The world is a statuette of realism where everything is an element or aspect of reality. In ancient times, need and situations made the man to progress towards a definite evolution. Thoughts gave way to human demeanor which was later regarded as ethics. Thus, ethics is an integral branch of philosophy which determines its rules by taking into consideration both, necessity for a human being to survive gracefully and reasons propelling a human being to commit inhuman acts. Moral consciousness cannot exist since birth, as archaeological explorations have already established that the early peoples did not have any ethical knowledge. It was the experience of nature that helped them to discover an abstract of moral consciousness. However, in today’s scenario, people seem to have forgotten the significance of ethics and are excessively concerned over materialistic behoove. The current scenario does not require mere ethical theories, but learning and practical application, which, actually, are now getting dormant. It does not matter if we discover our moral consciousness from within or from something or someone else. The point is to start practicing and not wait and ponder as to when morality will knock the doors within.

Acknowledged as one of the major trends in the post-Husserlian philosophy, phenomenology of life of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka offers a richness of inspiring conceptual and interpretative articulations for an ethics that stems from the original thesis about the “Ontopoiesis of Life”. Unfolding basic issues regarding the virtue(s) and the universal call for measure, the moral sense with its benevolent sentiment, the ethical responsible status of man within the entire web of life in the openness of human transcending and positioning in the cosmos, the Tymienieckan phenomenology circumscribes an ethics of life in the horizon of an enlarged valuation of creativity. According to the phenomenologist of life, creativity represents the most important potential to be activated for a constructive, enlightening and elevated human becoming(ness). In this paper, I aim to emphasize a part of a great learning of wisdom (in life) focused on the moral reference. I will especially explore so much needed orientation for well-being and progress in our nowadays bewildered reality, for the life’s continuous affirmation in its meaningfulness.

In recent years there have been many debates about the care ethics. Although there are some philosophers who claim that ethics of care should be separated from ethics of justice, some philosophers insist that care and justice are closely related with each other and they both should be taken into consideration. In this paper Socrates’ apology will be taken as an example of the junction point of ethics and justice, and the connection of care and justice will be examined in the light of the viewpoints of some philosophers who are interested in this subject.

Marcuse critiques the positions of Kant and Freud regarding the emancipation of reason. According to Kant and Freud, the individual attains autonomy via reason and consciousness. Marcuse claims that the concept of rationalism is rooted in the same social order that created the oppression! Thus, we must re-examine that concept in order to establish freedom and happiness. Marcuse believes that reason, in its accepted sense in Western philosophy, does not confer immunity from manipulation of consciousness. Reason’s advanced achievements do not lead to liberation; in fact, they lead to unnecessary oppression and suffering. Thus, we must establish freedom in a completely different dimension – one that will be the foundation for the reorganization of society. In this paper I will argue that Marcuse’s ideas regarding a new social order are not necessarily utopian. According to Marcuse, a change in the conception of a rational life style is necessary for the achievement of a true, free consciousness. Thus, a new social order, that aspires to reducing the time spent on alienating work alongside enlarging leisure time and deepening interpersonal relations, will create possible conditions to proceeds towards freedom and peace.

The point of departure for this paper is an argument for global rectificatory justice. The paper discusses conceptual questions and elaborates a model for rectificatory justice: X (the agent: person, state, etc.), did A (an injury or harm; stealing, killing, exploiting, etc.), to Y (the victim: a person, group, nation, etc.), at t (time). Given Case P, rectificatory justice requires; X’ acknowledges the harm done to Y’ and X’ apologizes for A, X’ compensates Y´ with B (something valuable; money etc.), andX’ assures that the harmful acts should not be repeated and a new relation between X’ and Y’ is established.The model is applied to the legacy of colonialism. Global rectificatory justice implies that there is a history of domination and exploitation behind the present unjust global relations and that colonial subjection is behind the present conditions for the global poor. Subsequently, the former colonial powers have a duty to rectify former colonies based on the premise that if you have harmed someone you are obliged to rectify.

This paper approaches the old question of what, if anything, we should do with our moral practice if we believe that moral nihilism is true and that there are no objective moral facts. Four responses to nihilism are discussed: abolitionism, conservationism, fictionalism and propagandism. They are all found to have their respective problems. Most of these problems stem from the complexity and variability of our actual moral practices which are curiously overlooked in previous discussions of this issue. These problems, however, point towards a solution. By combining some of the elements from the four discussed views, a fifth response to nihilism, that retains their virtues without their drawbacks, is proposed. This response I call ‘negotiationism’ and I defend it as the hitherto best answer to the question of how to deal with our moral practice in case we think nihilism is true.

Happiness is essentially an actualization [energeia], whereby a potentiality comes to be realized. Such a process of actualization is then viewed not simply as a means to an end but as instantiating the end itself. In this regard, the exercise of moral virtue may be viewed as forming part of what could be considered happiness. Consequently, a neat differentiation can hardly be made between what constitutes the means and what pertains to the end. As a moral virtue, friendship is an essential element of a happy life. “For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.” [Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a 5-6] How essential is friendship in happiness? What role does it play in the experience and realization of human ultimate good? And in what way can friendship help us understand the nature of happiness? The paper first argues why it is essential to view eudaimonia as actualization. It then takes into account the nature of friendship, pointing out its parallelism with happiness. And it aims to explain how friendship, insofar as it is paradigmatic of eudaimonia, can clarify the Aristotelian notion of happiness.

In this paper I critically examine the key normative claim of the so-called ‘new Natural Law ethics’, namely, the claim that being alive, in the biological sense of the word, has an intrinsically valuable standing. This claim is at the basis of the absolute condemnation of all acts aiming at destroying such a good. After explaining the meaning of this fundamental normative claim, I engage in a dialectical argument between the suicidal person and the new Natural Law ethicists in order to show that, despite the reluctance of new Natural Law ethicists to argue in favour of the intrinsically valuable standing of life, such argument is absolutely necessary. Finally, I critically examine the arguments that have been adduced to support it and reject them.

In the Preface to the Critique of Practical Reason Kant claims to afford a proof of the objective reality of transcendental freedom, which can be found in the Analytic of this work. However, the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason had already established the impossibility of a legitimate theoretical proof of that reality. So, in this study I attempt to interpret the proof developed in the second Critique as a practical one. I consider, first, that this proof would not be a theoretical transcendental deduction. Then, I investigate what might be a practical proof, by means of inquiring into its conditions and their fulfillment. One of these conditions would require the reference of the Idea of freedom to an object not as a possible datum, but as a possible accomplishment of pure practical reason. A strong candidate for this object would be the feeling of respect for the law, whose origin is pure. Finally, I argue that the supposed practical proof of freedom is inconclusive.

The secret of Being and Time and of its constant cultural and philosophical presence lies in its unusual hermeneutical richness. It becomes, so to speak, a precise seismometer capable of detecting, with surprising accuracy, the slips and falls of the contemporary era, offering us an exact scan of the ethical and moral conscience of our time. Being and Time does not develop a philosophical theory among others, but rather it faces the challenge of thoroughly reflecting upon the dilemma that is constantly present in philosophy, namely the question of human being and its relation to being in general. From this point of view I would like to consider the possibility of reading this Heidegger’s fundamental work as an ethics of existence, that is, as a book that promotes a cultivation of the self.

Professional ethics is most frequently associated with deontological ethics; however, lately it has been developed in the context of virtue ethics. A great number of authors have criticised the possible alignment of professional ethics with consequentialist ethics. Author defines the structure of professional ethics that would correspond to the needs of forming a professional ethical framework as well as the value tendencies of consequentialist ethics in its non-utilitarian form. There is an emphasis on the values of humanity, human dignity and moral right of man, also taking into regard values of justice, liability, tolerance and responsibility (all that in an effort to achieve a prevalence of positive over negative consequences.

Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism were regarded as the ‘Three Teachings’ of China, and they were highly influential to Chinese people. In spite of the obvious differences among these three teachings, the ultimate integration of them manifests in exhorting people to pursuing Goodness (shan 善) in this life. They all believe in the good nature of human beings, and therefore Despite divergent approaches to the actual process of moral and spiritual self-development, the three teachings all share the same fundamental belief that human beings can be perfected and reach the ultimate goodness through self-cultivation.

The concept of the self is at the core of Foucault’s ethics. The Self is a reflective concept. How are we to know ‘self’? The answer to this question has a long history in Western philosophical tradition, and Foucault’s ethics attempts to answer it. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the concept of the self through the history of Western Philosophy first, and examine Foucault’s ethics under this light.

The recent (2012) publication of John M. Cooper’s latest work, Pursuits of Wisdom. Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus proves to be the ideal occasion to initiate a dialogue between the three major philosophers of the art of living of our age (John M. Cooper, Pierre Hadot and Alexander Nehamas). By serially addressing the same question to all three of them, this paper retraces and explores their respective (possible) replies on the contemporary relevance of the ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life. Thus, the intellectualism stemming from Cooper’s conception of philosophy as a way of life might imply a challenging reconsideration of our prevalent models of psychological motivation, as well as a radical re-placement of philosophy at the zenith of human knowledge. By granting autonomy to the existential stances, practices and spiritual exercises that originally stemmed from the ancient philosophical schools and their specific discourses, Hadot manages to assert the perpetual relevance of philosophy as an ethical way of life. This serves as a counterpoint to a philosophical art of living that is more akin to a (post-) Nietzschean aesthetics of existence, as exemplified by the last reply offered by Nehamas.

A common strategy in ethical argumentation tries to derive ethical obligations from the rational necessity of not acting against certain “necessary” conditions for satisfying some good end. This strategy is very often fallacious, and works by equivocating over what counts as a “necessary” condition. Very often, what is counted as a necessary condition is not logically necessary for the end in question, but is at most related to it by affecting the probability of the end’s satisfaction. If other conditions affecting the probability of satisfying this (or similar) ends are then discounted as merely “instrumental” or “probabilistic” (in contrast to others imagined as being “necessary”), this strategy has the function of hypocritically privileging some of the arguer’s preferred values over others. We should instead recognize that nearly all conditions affecting the probability of satisfying some good end borrow some value from the value of the end, in proportion to how much they tend to affect its probability of satisfaction. The fallacy tends to support rigid deontological norms; once we abandon it, many arguments against consequentialism are revealed merely as special pleading. Many ethical arguments use this fallacy, but I focus here on its use by Immanuel Kant.

My text focuses on Derrida’s ethics of hospitality. For Derrida, the logic of the concept of hospitality is governed by an absolute antinomy or aporia. On the one hand, there is the law of unlimited hospitality that ordains the unconditional reception of the stranger. On the other, there are the conditional laws of hospitality, which relate to the unconditional law through the imposition of terms and conditions (political, juridical, and moral) upon it. For Derrida, the responsible political action and decision consists of the need to continuously negotiate between these two heterogeneous requirements. One of the problems I trace in Derrida’s aforementioned position is that it resorts to the use of terms such as “pure”, “real”, “genuine” or “absolute”, in order to describe unconditional hospitality and to differentiate it from conditional hospitality. Yet, such terms have been placed into question by deconstruction itself. Moreover, the disjunctive distinction that Derrida installs, at an initial level, between “unconditional” and “conditional” hospitality contradicts the work which he had undertaken during the 1960s and the 1970s of deconstructing basic conceptual hierarchical binary oppositions that govern Western metaphysical thought. Against the rather problematic guiding concept of “unconditional” hospitality, I counter-propose a continuous, incessant effort of limiting violence towards the arriving stranger. My argument draws from the particularly insightful remarks of Derrida regarding the violence that inescapably resides in every act of hospitality as a result of the host’s exercise of sovereignty over his/her home.

Images of human violence to animals challenge us both psychologically and morally. Sometimes images are so graphic, the treatment they capture so degrading and cruel, that they approach the pornographic. How can we responsibly approach them? Is it more respectful to witness such suffering, or to look away? I explore the notion of bearing witness to animal suffering as a manifestation of respect. I begin by asking why it is important to bear witness to human atrocities such as the Holocaust. Some rationales are forward-looking and consequentialist. We bear witness in the spirit of “never again”: to stir moral motivation and preventive action. But there are also backward-looking and expressive reasons: to show respect for the dead, to express our solidarity and grief, to affirm the moral value of both the lost and the saved. Some might argue that differences between human and nonhuman victims of violence make the latter rationales irrelevant when animal victims are in question. The animal dead did not value being remembered; animal survivors do not share a degrading collective memory of horror and do not care if we acknowledge it. Yet obligations of memory do find a foothold here. Bearing witness to human-animal violence affirms the moral status of animals; it expresses respect and is part of constitutive justice. Bearing witness, however, carries moral risks, so that it matters greatly how one does so. One problem is that witnesses’ “testimony” - usually visual documentation of animal abuse - does not find its way only to compassionate audiences, but also to others who will use it in pernicious ways and some who are simply voyeurs. In this way, the witness can unwillingly become “a pornographer of pain.” Given the motive of paying respect to the animal dead, this is the last outcome a moral witness desires. Yet showing atrocities done to animals in all their horrific detail is among the most powerful ways of gaining allies in the struggle to end animal abuse. In light of such dilemmas, I explore the importance of bearing witness in private and as communal activity, of who attends to animal suffering, and of how and through what media we do so.

Hume offers two ways of reconciling the partiality of people’s feelings with the generality of moral thinking. First, the general point of view in moral evaluation is not that of a disinterested observer, but of another person who has a close relationship with the person to be judged. Here I find something analogous to the idea of Nel Noddings, who attempts to build an ethical theory on the basis of caring relationships. Second, according to Hume, the generality of the rules of justice is also compatible with partial feelings. Such rules allow everyone to pursue his or her goals without fear of violent intervention from others. My idea is that these rules are comparable to those of a competitive game. The idea of fair competition is not necessarily alien to Noddings’ type of ethical theory. As children, human beings normally learn to be fair in competitive games, along with caring for family members and friends. An ethical ideal of fairness may develop through competitions and help people get along with others beyond narrow circles. Taking into account of the competitive elements in relationship between people will be helpful in giving a fuller picture of a broadly Humean, sentimentalist ethical theory.

Tenseless time is the series of all moments and events ordered by the relationships before and after. According to this conception, although there is a time order, there is no present and therefore no past nor future. It is what McTaggart called the B-series. For most philosophers, tenseless time is more basic, objective and consistent with science than the tensed time used in our everyday language. However, that conception of time is the subject of several criticisms. One of them states that, given that it admits the existence of events that now we call future, the tenseless time has unavoidable fatalist consequences; because if it is already true today that tomorrow a certain event will occur, we now can in fact do nothing to avoid it. This paper analyses the specific sense of tenseless existence and tenseless truth and concludes that, if we properly understand these concepts, there is no reason to attribute fatalist connotations to tenseless time, and that the aforementioned criticism is based on the mistake of introducing in this conception of time some tensed notions of existence and truth, which are alien to it.

There is a broad consensus that the proper measure of simplicity of phenomenological laws (models) is the number of its free parameters. I argue that the “measure” is specious without a prior understanding of what simplicity is. To this end I propose an empirical interpretation of simplicity. Next, I sketch a general method for assigning degrees of simplicity to the elements of a given function space that complements the empirical characterization. It is shown that a “function space” approach can help overcome difficulties of Bayesian accounts of the curve fitting problem.