Spunti di riflessione su un’etica per il nostro tempo

Abstract

Faced with the global situation, a progressive narrowing of the space for political action has occurred thereby giving free reign to the motivation to impose of those who command.

The shadows of a diluted system and the expansion of power that masks the real individuals who impose their own will with the concurrent scarcity of counter-weights devised to contain these authoritarian and arbitrary drifts brings to mind the problem of definition of the value base of power. On this topic the underlying approach is in the direction of opposition between proposals that are axiological noncognitivisms and those of perfectionistic visions.

Precisely in the wake of theories that have been directed to a search for formal rules to orient the material actions and for the indication of rational procedures to support collective choices, we have continued refining the theorising of a public ethics that, rising above the limits of a metaphysical direction, defines itself as a constructivist and objectivist proposal. With the declared intention to develop an open strategy of critical and collective comparison so as to determine the morality of an institution, the nucleus of the inquiry concerns the discovery of criteria of justification of the principles and rules that govern the public sphere through the formation of a collective agreement defensible through the use of good reasons.

Starting from these premises, A., having retraced critically the various theories about public ethics contained in the works of Bentham, Rawls and Dworkin, calls for a substantial rethinking of the public sphere organisational procedures to cover the way that politics, law and economics intersect. In particular, the need to restore the connection between the right and the good, in the awareness that the procedures cannot in any way disregard contexts and, that is to say, the presence of actual existing ideals and values that characterise each community and also single individuals, verifiable rationally.

The political, legal and economic have no value in themselves or in their reciprocal relationship, but only in connection with that whole that is human.