Throwing the Moral Dice: Ethics and the Problem of Contingency
Thomas Claviez and Viola Marchi
Abstract
Since Greek tragedy and philosophy, ethics has—more or less successfully—served as a bulwark against contingency; or at least to provide guidance in cases were decisions had to be taken in the face of the undecidable. The essays collected here tackle this problem against the background of an Enlightenment that has made the overcoming of contingency its raison d’être. However, contingency’s hardnosed existence subverts this success story. And it seems that Hegel’s dialectics—whose main goal it is to eliminate it—forms something like a last line of defence against it. Ranging from topics like co ... More
Since Greek tragedy and philosophy, ethics has—more or less successfully—served as a bulwark against contingency; or at least to provide guidance in cases were decisions had to be taken in the face of the undecidable. The essays collected here tackle this problem against the background of an Enlightenment that has made the overcoming of contingency its raison d’être. However, contingency’s hardnosed existence subverts this success story. And it seems that Hegel’s dialectics—whose main goal it is to eliminate it—forms something like a last line of defence against it. Ranging from topics like community, environmental ethics, and agency to the goals of critical philosophy, the renowned scholars assembled in this volume show that it might be time to leave Hegel’s cosmological concept of reason behind.
Keywords:
agency,
community,
contingency,
dialectics,
ecology,
ethics
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2021 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780823298075 |
| Published to Fordham Scholarship Online: May 2022 |
DOI:10.5422/fordham/9780823298075.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Thomas Claviez, editor
University of Bern
Viola Marchi, editor
University of Bern
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