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  • Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil See large image

    Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Wo es war) (Paperback) By (author) Alain Badiou, By (author) Jason Barker, Translated by Peter Hallward

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    Short Description for EthicsExamines the assumptions behind the "ethical turn" in political and academic agendas which serve to reinforce the ideology of the status quo. The author demonstrates how an ethics conceived in terms of negative human rights and tolerance of "difference" cannot underpin a coherent concept of evil.
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  • Ethical questions dominate current 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 broad consensus. Alain Badiou, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary French philosophy, explodes the facile assumptions behind this recent ethical turn. He shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve ultimately to reinforce an ideology of the status quo, and fail to provide a framework for an effective understanding of the concept of evil. Our consensual ethical norms amount to nothing more than a jumbled confusion of legalistic formalism, scandalised opinion, and theological mystification. By contrast, Badiou summons up an "ethic of truths" which is designed both to sustain and inspire a disciplined, subjective adherence to a militant cause (be it political or scientific, artistic or romantic), and to discern a finely demarcated zone of application for the concept of evil. He defends an effectively super-human integrity over the respect for merely human rights, asserts a partisan universality over the negotiation of merely particular interests, and appeals to an "immortal" value beyond the protection of mortal privileges.