Radical Ethics Research Articles

Towards a Grieving Church: Theo-ethical considerations for homophobic violence in South Africa

Hetero-masculine violence in South Africa continues to be an obstacle to peace. As indicated by crime statistics in South Africa, heterosexual women, heterosexual men and LGBTQI+ community have been victims of murder. Many continue to be victims of sexual violence as a result of hetero-masculine violence. While some Christian confessional traditions in South Africa have evolved and have become more welcoming to the LGBTQI+ community, this evolution has not made much difference to the public violence the LGBTQI+ community is exposed to in South Africa. Using the intersections of Caputo’s radical ethics and Meiring’s body theology, I propose a new theological framework that will assist and encourage confessional ecclesiological traditions in South Africa to deal with their own internal contradictions influenced by masculinist heterosexist discourse. This is an attempt to meaningfully contribute to the discourse on violence experienced by the LGBTQI+ community in South Africa. This article contends that the intersections of body theology and radical ethics assist ecclesiological traditions to recognise and embrace the fragility of metaphysics even in the face of discomfort. I argue that the exercise of continuously embracing the fragility of metaphysics assists ecclesiological traditions to be open to their own flaws. This gives them an authentic voice to constantly reconstruct and effectively speak out against the rejection of and violence perpetuated against the LGBTQIA+ community in South Africa.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This paper draws on conversations from Christian theology, ethics and their engagement with LGBTQI+ and public homophobic violence in South Africa.

Биоэтическая деконструкция феномена зла

Abstract. The phenomenon of evil in modern socialcultural situation from the point of view of bioethics, interpreted as deconstruc-tion is analyzed in the article. Evil as the striving to destruct appears in the form of the dividing of whole and extreme reductionism. In social and anthropological dimensions such reductionism is expressed in the idea of the society as original chaos (war of all against all) which is caused by “evil and vicious human nature”. However this chaos is structured by means of social contract (financial order) coming out in the form of the principle of a lesser evil. Now this structuring is the process of substitution at the new type of order: sur-veillance biocapitalism. This last is the real threat not only to human existence but to the whole bios. From here is the task of the devel-oping of discourse which is able to block given destructive tendency. Such discourse is conservative bioethics as radical ethics of salva-tion, on the basis of which the global bioethos can be formed. Global bioethos is the topos of cooperation and solidarity (Great Harmo-ny). In this new social topos Homo misericordis can rise: human whose main quality is misericordia. Owing to misericordia human overcomes estrangement, enters into a dialogue, and creates the premises for the meeting with Other (the whole totality of bios).

Infusing courageous love for universal dignity and environmental response-ability through management education and learning: Inspired By Freire’s dream

Freire’s pedagogy is commonly applied to the education of those relegated to known dangerous socio-economic exploitation locally and globally. In contrast, we apply his concerns to ourselves as among the seemingly privileged humans on this Earth. Through this essay, we challenge uncritical assumptions embedded in the forms of The Global Market normalized (and only occasionally challenged) in much business school education. We personalize ‘The Global Market’ as a particular representation of ‘Moloch’, an ancient deity demanding human sacrifice. We depict ‘Democracy’ as Moloch’s Handmaiden. Informed by Freire’s emancipatory values, we offer a contribution to management education that is responsive to, responsible for and response- able in the realization of global justice exemplified in (but not unique to) the aspirations of the United Nations. We offer an interpretation of the radical ethics of Emanuel Levinas whose attention lies with those countless people he claims each of us to have responsibilities for. Applied to the field of management education, we reflect on whether the United Nations-led Principles for Responsible Management Education offer opportunities to progress Freire’s Pedagogy of Hope to enhance forms of management learning infused with courageous love for universal emancipation from Moloch’s harms, an emancipation we express as universal justice.

Imagining a future for psychotherapy in Aotearoa

This paper discusses Donna Orange’s idea that Levinas’s philosophical position of radical ethics, when combined with the psychoanalytic concept of intersubjectivity, could unravel blindness to the climate crisis. Genocidal colonisation by Europeans across the world is a disavowed history that has been ruinous not only for the colonised, but also for the internal worlds of the colonisers. We remain in the grip of a destructive competitive mindset, driven by the forces of shame, shame anxiety, and envy. Psychotherapists could play a part in a better future by articulating the emotional defences at play in ecocide and strengthening our own workforce and those who are fighting against the climate crisis, with group work.

Ética radical para el psicoanalista de hoy

Radical ethics refers to the obligation we always have to our neighbor, that is, to the stranger/other, my brother or sister. In this work I review my reading of the task of the clinician and psychoanalyst, as a professional and as a human being and the commitment it implies for the development of their work. To do this I review the thought of a Danish philosopher, Knud Ejler Løgstrup, in line with the thought of the Lithuanian Emmanuel Levinas, influenced by Heidegger, on the demand that weighs on the human being.

Climate Justice and Radical Ethics

Climate Justice and Radical Ethics

Radical Ethics in Time of Plague

ABSTRACT What literary and philosophical resources can help us situate ourselves ethically during and after plague time? Returning to Camus’ The Plague provides a thoughtful entry to the timeless time of COVID-19. Isabel Wilkerson describes and challenges white supremacy as plague and caste system, both blatant and in its less obvious (to whites) forms. Emmanuel Levinas and Knud Ejler Løgstrup bring us the priority of the other and an ethic of responsibility.

“In came the self-evident and luminous little mess”: Ethical Life Writing in Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent i

Abstract Starting from a brief examination of Muriel Spark’s position as a Scottish novelist within the framework of her anti-essentialist, anti-authoritative aesthetics, my essay will take a seemingly abrupt, but in fact consequential turn to investigate the complex antinomies involved in her fictional representation of the lives of others. Although at home and abroad she is hailed as Scotland’s most celebrated author of the twentieth century, Spark’s writerly practice consists of regularly dismantling grand narratives or fixed, stable identities, often clashing with more localized or prescriptive views on the social and national functions of narrative. My argument, however, is that it is the very unease of her “Scottishness” that acts as one of the foundations of her literary ethics, embodied in her acute awareness of the antinomies involved in textualizing the lives of others. Spark’s shrewdly metafictional Loitering with Intent (1981) openly thematizes both the obligation, and the risks of telling one’s own and other people’s stories, performing a radical ethics of narrative alterity through its staging of the enmeshments of writing, (auto)biography and experience.

Beyond‐human ethics: The animal question in institutional ethical reviews

AbstractIn this paper, I investigate how the development of ethics and methods in beyond human and posthuman research have largely been ignored within institutional ethical frameworks. Specifically, I argue that the ethical review process for research needs critical consideration in light of emerging multispecies methodologies. The inclusion and consideration of animals in geography should go further than “bringing animals in” to the discipline; instead they must seek to rethink geographical theory as with and for non‐humans. The ethics, politics, and practices of animals’ inclusion in research have been differentially attended to across geographical scholarship. To do this, I investigate how institutional ethical review operates as a disciplining and shaping tool in the neoliberal university. In doing so, I contend that ethical review processes shape the narratives and structures of what kinds of research are possible for not only animal geographers, but across the discipline. I then explore how multispecies research specifically is affected by and can affect institutional ethical review, revealing how these processes fall short against the heightened backdrop of species difference. Where posthumanist ethics is in tension with institutional ethical frameworks, I argue that ethical approval does not necessarily indicate that researchers have successfully grappled with complex moral dilemmas. Particularly, the acquiring of ethical approval prioritises outmoded forms of knowledge that prioritise homogenised ethical and methodological practice over ethical innovation and questioning. Finally, I offer three propositions drawing on posthumanist ethics and informed by innovative and exploratory multispecies research: the inclusion of animals as participants in research; the reimagination of multispecies ethical and methodological practice; and the reform of institutional ethical review processes. By exploring how radical ethics might be mobilised in multispecies research, I argue that we can further geographical theory and practice to reconfigure who matters as a geographical and ethical subject.

Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics: Learning to Hear

Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics: Learning to Hear

THE PHENOMENON OF DISASTROUS PROGRESS IN THE LIGHT OF CONSERVATIVE BIOETHICS

The phenomenon of the disastrous progress is analyzed in the article. This one is conditioned by the development of technoscience having biocapitalism behind it. The essence of the disastrous progress is that so-called digitalization leads to the rise of digital civilization, which is giving opportunities for the total control, new, technological form of slavery and even optimization of the size of "useless" people. As the alternative of the disastrous progress the bioethical discourse in the form of conservative bioethics is proposed. This one is considered as new philosophy. Using deconstructive approach one is demonstrating that conservative bioethics is the study about human as spiritual creature, who is connected with life as net structure just in this dimension. Thus, conservative bioethics is interpreted as radical ethics of the preservation of life, which is able to block the destructive tendency of the modern progress

Bartolomé de las Casas, OP: History, Philosophy, and Theology in the Age of European Expansion

Bartolomé de las Casas, OP: History, Philosophy, and Theology in the Age of European Expansion

From Limits to Ecocentric Rights and Responsibility: Communication, Globalization, and the Politics of Environmental Transition

Abstract This article provides a comparative map of the outstanding discursive features and shared underpinnings of the Limits and Transition discourses (TDs) by examining how they have been communicated to reshape the public sphere. Though both are deeply implicated in globalization, the formation of these environmental discourses responds to distinct sets of social agents and interests and to different but complementary ontological and epistemological grounds. In the Global North, the Limits discourse challenged the assumption of unmitigated growth yet has remained anthropocentric. Environmental TDs associated with the Global South present more contestatory positions on the notion of growth by problematizing human-centeredness and embracing a radical ethics of care. Limits and TDs represent paradigmatic shifts in the history of environmentalism. Accordingly, communication scholars should consider the lessons that can be taken from these discursive fields to foster regenerative ecocultural identities and animate progressive thinking on environmental governance and its communication practices that serve both human and non-human wellbeing.

Bioethics in narrative foreshortening: from «science of survival» to the radical ethics of salvation (on the material of R. Kipling’s story «The miracle of Purun Bhagat»)

The increasingly foreshortening of bioethics known as narrative and even literary bioethics is analyzed in article. This analysis is realized on the material of Rudyard Kipling’s story «The miracle of Purun Bhagat». Deconstruction in its ethical aspect comes out in this case as method of the overcoming of logocentrism and becomes radicalization of ethics. The talk is about consideration of bioethics not simply as the science of survival but as radical ethics of the salvation of life. The text of the story is interpreted as pharrmacon, remedy, sure remedy for human consciousness, society and nature. The result of the analysis is the idea of the consideration of conservative bioethics as radical ethics of salvation and science about spiritual-moral essence of human. This essence is consciousness, which is always moral consciousness in contradiction to intellect deprivated of moral dimension and leading humankind on the way of catastrophic progress to transhumanistic, posthuman future.

Pornography, psychoanalysis and the sinthome: ignorance and ethics

ABSTRACTThis article conjoins pornography and the radical ethics of psychoanalysis to attend to the Real ignorance that pornography generates. Rather than a pathological symptom of the impossible sexual relation or a relativistic enjoyment assimilable to capitalist and patriarchal paradigms, Lacan’s seminar on the sinthome informs an approach to pornography as that which has the potential to undo regimes of phallocentric knowledge and form new bonds between fantasy and social reality, symptom and artwork, jouissance and ethical (sexual) relationality. I will explore the sinthomic potential of pornography in a selection of films and texts that represent the radical deconstruction of knots that solidify meaning and signification, and perform the creative elaboration of subjective knowledges tending towards substantialization. I demonstrate how the ‘savoir-faire’ that pornography supports and can engender – an absolute unknowability that exposes our essential ignorance – holds unique possibilities for creative appropriation of the Real in modes of artistic and ethical sexual practice.

Answering Levinas' Call in Organization Studies

This article aims at answering Levinas' call for a radical ethical stance in the field of organization studies, in which he has been increasingly mentioned in the past decade. Starting with an examination of the main aspects of his phenomenology (alterity, unconditional responsibility towards the Other, diakonia), this paper outlines the potential contribution of a Levinassian perspective to refine our understanding of organizations. We question the conditions of transferability of his radical ethics to managerial practices and present two main avenues of research that could be renewed: benevolent management and organizational justice.

The violence of the ethical encounter: listening to the suffering subject as a speaking body

How does the clinical encounter work? To tackle this question, the present study centers on the paradigmatic clinical encounter, namely, psychoanalysis, paradigmatic in that it is structured by the encounter itself. Our question thus becomes: how does the clinical encounter work, when its only modality is speech? By reading Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas together, we better identify how speech sets up as subjects those who address one another and how this subjectivation touches the suffering body specifically. In this framework, a definition of the encounter is put to work: The encounter of a sufferer and a listener, that is, the clinical encounter, is the opening of an inter-human space beyond suffering. This conception of the encounter permits a specifying of the violence it avoids—respecting the transcendence of the other irreducibly other—but also the violence that it mobilizes—through a presumption of subjectivity imposed upon the other, by which the subjectivation at work in the encounter is, by definition, a subjection to the other. This outlines, then, an ethics of the clinical encounter: a relationship of man to man commanded by one sensing body to another, i.e. a minimal and therefore radical ethics that is structured as a sensible ethics between speaking bodies.

The Solitary Writer in Shi Tiesheng’s Fragments Written at the Hiatus of Illness

What does it mean to become a “solitary writer”? For Shi Tiesheng, the answer arises from an intercultural weaving of thought from Daoism to existentialism, from the poetry of Qu Yuan to the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, from radical ethics to theology, and, finally, to ideological critique. In the end, Luying Chen shows how Shi transforms the notion of the “solitary writer” into a position that can overcome the forces of any collective ideology to unlock the power of a singular expression.

Socially Radical Ethics After Wittgenstein

Journal of Social PhilosophyVolume 46, Issue 4 p. 479-501 Submitted Article Socially Radical Ethics After Wittgenstein Simon Coghlan, Simon CoghlanSearch for more papers by this author Simon Coghlan, Simon CoghlanSearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 January 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12133Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume46, Issue4Special Issue: Symposium on the Political Philosophy of Food Policies, Part I: Justice, Legitimacy, and Rights. Edited by Matteo Bonotti and Emanuela CevaWinter 2015Pages 479-501 RelatedInformation

Therapy as Unconditional Hospitality

The paper examines ideas of morality and ethics and their implications for contemporary psychotherapy. Drawing on Arendt's definition of the citizen, as well as on post-structuralism and Zen, it promotes a theory and practice of therapy inspired by radical ethics and the notions of unconditional hospitality and not-knowing. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.