Ethics
Subtitle: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
Contributors: Peter Hallward (Translator)
Publisher: Verso
Published: May 3, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9781859842973
Subjects: Ethics & Moral Philosophy; Logic; Western philosophy, from c 1900 -; Metaethics; Philosophy; History & Surveys - General; Good & Evil; Ethics; Good and evil
Description: "Ethical questions dominate today's political and academic agendas. While government think-tanks ponder the dilemmas of bio-ethics, medical ethics and professional ethics, respect for human rights and reverence for the Other have become matters of virtually instinctive consensus." "Alain Badiou, one of the most powerful and unusual voices in contemporary French philosophy, explodes the facile assumptions behind this recent ethical turn. He shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve to reinforce an ideology of the status quo and demonstrates that an ethics conceived in terms of negative human rights or tolerance of difference cannot sustain decisive and precisely situated interventions any more than they can underpin a coherent concept of evil. Our consensual ethical norms amount to nothing more than a jumbled confusion of legalistic formalism, scandalised opinion, and theological mystification."--Jacket.