Ethics

.... just wonderful. His critique of the liberal position on difference and sameness penetrates right to the core. Badiou throws a stink-bomb into the bunker in which the smug liberal philosophers skulk, and the bomb contains the distilled essence of their own discourses. He represents a batch of new radical philosophers who have been coming on stream in the past twenty years or so, and long may it continue. Let's see how long the liberals can tolerate the stink of the barbarism that their past acts of tolerance have allowed to fester under the floorboards being wafted in their faces. As soon as they start grimacing and coughing, that's the sign that they're certainly not the ones to be informing our ethico-political lives.

This is a very worthwhile text for anyone interested in ethical theory, or drawn to appeals rooted in human rights. It begins with a strong critique of the dominant strands of Western ethical theory (rights based, virtue-based and utilitarian; also deontology, though there are elements of Kantian theory that Badiou respects) -- that if nothing else should serve as a kind of gadfly to provokes theorists to reconsider the upshot of their labors. In a nutshell, Badiou's critique suggests that ethics as we know it merely serves the status quo -- whether by proposing an unrealizable "ought" or by limiting its prescriptions to what is realizable within the status quo and leaving politics and economics untouched. He argues (taking his cue from a rough approximation of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals) that what is really wrong/dangerous/weak in Western ethics is that it takes for granted the existence of evil (reality is such that there will be innocent suffering, people are such that they will inflict suffering on others in the pursuit of their own aims) and defines its good negatively as what would mitigate this evil. These theories have no positive conception of the good. His critical observations are quite powerfully stated and constitute a very reasonable challenge, that ought to be addressed. In the positive side of his "doctrine," things get a little more muddled. It seems like he is trying to do two things: (1) formulate another ethical system that would begin from a positive conception of the good, and define evil as that which hinders or distorts that good; (2) articulate the ethical implications of his thinking regarding "events," developed elsewhere over the period of several years, and only partially clarified in this text (his master work: "Being and Event" has not yet appeared in English translation, but it will appear soon -- I can't say anything about that book though I have read a couple of other things by Badiou that have already appeared in English). The combination of these two aims is, I think, partially successful here but remains pretty vague. It is most successful (and most significant for contemporary thinking about issues like terrorism) in its description of the evils that pervert the good. Roughly what he wants to say is that there can be no ethics within the "situation" -- this is a loose application of the is-ought distinction we find already in Hume: the situation is the world as it is, as it is understood by a present age and while this understanding gives rise to expectations and demands and limitations, it doesn't carry with it an "ethical" dimension. Ethics has to involve something more -- but since Badiou doesn't believe in a transcendent moral reality, he puts this something more into the "future," and not merely the temporal future but the radical possibility of bringing something new into the world -- the something more is the "event" that brings something new into the world, that opens up a new hor

I enthusiastically recommend this book to those that are ready to examine a another way of being in this world and for those that can move beyond narrow clingings to their safe and dominant worldviews. Badiou asks the question about our Western identity politics and prescriptive ethics "how is it working out for us?!" Upon the answers that we receive: war, unsustainable environmental harm, implicit and explicit oppression, etc. Badiou offers another way of being. It concerns being faithful to a truth process- fluid, individuated, and NOT transcendent universals, morals, and ethics. The argument against ethics is that it places one person as an "other or lessor" and another as "benefactor". Example: it is the ethical thing for me (the benefactor) to help the poor (lessor/other) homeless. Another: A claim such as "You should not drink alcohol" puts ME in the righteous position (a non-drinker) and looks down on YOU (who chooses to drink)essentially is essentially a claiming that I am better (when in reality I am not). Instead of "othering" people in our hubris that we are ethical and saintly, Badiou speaks of fidelity to a truth process. With truth as the focus and not our ethical, moral, and saintly wonderful self, transcendent evil is changed. Evil is reconceptualized as three forms: 1.being faithful to a false image of truth, 2."cheating on" your truth by giving up because of the difficulties associated with fidelity to truth, and 3. abusing the power of the truth to control others and/or amass power. What is most interesting in this book to me is the discussion of the truth process. This book is accessible yet difficult because it really pushes the ideas that we hold dear to account for themselves. Badiou writes the book because these ideas are structurally weakened under such scrutiny. I would recommend that upon reading you identify where you are afraid and push through the fear to follow the ideas and see where they take you. A stubborn proud mind will be frustrated with this text because it threatens one's current paradigm and the way we live in the Western world. Hope this helps you.

Ethics: An Essay On The Understanding Of Evil by political activist and philosopher Alain Badiou is an informed and informative indictment of currently prevailing ethical principles. Explaining that the widely distributed ideology of good and evil is actually used to benefit the status quo while neglecting a true understanding of evil, Ethics wrestles with the quintessential problems of evil itself, the existence of man, the ethics of truths, and more. An erudite and expressively written collection of linked and well-reasoned propositions, Ethics is a very strongly recommended addition to Philosophy & Ethics reading lists and library collections.