4 . Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, Oxford, 2001, p. 91.
5 . This, for example, is the notion of disinterestedness of the great eighteenth-century Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson. See R. S. Downie (ed.), Francis Hutcheson: Philosophical Writings, London, 1994.
6 . Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Mass., 2000, p. 157.
7 . Independence and objectivity, to be sure, are not quite the same thing. But it is because we recognize something as independent of us that the issue of trying to see it as it really is arises. We would not strive to see our hallucinations as they really are.
1 . Typical of this view are these words of Fredric Jameson’s, one of several such formulations in his work: ‘… ethics, wherever it makes its reappearance, may be taken as the sign of an intent to mystify, and in particular to replace the complex and ambivalent judgements of a more properly political and dialectical perspective with the comfortable simplifications of a binary myth’ (Fables of Aggression, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979, p. 56). Not only is Jameson mistaken to believe that all ethics displaces politics; he also assumes inaccurately that ethics is always a rigid binary matter of good versus evil. It is an oversimplifying account of a supposedly oversimplifying phenomenon.
2 . For an account of this version of ethics, see Terry Eagleton, ‘Deconstruction and Human Rights’, in Barbara Johnson (ed.), Freedom and Interpretation, New York, 1993.
3. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Donner la mort’, in Jean-Michel Rabaté and Michael Wetzel (eds.), L’Ethique du don, Jacques Derrida et la pensée du don, Paris, 1992.
4 . Alain Badiou’s dismissal of the biological as the proper domain of ethics is one of the more questionable features of his otherwise suggestive Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London and New York, 2001.
5. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, London, 1998, p. 8.
6 . ibid, p. 49.
7 . Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, London, 1968, p. 80.
8 . A contemporary example of this would be the work of Jurgen Habermas. In Habermas’s public sphere, each person is free to express herself as she wishes; but there is little recognition of the way in which social interaction itself can become the vital medium of individual self-expression at its best. Nobody here – to put the point in a different theoretical idiom – seems to receive themselves back as a subject from the Other, as opposed to attending with due sensitivity to what the other has to say.
1 . Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, London, 1974, p. 156.
2 . Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Oxford, 1966, p. 16.
3 . Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, 1963, p. 85
4 . Blaise Pascal, Pensées, London, 1995, p. 62.
5 . Fundamentalism is not only a textual matter: it also involves a strict adherence to traditional doctrines and beliefs, a commitment to what are taken to be the unchanging fundamental beliefs of a religion, and so on. But literalness of interpretation is of its essence.
1 . Blaise Pascal, Pensées, London, 1995, p. 34.
2 . Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, London, 1974, p. 79.
3 . Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Chicago, 1964, p. 159.
4 . See Richard J. Bernstein, Radical Evil, Cambridge, 2000, p. 215.
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