Siðferði og stjórnmál á tímum vistkerfishamfara

Maeve Cooke, prófessor í heimspeki við University College Dublin, flytur fyrirlestur á vegum Heimspekistofnunar og Siðfræðistofnunar Háskóla Íslands. Fyrirlesturinn fjallar um frelsi á tímum loftslagsbreytinga og nefnist „Re-Envisioning Freedom: Ethical and Political Agency in our Times of Ecological Disaster.“ Maeve Cooke sérhæfir sig í stjórnmálaheimspeki og félagslegri heimspeki. Hægt er að kynna sér rannsóknir hennar nánar á vefsíðunni people.ucd.ie/maeve.cooke

Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn í Auðarsal (023) í Veröld föstudaginn 30. september kl. 15-16:30. 

Ágrip á ensku:

There is widespread consensus that human activity, intensified by capitalist industrialization, is a major factor in the contemporary global ecological disaster. There are strong reasons to think that certain understandings of human agency play a significant role in this. The understandings in question rest on the conviction that humans are ethically superior to nonhumans, which are primarily objects for manipulation and control. In political theorizing, the predominant conceptions of freedom in terms of individual choice and decision express this conviction. I aim to develop a fundamentally different framework for everyday thinking and behaviour, for social institutions and practices, and for contemporary political theorizing. To this end, I propose a re-envisioning of freedom as a mode of ethical-aesthetic-political agency. I construe freedom ethically, as involving a concern for the good and argue that our perspective on the good should be ‘ecologically attuned’. I also construe it aesthetically, taking ‘aesthesis’ to mean affectively based perceptual change through disclosure. My overall intention is transformative political change for the better. By offering a new picture of freedom, and corresponding new vocabulary, I seek to empower humans globally to address the manifold uncertainties and challenges presented by the contemporary ecological disaster.