Marguerite La Caze

A consideration of what are sometimes known as the reactive attitudes is useful to outline more positive conditions of ethical restoration. This paper focuses on the ways in which perceptions and experiences of guilt and shame are shaped by political conceptions of who belongs to the more guilty and shameful parties. I use the debate between Karl Jaspers and Arendt over guilt and responsibility, as well as Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Giorgio Agamben’s work on shame, to develop an account of the political aspects of perceived and felt guilt and shame in people who are oppressed. I discuss how some philosophers, for example Cheshire Calhoun, have argued that the oppressed should accept the burdens of guilt and shame expected of them because of the social nature of our ethical experience; and then show how that view can be questioned. However, I argue that the view that members of oppressed groups should experience the guilt and shame expected of them by dominant groups ought to be challenged. In this paper, I demonstrate that the debate concerning shame and guilt has obscured emotions that are responses to the actions of others, such as humiliating treatment, thus leading to an inappropriate focus in philosophical discourses on the victims of wrongdoing rather than the perpetrators. This focus implicitly supports the dynamics of humiliation, as I will show.

Luiz Cost Lima argues in The Limits of Voice that Kant’s Critique of Judgment plays a pivotal role in furthering aestheticization, or the objectification and universalization of aesthetic experience. He introduces the term criticity to refer to the act of questioning and finds that Kant poses the alternatives of aestheticization and criticity. However, Costa Lima sees Kant and most of the following literary criticism as accepting aestheticization, with exceptions such as Schlegel and Kafka. (xii) He states ‘The effective actualization of an aesthetic experience is then defined by the fact that it constitutes a mute universality, one that necessarily cannot be communicated’. (100) Yet Kant’s view is that aesthetic experience is communicable. I suggest the tension between the two can be resolved through the distinction between actual and potential communication, and argue that what is foremost for Kant is the potential to communicate aesthetic experience, not its privacy. Thus I demonstrate how Kant can be seen as a proponent of criticity and can account for our capacity to share experiences and judgments of taste. Furthermore, I contend that Hannah Arendt’s work on ethical and political judgment, particularly in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982), can be seen as an another example of criticity in the moral and political spheres, and show how she extends both Kant’s aesthetic work and Costa Lima’s ideas. Arendt, like Kant, shows how aesthetic experience is potentially communicable. Finally, I explain how Arendt turns Kant’s aesthetic judgement to criticity in ethical and political judgment through developing an intersubjective account of judgment. In that sense, aesthetic experience is able to find a way out of muteness and Costa Lima’s concept of criticity can find a place in other fields.

I begin by examining the logic of autoimmunity as characterized by Jacques Derrida, ‘that strange behaviour where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘‘itself’’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its own immunity’ (Borradori, 2003: 94). According to Derrida, religion, democracy, terrorism and recent responses to the trauma of terrorism can be understood in terms of this logic. Responses to terrorism are ‘autoimmune’ and increase the trauma of terrorism as well as risking democratic values. I argue that the risks of autoimmunity can be negotiated in better ways if we see how autoimmunity relates to another important Derridean concept, hospitality

I argue that Sartre's understanding of needs is not inconsistent with his conception of the human condition. I will demonstrate that his use of the term "needs" signals a change of focus, not a rejection of his earlier views. Sartre's Iater "dialectical" account of human needs should he read, in light of his phenomenological account in Being and Nothingness, as aspects of our facticity and situation. Satisfying needs is compatible with a range of choices about how to satisfy those needs and what they mean for us. I contend that Sartre remains true to the phenomenological roots of his work and avoids a commitment to a human nature or essence. Finally, I will address some of the questions that arise from Sartre's focus on needs in his dialectical ethics. I will begin by examining Sartre's early account of the human condition, and then consider his focus on needs in relation to this account.

Derrida's purpose in ‘Death Penalties’ (2004), is to show how both arguments in favour of capital punishment, exemplified by Kant's, and arguments for its abolition, such as those of Beccaria, are deconstructible. He claims that ‘never, to my knowledge, has any philosopher as a philosopher, in his or her own strictly and systematically philosophical discourse, never has any philosophy as such contested the legitimacy of the death penalty.’ (2004, 146) Derrida also asks how it is possible ‘to abolish the death penalty in a way that is based on principle, that is universal and unconditional, and not because it has become not only cruel but useless, insufficiently exemplary?’ (2004, 137) In my paper, I examine Derrida's claim about the lack of systematic opposition to the death penalty on the part of philosophers and suggest an answer to his question concerning the possibility of a universal and unconditional opposition to capital punishment

Jean-Paul Sartre’s final ethics of the “we” or reciprocity remains controversial and less developed than his other ethics. Scholars have generally accepted the periodization of his ethics into three, as Sartre himself described them: the first ethics of authenticity, the second Marxist or dialectical ethics, and this final ethics, that considers the ontological basis of ethics, based primarily on the 1980 interviews in Hope Now (1996) (L’espoir maintenant, 1991). I will focus on Sartre’s responses in the interviews, rather than contributions of his interlocutor so that I can reconstruct the lines of his thought. Sartre’s comments in these interviews are also consonant with that in other earlier interviews, such as that with Michel Sicard (1979) and Leo Fretz (1980). This article aims to show both the continuity with Sartre’s earlier ethics in his responses to Lévy and the potential of the original ideas of the final ethics. My interpretation is that Sartre draws ideas from his earlier ethics, introduces some new ideas, and makes some startling formulations in suggesting the form of an ethics of reciprocity. I will discuss first the basis of the ethics of reciprocity, then the concepts of fraternity and democracy, and finally, Sartre’s account of hope and messianism.

Government refusals to apologise for past wrongful practices such as slavery or the removal of indigenous children from their parents seem evidently unjust. It is surprising, then, that some ethical considerations appear to support such stances. Jacques Derrida's account of forgiveness as entirely independent of apology appears to preclude the need for official apologies. I contend that governments are obligated to apologize for past injustices because they are responsible for them and that official apologies should not involve a corresponding expectation for forgiveness. My argument is that an apology and forgiveness are asymmetrical because an apology is based on respect, a perfect duty, and can be a public act, whereas forgiveness is based on love, is an imperfect duty, and is a personal undertaking. It follows from this asymmetry that an apology is a prerequisite for reconciliation, but forgiveness is discretionary. Refusals to apologize tend to impede the reconciliation process and make the possibility of forgiveness remote. The concept of reconciliation has also been criticized on the grounds that reconciliation implies a former harmony that should be restored and fault on both sides. However, I argue it should be understood as a willingness to work together without a presumption of having overcome the past.

In a suggestive reading of Descartes’ The Passions of the Soul, Luce Irigaray explores the possibility that the passion of wonder, the first of all the passions, can provide the basis for an ethics of sexual difference. Wonder is the first of all passions because it has no opposite, is prior to judgment and comparison, and because it is united to most other passions. Wonder is surprise at the extraordinary, and Irigaray believes it is the ideal way for women and men to regard each other, as it is prior to judgement, and thus free of hierarchical relations, contrary to traditional ethics. In this sense, it leaves us open to new experiences and the distinctiveness of the other. For Descartes, a different passion, the passion of generosity, gives the key to ethics. Generosity is a species of wonder combined with love, which he understands as proper self-esteem. This proper self-esteem ensures that we have appropriate esteem for others by recognising them as like ourselves in the most important respects – the capacity to exercise free will and the resolve to use it well. He believes that if we value ourselves appropriately, then we will respond to others appropriately. This passion must be cultivated as a habit and virtue. In this paper, I examine how wonder and generosity can be linked to ethics, the relationship between these two passions, and Iris Marion Young’s view that Irigaray’s understanding of wonder can easily be extended to any structured social difference, such as race, class and religion by adopting a stance of ‘moral humility’ and accepting that our relations with others are asymmetrically reciprocal.