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Ethics : an Essay on the Understanding of Evil by Badiou, Alain is a philosophy book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Ethics : an Essay on the Understanding of Evil about?

Ethical questions dominate today's political and academic agendas. While government think-tanks ponder the dilemmas of bioethics, medical ethics and professional ethics, respect for human rights and reverence for the Other have become matters of virtually instinctive consensus. <p>Alain Badiou, one of the most powerful and unusual voices in contemporary French philosophy, explodes the facile assumptions behind this recent ethical turn. He shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve to reinforce an ideology of the status quo and demonstrates that an ethics conceived in terms of negative human rights or tolerance of difference cannot sustain decisive and precisely situated interventions any more than they can underpin a coherent concept of evil. Our consensual ethical norms amount to nothing more than a jumbled confusion of legalistic formalism, scandalised opinion, and theological mystification.</p> <p> By contrast, what Badiou calls an 'ethic of truths' is designed both to sustain and inspire a disciplined, subjective adherence to a militant cause (be it political or scientific, artistic or romantic), and to discern a finely demarcated zone of application for the concept of e

Who reads Ethics : an Essay on the Understanding of Evil?

Author

Badiou, Alain

Publisher

Verso Books

Published

2001

Language

EN

ISBN

9781859842973

Category

philosophy

Subjects

Philosophy, Western, History

Rating

3.9 / 5 (40 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14