climate action. The present study examines prolepsis to discuss how the figure’s inducement of suasive effect through appeals to hope and fear shape the ethical horizons for action. We examine media coverage of the IPCC’s sixth report, Part I, warning of the enormous impacts of the ongoing climate emergency and necessary climate action to mitigate the worst of these effects.

Kokyu Studio in Wrocław: A Place of Practice

This article attempts to outline the most important assumptions of the work of Kokyu Studio led by Przemysław Błaszczak and Joanna Kurzyńska and based at the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław in Poland. The Studio’s educational and artistic programme is founded on the idea of a ‘place of practice’, which captures the philosophical, practical, aesthetic, and ethical horizon of the activities common to all members of the Studio. The regularity of practice, exposure to long working processes, and the improvement of the quality of movement, which are rooted in several traditions and methods of work, allow practitioners to study their own development and integrate various sources of knowledge. Reflections here also ask questions about the place and application of such a model of work in the context of contemporary challenges for actor-performer training.

Synthetic embryos: a new venue in ethical research.

Two independent groups have reported the development of 'artificial embryos'. Those are in vitro models made of mouse embryonic stem cells, without the need for egg or sperm, and grown ex utero without requiring implantation. This system might open new venues in bioethical research if human cells show the ability to replicate this system. The recent publications reported in 2022 reveal the possibility of obtaining mouse embryos without the need for egg or sperm. These 'artificial embryos' can recapitulate some stages of development ex utero - from neurulation to organogenesis - without implantation. Synthetic mouse embryos might serve as a valuable model to gain further insights into early developmental stages. Indeed, it is expected for these models to be replicated by employing human cells. This promising research raises ethical issues and expands the horizon of ethics in regard to the development of the human embryo. From this point of view, we state some of the new open venues for bioethical research.

Odds on Erasure: The Status of the Novel on the Receding Horizon of Democracy

AbstractLiterary sociology’s recent turn to contemporary publishing has brought renewed attention to Percival Everett’s acclaimed novel, Erasure (2001), which satirizes late twentieth-century media and publishing culture and raises concerns about the status of the literary novel. An episode in which literary-prize jurors cast their votes suggests the novel’s engagement with the discourse of democracy as well. This essay sets Everett’s novel in dialogue with the historian James Kloppenberg’s recent monumental study, Toward Democracy (2016). In contrast to literary sociology, which generally inflects its critical assessments with uncontroversial conceptions of democracy that rarely extend beyond egalitarian pluralism, Kloppenberg presents his work not merely as a history of centuries-long struggles with democratic practices but as a plea that we regard democracy as a conceptual and ethical horizon. Its entailments go far beyond popular sovereignty and participatory action. They include principles of autonomy and equality as well as premises of deliberation, pluralism, and reciprocity. Kloppenberg’s insistence on the relevance of these conditions dovetails with Everett’s narrative of—or implicit demand for—the relevance of aesthetic conditions that give rise to the same autonomous literary art that his fictional protagonist and Everett himself ordinarily write.[Erasure’s realism] makes visible a world populated with liberal democratic institutions that enjoy many degrees of separation from a neoliberal media and publishing world afflicted with unreality hunger.

Ética climática, (in)justiças e limitações do Pagamento por Serviços Ambientais no Brasil

Abstract From the perspective of climate ethics, this article proposes to analyse the Payments for Environmental Services (PES) at the local (case study in São Paulo) and national (National Plan for Payments for Environmental Services) dimensions. The practices observed in these Brazilian political arenas were assessed via content analysis; From the guiding principles of political action, we analyse the dynamics of public policymaking actors in the light of categories such as planned naturalness, decision-making plurality, generational benefit, energy location and access to knowledge and material (PLANB Index). The final considerations refer to the urgency of public climate policies aligned with a normative ethical horizon, which must consider local perspectives as the starting point that helps the fulfilment of multilateral global agreements.

O princípio responsabilidade como resposta À técnica moderna

The main objective of this article is to present an ethics of Hans Jonas' responsibility as a response to modern technique and a repercussion of its negative effects in the future. In view of the unbalanced growth in the power of technique, traditional ethics have failed to offer answers that guide human actions in comparison to those brought about by technological civilization. The horizon of anthropocentric ethics aimed only at the present. Therefore, it is necessary to have an ethics that breaks with the frontiers of the present and the future. The methodological path based on hermeneutics that consists of undertaking analyzes and interpretations taking into account the historical context in which the technique developed and its possible consequences not only for the present, but also for future human and extra-human life. The ethics of responsibility aims at caring for life. It is also characterized by the non-reciprocity of actions, based on the parental and political model. In view of this, the philosopher emphasizes the heuristic of fear, that is, prudence in the use of modern technique so that not only man, but also nature has the right to exist. This theme is necessary in the current situation given the unbalanced growth of the technique and the impacts that the environment has been suffering affecting humanity. In view of this, Jonasian ethics proposes the permanence of an authentic life on earth.

Reading Levinas’ Deconstruction of Time Through the Ethical Subject

This paper will take a closer look at Levinas' ethical subject and diachronic time in relation to Heidegger's project of Being and Time. Throughout the analysis, I will show how Levinas reformulates Heidegger's task and overcomes its limitation by successfully construing “the whole of time”, in the mode of discontinuity. Levinasian Diachronic time reveals a new signi-fication of finiteness, to be a Messiah, who dedicates oneself to the suffering others without seeking other-worldly hopes, for the “responsibility of a mortal being for a mortal being” itself is “the relationship with the infinite”. Furthermore, I will argue that through this diachronic time, Levinas attempts to construct a new structure of eternity under the influence of Rosenzweig. Levinas declares that only after falsifying hopes are dissolved in despair, infinity breaks into time, and enables “mortal human beings” to participate in “immortality” through the time of the Other. Whereas Heideggerian ontology attempted to articulate the meaning of Being-in-general based on the being of Dasein and temporality, Levinas captures that the pri-mordial horizon of ethics is the manifestation of the face of the Other and diachronic time, which lead us to think beyond Being, namely, “the otherwise than being”.

Paternoster, or Invective by paradigm

The poem Apostrofa (na czas stanu wojennego) by Father Kazimierz Wójtowicz was published in the collection of poems Odpisy Nadziei in Vienna in 1982. The artist is a Catholic monk (a Resurrectionist) and a poet with considerable achievements, acknowledged in the so-called priestly poetry (Krzysztof Dybciak, Bożena Chrząstowska), but going beyond the features of its style through the connection with linguistic poetry and the New Wave poetics. The author of the article attempts to recognize the phenomenon of the text, which belongs to the realm of martial law literature and in which the poet expresses a politically and morally motivated reprimand addressed to General Jaruzelski through the pattern of Pater noster — the most important Christian prayer. The foundations of the strategy implemented in Apostrofa are: the shift of meanings (“Our Stepfather” as an invective), the reference to the language of values, the use of several rhetorical figures (including figures of thought and aversio), as well as the reference to the Lord’s Prayer in the form of reactivating a separate literary genre (pacierz — Lord’s prayer) in its serious and exhorting variant (paternoster — ‘scolding’ prayer). With such an approach, the text of Our Father cannot be perceived as the subject of occasional intertextual stylization (parody, travesty or burlesque), the matrix of a pamphlet or a pasquil, but rather as the root paradigm (“the cultural model of behavior”; Victor Turner’s concept) defining a universal ethical horizon for Wójtowicz’s poem.

A decolonial narrative of sexuality and world politics when race is everywhere and nowhere

ABSTRACT In a first section, this article introduces three postcards narrating sexual politics in three different States. Each postcard was inspired by a way of conceptualising ‘race’ in world politics: as a powerful structure altering the starts and ends of wars, as a social construction of bodies creating economic and political (hierarchical) institutions, and as a historical and material global order engendered through colonial encounters and dehumanisation processes. In a second section, this article constructs a theory of sexual ethical horizons for global political action obtained through aesthetics of trauma and movement. It argues that narratives emanating from pleasure itself can resist the formation of a (new) science of sexual politics and, instead, they can create conocimientos (decolonial knowledges) for political movement amidst global trauma and violence.

Beauty as Propaganda

This paper considers W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story, “Jesus Christ in Texas,” in the perspective of his analysis of the concept of beauty in Darkwater (1920); his exposition of the idea that “all art is propaganda” in “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926); and his moral psychology of white supremacy. On my account, Du Bois holds that beautiful art can help to undermine white supremacy by using representations of moral goodness to expand the white supremacist’s ethical horizons. To defend this thesis, he relies on an image of “the cross and the lynching tree” to revise imagery that he draws from Albrecht Dürer’s 1504 painting, “The Adoration of Kings.”

Revolution andRevellion

It has been increasingly common to hear talk of the need for “revolutionary action” to break the Anthropocene/Capitalocene trajectory of northern petroculture. Sometimes this talk is deployed by transition-oriented political movements like Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion. At other times, it is the mild liberal-consumerist “join the revolution” discourse put forward by green capitalist ventures. In both cases it raises the question of what is meant by revolution, a term that Arendt observed has both radical and conservative valences. As we contemplate revolutionary solarity in the twenty-first century, we must further settle accounts with the legacy of twentieth-century revolutions, many of which were predicated on energy-intensive and technoaccelerationist principles. This essay discusses what should and should not belong to revolutionary solarity and puts forth an alternate ethical and practical horizon of “revellion” in which the violent legacies of revolution are displaced by a politics that seeks to rewire the overheated pleasure circuits of northern civilization toward the pursuit of humbler joys and playful relations.

Correction to: The ethical horizon of the Elea-Velia Medical School

Correction to: The ethical horizon of the Elea-Velia Medical School

El polémico y fecundo diálogo entre la teología y la ecología

El ecologismo contemporáneo, a pesar de la polémica generada por su pretensión sociopolítica, su propuesta sistémica y su espiritualidad ecléctica, no tiene por qué entrar necesariamente en conflicto con la fe cristiana. Al contrario, en las últimas décadas el movimiento ecologista está siendo un acicate, un revulsivo y una oportunidad histórica para volver a las fuentes teológicas, profundizar en el significado de la tradición sacramental, recuperar una antropología relacional, redescubrir una mística de alabanza al Creador, rehabilitar la categoría de sacrificio y expandir el horizonte ético del pensamiento social cristiano. Al mismo tiempo, en el diálogo entre la teología y la ecología, el cristianismo puede realizar una valiosa contribución que corrija algunos de los excesos ideológicos del ecologismo.

The ethical horizon of the Elea-Velia medical school

The ethical horizon of the Elea-Velia medical school

The Sexual Abuse Scandal and a New Ethical Horizon: A Perspective from India

Despite recent signs of change, the Indian church was rather reluctant to acknowledge the clerical sexual abuse scandal as its own problem. In the Indian context, the scandal entails not only the abuse of minors, but also the abuse of women and other vulnerable adults by church personnel. The hierarchical structure of Indian society, gender relations based on patriarchy, and postcolonial attitudes provide a fertile ground for abuse. Clericalism, centralization of power in the church, and continuing negative attitudes to sexuality are further contributing factors. The clerical sexual abuse scandal calls for developing new ethical horizons based on a theology of a participatory church, and a reconsideration of the church’s attitude to sexuality and gender relations.