Editorial: Values and Ideals: Theory and Praxis Part V Ecophilosophy for the Human and More Than Human World Human Values and Ideals. Their Role in Personal and Cultural Identities Moral Systems and Moral Practices

• Autorzy: Brown Charles , Czarnocka Małgorzata
• Języki publikacji: EN

Abstrakty

EN

This is the fifth and last in a series of Dialogue and Universalism issues featuring a selection of peer-reviewed papers submitted to the 11th World Con-gress of the International Society for Universal Dialogue, held in Warsaw, Poland, July 11–15, 2016. Its theme is VALUES AND IDEALS: THEORY AND PRAXIS. All the papers being the achievement of the 11th World Congress express the general attitude that a clarification and rethinking of the nature and role of values and ideals are a necessary step toward addressing many of the most vex-ing problems facing our world. Distorted understandings of the nature and role of values have diminished our ability to conduct rational public discourse, im-plement wise policy, or even imagine a better world. These papers suggest that the role of a philosopher must include active participation in the rebuilding of the human world through the clarification and renewal of moral discourse. Values are neither personal sentiments nor private feelings but arise sponta-neously from intersubjective efforts to make sense of things. As such, they are objects of public reflection. Values and ideals are the conditions of the possibil-ity of a meaningful and coherent world as well as a basic factor of individual and collective human existence. Values and ideals are worldly affairs belonging neither to the divine nor the Absolute. Our everyday experiences of a sense of fairness, a sense of compassion, and a sense that “we are all in it together” underlie our social nature and our bonds of attachment with family and community. Such experiences are the root and common ground of all moral and political reflection. These elemental forms of moral phenomena precede theory as they emerge through everyday praxis. They are the meaningful phenomena presupposed by discourse and theory. Attempts to dismiss values either as arising from the private or non-rational or to reduce them to a non-human ‘beyond’ serve to sever the connection between moral theory and moral experience. Severing the connection between elemental moral experience and rational public moral reflection robs us of the possibility of finding common ground for philosophical dialogue and practical politics. Our diminished capacity to imagine a better world and to promote rational moral discourse comes at a time when our shared world increasingly becomes a less secure and friendly place to live. Dramatic advances in economic growth, transportation, communication, and medicine coexist with rising economic ine-quality, shrinking food and health care security for all, war, enslavement, over-population, human trafficking, and feelings of alienation, as well as climate disruption and mass extinction.1 Pernicious forms of ethnic nationalism undermine the hope of authentic de-mocracy as they encourage the development of forms of self-identity tethered to the exclusion and subordination of others. The rise of neoliberalism, ethnic na-tionalism, religious fanaticism, and even fascism are among the many storms threatening our very lives today. Burns like a red coal carpet Mad bull lost your way.2 Those threats and conflicts, as well as difficulties in communication between cultures, nations, and citizens threaten a civilizational collapse. Some experts warn that human extinction is inevitable if the human world does not turn back from its path of self-destruction. These threats require more than superficial changes or technological fixes. They require the rebuilding of the very founda-tion of the human world. The rise of social pathologies begins as values and ideals are recast and dis-torted by the impersonal logic of the market, the idolization of individual self-interest, empire, and conquest. Glorification of individual triumph replaces au-thentic values. As hyper-individualistic ideology displaces the centrality of com-munity with the individual, the commitment to self-interest and rational choice theory replaces moral discourse with instrumental rationality. In such an envi-ronment, ideals and values first become individual preferences and then commod-ities to be traded. As the ideology of self-interest grows, we become blind and insensitive to our sense of value and goodness that make moral reflection, critique, and re-newal possible. The result is rising fear, uncertainty, alienation, anomie, and terror making the prospects for an authentic democracy increasingly difficult. As authentic moral discourse withers, our choices too often seem limited to either a global neoliberal world order or a retreat into an exclusionary ethnic nationalism. The present threats require a return to and a reclaiming of deep and ele-mental values such as care and concern for others, care and concern for truth, care and concern for our shared accomplishments. Such cares and concerns are conditions of the possibility of the good life. Such cares and concerns are both the source of great ideals and communal projects as well as the roots of social, religious, ethical, cognitive, and aesthetic systems. Such cares and concerns are the source of renewal and replenishment for stagnant and taken for granted cul-tural dead ends. The International Society for Universal Dialogue’s members participating in the XI World Congress were going a long and fruitful way when revealing and researching the multiplicity of ideals and values, their problems and the constant conditioning by them all the human world. We hope and believe that this Inter-national Society for Universal Dialogue achievement is not only an intellectual legacy of the society, but also its step in a battle for a better human world. We have published about 1000 pages of studies and essays devoted to the problems of values and ideals—an amazing evidence of the common extensive activity of the International Society for Universal Dialogue. This research, pub-lished in five Dialogue and Universalism issues, has not exhausted the panora-ma of issues of values and ideals. Philosophy—which is continuous flux—never offers any full or final conceptions. However, we believe that the International Society for Universal Dialogue made a worth step towards the elucidation of values and ideals.

• Wydawca: Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk; Fundacja Filozofia Na Rzecz Dialogu
• Czasopismo: Dialogue and Universalism
• Rocznik: 2017
• Numer: 4
• Strony: 5-7

Twórcy

autor

Brown Charles

• Emporia State University, USA

autor

Czarnocka Małgorzata

• IFiS PAN, Poland