Responsibility in Context: Perspectives

ISBN-13: 9789048130368 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 147 str.

Gorana Ognjenovic

Opis

Arne Johan Vetlesen Ours is the era of globalisation. This means that the world is expanding; pressing a key, I can immediately reach persons living in another continent; products travel across the world to the store just around the corner from me; thanks to modern media, I am cognisant of events taking place right now thousands of kilometers away. The world is expanding in the sense that yesterday's time-space limits are rendered irrelevant; my communications, my needs, my aspirations, transcend all such givens. Whatever confronts me as part of my here-and-now, as making up my present contextuality, I can - and will - easily transcend and leave it behind. That the world is expanding means I am expanding, insofar as my range of action, my horizon for thinking, indeed for existing, is perpetually expanding. Expansion as such is forever-happening; it is without limits. This is what we are being told about the nature of globalisation. It rings true; or more to the point, it sounds trivial. But perhaps it is neither. Let's make a new start. Ours is the era of globalisation. This means that the world is shrinking. It is becoming smaller and smaller. It imposes itself upon me, wherever I go, whatever I undertake to do. It exerts all kinds of pressure from all kinds of directions, on all kinds of levels: psychologically no less than physically.

Spis treści

Responsibility – Introduction.- Question of Responsibility, a Philosophical Exchange with Zygmunt Bauman.- Paradoxes in Kant’s Account of Citizenship.- Political Autonomy and Moral Self-understanding: Kant’s Justification of “Substantive Freedom”.- Responsibility and Global Labor Justice.- A Theory of Indifference1.- Media, Bystanders, Actors.- Temporality and the Culture of Modernity.- Moral Responsibility for Others: Why Does the “Being for” Always Precede the “Being with”.

Blurb

This path breaking volume raises a number of necessary questions related to various aspects of responsibility for others through its multidisciplinary approach. Unlike its predecessors it takes a starting point in various empirical contexts and consequently draws conclusions from there on.

The importance of the topic is reflected by absolute domination of neo-liberalism: facing a dismantling of the welfare state, privatization and the spread of "privatist" mentality in the era of individualization. The economic rationality sets the values that we are expected to live up to, reincarnating yet again the classical Frankfurt School diagnosis: politics are determined by economy.

The importance of the method is reflected by taking real life situations as a starting point. In doing so, the method also challenges the current trend science generally where concepts are kidnapped from their native contexts, and recycled: re-used in contexts unnatural to them, where the only reality that matters is the one determined by the scientists’ ability to define it.

This volume rejects the neo-liberal paradigm of ‘responsibility’ as the only valid interpretation of reality. Therefore academics, undergraduate and graduate students, as well as general readers will find this volume thought provoking.

"….the commitment to situating questions of responsibility in social contexts – this is something that is neglected in philosophy and only recently coming to the fore in sociology."
Keith Tester, co-author of Bauman Before Postmodernity: Invitation, Conversations and Annotated Bibliography 1953-1989, author of The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman (2004), Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (2001).

"This project is an original and valuable contribution to discussion of these important issues,... a good text for graduate and senior undergraduate texts in political theory, political philosophy, moral philosophy, and social and political thought."
Lorraine Code, author of Ecological Thinking, The Politics of Epistemic Location (2006); Encyclopaedia Of Feminist Theories (2000); Feminist Interpretations Of Hans-Georg Gadamer (2003).