“Living on the world”: rethinking justice by reconsidering vulnerability and autonomy

2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-211
Author(s):  
Carla Danani

In this article, I propose a unitary vision that links vulnerability and autonomy together. The aim is to rethink a number of crucial issues related to justice. Firstly, I undertake an in-depth consideration of human vulnerability. By human beings, I understand instances of “embodied consciousness”, who inhabit the placedness of the world not simply by living in it but also by living on it. Openness, exposure and exchange are ontological features through which human beings both receive and cause harm and injuries, but also receive and cause enjoyment and fulfillment. Secondly, I point out that the condition of human interdependency does not require us to give up the demand to pursue “autonomy”. On the contrary, autonomy needs to be rethought, by presenting it as something that is constitutively relational. Finally, I argue for the centrality of issues concerning justice, for human beings develop by constantly establishing relations with human and non-human alterities. The model of subordination, though, should be avoided. My aim is to go beyond the sterile opposition between context perspectives emphasized by care ethics and universalistic approaches endorsed by the ethics of rights. The goals are to build a world where everyone can live one’s ontological inter-dependency without paternalism or subordination, can be protected from avoidable vulnerabilities and have the opportunity to develop and to perform one’s autonomy. This raises issues about the distribution of goods in the social-economic sphere, but also on the management of social infrastructures and the recognitional practices in societies: which are all always placed.

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis A. Aronowitz ◽  
Elif Isitman

Organ trafficking is perhaps the most obscure form of human trafficking. It is an international problem with transnational dimensions and involves the intersection between the world of organized crime, impoverished organ donors, sick recipients and unscrupulous medical staff. This article starts out by exploring the global patterns of organ trafficking, highlighting the physical and psychological harm caused to victims. The statistics on organ transplants and patterns of organ trafficking as well as the social, economic and legal dimensions of this type of crime are examined. The article subsequently continues with a discussion of the domestic, regional and international legal and semi-legal instruments established to battle organ trafficking and reflects upon whether or not these instruments are effective in curtailing this growing problem. The article ends with a discussion of alternative approaches to deal with the problem of organ trafficking and makes a case for more problem-driven solutions, such as increased extra-legal measures, international cooperation and a focus upon the causes and victims of organ trafficking rather than focusing upon criminal law alone.


Author(s):  
Alexander Gillespie

The years between 1900 and 1945 were very difficult for humanity. In this period, not only were there two world wars to survive but also some of the worst parts of the social, economic, and environmental challenges of sustainable development all began to make themselves felt. The one area in which progress was made was in the social context, in which the rights of workers and the welfare state expanded. The idea of ‘development’, especially for the developing world, also evolved in this period. In the economic arena, the world went up, and then crashed in the Great Depression, producing negative results that were unprecedented. In environmental terms, positive templates were created for some habitat management, some wildlife law, and parts of freshwater conservation. Where there was not so much success was with regard to air and chemical pollution.


1988 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-606
Author(s):  
John Villiers

The numerous and voluminous reports and letters which the Jesuits wrote on the Moro mission, as on all their missions in Asia, are perhaps of less interest to us now for what they reveal of the methods adopted by the Society of Jesus in this remote corner of their mission field or the details they contain about the successes and failures of individual missionaries, than for the wealth of information they provide on the islands where the Jesuits lived and the indigenous societies with which they came into contact through their work of evangelization. In other words, it is not theprimary purpose of this essay to analyse the Jesuit documents with a view to reconstructing the history of the Moro mission in narrative form but rather to glean from them some of the informationthey contain about the social and political conditions in Moro during the forty years or so in the sixteenth century when both the Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese were active in the regio Because the Jesuits were often in close touch with local rulers and notables, whether or not they succeeded in converting them to Christianity, and because they lived among their subjects for long periods, depending upon them for the necessities of life and sharing their hardships, their letters and reports often show a deeper understanding of the social, economic and political conditions of the indigenous societies and, one suspects, give a more accurate and measured account of events and personalities than do the official chroniclers and historians of the time, most of whom never ventured further east than Malacca and who in any case were chiefly concerned to glorify the deeds of the Portuguese and justify their actions to the world.


Author(s):  
Noah Benezra Strote

This concluding chapter argues that Germans themselves imagined the framework for a more stable political structure before the arrival of American troops. The reconstruction of post-Nazi Germany relied so much on the reconciliation of previously conflicting groups that “partnership” became its foundational ideology. The Germans who rebuilt the educational system in the Federal Republic, West Germany's intelligentsia, were the lions and lambs of the Weimar Republic in their youth. They lived through and participated in the social, economic, political, and cultural conflicts that tore apart German society before Hitler's rise. They also witnessed the Nazi attempt to overcome those conflicts, and some supported Hitler publicly before opposing him as he led Europe and the world into a catastrophic war. When this generation of Germans designed courses of education for the rising post-Nazi generations, they celebrated the ideal of partnership precisely to avoid the earlier conflicts.


10.14201/3110 ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo S. Vila Merino

RESUMEN: Los seres humanos, como seres culturales, tenemos nuestras referencias inmediatas en los significados con los que interaccionamos en nuestro proceso de socialización y es a partir de los mismos desde donde nos hacemos y construimos el mundo. En este sentido, y más aún en nuestras complejas sociedades multiculturales, resulta muy importante rescatar el valor del concepto de mundo de la vida y sus aplicaciones al ámbito educativo. Todo esto nos debe llevar a entender este proceso como integrado por acciones simbólico-significativas y argumentando la necesidad de desarrollar en el mismo posicionamientos comunicativos que potencien la dimensión ética e intercultural en los intercambios socioeducativos.ABSTRACT: Human beings, as cultural beings, have our immediate references in the meanings which we make contacts in our socialization process, and from this relations we build the world. In this sense, and still more in our multicultural and complex societies, is very important to rescue the value of the concept life-world and its applications to the educative ambit. This question must lead us to understand this process as integrated for symbolic-meaning actions and reasoning the need to develop in the same comrromicative positions that promote the ethical and intercultural dimension into the social-educative exchanges.SOMMAIRE: Nous, les êtres humains en tant qu'êtres culturales, nous avons nos références immédiates dans les significations avec lesquelles nous interagissons dans notre processus de socialisation. C'est à partir de ces mêmes significations que nous nous formons et à la fois construisons le monde. En ce sens-là, et même plus dans nos sociétés multiculturelles complexes, il est primordial de restituer la valeur du concept de monde de la vie et de toutes ses applications au domaine éducatif. Tout cela doit nous amener à comprendre ce processus comme intégré par des actions symbolique-significatives et, parallèlement à justifier le besoin de développer des positions communicatives qui favorisent la dimension éthique et interculturelle dans les échanges socioéducatifs.


Author(s):  
Alexander Nikulin

The Russian Revolution is the central theme of both A. Chayanov’s novel The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia and A. Platonov’s novel Chevengur. The author of this article compares the chronicles and images of the Revolution in the biographies of Chayanov and Platonov as well as the main characters, genres, plots, and structures of the two utopian novels, and questions the very understanding of the history of the Russian Revolution and the possible alternatives of its development. The article focuses not only on the social-economic structure of utopian Moscow and Chevengur but also on the ethical-aesthetic foundations of both utopias. The author argues that the two utopias reconstruct, describe, and criticize the Revolution from different perspectives and positions. In general, Chayanov adheres to a relativistic and pluralistic perception of the Revolution and history, while Platonov, on the contrary, absolutizes the end of humankind history with the eschatological advent of Communism. In Chayanov‘s utopia, the Russian Revolution is presented as a viable alternative to the humanistic-progressive ideals of the metropolitan elites with the moderate populist-socialist ideas of the February Revolution. In Platonov’s utopia, the Revolution is presented as an alternative to the eschatological-ecological transformation of the world by provincial rebels inspired by the October Revolution. Thus, Chayanov’s liberal-cooperative utopia and Platonov’s anarchist-communist utopia contain both an apologia and a criticism of the Russian Revolution in the insights of its past and future victories and defeats, and opens new horizons for alternative interpretations of the Russian Revolution.


Author(s):  
Al Campbell ◽  

The attempts to build post-capitalist societies in the twentieth century all used variations of the material-balances economic planning procedures developed first in the USSR. Most advocates of transcending capitalism came to accept the idea that the desired new society could operate only with some variation of such an economic planning tool. One part of the current thorough reconsideration of how to build a human-centered post-capitalist society is reconsidering how it should carry out, in a way consistent with its goals, the social economic planning that all systems of production require. This brief work first addresses a number of misconceptions and myths connected with the identification of planning for socialism with the material-balances planning system. After that, and connected to real-world experiments now going on in a few countries in the world, the work considers if the required social economic planning could occur through conscious control of markets, for countries attempting to build a socialism that uses markets for both the necessary articulation of all the steps in its many production chains and for the distribution of consumer goods.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-29
Author(s):  
M.V. Vinogradov ◽  
O.A. Ulyanina

The article analyzes the processes of intensive informatization and technologization of modern society, affecting the vector of development of the social, economic, political and military spheres of the state. In this context, the problem of informational impact on a human personality, his consciousness, mindset, spiritual and value orientations is considered. On the scale of the geopolitical interaction of the world community at the information-psychological level, this problem is revealed through the prism of describing the nature and content of the information war carried out in the interests of achieving political and military goals. Areas of informational influence on police officers are specified. In this regard, the need for the formation of information literacy of law enforcement specialists is being updated; the directions of information and psychological counteraction and protection against information attacks are highlighted. Psychological resistance, critical thinking, information security are named among the priority solutions to the highlighted issue.


2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 387-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Featherstone

The term global suggests all-inclusiveness and brings to mind connectivity, a notion that gained a boost from Marshall McLuhan's reference to the mass-mediated ‘global village’. In the past decade it has rapidly become part of the everyday vocabulary not only of academics and business people, but also has circulated widely in the media in various parts of the world. There have also been the beginnings of political movements against globalization and proposals for ‘de-globalization’ and ‘alternative globalizations’, projects to re-define the global. In effect, the terminology has globalized and globalization is varyingly lauded, reviled and debated around the world. The rationale of much previous thinking on humanity in the social sciences has been to assume a linear process of social integration, as more and more people are drawn into a widening circle of interdependencies in the movement to larger units, but the new forms of binding together of social life necessitate the development of new forms of global knowledge which go beyond the old classifications. It is also in this sense that the tightening of the interdependency chains between human beings, and also between human beings and other life forms, suggests we need to think about the relevance of academic knowledge to the emergent global public sphere.


2020 ◽  
pp. 146954052094422
Author(s):  
MJ Ryder

The diverse fields of business, management and marketing have long explored the concept of the ‘prosumer’ – the producer-consumer who not only consumes those products produced by industry, but also has some hand in their creation. But while the term itself is often credited to futurist Alvin Toffler , the concept he describes (and that which Ritzer et al. adapt) is a central concern of science fiction, which has much to offer our understanding of modern-day prosumption and is not limited by the language and limitations of purely scientific academic discourse. Indeed, one of the most important voices in this area is author and editor Frederik Pohl, with his co-authored novel The Space Merchants and short stories including ‘The Midas Plague’ and ‘The Man Who Ate the World’. In each of these works, Pohl seeks to satirise the mindless robot-like behaviour of human beings, while also posing a word of warning for the social, economic and ecological impact mass-prosumption. This is a particularly relevant message given the rise of ‘surveillance capitalism’ – the real world manifestation of the dystopias that Pohl and his contemporaries describe. In this paper, I argue that science fiction isn’t just a useful tool for social theorists, but rather, a vital resource, as it provides a speculative framework through which to interrogate the potential impacts and implications of new technology, and the links between production and consumption, technology and work. Furthermore, it provides the means through which to imagine possible futures and the lasting impacts of consumption that go beyond describing the world as it is, and move into the realms of what the world may become.


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