Think ethics?

Abstract

Multiform presence, strategic impact: these two terms qualify the contemporary status of ethics. Multiform presence: in the most diverse media and under the most disparate forms: from philosophical reflection to everyday consumerism, from social work to medical practices, from legal and judicial matters to industrial and commercial issues, from psychoanalysis to the protection of the environment ... It would be difficult to evoke an area of ​​individual or collective existence, whether private or public, where ethical considerations are radically absent, or where their presence seems incongruous. Everything leads to ethics and ethics leads to everything: it currently has a true gift of ubiquity. Fashionable effect? Even if that were the case, it would be necessary to explain why it is precisely this fashion that predominates and not another? Through ethical issues, rules of coexistence, decision-making, friendships and quarrels, compromises and break-ups of alliances are at stake. They condense what each one can bear, the obligations and daring that each one can consent in the professional, cultural, political, and of course personal, subjective, intimate sphere. Summary that we could renounce without denying ourselves, without denying ourselves individually and-or collectively. Strategic impact: ethical issues include discourses and actions, mobilize institutional instances, involve concrete and material effects. According to the ethics put in work, they are not the same positions that are adopted, the same institution for which one accepts to work, has pleasure in working, resigns himself to work, or ends up abandoning. Ethical questions can not be avoided, nor can they be left aside. They are imposed on individuals, groups, institutions.