Francisco Javier Gil Martín

Different approaches have tried to unravel the ways humour works in politics. We consider the relevance that humour practices and products acquire after the affective turn in political and social theory and examine more specifically the populist mode of humour from the perspective of moral tribalism. We focus on a threatening and self-indulgent humour that fuels collective emotional shockwaves and becomes an aggressively disrespectful weapon for discrediting and ridiculing the opponents while inciting large audiences in highly polarized scenarios. The populist humour combines with the strategy of taking advantage of the proliferation of pseudo-truths in current postfactual politics and truth markets. Arguably, populist humour enforces the moods and consumers’ attitudes that are only sensitive to alternative facts and make justified information ridiculous. It is directly addressed to those who are willing to reaffirm their unexamined beliefs and to complacently swallow the agreeable manipulation that is offered to them. We claim that political humour should reinforce the conflict around the emotions and the facts, instead of supplanting the latter, and be at the service of public positioning and critical discrepancies of the emotional citizens without surrendering to the hegemony of post-truth politics.

This article focuses on some «disaster ethics» considerations on disaster preparedness and its related responsibilities. After recalling that concerns about preparedness and vulnerability have come to the fore in the domains of «disaster risk reduction» over the last decades, the article will endorse the view that the demarcation between natural disasters and human-induced disasters has becoming blurred and even questionable in many cases. Then, it will be argued that the ethical assessment of disasters needs to consider the entire disaster cycle and that ethical duties extend to the phase of disaster preparedness and require a framework of prospective and shared responsibilities. Accordingly, a number of ethical duties concerning disaster preparedness will be commented upon. Finally, the article will discuss a specific socio-epistemic dynamics of blame assignment that unbalances the appraisal of both vulnerability conditions and moral responsibilities of certain worst-off disaster victims.

En este artículo se analizan algunas de las implicaciones que tienen las prácticas de triaje para la ética de desastres. Se considera la centralidad técnica de la cuantificación en los modelos algorítmicos y numéricos de triaje y se incide en la prevalencia normativa de los criterios consecuencialistas, incluso cuando éstos hayan de ajustarse a sistemas de múltiples principios. Finalmente se sugiere que una concepción ética de los desastres precisa de una perspectiva compleja y integral de la gestión de los desastres que no se limite a la fase de respuesta inmediata a los mismos y que supere a la par que integre los principios de la bioética y la indispensabilidad de los criterios consecuencialistas en las decisiones de triaje.

In this article, we identify various kinds of injustice at work in the global care chains by looking at the damages they entail and at some of their ties. Taking as our point of reference an invidious privileges dilemma that poses a real challenge to feminist theories, we analyze first the moral harm that, as Eva Kittay maintains, follows the fracturing of central, interpersonal and affective relationships of the women migrant workers. This specific moral harm of care relationships is not reducible to other kinds of social injustice. These other kinds are identified by applying Nancy Fraser’s questioning of the frame problem to the global care chains. We can then talk of an interdependence of several genres or axes of injustice (maldistribution, misrecognition and misrepresentation) that work and intersect at several scales

Drawing upon several questions raised in a recent exchange between Putnam and Habermas, this paper exposes Putnam's pragmatist arguments against both moral skepticism and substantive moral realism and examines his realist account of moral objectivity in connection with the notion of truth. We defend that Putnam's conception of moral objectivity can be better understood as a new version of a procedural realism. Furthermore, we discuss an internal tension and some problems that threaten the defense of this kind of moral realism

In this article Jason Brennan’s arguments about the moral duties relating to our practice of voting are examined. These arguments provide an epistocratic approach of politics and present a conception of abstention at four levels: abstention as a personal choice, as a moral responsibility, as a duty legally enforceable and as an obligation decided by lot. The contrast with John Stuart Mill’s positions helps to highlight the postdemocratic ambivalences and the latent paternalism behind Brennan’s rejection of massive voting and electoral democracy. A deliberative, Millian-inspired understanding of abstention also allows questioning the assumption in Brennan’s successive proposals that there is no significant loss in overlooking the political valence of qualified abstention.

In this paper we argue that the best way to explain the normative framework of science is to adopt a model inspired in the democratic characterization of a public sphere. This model assumes and develops some deliberative democratic principles about the inclusiveness of the concerned, the parity of the reasons and the general interest of the subjects. In contrast to both bargaining models and to power-inspired models of the scientific activities, the model of scientific public sphere proposes to account for the self-legislative capacity of science, the public nature of the scientific results and the epistemic virtues of scientific research in terms of the deliberative process carried out by individuals who are engaging in the public use of reason. This perspective provides new insights into the normative conditions of a democratic science.

Al menos en tres ocasiones Habermas ha perfilado su concepción comunicativa del lenguaje mediante una contraposición con concepciones del lenguaje asociadas con las tradiciones analítica y hermenéutica. Esas exposiciones coinciden en el tiempo con sendas aclaraciones del instrumental conceptual de la pragmática formal y contienen variaciones que indican a las claras algunos de los más importantes reajustes de dicha teoría. El artículo recupera y contextualiza los enclaves textuales de tales perfiladuras conceptuales y los marcos teóricos de la pragmática formal alzaprimados en cada caso.