Category Archives: Volume 8, no. 3 (2013)

Introductory note

With this Special Issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum we are proud to publish some of the papers that were presented at the Summer Session of the Nordic Summer University at Sunnmøre Folkehøgskule in Ålesund, Norway from July 29 to August 5, 2013 in the NSU research circle “Towards a New Ethical Imagination. Political and Social Values in a Cosmopolitan World Society”, 2011-2013.

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Cruelty and Austerity. Philip Hallie’s Categories of Ethical Thought and Today’s Greek Tragedy

In this paper, 20th-century ethicist Philip Hallie’s research on cruelty is outlined and explained in order to determine and discuss categories of thought that make cruelty attributable to social forms of agency. The semantic ambiguity of “cruelty” and its cognate “cruel” are acknowledged and also discussed, but Hallie’s understanding is upheld nonetheless as technically articulate and, above all, as reasonable. As such, his understanding can be utilised to interpret and assess in ethical terms the recent austerity policies pursued in many countries of the world after the 2008 economic crash, which was induced by unsustainable deregulated trade of financial assets, particularly of toxic assets. The case of Greece is examined as exemplary, referring especially to the Loan Agreements of May 2010 between the representatives of the Greek State and those of the Euro-area Member States under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund.

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The Peace System – As a Self-referential Communication System

Peace communication as diplomatic communication is an often neglected phenomenon in social and political theory that concerns problems of international order, justice and peace. Political philosophy seldom embarks on the theme with more than a few comments. Yet, throughout history, diplomacy has a strong record not only for negotiations but also for social learning processes about communication codes. Many codes of respect, trust, expression and listening have a top-down history from aristocratic circles to broader social layers. However, the article argues that communication codes of peace developed in opposition to violence and war exactly when they transgress dividing lines allow for cross-cultural and even cross-stratified communication. The article’s main point is to describe how such communication codes about peace and diplomacy can be described in recent social theory of communication, and to get some added value in this respect Niklas Luhmann’s theory of self-referential communication systems has been applied.

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Ethics of Administration – Towards Sustainability and Cosmopolitanism

After the publication of my book Ethics for Psychologists, one reviewer asked the question about whether and when I would write an ethics of public administration.With this suggestion in mind, I proposed a new book to the publisher (DJØF’s forlag – Danish Lawyer’s and Economist’s publishing company) and the publisher accepted. So now the problem is how to formulate an ethics of administration. Indeed, facing the present global crisis and the need for global principles of sustainability and cosmopolitanism it could be argued that public administration ethics should be redefined according to these ethical ideals. As such I would argue that a book about ethics of administration should deal with ethical theories and principles and dilemmas of public administration in public organizations and institutions, i.e. state, regional and municipal administrations and bureaucracies, including ethical dimensions of the work of courts, police and military. A presentation of ethics of administration should also look at problems and dilemmas in different types of more or less public organizations and institutions.

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Responsibility to Nature? Hans Jonas and Environmental Ethics

This paper presents the philosopher Hans Jonas’s idea of an environmental ethics. Through an outline of the development of man’s relation to nature from Greek antiquity to the present it is argued that science and technology in modernity favour a relation of exploitation which is partly the cause of fatal climate changes. Through Jonas’s philosophical notion of an ontology of man as an alternative to classical dualism and by means of a turn to an ontological interpretation of Kant’s categorical imperative, it is argued that mankind has a responsibility to both coming generations and to the biosphere as a whole. Not only does this ontological shift from philosophy of mind to an ontology of man transcend dualism in philosophy, it throws a new critical light on the technological development and suggests a new way of considering man’s place in the cosmos.

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Human Rights, State Violence and Political Resistance

This article investigates Hannah Arendt’s and Giorgio Agamben’s critiques of human rights and argues that the two thinkers share a blind spot with regard to the radical potentials of human rights. The problem is that they do not break with two fixed imaginaries which still haunt liberal democracies: (1) the historical essentialist understanding of human rights and (2) nation-states and individuals as the principal loci for political rights, power, and action. Based on the work of Jacques Rancière, Costas Douzinas, and Étienne Balibar this article argues that human rights can be thought of as a constituent part of a radical political praxis and resistance movement. If human rights are thought of as a praxis of “right-ing” (Douzinas) or a “dissensus” (Rancière), which both contest the current “distribution of the sensible,” a new “cosmopolitics of human rights” can be imagined where human rights are conceived as a borderline concept (Balibar).

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Kierkegaard’s Critique of Hegel. Existentialist Ethics versus Hegel’s Sittlichkeit in the Institutions of Civil Society of the State

Kierkegaard and Hegel are in agreement that Socrates is the founder of morality; insofar as Socrates, through irony, creates a distanced relationship to the substantive ethical order in the Athenian city-state, and they both ascribe this as having a world-historical significance. However, their assessment is different.

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