Ethical Criticism Research Articles

Kritik Budaya Moralitas Pendidikan Sekolah Prespektif Neil Postman dan Azyumardi Azra

This paper contains the results of a study on cultural criticism of school education morality. The school is a complete and structured educational center. The school becomes one of the complete educational centers and structures. As a whole, schools require mutual involvement between teachers and students to achieve certain goals. The integrity of the role is then supported by a structured process, starting from planning, implementation, to the process of monitoring and evaluation. The purpose of this research is to find out the criticism of the moral culture of school education according to Neil Postman and Azyumardi Azra, and to find out the construct of the idea of a culture of morality in school education according to Neil Postman and Azyumardi Azra. This study uses a type of qualitative research literature (Library Research). The method used in this study uses an interpretive approach, the researcher tries to reveal and identify the culture of morality in school education according to the thoughts of Neil Postman and Azyumardi Azra, so that all ideas, and the work of Neil Postman and Azyumardi Azra regarding Morals can be known. Sources of data in this study using two sources, namely, primary data sources and secondary data sources. Therefore, the sources of data collected in this study are documents related to the thoughts of Neil Postman and Azyumardi Azra about school education. The results in this study are that, in criticizing the culture of morality, Postman discusses at least five important things, including: In criticizing morality culture, Postman discusses at least five important things, including: (first) Teachers do not appear as top figures, (second) Children are not given critical thinking space, (thirth) The reality of rapidly developing technology, (four) Schools are only limited to fulfilling profession. Azra's thoughts on morality culture explain how education can liberate humans from physical work that shackles human nature to develop. Azra becomes exposed to his cultural critique of morality into several parts. (first) The orientation of education on the formation of artisans, (second) Education takes place in a schooling system. (thirth) Rigid school formalism.

Politics by Automatic Means? A Critique of Artificial Intelligence Ethics at Work.

Calls for “ethical Artificial Intelligence” are legion, with a recent proliferation of government and industry guidelines attempting to establish ethical rules and boundaries for this new technology. With few exceptions, they interpret Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics narrowly in a liberal political framework of privacy concerns, transparency, governance and non-discrimination. One of the main hurdles to establishing “ethical AI” remains how to operationalize high-level principles such that they translate to technology design, development and use in the labor process. This is because organizations can end up interpreting ethics in an ad-hoc way with no oversight, treating ethics as simply another technological problem with technological solutions, and regulations have been largely detached from the issues AI presents for workers. There is a distinct lack of supra-national standards for fair, decent, or just AI in contexts where people depend on and work in tandem with it. Topics such as discrimination and bias in job allocation, surveillance and control in the labor process, and quantification of work have received significant attention, yet questions around AI and job quality and working conditions have not. This has left workers exposed to potential risks and harms of AI. In this paper, we provide a critique of relevant academic literature and policies related to AI ethics. We then identify a set of principles that could facilitate fairer working conditions with AI. As part of a broader research initiative with the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, we propose a set of accountability mechanisms to ensure AI systems foster fairer working conditions. Such processes are aimed at reshaping the social impact of technology from the point of inception to set a research agenda for the future. As such, the key contribution of the paper is how to bridge from abstract ethical principles to operationalizable processes in the vast field of AI and new technology at work.

Ethical Flaws in Artworks: An Argument for Contextual Conjunctivism

Abstract According to Ted Nannicelli, ethical disputes about art today often concern not the controversial attitudes expressed by the works but the ways in which they have been created, that is, as well as interpretation-oriented ethical criticism of art, we find production-oriented ethical criticism. The main question that I explore in this article is: are the interpretation- and production-oriented approaches to ethical art criticism essentially disconnected or can there be a connection between them? I argue that in the disjunctivist view, the two approaches are disconnected, for ethical flaws in the production of artworks are never conditioned by ethical flaws in the attitudes expressed by those works and vice versa. I show that disjunctivism is mistaken and defend what I call contextual conjunctivism. In this view, the two approaches can be connected since attitudinal ethical flaws in artworks can indeed cause ethical flaws in their production and vice versa depending on context. I support this view using several examples of controversies about contemporary art.

The Ethics of AI Ethics. A Constructive Critique

The paper presents an ethical analysis and constructive critique of the current practice of AI ethics. It identifies conceptual substantive and procedural challenges and it outlines strategies to address them. The strategies include countering the hype and understanding AI as ubiquitous infrastructure including neglected issues of ethics and justice such as structural background injustices into the scope of AI ethics and making the procedures and fora of AI ethics more inclusive and better informed with regard to philosophical ethics. These measures integrate the perspective of AI justice into AI ethics, strengthening its capacity to provide comprehensive normative orientation and guidance for the development and use of AI that actually improves human lives and living together.

Ethics, politics and affects: renewing the conceptual and pedagogical framework of addressing fanaticism in education

ABSTRACT This essay reconceptualizes fanaticism as an activity that does not rely on the condemnation of ‘fanatical’ acts as a priori ‘irrational.’ Rather, it theorizes fanaticism as a method of ethical and political critique against a regime of representation. It also argues that it is crucial to understand fanaticism through an approach that does not set up a dichotomy between affect and reason, disavowing the ‘irrational’ behavior of fanatics. Drawing on affect theory and particularly the entanglement of feeling-thinking, this paper emphasizes that fanaticism is better understood within a framework that takes seriously the role of affects. Such a conceptual framework has important pedagogical implications for how to address fanaticism in education. This essay suggests that it is crucial to invent pedagogical strategies that are rooted in a reconceptualized notion of fanaticism that pays attention to its ethical, political and affective dimensions.

Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783 by Lee B. Wilson

Reviewed by: Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783 by Lee B. Wilson Justin Roberts Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783. By Lee B. Wilson. Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 288 pages. Cloth, ebook. The preamble to the first comprehensive English slave code—passed in Barbados in 1661—justified the creation of this set of laws by arguing that in all of the "Lawes of England" there was "noe tract to guide us where to walke, nor any rule sett us, how to governe such Slaves."1 This would suggest, as some colonial American historians have surmised, that slavery constituted a radical departure from English legal traditions. Lee B. Wilson's Bonds of Empire offers a counterpoint. By looking at a more comprehensive set of legal practices undergirding slavery in the British Atlantic, Wilson is able to stress the continuity of English legal systems in the development of colonial slave law. She argues that colonial slave law was not "a legal aberration" (3) or "beyond the pale of English imperial legal history" (5); rather, it "was a natural extension" of the English "legal system" (10). Bonds of Empire is nominally about slave law in South Carolina, but it is really much broader and more ambitious because Wilson extends her analysis to the Caribbean colonies—particularly Jamaica—and to the maritime world. Her book follows a loose chronological trajectory from the late seventeenth century through the end of the eighteenth century. The chapters trace that arc while remaining thematically organized around the concepts embedded in private law sources such as the conditional bonds used to transfer enslaved property, the records of the Vice-Admiralty Courts, and the records of the Board of Police, which governed Charleston during the American Revolution. Wilson relies on her legal training to shed light on how these records, which most scholars have overlooked, illuminate practices related to slavery. By focusing on such sources, Wilson offers a deeper appreciation of the ways in which English law buttressed the colonists' "commercial need to treat slaves as things" (261). Bonds of Empire clearly demonstrates that the prescriptive slave codes that have drawn so much attention from slavery historians were only a narrow subset of a far more expansive body of slave law. "Bloody and punitive," the slave codes addressed the slaves as potential criminal actors in need of social control, and they focused on "stripping enslaved people of the rights" (10) of freeborn English people. The "viscerally shocking" nature of these [End Page 491] slave codes has led some historians to emphasize that their creation signals "colonial legal deviance" (39). Wilson, by contrast, turns most of her attention to "the 'private' law of slavery—embodied in quotidian transactions and routine litigation" (39). These are sources that generally depict slaves as little more than commodities. Wilson maintains that by conceptualizing slaves as chattel and making them analogous "to ships, cows, or horses" (13), enslavers were able to draw directly from traditional English legal practices and "slot slaves into extant legal procedures and forms" (17), especially instruments of English property transfer such as "preprinted bills of sale, mortgages, trusts, and conditional bonds" (13). By relying on conventional English legal practices, she argues, colonial enslavers normalized the institution of slavery, insulating it from "moral critiques" (5). This continuity in "improvisational" (10) English legal practices and traditions made colonial British slavery resilient in the face of moral criticism and adaptable to change. Ultimately, Wilson argues that the status of the enslaved as property encouraged the "replication" of long-standing English legal practices in private law, which simultaneously bolstered the institution of slavery and "contributed directly to the dehumanization of enslaved people" (21). By privileging legal sources more concerned with enslaved people as alienable property than as potential criminal actors in need of social control, Wilson reinforces the idea that this chattel principle—the idea that a person could be bought and sold—was at the essence of Anglo-American slavery. She argues that "historians have long understood that transforming people...

(Un)Standardizing Emotions: An Ethical Critique of Social and Emotional Learning Standards

Background: This study took place within a policy context in which the state of Ohio, echoing moves across the country, adopted a set of K–12 Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) standards based in the work of the Collaborative for Academic and Social Emotional Learning (CASEL) and its core competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. As one of the first states to make such standards part of the state reporting system for school progress, and considering recent critiques of the hegemonic, normative impacts of SEL, we engaged in a systematic analysis of these standards to consider how they affect and further exacerbate the systemic oppressions experienced by multiply-marginalized people in schools. Purpose: This article reports on the normative assumptions in the Ohio SEL standards, using critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the DisCrit tenets to engage in an ethical critique of the real and potential social effects of these standards. Situating these standards relative to existing scholarship on race and dis/abilities in school, we show how the Ohio SEL standards and the CASEL competencies ignore racism, ableism, and other oppressions; privilege civility over productive conflict; and focus on behaviors over emotions, especially when expressed by Black, Brown, dis/abled, and queer people. Research Design: This is a qualitative study whose data were derived from an analysis of the Ohio K–12 Social and Emotional Learning Standards and the CASEL core competencies. Conclusions/Recommendations: Our ethical critique of the Ohio K–12 SEL standards and CASEL core competencies demonstrates how benign acquiescence to their expressed assumptions may negatively affect the experiences of multiply-marginalized people in schools. By ignoring racism, ableism, and other oppressions; privileging civility over productive conflict; and focusing on behaviors over emotions, especially when expressed by Black, Brown, dis/abled, and queer people, SEL standards may undermine or erase the critically productive role that emotions have played in movements for social justice. If we truly want to prioritize the actual social and emotional learning of all students in schools, we need a framework that explicitly names inequities, allows for collective agency, and acknowledges and enables access to emotions. Making space for these emotions, although considered by some to be outside the “norm” of acceptable classroom behaviors, would allow all students to be seen for who they are, to truly express how they feel, and to create and take up opportunities, themselves, for social change and justice.

Religious Otherness and National Identity in Scandinavia, c. 1790–1960: The Construction of Jews, Mormons, and Jesuits as Anti-citizens and Enemies of Society

Religious Otherness and National Identity in Scandinavia, c. 1790–1960: The Construction of Jews, Mormons, and Jesuits as Anti-citizens and Enemies of Society

Should risk-averse investors target the portfolios of socially responsible companies?

Research background: Companies are required to implement Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policies to mitigate the adverse social and environmental effects of their activities and gain legitimacy in the eyes of society. Sustainability initiatives are costly for companies but, at the same time, they are important value-creation drivers. Retail and institutional investors are increasingly choosing portfolios based on CSR performance. However, the relationship between CSR and market beta has hardly been studied at all in the literature, and no direct comparison of the U.S. and European markets has been conducted. Purpose of the article: The two fundamental variables that define an investment are return and risk, and the appropriate risk-return combination depends on the profile of the investors. This research aims to analyze the relationship between CSR and market risk, understood as price volatility and measured by market beta in the U.S. and European markets. Methods: Companies listed in the S&P 500 and Euro Stoxx 300 indexes from 2015 to 2019 were examined using OLS regressions with instrumental variables (IV) and fixed effects panel data. Findings & value added: The results show that those companies with higher CSR have betas below the market index in the U.S. market as well as lower volatility, and are, therefore, more appropriate choices for risk-averse investors. However, this relationship was not confirmed in the European market. This difference may be justified by two reasons: 1) The non-adherence of the United States to the Kyoto Protocol, resulting in less strict legal regulations than in Europe; 2) In the U.S. market, betas are more aggressive, while in the European market they are more defensive, with little margin for reduction. This research contributes to the current state of knowledge by providing empirical evidence that social, environmental, and corporate governance sustainability practices reduce stock volatility in the U.S. capital market, which is highly relevant for private and institutional investors who make their investments based on moral criteria. The results are current and reliable since they cover a broad and recent period for two of the most important stock market indexes.

The Ethics of the Anti-War Letter and Poetics of Testimony in Tvrtko Kulenović’s History of Illness (1994)

Tvrtko Kulenović’s History of Illness (1994) belongs to the anti-war letter and poetics of testimony genres from late 20th-century Bosniak and Bosnian-Herzegovian literature. Although a novel, History of Illness depicts the evils of the 1992–1995 war, in which Sarajevo was besieged by the Yugoslav People’s Army and the Army of Republika Srpska. Kulenović writes from the position of victim, and advocates the idea of ethical engagement during the writing process, in which the narrative and existential selves merge. This paper uses the methodological bases of ethical literary criticism to prove the ethical dimension of the literary text.

Direitos Humanos e Retóricas Canibais

Se a universalização dos direitos humanos representa para alguns uma vitória gloriosa da cultura jurídica do século passado, para outros, entretanto, espelha o fracasso e está vinculada aos últimos suspiros de um tipo de racionalidade jurídica que buscara, ainda que de forma bem intencionada, a ampliação máxima do alcance desses direitos pela correlata busca por fundamentos últimos e definitivos. A hipótese que foi aqui levantada é que sem perceber e se deixando guiar por critérios morais supostamente universais e, portanto, arretóricos, desprestigiou-se o diálogo intercultural e se desconsiderou o que há de único e endêmico nas culturas minoritárias, legitimando a exclusão ou a inclusão subalterna. Canibalizando, assim, através de retóricas com pretensões apodíticas (retóricas arretóricas), as outras inúmeras gramáticas da dignidade que ainda vigem no mundo plural que habitamos. O objetivo aqui é, portanto, denunciar, pelo método da análise retórica, esse processo de canibalização, subsunção e menosprezo pela compreensão de mundo alheia à que subjaz por detrás das teorias universais de direitos humanos.

Seeking The Authentic Christianity: A Prologue on Coptic Orthodox Christianity in Indonesia

<p>The history of Christianity in Indonesia is inextricably linked to that of Western colonialism. Due to this historical fact, Christianity has been stigmatized in Indonesian mainly by Muslim society as a colonial religion. This stigma later emerged in a number of Indonesian Christian communities. This study will look at the development of Coptic Orthodox Christianity in Indonesia through the lens of a religious purification movement. This study employs a sequential mixed research method that includes interviews, questionnaires, observation, and documentation. This study show that the conversion of mainstream Christians to Coptic Orthodox Christianity arose from a perception that mainstream Christianity was impure, too westernized, and did not conform to the identity of Indonesians as Easterners. This study ends with a conclusion that the presence of the Coptic Orthodox Christian community in Indonesia was exacerbated by an identity crisis, moral criticism, and rejection of the truth system in mainstream Christianity, as well as a desire to return to authentic Christianity.</p>

Dark souveniring: just a souvenir or something more complex

ABSTRACT Dark tourism shops have faced considerable moral criticism. This study draws on site observation and worksheets associated with a field trip to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, to examine children’s souvenir purchasing experiences. Employing thematic analysis of children’s narratives, the findings reveal that dark souvenirs can facilitate contextualisation of the site, emotional engagement, and symbolic meanings for the purchase of such souvenirs. Souvenirs and souveniring are discussed in reference to cause-related marketing strategies to balance the commemorative, educational, and economic objectives. The cause-related marketing partnership between the museum and charitable organisation enhances the acceptance of the souvenir shop and its products. The concept of cause-related marketing is valuable for explaining museum and charity shop dynamics, to inform effective management.

Anticipating the Unknown

Human beings expect and anticipate the unknown, including wishes, ambition, and the future. At times, the future is imagined as bright and hopeful. At other times, the future is expected to be gloomy and ominous. Therefore, human beings deal with the future with fear and skepticism. These fears are justified given the circumstances in the present, including human conduct in general, the conditions of wars, and environmental changes. Since literature recalls the past and tackles the issues of the present, it also expects what will happen in the future by visioning what the future would be. The visions presented in literature motivate the reader to think of other possibilities for the future by amending the present. Usually the future is portrayed through literary works, such as: science fiction, but in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the future is presented to show the reader that the it is the outcome of the past and the present. The current paper is an ethical critical study of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road . It aims to explore the reasons that lead to a dark future in McCarthy’s The Road. The paper aims to approach The Road by using Ethical Criticism. The paper also investigates human’s reaction to these changes in the future.

Sinful Foods: Measuring Implicit Associations Between Food Categories and Moral Attributes in Anorexic, Orthorexic, and Healthy Subjects.

Recently, neurocognitive studies have shown that food categorization is sensitive to both the properties of the food stimuli (e.g., calorie content) and the individual characteristics of subjects (e.g., BMI, eating disorders) asked to categorize these stimuli. Furthermore, groups of patients with eating disorders (ED) were described as relying more on moral criteria to form food categories than were control subjects. The present studies built on these seminal articles and aimed to determine whether certain food properties might trigger moral categories preferentially in subjects suffering from ED and in the general population. Using a Go/No-Go Association Task, Study 1 focused on the extent to which food categories are laden with moral attributes in ED patients compared to control subjects. Study 2 was a follow-up with a different design (an Implicit Association Test), another food variable (calorie content), and two non-clinical subgroups (orthorexic and healthy control subjects). Results revealed for the first time implicit associations between food variables cueing for energy density and moral attributes in the general population, the population suffering from anorexia nervosa, and subjects suffering from disordered eating such as orthorexia nervosa. These findings suggest that moralization of food is a pervasive phenomenon that can be measured with methods reputed to be less vulnerable to self-presentation or social desirability biases.

Ciceronian Officium and Kantian Duty

Ciceronian Officium and Kantian Duty Andree Hahmann and Michael Vazquez One of the characteristic markers of the advent of modern moral philosophy is the conceptual distinction between morality and one's own happiness.1 Nowhere is this innovation more visible than with the concept of "moral duty," which in modern terms is often defined precisely by its opposition to prudential self-interest or one's own happiness.2 It is generally assumed that the Stoics are ancient precursors to this decidedly modern concept.3 The concept of duty, or [End Page 667] something like it, plays a central role not only in their account of the psychology of human action but also in their prototypical conception of natural law ethics.4 Yet as recent commentators have emphasized, while the commonalities are tantalizing, appearances are misleading. The Stoics are, at bottom, eudaimonists in the Socratic tradition for whom the modern distinction between morality and prudence would be incoherent.5 No historian of philosophy will deny the vast expanse that separates Stoicism from modern moral philosophy, but the picture [End Page 668] remains largely obscure. It has long been suspected that Cicero played a decisive role in this development due to his crucial role as a translator and mediator of Greek philosophy. After all, Cicero is responsible not only for giving Greek philosophy a Latin dress, but also for shaping the linguistic and conceptual resources of Western philosophy for centuries to come. Scholars have offered varying explanations for Cicero's role in the movement away from eudaimonism: Cicero's Antiochean and syncretizing tendencies,6 the Roman and juridical cast of his appropriation of Stoic ethics and natural law,7 his emphasis on moral progress and the performance of officia by nonvirtuous agents (a [End Page 669] feature of middle Stoicism),8 his anti-Epicurean polemics,9 or some combination thereof. Most important from the point of view of the history of ethics is the fact that Cicero's ethics of officia, although articulated in a decidedly eudaimonistic framework, eventually formed the basis of an ethical system in which moral principles function to place limits on and constrain one's pursuit and maximization of happiness. Furthermore, when we arrive at Kant, whose radical reconception of moral philosophy is a watershed moment in the history of philosophy, we find a direct reference to Cicero at a crucial point in which he explicitly carries out the separation between morality and happiness. In this article, we would like to unpack this story about the history of ideas and look more thoroughly at the ways in which Cicero could have contributed to the development of the modern understanding of moral duty. In so doing, we also shed new light on the intellectual context within which Kant worked out his first major contribution to moral philosophy. [End Page 670] The remainder of the article is divided into four sections. In the second section we outline basic features of the Stoic concept of καθῆκον. In the third section we examine Cicero's translation of the notion into Latin as officium. While Cicero problematized and deliberated over his translational decision, we do not find an adequate basis to conclude that his translation of the Stoic doctrine into Latin and into a Romanized context led to the sort of development some commentators have suggested. Instead, we find that Cicero's translation largely preserves the basic core of the Stoic doctrine of καθῆκον. In the fourth section, we examine important developments in the meaning of "duty" between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, with a particular focus on Pufendorf's reworking of Ciceronian officium in ways that anticipate Kant's critique of Garve's Ciceronian ethics. While it is not Cicero's translation and appropriation of καθῆκον into Latin as such that shapes the modern understanding of moral duty, we argue that Cicero did play a decisive role in this notion's development. In particular, we argue in the fifth section that Cicero's impact is indirect but substantial: Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten and some of the central theses contained therein are formulated as a direct response to Christian Garve's Ciceronian ethics. Kant, foreshadowed by his predecessor Pufendorf, rejects the Ciceronian...

The Genealogy as a contribution to a natural history of morals

AbstractNietzsche's readers are often tempted to look for his critique of morality in On the Genealogy of Morality. However, I will argue that the Genealogy does not contain Nietzsche's critique of morality, nor was it intended by Nietzsche to contain his critique. Rather, the Genealogy is Nietzsche's attempt to develop crucial parts of what he calls a natural history or typology of morals, which he considers to be a descriptive project meant to serve as preparation for a critique of values. More precisely, the Genealogy serves as preparation for a critique of moral values in three ways: it (1) traces the historical development of Judeo‐Christian moral values in a way that (2) enables diagnosis of their psychological effects on various types of people, and of the physiological traits and states of which those values are symptoms. In turn, this vital factual information is needed by Nietzsche so that he can (3) compare Judeo‐Christian values to other values. 1–3 are purely descriptive, and they make possible a further, evaluative project Nietzsche does not undertake in the Genealogy itself, namely, his critique of those values by determining their place in a new rank ordering of values (i.e., Umwertung or revaluation of values).

Ethics as part of police management

This article examines which ethical features can be found in the police's more economically oriented management tactics, as well as the extent to which ethical considerations are factored into police decision-making processes. In this approach, the article builds on the author’s previous work, which focused on a police resource's risk assessment. The goal of this research is to answer the scientific question of whether or not harmful police trends could have been detected sooner. In this context, it's worth noting that the police force and its members are under a lot of moral and ethical criticism from a population that's becoming increasingly critical across borders. The author concludes that every police officer's moral compass can really provide a foundation for police activity, based on a literature study and a secondary quantitative content analysis. It is demonstrated that, in terms of duty ethics, ethical features are heavily reliant on role models. However, such role models are not always available. Supervisors, on the other hand, do not always live up to their responsibility as role models. Professional ethics are being implemented and strengthened in the training of young police recruits, which is positive. It is intended that ethical considerations would become more prevalent in the police force.

Moral crisis/moral critique?

The crisis of neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracy has a genesis stretching back a decade or longer. Why is it that, until now, socialists and those on the left have struggled to articulate a coherent counter-hegemonic discourse? We argue that at least part of this failing comes from an ambivalence about making the moral argument for socialist transformation. Both a moral critique of the existing order and the articulation of socialist future grounded in a distinct moral order are necessary components of transformative change: they are able to fix substantive policy initiatives - whether a green new deal, universal basic income or the nationalisation of essential services - within a broader vision of how society and the state should function, and on whose behalf. Morals are important in the functioning of any socio-economic order - communicating meaning, providing rationale and generating expectations regarding the practices of ourselves and others. They construct and stabilise contingent social orders and hierarchies. The current social contract is characterised by increased individualisation, responsibilisation and the moral imperative towards competition and consumption. Morals are what allow people to tolerate current conditions. But as contemporary capitalism becomes increasingly uninhabitable, a moral critique - that is the ability to both unpick what stabilises the current conjuncture and offer an alternative - becomes all the more urgent. We look at a number of initiatives and movements, most but not all lodged in the anti-austerity protests of the past decade, for examples of such political strategies. In such movements we see how material criticisms of capitalism are grounded in concrete struggles for justice and emancipation but framed in a counter-hegemonic moral framework that explicitly challenges the status quo.

Deleuze on Spinoza and Rousseau: Ethics and Materialism

In the lecture of December 16, 1980, Deleuze proposes a cross-reading of Spinoza and Rousseau. First, Deleuze reinterprets Rousseau’s morality in the light of Spinoza’s critique of ‘morality’ based on the opposition of good and evil; second, and reciprocally, he rereads Spinoza’s practical and ethical philosophy from a concept extracted from Rousseau’s work: that of the ‘materialism of the wise’. According to Deleuze, this ‘practical materialism’ (and not metaphysical) evoked by Rousseau, consisting of both ‘determinism’ and ‘sensualism’, has a Spinozist inspiration, insofar as it has an amoralist dimension, close to the critique of morality developed in the Ethics. But on the other hand, Rousseau’s ‘materialism of the wise’ allows us, conversely, to reread the Spinozist explanation of the conquest of freedom, by revealing the presence of practical principles very close to those of Rousseau’s ethical materialism. The cross-reading of Spinoza and Rousseau thus presents a double aim: on the one hand, to identify the presence of amoralist themes and issues in Rousseau’s work; on the other, to reveal the existence of materialist principles (in the sense of Rousseau’s ‘materialism of the wise’) in the Spinozist ethical itinerary.