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This chapter explores some of the major findings in developmental, cognitive, and moral psychology that have been taken as evidence for the foundations of ethics. It looks at research on human capacities and propensities for things such as sharing and cooperation, intention-seeking, empathy, self-consciousness, norm-seeking and enforcement, discrimination, and role-swapping. While these human capacities are necessary, they are not sufficient conditions for ethical life. What they help explain is what it is about humans that makes them prone to taking an ethical stance. For the psychology of ethics to have a full social existence, it must be manifest in ways that are taken to be ethical by someone. Ethics must be embodied in certain palpable media such as words or deeds or bodily habits. The ethical implications must be at least potentially recognizable to other people.

This chapter examines Hegel’s concept of tragedy from his Early Theological Writings, through the Phenomenology of Spirit to his Lectures on Aesthetics. Through the action of the tragic hero the main institutions of ethical life, the family and the state, come into conflict. In Hegel’s view the essence of tragedy is conflict, not a moral conflict between right and wrong, but a conflict between legitimate rights and institutions. Such conflict moves the unmovable, i.e., the norms and institutions of ethical life, threatening them with destruction. Such conflict arises out of the false consciousness of the tragic hero, who, convinced of his own rectitude, embodies a stubborn fixity of will that issues in one-sided action that both violates another legitimate right and plunges the hero into self-contradiction. S/he refuses to recognize what, if s/he were true to her/himself, s/he should honor. Like Aristotle Hegel believes in tragic resolution. In Hegel’s view the tragic resolution demands that the hero yield, give a little, recognize what s/he refuses, enlarge her perspective. If s/he yields, the drama does not have to end tragically; but if s/he refuses to yield, then the hero is destroyed by the very powers s/he refuses to recognize. The tragic resolution is constituted by a fundamental contrast: on the one hand, we are shattered by the destruction of one who is noble and excellent, but on the other we are fundamentally reconciled to this destruction because a conflict and loss of essential institutions that hold everything together would be even more unbearable. Hegel agrees with Nietzsche that the destruction of the hero, whose one-sided action threatens to destroy ethical life, is necessary, and is a healing, not as a fusion with primal being but rather the upholding of the essential rights and institutions of ethical life, the one as counterbalanced by the other.

Bakhtin believed that the structure of language reflected the precepts of Christian ethics. He saw in language the substance of ethical life. The history of language was the history of social life. Bakhtin may have written a great deal about language and very little about religion but he may also have thought analysis of the first rendered discussion of the second superfluous. He argued that close attention to language reveals the ethical and event-like nature of the world. He attributed it to the aesthetic nature of language and later to the dialogical nature of language. He did not make the argument on the limitation of formal linguistics per se. He chose to discuss it in literary form, a novel. He made it clear that this self-confessed ‘system of languages’ was a model for the modern European vernaculars.

The repertory of mediated experiences allows us to begin deliberating on the question of how we should live, to choose the extent that it is possible through our actions and passions, and to justify our choices. The most basic kinds of works — history, art, science, and philosophy — divide among themselves various tasks that allow us to understand ourselves and our world, to know how we should live. Since philosophy uses arguments to make explicit, criticize, and improve the norms that govern our already current practices, and hence its arguments cannot exist in separation from the representations of history and art, Hegel’s thesis of the end of art cannot stand. But art is more than an instrument of self-knowledge and self-invention; no less important than education is pleasure. The various views concerning the possible worth of the disinterested aesthetic pleasure that have been historically derived from Kant’s analysis: all variants of the claim that to the extent that we value human freedom, we must also value those activities in which the possibility of such freedom is most clearly and characteristically demonstrated, do not persuade; any pleasure, unless it is harmful, is self-evidently valuable and does not require any further arguments in its favor. It is argued that there is nothing inartistic or improper in deriving interested pleasures from the experience of art. Against puritanical moralists, it is argued that such interested pleasures may function not only as a means of self-escape or of corrupting the young and irresponsible, but also as a means of self-discovery, in which pleasure is edification.

Chapter 4 gives an account of what agents do when they engage in ethical deliberation and an account of Hegel's model of justification in ethics. This chapter presents the work of Barbara Herman on judgment and deliberation as a frame for understanding Hegel's concerns about moral reflection. The chapter argues that Hegel turns to the concepts of Spirit and Ethical Life as contexts of value that allow for objective resolutions of moral conflict. The operative model of justification is a Default and Challenge model, where individual beliefs are given default entitlement status but are subject to challenges from others. The chapter shows that Hegel's claims about the authority of conscience, and the dependence of conscience on the objective contexts of Ethical Life, show that he takes conscience to be the claim of default entitlement, and that properly understood it is subject to definite challenges but not to global skepticism.

Chapter 6 brings the preceding analysis of practical reason to bear on the three main institutions in Hegel's account of Ethical Life, namely the family, Civil Society, and the State. One of the main goals is to understand how individual subjectivity is respected and expressed within those institutions. The chapter shows that all three institutions exhibit structural features determined by the account of practical reason. In the case of Civil Society and the State the chapter show that there is a need for the authority of individual conscience even within the institutional contexts, and that the institutions are organized so that individuals can recognize institutional action as a function of their own agency. The institutions are not merely authorities over the actions of individuals, but they are contexts for the actions of individuals within which the right of self-consciousness can be satisfied.

This chapter asserts that the principles of resource distribution in Menciuscan be conceived as principles of sufficiency. The aim of social justice, according to this perfectionist view, is to enable every member of a community to live a good life. What is morally significant is whether each person has sufficient resources to lead a good life, not whether each has the same amount. The Confucian conception of the good life sets a rough standard for sufficiency—namely, the amount a person generally needs to live a decent material life and feel secure enough to pursue the higher, ethical life. On the matter of distribution of resources, Confucian justice is not of an egalitarian but a sufficientarian view.

Whereas the Greek enlightenment brought Greek freedom to ruin, the modern European Enlightenment promises to bring Europe into a new state of freedom. That enlightened, rational freedom is, in Hegel's view, now in the process of actualizing itself. That order consists of thinking of ourselves as having the normative status of “individuals,” which can be actualized only in determinate institutions and practices that support the even more determinate statuses of rights bearers and moral agents. Those two statuses themselves can be actualized only if our statuses as modern family members, burghers, and citizens is also actualized. Each of these statuses, however, brings in its wake a set of antinomies that threatens to undermine the whole.

This chapter compares Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche on the topic of friendship, love (philia), and community. Walter Kaufmann maintains that Nietzsche retrieves Aristotle’s view of noble friendship in the figure of the great soul (megalopsychos) because it includes relation to other in the self-relation, and thus appears to avoid the opposition between egoism and altruism that Nietzsche criticizes. However, Aristotle’s praise of megalopsychos is ambiguous because its relation to others is asymmetrical. Martha Nussbaum criticizes this asymmetry as a-social, and claims that the Nicomachean Ethics is an extended polemic against the view that virtue and the good life could be purely solitary. Aristotle’s claim is that the good life, including all the virtues, is social. It would be strange to make the good life solitary, for no one would choose the whole world on the condition of being alone, since man is a political creature and one whose nature it is to live with others. Moreover, Aristotle cannot formulate his concept of friendship (philia) without bringing in the concept of recognition. Hegel not only gets Aristotle’s point, but also agrees with Aristotle that love, philia, friendship are the intersubjective origins and foundations of justice and ethical life.

This introductory chapter talks about philosophy and its relation to thinking and living an ethical life. It presents an overview of the parts of the book, the essays included in this collection, and the key topics discussed in each essay.

This chapter considers how Homi Bhabha's reflections on interstitial space and the problem of nation, narration, and counter-narration provide important occasions for thinking about the problem of originary fracture. It explains that the force of difference in the hybrid and hybridising identity of Bhabha's subject fundamentally alters, yet remains engaged with, the fragile force of ethical life, and that he showed how the urgency of the postcolonial situation pushed matters of collectivity and migration to the fore. The chapter argues that Emmanuel Levinas's most important innovation in Otherwise Than Being never quite comes to terms with mixed identities, even as subjectivity is understood, as it crosses from the ethical to the worldliness of politics.

This concluding chapter explains that sacrifice is an essential phenomenon of religious, ethical, and political life. In its two senses, as “sacrificing to” and “sacrificing for,” the linguistic use of the term covers immensely diverse experiences. It touches on ritual, atonement, substitution, self-transcendence, war, the responsibility to the past, and the state. Yet there is something at the core of this varied, rich phenomenon that justifies the use of the same word to express both meanings in so many languages. The term has to do with the identification of the sacrifice with the noninstrumental realm.

This chapter explores the feminist philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. She states that the failure to correlate with oneself is more than an inability to achieve one's self-serving goals. It also demonstrates the impossibility of caring for others and liberating them completely—to rescue them from every crisis. More than any other person, this is what a mother is expected to do for her children; thus ethical failure is a constant threat to her. Beauvoir describes how motherhood increases the painful tensions of ethical life, and leads to an attitude of ambivalence toward one's children. Her depiction of the mother–child relationship is a vivid example of her philosophy of intersubjective ambiguity. She explains that even the most generous mother will rightfully feel a conflict between her child's needs and desires and her own. While a sense of mutuality may motivate the desire to nurture, dispute provokes recognition of interpersonal divergence.

Fascism is inseparable from the oppression of others because it is an expression of the desire for repression of one’s own multiple, imbricated, and fluid selves. An ethical life that chooses freedom must therefore nurture those connections that will reinforce habits that foster qualities such as thinking, creativity, and questioning – especially self-questioning that leads to deindividuation. The theory of the subject Deleuze develops in his early work on habit and critique of the faculties is thus the ground of a set of ethical practices that cultivate moral judgment through habits of self-criticism. Because these habits of self-criticism must be lived, practiced, and re-evaluated, Deleuze’s critique is best understood in terms of the Greek notion of an ethos, a way of living the ideas implicit in one’s ontology as ideals. This ethos defined by critique necessitates a permanent creation of our selves as the form of responsibility the analysis of our selves as historical artifacts takes. Thus the critique would not be merely descriptive; it would be practical and it would take its goal to be resisting the forms of experience that constrain thinking – thereby freeing life itself to new potential.