Monarch Management Review, Vol1, Num1, Oct-2010-Madarasz

Monarch Management ReviewManagement Research UGSM-Monarch Business School - Volume 1, Number 1, October 1, 2010www.ugsm-monarch.com

The Monarch Management Review is the scholarly journal of management research and practice from UGSM-Monarch Business School.

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CSR As Mythology - Dr. Jeffrey Henderson 7

EVA: Pros And Cons - Dr. Igor Pustylnick 16

Empirical Testing of Technology Spillovers 37Among Trading Partners - Dr. Fadi Fawaz

The Subjective Field of Ethics: 55A Philosophical Panorama - Dr. Norman Madarasz

The Value Added of the Human Resource Function 80of the Enterprise- Dr. Ali Mabrouk

Comparing The Five Factors of Production In Southeast 25Wisconsin - Dr. Gary Keller

Research& Review

FeaturedArticle

The Monarch Management Review 1

From The Editor ............................................................................................................................................ 2New Researcher Contribution Program ............................................................................................ 3Abstracts ............................................................................................................................................ 4

ArticlesCSR As Mythologyby Dr. Jeffrey Henderson ................................................................................................................................. 7

EVA: Pros And Consby Dr. Igor Pustylnick ....................................................................................................................................... 16

Empirical Testing of Technology Spillovers Among Trading Partnersby Dr. Fadi Fawaz ........................................................................................................................................... 37

The Subjective Field of Ethics: A Philosophical Panoramaby Dr. Norman Madarasz ................................................................................................................................. 55

The Value Added of the Human Resource Function of the Enterpriseby Dr. Aki Mabrouk ......................................................................................................................................... 80

Featured Article - Exemplary Contribution Comparing The Five factors of Production of For-Profit Firms And Not-For-Profit Organizations in Southeast Wisconsin

by Dr. Gary Keller ............................................................................................................................................ 25

Editorial Policy ............................................................................................................................................. 103

The Monarch Management ReviewVolume 1, Number 1 - October 1, 2010

Contents

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“Senior Executives often include a slide of Maslow’s hierarchy in their presentations. They know that employees will find fulfillment only if

they’ve been given the chance to exercise their higher order capabilities --- initiative, imagination, and passion.”

! ! ! ! ! ! Management Guru - Gary Hamel


The Monarch Management ReviewVolume 1, Number 1 - October 1, 2010

Abstracts

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CSR As Mythology - Dr. Jeffrey Henderson

In “CSR As Mythology” author, Dr. Jeffrey Henderson, brings to the foreground several issues existing within the state of affairs of CSR study that force a re-evaluation of the efforts produced by academics and scholars within the domain.

Principally, the issue that academics since the early 1950s have felt the need to take a secular view of an inherently moral discourse is shown to have yielded sparse advances in the field of business in society literature up to present day. Coupled with the application of adherence to anachronistic social myths the domain of CSR study has been stripped of its soul by those very people charged with its livelihood. This fact is illustrated by Dr. Henderson to be the limiting factor behind the study of CSR and the primary reason why many investigators claim that the domain of CSR study is presently bankrupt.

Within the article, Dr. Henderson reviews the contributions of Dr. Joseph Campbell and his theories of mythos as applied to the domain of CSR studies. The premise is addressed that true social change will not take place until society replaces the anachronistic archetypical myths that reinforce the orientation of conflict based economic systems for those of a more cooperative form. Inspiration for change can be found in the timeless writings of major figures such as management Guru Peter Drucker who is shown to have taken a homo-centric view of the practice of management, as compared to the often cited writings of Milton Freidman who champions the profit-centered view that tends to deny corporate social responsibility.

EVA: Pros And Cons - Dr. Igor Pustylnick

EVA is a proprietary analysis tool trademarked by Stern Stewart. In the recent years many consulting companies attempt to use EVA for the evaluation of the company performance. This short paper discusses pros and cons of using EVA and gives the reader an idea of when and where the use of EVA makes the most sense.

Comparing The Five Factors Of Production Of For Profit Firms And Not For Profit Organizations In Southeast Wisconsin - Dr. Gary Keller

Assessing and explaining how corporate leaders utilize the factors of production at their disposal has been researched and debated traditionally by scholars but more recently the popular media. Over the centuries numerous economic and management theories have been proposed to resolve why some companies with equal access to labor, capital, land and ideas have succeeded while others collapsed. Traditionally, examinations of how managers classify and utilize the factors of production have centered on the private (i.e. for-profit) sector. However, on a global basis not-for-profit organizations (NPOs) or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are Vo

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making an increasingly important contribution to their national economies. For example, in the United States in 2007 there were 1,569,572 tax-exempt organizations accounting for 8.11% of all wages and salaries paid with $2.6 trillion in total assets (National Center for Charitable Statistics, 2010).

This study compares and contrasts how managers in the private and public sectors located in two counties in southeast Wisconsin ranked the factors of production, defined as: financial resources, employees, management practices, materials, and technology. The data for this research project was derived from two studies designed to correlate firm/organizational management practices and economic outcomes of for-profit (Keller 2009) and not-for-profit firms (Keller, 2010) located in two counties located in the state of Wisconsin (USA) Racine and Kenosha.

Empirical Testing of Technology Spillovers Among Trading Partners - Dr. Fadi Fawaz

Previous literature suggests that trade contributes to knowledge and technology spillovers among trading partners. Using panel data and country-specific fixed effects, we show that the technology of a country is explained by existing technology of its major trading partners. We build an endogenous growth model for OECD countries for the 1960-2000 period; we draw the residuals to measure the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) of each country. Then using spatial econometrics, we regress the TFP of each country on previous TFP of its major trading partners. In addition, we run a Random Coefficient Model, to let this relationship vary randomly by country. Finally, we run the endogenous growth model again, but now it includes the Spatial lag term as an explanatory variable.

The Subjective Field of Ethics: A philosophical Panorama - Dr. Norman Madarasz

Most approaches of ethics in disciplines other than philosophy do not tend to emphasize the singular dimension in which it acquires its binding force and consequential implications. This dimension is the field of the subject. Subjectivity today is a vast concern in the social sciences. Most models of subjectivity stipulate the existence of at least a minimal concept of mind, i.e. of an interior field in which language, perception, intentionality and higher order inferences merge into synthesized experience. Often this mental synthesis projects a purpose that then translates into action. Inevitably, when one contemplates the field of the subjective conditions behind ethical conduct, one considers the philosophical models at the origin of the paradigms prevailing in the contemporary epistemological field. Our aim will be to distinguish some of the main paradigms of subjectivity generally encountered in ethics.

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The Value Added of the Human Resource Function of the Enterprise: Dr. Ali Mabrouk

HRM forms one of the most significant areas in determinig the success of the enterprise. A number of studies have noted the importance of HRM activities in the success or failure of a company, where business survival is directly correlated with the HRM function. People are increasingly being seen as the most critical asset of a company.

The strategic role attributed to the HRM department demands that it should be well managed in order to get the best out of the organization. Managing the human resource department demands measuring the performance of that department. HRM measurements transform human resources capabilities into measurable strategic value-add items that are then made transparent to the organization in order to improve connection with leadership across the company. In order to demonstrate the added value of HRM to the entire company, several possibilities have to be taken into consideration. In this article Dr. Mabrouk takes the reader through a review of these methodologies which include: measurement, linking, aligning of employees and the use of the HR balanced scorecard.

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Ethics has been in vogue for the better part of three decades, filling a gap in the practice of principled behavior left vacant in a time sequence that Daniel Bell once called the “end of ideology”. (Bell, 1960) It is true that ethics and ideology are odd bedmates. After all, ideology addresses the construction of collectives of different sizes and orders, whereas ethics seems to rest with the individual. Thus, it seems that ethics could not be a likely successor to a more tainted form of thought, the image of which ideology most often triggers. Although such a view is not incorrect, I would like to argue that it hardly hits at the essence of ethics. The specific model of subjectivity presupposed by an ethical theory is every bit as formative on both the individual and collectivities as is ideology.

The contemporary surge in ethics marks an epochal phi losophical phenomenon, which is worth examining

in its singularity. As much as the anti-metaphysical mood of post-World War I cultural setting may have exposed philosophy to reject its claims as the matrix of all sciences, the diversification recently undergone by ethics has brought the latter to the edge of scientific autonomy and, perhaps, emancipation. As has occurred with countless sciences whose inception was akin to a parting, ethics is in the process of shedding its philosophical skin, and memory. An intrinsic aspect of this memory is the subjective nature of the field. Its objects of inquiry are conduc t , dec is ion -mak ing , and justification. In other words, nothing but subjective attitudes – the carrying out of which would be based on what one hopes are all the right reasons.

As opposed to law, moral systems and politics, ethics offers study of the broader perspectives on conduct. With respect to the former knowledge fields, it arises as the weaker sibling in

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1The Subjective Field of Ethics: A Philosophical Panoramaby Dr. Norman Madarasz

Dr. Norman Madarasz holds the position of Professor of Philosophy & Ethics and Head of the Academic Council at UGSM-Monarch Business School. He is also currently Department Chair of the philosophy program at the Graduate School (Programa de pós-graduação em filosofia) of Universidade Gama Filho, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Professor Madarasz is an international specialist on twentieth century French philosophy, especially of the transdisciplinary thought of Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Dr. Madarasz completed his graduate work at the Université de Paris 8 and Collège international de philosophie, where he was awarded the French Maîtrise, Diplôme d’études approfondies and Doctorat.


an area already torn about by conflict, corruption and the concavities of human nature. Compared to the force of the law and support of the State to regulate it, ethics seems to go astray faced wi th the meander ings of individual interest. As opposed to moral and theological systems, ethics is often victim to a short-sighted excessive secular vision of benevolence and dignity suitable, it would seem, to certain contexts, whereas utterly disregarded in others. Faced with the usual temptations of power, corruption and influence peddling found in public professions, one need not even mention that ethics has little or no place in the dimension of human action when the means to reaching ends are lined with conflict.

Still, for all their pertinence to dealing with the challenges to working within the structures of State and its ties to business, the aforementioned propositions hardly do justice to the field of study of ethics. A preliminary reason is that the referential base contextualizing these propositions is rooted in object ive and factual declarations. The contention being put forward in this paper is that if ethics d o e s p e r t a i n t o a s o c i e t y ’ s understanding of itself: it is due to its subjective structure. The aim of this article is precisely to have a closer look at this claim about subjectivity. The implication of this statement is that there is not a single way to consider

subjectivity. As we shall see in due course, our culture works with three, perhaps four, concepts or models of subjectivity. The fourth model seeks specifically to integrate a theory of evil that is neither radical nor absolute, though nor is it relativist. My overall argument shall be unpacked in a discussion on the theoretical contexts f rom which they ar ise and are negotiated.

That said, our aim is not to advocate a one-way constructivist theory of the subject. For all its elasticity and plasticity, subjectivity is a given reality of human experience. Yet it shall become clear that ethics is a field in which the concept of human nature is nothing that one ought to be very set and firm about defining. ( H a c k i n g , 2 0 0 0 ) T h e o r e t i c a l persuasions inevitably provide different perspectives on human nature. The general trend in ethics would not be to presuppose that its mental content, and especially its moral content, exists prior to experience. That said, theories of the subject in the context of ethics are our topic here, while the mind is not. For all its vague and ephemeral borders, the mind is still an objective entity in terms of the universal and quantitative principles aimed at grounding its existential structure. In other words, discussions of the mind are not always immanently situated with respect to it.

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In sum, we seek to lead the general reader, as well as the specific reader in management, into the realms of subjectivity. The task is precisely to s h o w h o w e t h i c s a c q u i r e s i t foundational grounding within the model of subjectivity we apply to ourselves and to our understanding of ourselves as beings who strive and are called upon to justify our decisions, acts, motives, and conduct. The bodies summoning such justification are subjective projections of society, family or the divine.

I. Distinctions Between Morality And Ethics

For the purposes of this essay, let us call “philosophical ethics” the field dealing with the study of the cognitive, argumentative, moral and conceptual activity involved in ethics. A secondary task of this paper is to consider the d i f f e rences be tween e th i cs as deve loped wi th in the scope of philosophy are associated fields that evaluate how a given conduct is justified. One such field is “applied ethics” or “professional ethics”, whose working as a distinct knowledge field reminds one of how philosophy, despite contemporary claims to the contrary, continues its historical mission of producing new sciences. Marking its philosophical heritage, applied ethics formulates appreciations of good and e v i l , h u m a n d i g n i t y , c h o i c e , consequences, imputation and general

good. Where it tends to fall short is in the creative potential endemic to philosophy when it comes to forging new concepts and new arguments. (Cortina, 2007)

The concept of subject, albeit well-known in English, maintains less of an immediate referential base than it does in either French or German. In the French post-Hegelian tradition, it is a more versatile concept than mind, or mere “subjectivity”, insofar as it is not reducible to the individual or legal entity. The idea of subject includes the sociable structure of being human. It gives little headway to libertarian positions on the primacy of the individual. As such the idea of subject, despite its sources in Cartesian philosophy, is asymmetric, if not dissymmetric, to the mind-body debate. The subject is a body-mind complex. It is an ontological concept, one that relates experience to being and is formative in a structural dimension.

The distinction between applied ethics and philosophical ethics is surely easier to draw than between morality a n d e t h i c s . A s w i t h m u c h o f philosophical genealogy, the different orientations that specify Plato and Aristotle’s philosophies long ago became paradigmatic for the emerging European sciences. It can thus be said that Plato introduced the groundwork for what would become the field of moral philosophy or more specially

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morality as the ethical component of Christian theology. The central works in which Plato’s morality is developed are the Phaedo and Republic (or Politeia). Within Plato’s philosophy, Socrates’ fictional character plays the role of an ethical vector. In the Apology¸ Socrates asserts his commitment:

As such he sets out the general scope of existential concerns linked to the political obligations of a citizen that prompt reflection on ethos, that is, lifestyle, way of living or habits.

The Socratic and especially Platonic commitment to analyzing ethos was bound to an innate theory of virtue. Questions on ethos were submitted to debate instead of mere teaching. The d o r m a n t q u a l i t y o f o u r s e l f -understanding meant that virtue had to be prompted instead of learnt. Plato considers virtue, areté, to have a cognitive disposition to reach the highest orders of knowledge due to its prior co-existence with the Forms in the

intelligible dimension. Given that he equates the Good with the True and Beautiful as the trilogy of supreme forms, the whetting of virtue becomes a key methodological means to achieve spiritual fulfillment.

Aristotle’s perspective on virtue is considerably different. Presented in three separate t racts, i t is h is Nicomachean Ethics that first attempts to systematically document the entire range of ethical dispositions. His task in the early chapters – or “books” – of the Nicomachean Ethics is to distinguish the various intensities of eudaimonia, i.e. “happiness” in the sense of the s a t i s f a c t i o n r e s u l t i n g f r o m accomplishing sundry tasks and actions. The means by which actions are accomplished is the work of ever more refined acts of areté, which, in Aristotle’s sense, refers to technical excellence. As the latter grows more refined, the experience and intensity of eudaimonia begins to diversify. This is the threshold of practical wisdom – phronesis --, which is the skill

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“to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and other [which] is really the best thing that a man can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living.” (Plato, 1961, 38a)

“to be able to deliberate well about what is good and expedient for [a person], not in some particular respect, e.g. about what sorts of thing conduce to health or to strength, but about what sorts of thing conduce to the good life in general.”

(Aristotle, 1941, 1140a26-28.)


Phronesis develops a talent to aim firmly for the ends and carve out the middle path to reaching them. Given that action only amounts to eudaimonia when the ends are good, for Aristotle, “it is impossible to be practically wise without being good.” (Aristotle, 1941, 1144a37).

This turn back to the Greek origins of Western moral thought is important in order to set aside doubts about the temporal succession by which the relationship between morality and ethics at that time was portrayed. By no means can it be held that ethics, insofar as it is presented as the moral field of Western secularism, would be posterior temporally speaking to morality. As the Greek record shows, ethics is prior to morality. Or rather, the morality that became paradigmatic for religious and dogmatic structures emerges as a break with the Greek concern with ethos.

The formal distinction between morality and ethics remains of prime impor tance in work ing out the singularity of ethics within the Kantian division of pure and practical reason. The latter specifically refers to the argumentative and justificatory nature of the discourse by which human beings assert their autonomy with respect to the legacy of moral law. In s e c t i o n s t h a t h a v e b e c o m e fundamental for dealing with this

difference, Hegel, writing after Kant, integrates ethics into the structure of the mind, and of what he terms the “subject”. In the Third Part of The P h i l o s o p h y o f R i g h t , d e v o t e d specifically to “The Ethical Life”, Hegel argues that ethics, or “Sitte”, is conceptually superior to either right or morality.

The incremental coeff ic ient

working to separate levels in the temporal unfolding of Geist (Mind or Spirit) is the concept of freedom. Hegel argues that in morality, subjectivity and freedom remain separate. In his doctrine of autonomy represented by the categorical imperative, Kant provided the initial step to equating the t w o . Ye t , H e g e l a r g u e s , K a n t perpetuated the intrinsic division between morality and ethos, insofar as he split reason into the field of the pure and the practical. By contrast, ethics acquires its conceptual field in plying the justification of conduct into the actual world, i.e. into the space of custom and habit – das Sittelich. This is the point at which “the substance of mind” exists as mind for the very first time. The implication here is that subjectivity moves beyond the classical metaphysical concept of substance, i.e. the Scholastic translation of Aristotle’s concept of a conceptual motivational infrastructure called hypokeimenon. Through the philosophical tradition, substance is conceived main ly according to the paradigm of objectivity.

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Whereas for Hegel subjectivity splits from substance insofar as self-consciousness becomes manifest as self-consciousness not merely of the world but of Mind (Geist) itself. (Hegel, 1945)

Subjectivity triggers a reflection of self from within oneself, immanently as it were. As Hegel mentions in the “Addition” to section 106, of the Second Part of the Philosophy of Right,

What changes from morality to ethics is the degree of immanence acquired in the propensity to achieve freedom. Prior to self-consciousness of Mind and Will, the immanent plane in Hegel is ak in to the Concept becoming adequate to itself, i.e. the Concept of Freedom becomes both formally and

contextually identical as it is manifested in the world and in mind. (Hegel, 1945, s. 151) The process by which freedom becomes true to itself is “education [which] is the art of making men ethical.” (Ibid.)

From Hegel’s journey of mind, contemporary readers ought to extract three key elements. First, ethics grows within the field of subjectivity into ever more immanent degrees of self-consc iousness, a process tha t temporally accomplishes the concept of freedom. Second, subjectivity itself moves into a higher plane beyond the split between the objective notion of substance and the abstract field of concepts external to themselves, such as will and mind. The final point is the most essential: education (Bildung) is the process by which ethos or custom is confronted with change.

Hegel introduces a major break with Aristotle insofar as the task of studying ethics is not merely to achieve the conditions by which to partake of the ph i losophica l happiness o f contemplating the formal structure of people’s ordinary happiness. Instead, it is the conditions by which the status quo, with all its defects, with all its conviction that human nature is bound to sin or corruption or evil, is by no means our destiny. His deep insight is that without a thorough understanding of the subjective conditions for acting and justifying our reasons for acting, we

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“Man wishes to be judged in accordance with his own self-determined choices, he is free in this relation to himself whatever the external situation may impose upon him. No one can break in upon this inner conviction of mankind, no violence can be done to it, and the moral will, therefore, is inaccessible. Man’s worth is estimated by reference to his inward action and hence the standpoint of morality is that of freedom aware of itself.”

(Hegel, 1945, section 106, addition)


shall remain subjects caught within the submission to current philosophical views on the stagnancy of human conduct.

It is quite impossible to follow all of the agreements and disagreements with Hegel’s conception of ethics. Much of them make up the university undergraduate discipline of moral philosophy. Yet one can argue in general terms that phi losophies m a n i f e s t i n g a m o r e r e l i g i o u s persuasion tend to diminish the difference between morality and ethics. Paul Ricoeur, for example, in a classic article reworking his own initial theory in Soi-même comme un autre, creates a topological picture in which morality occupies a part of the structure of thought in an ascending slope allowing for imputability and recognition of oneself as the author of one’s actions. (Ricoeur, 2001) The origins of our moral concepts, however, are left completely out of the scope of philosophical inquiry, deemed as they to be conceptually undecidable in this regard. I t i s i ron ic that the s t ream of philosophical analysis going by the term neurophilosophy, so quick to denigrate the speculative philosophical sys tems l i ke Hegel ’s , g ives in gratuitously to metaphysics when speculating about the evolutionary origins of morality. At the safest, our moral concepts can be said to precede the discovery of writing. Ricoeur sees ethics as part of a descending plane in

order to maintain coherence as a reflection on what precedes it. As such, it maintains its position bound to society and state by a justificatory analysis of action, which is the very building block of self-consciousness, while at the same time striving for a “practical wisdom” of regional ethics, whose matrix is phronesis. This ethics is plural in nature. It deals with the varied areas i n w h i c h r e s p o n s i b i l i t y m a k e s individuals accountable to guilds, a c a d e m i c a n d p r o f e s s i o n a l communities and the State, and these entities accountable to individuals.

Following Ricoeur’s model, there is no consensus on the claim of ethics being a discourse that has an innate cognitive structure. As such, ethical justification does not partake of intentionality, drive or motivational causality specific to the way we form thoughts. Although its emergence would be contingent and essentially contextual, its discourse does acquire internal coherence. This provides another key difference with morality: ethics is a field of argumentation. Insofar as our cognitive structure incorporates a drive to transmit what is perceives and synthesizes into understanding as being at least valid, if not true, it can be said that ethics reconstructs the human subject’s striving for the Good.

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II. Models of Subjectivity

The three models of subjectivity presented at the outset of this essay as the contexts in which ethics emerges are not exhaustive. The claim is made here that their juxtaposition comes close to covering the inquiry as to how ethics acquires its binding force. The models in question relate specifically to:

These three models are not necessarily models in succession, although (B) does precede (C). However, it is plain that (C) does not cancel out (B). To some degree, (C) is hostile to (B), striding out against the omnipotence of its application. In general, however, it seems plain that (C) vanquishes, or at least comes to replace (B) out of a natural evolution in subjectivity, which would take account of mult ipl ici ty, plural i ty and the diversification of relations as well as embody a growing awareness of the

need for reliable verbal communication to get the message across.

H o w e v e r , t h e p o w e r o f unification, reduction and subsumption which sustains the sovereign subject model just may be more resilient than the exchange model of intersubjectivity. In this likelihood, we examine the (B$) which is the alter subjectivity model. The case of B$ is not to deny the unity of the sovereign subject model altogether. Where it differs is in rejecting the pre-existence of a structural object, that is, the object of capture, transformation, exploitation and production made by a subject. If anything, the subject is accomplished by means of these processes. The subject is multiplied in relation to definite contexts, and the subject figure, as opposed to its early theorization in Descartes and Kant, is spotted as manifesting a split in relation to its true essence of the capacity to know thyself.

The alter subjectivity model B$ can also be called the event subjectivity model. An event designates the emergence of the radically new. The subjectivity emerging in the wake of the event is involved in transforming the environment or context in which it arose. Moreover, the event-subjectivity model argues that (C) has but a surface impact on the centra l iz ing and asymmetrical dominance implied in model (B). But its ethical superiority lies in the radicality of its proposal, which

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(A) the relativist, immoralist or opinionated model of the subjective;

(B) subjectivity as the active agent in the sovereign subject model; and,

(C) negotiated subjectivity in the model of inter-subjectivity.


might impose a strain on social stability when the society is deemed to be unjust. Nonetheless, lacking the contextualization of an “event”, (C) a p p e a r s t o b e a s a t i s f a c t o r y compromise.

The names associated with these models are as follows: (A) Plato and Aristotle. (B) Descartes and Kant. (C) Habermas. (B$) Badiou.

II.1 Model (A) Opinion

In the realm of opinion, gossip and med ia sp in , the mode l o f subjectivity in action is surely (A). Opinion, as a typical form of the understanding of what is subjective, is the self-reflexive form by which partialness is avowed. How often does one hear another person emphasize how this or that idea or claim, is “at least, my opinion”? The mind reacts in strange ways. As if to compensate for the obvious partialness of opinion, the lack of verifiable fundament, or indeed fabulation or simple arbitrariness, the mind displays an incl inat ion or intentionality to remind the subject through a truth claim of what it is prior to partaking in the comfort of the objective world. However, opinion is nothing but objective, precisely in the philosophical sense that it is thinks in and through objects, or even when existence of these objects is a mere matter of belief. As Hegel put it, o r d i n a r y c o n s c i o u s n e s s i s

consciousness about objects only. Opinion is precisely anything but a thought on itself thinking. While it might be subjective, it falls dramatically short of thinking subjectivity, or rather thinking subjectively.

This is one of the reasons for which it could be said that the current vogue in ethics nowadays is not one that philosophers necessarily cherish. Some areas of applied ethics aim to contextualize justification in this limited, and essentially flawed, dimension of human subjectivity. They tend to solicit philosophical positions merely when their complexity can be easily simplified and maintained within the general status quo. At times, one suspects a ce r ta in sense o f conserva t i sm associated with ethics. In the old d i c h o t o m y b e t w e e n r e f o r m o r revolution, ethics would seem to forever partake of the former.

With the collapse of the Soviet block and mainstreaming of the varied forms of Western Euro-communism, ethics was raised to a general status of fo rm ing the l i be ra l democra t i c individual. As liberal democracies aimed in varied degrees since the 1970s to reinforce the separation of Church from State, ethics appeared not only a compensatory political theory to the demise of socialist visions, but as a means to warding off new forms of C h u r c h - S t a t e c o l l u s i o n , f i r s t encountered in Ronald Reagan´s

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presidency in the U.S. These days such collusion justifies more violent criticism about the state of contemporary democracies. Ethics thus appears as a complicated annoyance to which one nonetheless must pay lip service.

When it comes to more specific debates, such as abortion, genetics, cloning, pollution, mass consumption, crimes against humanity or the operation of the United Nations Organization, ethics appears as a mild variant to deal with issues that are really of the order of the law and indeed of force. Yet when fundamental issues in human conduct reach the highest bodies of the legal system in modern democracies, jurisprudence is but one of the resources present in the due process of the law. The other involves ethical arguments.

Is ethics truly bound to acquire legitimacy merely in subservience to the legal system? The posit ion philosophers defend seldom believes it is so. Ethics is the knowledge domain in which one encounters work on the concep tua l con f i gu ra t i ons and argumentative forms required to bring consistency to justifications formulated in defense of decisions made and actions taken. Yet does ethics ever leave the realm of subjective, and therefore apparently arbitrary conduct? It does precisely insofar as it presents various means of justifying action, which should be taken to include even

intellectual actions such as belief. Still, action often results from a personal decision. How does ethics attain coherence as a way to generalize conduct for groups of individuals? Where and how does it acquire its normative scope?

This is precisely where the question of subjectivity comes in. To defend as I do in this article that ethics is a subjective science should in no way mean to entail that it is arbitrary. Ethics is a subjective science insofar as it deals especially with the real of the subject, whether the subject is endowed with interiority or not. The so-called arbitrariness implied in the term subjective certainly has to do with the lack of universally quantified rules that would apply regardless of the context and use of language. For centuries, the fate of axiologic sciences such as ethics, were considered from within a relegated position, one that suggested the essential fallibility of human endeavors, and the fluctuations of h u m a n i n t e l l i g e n c e . A t t i m e s overcoming complexity and integrity, human beings reach the higher spheres of genuine knowledge.

Plato called “doxa” precisely the banal order of half-truths, objects as imitation of Forms, and the temporal experience forged by language. Aristotle, less contemptuous of the ordinary than his master, considered real, ethical happiness as attainable in

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everyday life. However, like Plato, he linked happiness (eudaimonia) to increasingly fine-tune technical know-how, or virtue (areté). As Aristotle writes, “the life of the man who is active in accordance with virtue will be happy.” (Aristotle, 1941, 1179a8-9). Still, just like for Plato, in the moment of philosophic conversation that imposes self-control on the extremes to which the human soul is subject, human beings develop through habit a keen sense of the path to accomplish acts that prompt ever increasing moments of happiness. The cumulative dimension of happiness may be reached through the identification of the just path to which the sense of prudence sharpens the subject´s goal. Despite the intricacy of this ethical exaltation of the ordinary act, Aristot le considers “perfect happiness” as occurring only in contemplative activity. Or in this case, contemplation of the very form by which the thinking producer manages to trigger an ever more intense sense of satisfaction and happiness. Aristotle’s conception of the final cause works to lead the human subject onward and away from the realm of doxa.

Aristotle as well as Plato´s critique of the democratic form of governance found in Greece, or the one projected as ideal, provides some of the most solid definitions of doxa. Opinions, fictions and half-truths at best circulate among the chattering masses. Truth would lie at the disposal only of

the most committed and well-educated, the aristos or best. The suspicion with which our culture generally treats the subjective is already enshrined in their respective philosophies. It is true Plato emits a harsher verdict against opinion than Aristotle, who shows how the subjective investment each and anyone makes in car ry ing ou t ac t ions nonetheless has a common dimension, without having to resort to Plato’s epistemological and cosmological model-copy paradigm.

Whi le op in ions are sure ly subjective, what the subjective is cannot be reduced to mere opinion. At its most promising, the subjective is reserved to notions that have not as yet been proved. However, as is often the c a s e , t h e s u b j e c t i v e i s a characterization presenting a dead-end. In a culture of computability, a property of being subjective could be a death sentence for a discourse having scientific ambitions. This is where the striving for perfection becomes a slide toward tragedy. For little of the human being can be understood without a concept of a certain type of subjectivity.

From an ethical perspective, however, the claim for the pertinence of a model of subjectivity cannot easily be separated from truth without losing its coercive potential.

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II.2 Model (B) The Sovereign Subject

From the point of view of moral philosophy, the sovereign subject model suggests an ethical evolution toward moral superiority. Yet it is less in terms of the degrees of moral intensity, which presents structural problems about earlier subjectivity models, than it is a formal, existential base for personal identity. For the identity-centered aspect typical to subjectivity prompts exclusion and hostility to those who do not share its principles and norms. This exclusionist tendency seems contrary cognit ively-speaking to a model vaunted for its epistemological structure as much as for its ethics. It is our c o n v i c t i o n i n t h i s e s s a y t h a t unders tand ing these s t ruc tu ra l dimensions of subjective forms is a precondition for a true applied ethical context to be asserted. This context, like its formal ancestor, is destined to be one of justification for the reason to think a certain way, i.e. an argued position submitted to the understanding and assent of an audience. Without an additional understanding of the ethical propensity of argumentation, the aim at getting to better understand ethical cognition seems to be stilted from the outset.

The sovereign subject is a model that sets the subject in relation to itself, distinct from others and the objective space. It is the paradigm for the Western liberal idea of the individual.

But as a sociological, or ideological phenomenon, the individual would struggle greatly to be able to expand its values into becoming a universal phenomenon. As firmly as Western intellectuals and the general public defend the sacrosanct idea of the individual, Evelyn Fox Keller reminds us of the anomaly of espousing individualism while accepting ourselves as biologically determined beings, i.e. the “a gene-driven representation of identity”. (Keller, 2007, p. 360). What the sovereign subject model has always falsely presupposed is that what does not partake of its essence is reduced to objectivity. The harmful ethical consequences of a personal ident i ty theory bui l t upon such foundations have been legion.

It is a powerful point of view, at times radically bent on proving that it is constitutive of objective reality, in which data is inert. Insofar as it is a point of view, Thomas Nagel’s definition is adequate to describe the field of objectivity it creates. According to him, a point of view “is more objective than another, if it relies on the specifics of the individual’s makeup and position in the world”. (Nagel, 1986, p. 5) Detachment from the contingent process of worldly experience is the process whereby the subject grounds itself recursively. The modus ponens argument is often a valid form of arguing in favor of such a specific constitution of sovereignty over the

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quantitative dimension of what pertains to the non-subjective, i.e. to objectivity.

This theory of subject iv i ty, however, is also motivated by theories of language. In 20th century philosophy, the analysis of language began to overtake the descriptive methods brought to analyzing the subject as a perceptual being. This is the process to which Richard Rorty gave the name: the “linguistic turn”. (Rorty, 1977). Insofar as language became the focal point of the analysis, the subjective coefficient as such tends to dissipate. In other words, the study of language – in its structural, symbolic, phonetic, semantic, referential as well as performative and lifeworld dimensions – makes subjectivity into a so-called surface effect. Yet in precisely this way, subjectivity becomes more objective as a phenomenon. Prior to being rational, the ego cogito is a doubter.

The name most often associated with the sovereign subject model is René Descartes. As with much phi losophical work, one had to distinguish Descartes’ theory of subject in the conditions of its creative dimension, including its ingeniousness, innovativeness, and cutting-edge character from the uses to which it has been placed since then. One of the most striking transformations since Descartes’ time of the so-called “res cogitans”, or “cognitive thing”, is its reduction to a rational faculty. The

original definitions given of the ego cogito, which remains irreducible to the res extensa, i.e. the body, or the bodily spheres, is its lack of extension. The thinking substance is inherently non-denumerable and non-measurable. It lies prior to the perimeter bounded by the zero and the infinite. Insofar as it is the field in which the passions are manifest, the Cartesian subject exceeds considerably the range of emotional and reasonable action that generally goes by the designator “rational”. Descartes sought to recursively infer its existence. Yet, by means of the thesis on radical doubt, what he does instead is establish it as a postulate.

With respect to what we have already seen of Hegel’s description of mind, Descartes’ innovation is akin to a mathematical point of singularity. A reduc t i on o f i t t o an ex te rna l configuration would be a travesty. The upshot would be to rid the subjective field of its phase state and substitute it merely with categories of objectivity. Such a transformation leads us to the notion of the Cartesian subject – a centralized seat of potency to decipher the world, i.e. of what is not it. While this version might lie at some distance from Descartes’ original insight, its formal configuration has become the subject of Western technoscience, i.e. the centralized center for determining objectivity. As such, it is the grounds to the fictional construct Thomas Nagel

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has called the “View from Nowhere”, i.e. the subject would be the entity that is both prior to reality and generative of it. This View has often led to the demise of the subjective within science. But as Wolfgang Carl has argued, “the quest for an objective representation of the world doesn’t require us to give up a subjective point of view defined by the contingent nature of our experience and to aim at a ‘detached’ view of the world, but rather to have a reflective understanding of our experience in order to distinguish between how the world appears to us and how the world is independent of us.” (Carl, 2009, p. 456) In other words, maintaining Descartes’ insight is fundamental if we choose to consider – and it is my contention that we must – objective reality according to the two modes by which it affects our organism: one is the most familiar to our so-called objective techno-scientific commodity culture, whereby everything has its measure and price; the other, considerably less mercantile, although no less economic, is how the phenomenal sphere appears to us as endowed with meaning and a holistic dimension or purpose.

To achieve the latter, one might

follow a line of analysis more specific to Lacan and consider the convergence of the subjective grammatical position “I” with the objective position “me” as complicating Descartes’ inference of “I think, therefore I am”. Indeed, the “me” would be akin to superimposing

extensionality on the purely intensive dimension of the “I”. With the fusion or “reduction” of the “me” and the “I” comes one of the other effects of the t r a v e s t y o f D e s c a r t e s ’ conceptual izat ion, which is the structuring of an exclusivist dimension. Therefore, the immediate consequence of separating the first- and third-person is recognition of the multifaceted aspect of objectivity.

Let me recall that my aim in reconstructing the sovereign subject model is not to provide a one-sided version. In this panorama of paradigms of subjectivity, I am trying to get at some of the structural deficiencies the va r i ous mode l s m igh t bu t no t necessarily do provoke. In this regard, the “I” would be the condition by which otherness is separated. The question emerges as to whence the subject acquires the conceptual configuration by which to attain a degree of insight about itself. It is well known that to answer th is problem Descartes introduced the notion of self-evidence and the common plane between the Divine and the I, through which the fundamenta l concep ts o f “ f i r s t philosophy” circulate. While it could be held that the presence of the divine in Descartes’ positing of the subject is an intrinsic presence of otherness, the methodology he uses reduces the Divine to the sphere of the Same. The Divine is different to the human not so much by species than by degree. This

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is where Descartes ran into trouble with the ecclesiastical order of his time, for the human mind is fully endowed with the capacity to reason according to the categories of the divine, for example, the absolute, the infinite, omnipotence, omnivalence, and absolute perfection. Where it fails to commune with the divine is in the sphere of power, i.e. its ethical power to spread the Good. When the subject wages power alone, confident of its full autonomy, it most often conveys its particularities and self-interestedness.

The upshot is that the sphere that becomes to the human subject is forged on the grounds of exclusion. Insofar as Cartesianism and the vision of the subject it espouses is also the source of Western metaphysics, Brazil ian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro rightly argues that “Western metaphysics is really the fons et origo of all colonialisms.” (Viveiros de Castro, 2009, 9) Advocating for the need of an “anti-Narcissus” internal critique to anthropology, he asserts that “to question what makes ‘us’ different from others – other species and other cultures, regardless of what ‘they’ are, since what matters is ‘us’ – is already an answer.” (Viveiros de Castro, 2009, 8) The answer is predicated upon the negative exclusion from the subjective sphere of what is deemed to be different. Still, Viveiros de Castro’s internal criticism is postulated upon a “cross perspectivism”, in which he

seeks relations external perspectives instead of the representations as he c r e a t e d w i t h i n a n i n d i v i d u a l perspective. (Viveiros de Castro, 2000, p. 423). He recalls the accounts of early contact between Europeans and Amerindian peoples and the perception m a d e b y E u r o p e a n s t h a t t h e Amerindians had no soul, whereas the Amerindians perceived the Europeans to be without a body. What undermines the sovereign subject model is not the exclusiveness per se, but how it deals with the knowledge other subjects present.

In the steps of critics such as Viveiros de Castro, there arise solid grounds for rejecting Model B. The omnivalence of the identity category which fundamentally structures the ego cogito when stretched to its limits shows the reason, in all of its clarity and distinction. Descartes’ model has served the very mode of human thought that so easily partakes of the creation of subjective groups to the expense of those who are seen as not belonging. As Descartes’ model filters the meaning of humankind’s propensity to group formations, which begins with the smallest form in friendships and f a m i l y, a n d c u l m i n a t e s i n t h e extraordinary dimensions of nation-state and imperial configurations, those deemed not to belong have suffered the backlash to the identity I-centered model.

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It is no caricature to call the various factions waging war and crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia as “identity” politics, even prior to inter-ethnic conflict. After all, the ethnic characterization has little if anything to do with the distinction between Serbs, Croats and that multifarious designation of Bosnians. Then again, if religious difference distinguishes Serb from Croat, why wouldn’t it distinguish Bosnian, who are predominantly Muslim although not s o l e l y ? L i n g u i s t i c d i f f e r e n c e , p h o n e t i c a l l y a n d s y n t a c t i c a l l y understood, does not mark the line between these cultures, whereas the written inscription of this language might. Then there’s the question of the ethnic model characterizing the State in which the threat to human rights emerged from the dominant ethnic group. This was finally not the case in the Bosnian conflict per se, although Milosevich’s ethnic-cleansing Serbian nationalism did sustain the anti-Muslim fanaticism of Radovan Karazich and General Ratko Mladic. None of this discussion should be understood to reject the pertinence of the ethnic model. My discussion aims at stressing how the ethnic is underscored by the identity-structure specif ic to the sovereign subject model deriving from Descartes’ origin innovation – once, that is, the ego cogito is identified according to his rational twin the res extensa.

The drawbacks of this model begin to take shape within the philosophical sphere merely in the wake of World World II. In the next section, I explore some of the critical positions the Sovereign subject model faces. It is too strong a critique to claim that the sovereign subject model is inherently anti-ethical. As I have tried to argue in this section, there is validity and solidity to the claim that the exclusivist dimension of human thought is marshaled by the identity model when stretched to the extreme. As one of our purposes is to argue against the theory of an innate human nature, at least regarding the semantic and conceptual sphere of thought, it became vital in philosophical circles to do away with the sovereign subject model. The entire contemporary concern with the revolution in rights, the recognition of difference, and the primacy of the radical, and a fortiori , vulnerable other is part of this ethical critique.

In the next section we turn to two of its most complete and coherent alternatives. First, model C, i.e. the model of inter-subjectivity as developed within Jürgen Habermas’ theory of discourse ethics, which we shall complete with reflections taken from Michel Foucault’s work. Second, the ethical model B$, forged by Alain Badiou, identifies otherness with what is radically new, and whose essence would be made manifest by a faithful

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commitment to establishing its truth. In other words, the new is only novel insofar as it retains an essential component maintaining it over and above the inclusion of a model built upon the Cartesian logic I have just set out. Insofar as the novel does maintain such a component within itself, it is an example of nothing less than integrity. It i s wha t has rema ined , as the expression goes, true to itself. As such, the new also embodies the true, and therefore the Good.

II.3 Model (C) Intersubjectivity

The model of intersubjectivity has its roots in the study of consciousness and the frustration encountered from within the Cartesian paradigm to explain what maintains an irreducible dimension in the choices and decisions we tend to make spontaneously and in moments of considerable impact. Instead of resorting to the concept of the transcendental to explain shared features among speci f ic minds, intersubjectivity prompts a shift into spatial perspective. From the vertical vantage point, a shift to the horizontal relationship between minds and other minds occurs. From centralization in an o r i g i n a l p o i n t , w e m o v e t o diversification, and a network-like system. From the author-centered configuration of the rise of ethics as the completion of the absolute mind or spirit’s accomplishment as a free

subject self-consciousness of itself, we move into the sphere of the multiple, whereby individual points either derived from, or are created by the terms and protocols of negotiation of meaning, policy and rules.

In Model C, we move from speculations on a transcendental domain f rom which phenomena manifest their meaning as world-events, to an argumentative and debated sphere in which the minimal condition for thought to occur passes by a claim to validity on a given position. The upshot of this is the need to absorb the other’s argued position when the other carries the better argument. In terms of a theory of mind, it is an opening to the outside of the subject’s sphere. The model is by no means averse to dialectical interaction. There is no pre-constructed end to this negotiation, for the model needs to be created.

However, there is a limit to the types of logics that can function as an agent by which to achieve social cohesion. The aim is to include the other, according to increasingly different degrees of intensity. There is no longer a view from nowhere, as everyone is implicated – so long as they agree to argue and not merely reject out and out. Even the event theory of radical change reaps its coercive power from

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the subjective sphere in which fidelity to making the truth of the event achieve its potential goes by a dialogical p rocess , a l t hough one tha t i s essentially open to the needs of creative innovation in order to preserve and assist the new to accomplish its promise. As a structural picture, it is normative and ethical, although by no means is it independent as a process from the context in which any event breaks through.

T h e r e f o r e , t h e m o d e l o f intersubjectivity attempts to recover from the ethical subservience of the sovereign subject model. Once again, these models are discursive models. Part empirical and historical, and part prescriptive, they provide a general framework within generous margins of the way we understand ourselves as reflective individual and group beings. Intersubjectivity acquires its original context in the phenomenological analysis of consciousness specific to the work of Edmund Husserl. Emerging in the later part of his career in the famous lec tures on Descar tes ’ Metaphysical Meditations at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1929, Husserl sought to transcendentally ground our anticipatory understanding of other minds. (Husserl, 1977) However, the passage from the interior dimension of the res cogitans to the exteriority of the world was never adequately explained from a conceptual point of view. Insofar as it is fair to assume that only some

parts of the mind are interior, if any are at all, it would be in the intersubjective space that minds end up creating the c o m m o n g r o u n d n e e d e d f o r communicating – namely, the semantic d i m e n s i o n o f t h i s i n t e r i o r i t y. Communication is one of the key notions at stake in this model.

It is generally accepted within philosophical scholarship that Husserl faced a complicated task to explain the dynamics of his concept of subject, as his foundational terms were essentially Gestaltist perceptual categories. He would describe the passage, as if in a Moebius strip, from the sensations of touching and being touched, as providing the grounds for the mind to extrapolate and generalize about internal and external space. These two t e r m s , h o w e v e r , a r e a l l b u t psychological in structure. Indeed, they are external in their conceptual structure in the argumentative logic used to convey them.

The principles of Habermas’ notion of intersubjectivity follow from Wit tgenste in ’s d iscovery in the Philosophical Investigations, according to which words acquire their meaning from the use to which they are put. (Wittgenstein, 2009) With Wittgenstein, philosophy becomes useful again, ushering in as is later be named the “pragmatic turn”. Wittgenstein thus goes beyond his initial theory of meaning, whereby meaning arises from

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the propositional context, eventually compiled into dense configurations of propositions, but whose essentially terms are predicated upon the truth-value of propositions. The truth-value theory of proposit ional meaning p r e s u p p o s e s a b i v a l e n t l o g i c , essentially applying the Aristotelian logical principles of non-contradiction and excluded middle. In Wittgenstein’s later work, logics abound: paradoxes, contradict ions and enigmas are integrated into the sphere by which meaning arises from action and use. The field of ethics understood as the field of study of the reasons for conduct turns into the full fledged area of examining the justification for these reasons insofar as it is understood that t he mean ing embod ied i n t he justification is acquired from the use to which the reasons for conducting oneself in such and such a way are put. In other words, justification merely describes or explains. It normatively sets the terms by which we understand the relationship between reasons for acting and acting as such.

Now, Foucault also operates a major dislocation of Model B. In the analysis he gives in The Order of Things of the emergence of the science of linguists as well as the symbolist poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, Foucault portrays the space of language as achieving autonomy from representing the world as it is. Instead, sense splits from the subject to reveal its “unique

and difficult Being.” (Foucault, 1970, p. 334) The human subject in turn proves to be the result of what Foucault calls “discursive practices”: “In every society, the product ion o f d iscourse is controlled, organized, redistributed, by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its c h a n c e e v e n t s , t o e v a d e i t s materiality.” (Foucault, 1981, p. 52) The effect on the subject, however, is to diminish the scope of justification, for the choice of objects and norms on which to act are pre-determined by the procedures organizing a practice. The bottom line for Foucault would be that justification on its own is not a posture sufficient in and of itself to break with the power mongering tendency of the sovereign subject’s way of thinking for this already belongs to the discursive practice in which the subject arose. Justification for conduct has to integrate the generalized split subject in a social context whose rules are not entirely of the subject’s making.

Habermas mainta ined that Foucault’s out and out rejection of the Cartesian and humanist subject made philosophy the bait to non-ethical t h i n k i n g b e n t o n s t r a t e g i c a l l y manipulating situations and contexts in order to push moral logic towards the posture according the which the ends justify the means. (Habermas, 1990) A post-Kantian in this regard, the only posture able to preserve against such

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propensity is the argumentative scope of the community conceived as one that is dialogical, but also and primarily predicated upon the rule of forming validity claims. These claims ought to be warranted by the interests of the entire community universally, at least if “universal” is understood in terms of propositional logic.

Desp i te h is ins is tence on argumentation and on the finality in c o m m u n i c a t i o n o f r e a c h i n g u n d e r s t a n d i n g , H a b e r m a s ’ argumentation theory is formalistic in nature. He offers a minimal clause for inclusion of participants in the debate community, which is fair given that Habermas aims for the inclusion of all. He has received criticism for stipulating that rational discourse be a condition for belonging. Yet, following Apel and his own positions, their view of rationality is “performative”, i .e. rationality has no tight bounds prior to debate. However, when one conceives of Habermas’ own post-Kantian fiber, these bounds are not as flexible as they seem. Now, this view is voiced in his opposition to post-modern theories of knowledge, and his deep suspicion of contemporary French philosophy: as if mimicking Model B in altered forms, i.e. endowed with an unconscious, for example, or split by the demands of political mobilization.

The minimal criterion for inclusion, then, is to voice a validity claim within a

given language-game context, or, as Habermas puts it, life form. If one considers an argument to be a set of propositions, in which one is the conclusion and the rest the premises, surely the elementary validity claim is necessary. In that regard, a simple discussion about what restaurant to dine at, or what film to watch, or which of Rio de Janeiro’s beaches is better to frequent on a typical hot sunny tropical day, is indeed an argument: a disjunctive syllogism. Yet at this stage in the game we have hardly reached the ethical potential in argumentative theory. One can study logic and grammatical construction in semantic topics without ever touching upon the quest ion of ethics. This is not necessarily a drawback. For many contemporary thinkers the type of finality Habermas points to evokes Aristotle’s purposeful cosmos and final cause.

Still, the intersubjective model aims to include speakers in a rational communication community. It also stipulates two attitudes as leading nowhere and therefore having to be rejected from membership in the community. One is the question of rejecting any universal claims, whether they be epistemological or logical, as Habermas intends. The other question is the so-called instrumental and strategic attitudes, which seek to pervert the rules of the language games.

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In elementary formal logic, a universal proposition is one that affixes the universal quantifier (For all x, ….). Such a proposition may be either contradicted by a single particular counter-example, or it may be apposed with another universal proposition involving another target group. So the idea of universality here at play is not the strong epistemological universally t h a t o n e f i n d s i n t h e F r e n c h Enlightenment or in the system of 1 8 t h - 1 9 t h c e n t u r y G e r m a n transcendental idealism. It is the formal universality adequate to dealing with sharing properties in a given group. Whether they ought to be expanded to a broader group depends on the arguments formulated to justify not only their validity, but indeed their solidity. It is only when solidity, that is, true propositions as premises and as conclusion that one begins to enter the waters of ethics.

Solid arguments are desirable to ward off and undermine strategic attitudes. Strategic attitudes might be sophistic in nature, and might use fa l lac ies, a l though i t would be shortsighted to negate strategy as being part of the ethically inclined attitude. Instrumental reason, on the other hand, would tend to limit the scope of rationality to purpose or ends, and possibly remove the eudaimonic fac to r f rom d iscuss ion , i .e . o f considering discussion to be part of the

practical actions Aristotle considered in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics. Without going into dealing here, both attitudes are seen by Habermas as limiting the scope of intersubjectivity, and especially of undermining the radical potential involved in including the other into the communication community. That potential is one that points not only to a broader and more multi- or intercultural community, but especially to a context in which oneself i s o p e n t o b e i n g c h a n g e d fundamentally by the ethical sense delivered in a better argument than formulated thus far.

Inclusion of the other is thus a prime political motive to Habermas’ intersubjective model. It has shown its potential in the arguments Habermas has forged to diminish the dichotomy b e t w e e n t h e l i b e r t a r i a n a n d communitarian debate. It is the condition sine qua non of working in favor of a conception of “radical democracy”. Also, it is the building block to Habermas’ conception of constitutional patriotism, which he has forged in the context of the debate on reunification of the two Germanys. More recently, constitutional patriotism has appeared in debates regarding the terms according to which citizen membership to the European Union ought to be conceived if ethnic or national affiliation does present an obstacle to a polit ical construct

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favorable to all members of the Union. This point, with the current economic collapse of Greece and fragility of Spain, are, however, open to debate as regards desirability.

One of the main objections raised against Habermas’ model is that it would neutralize, at least in the c r i t e r i o l o g i c a l t e r m s o f t h e intersubjective model being developed, the new and the novel. In that regard, Habermas’s conception of a “radical democracy” would merely be refining a model that has shown its limitations as far as Western liberalism is concerned. It would thus have reached a point of disconnection from the interests of society and the population at large.

An option to a generalized subjective model seeking to integrate ethics into the very process of political deliberation and negotiation is offered by Alain Badiou in his so-called “ethics of truth”. (Badiou, 1999 and 2002) Badiou inherits a model of subjectivity that develops f rom without the boundaries of philosophy per se, in the psychoanalytic experience of Jacques Lacan’s theoretical clinic. In that regard, the subject’s relationship to knowledge of itself is always half-said and half-known. As such, the subject is cleaved. In the Anglo-American context, there has been such an extensive backlash against the clinical dimension of psychoanalytic therapy that one hardly

understands the meaning of a split subject anymore, when it is not entirely confused with a state of schizophrenia. The subject is split from its own somatic conditions, which are structured physically, genetically and mentally during infancy. Throughout our lives, these conditions continue to modulate who we imagine we are and what we would like to see ourselves become.

In Badiou ’s e th ica l theory, however, the subject is split from the occurrence that gave it its original baptism: the event. Badiou offers a philosophical perspective on the type of novelty that involves the emergence of new subjective forms. An event is not something easily identifiable. Indeed, there is a degree of decisionism in Badiou’s theory that at times calls out for an analysis of the process of thoughtful decision itself, i.e. how thought comes around to designating an event and naming it. However, this question rests far from the interests and implications of his ethics.

His ethics point to the specific contexts in which a rare event and new subjective form arise. These may be the contexts of art, science, political innovation or love. The specificity of the state of the situation with respect to the context in which an event breaks determines the structural nature of the subjective form to arise. The ethical challenge presented here is how to

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keep a subject’s expansion alive when the event giving rise to it is associated with the Good. For Badiou, the key operator is fidelity to the continued production of truth forms regarding the nature of the event. Truth here clearly integrates both a referential as well as creative dimension. As the event, by definition, constitutes a break with an unjust state of the situation, its reference can only be indirectly achieved by means of the set of truths produced to explain its novelty and significance.

Yet commitment to the truth, even from an ethical perspective, of ten const i tutes a d issuasive challenge. When the process of ushering in the new subjective form is abandoned, Badiou considers the subjective agents to have betrayed the act of fidelity to the promise and prescription of the event’s unfolding. L i k e w i s e , w h e n t h e s u b j e c t determines that truth has been achieved and one need not venture further to understand the new art form, the revolutionary potential of a political movement, the theoretical implications of a new scientific breakthrough or the life-changing impact of an erotic encounter, that is when the current state of the situation re-establishes its dominance and hold over the promise of the new. Both betrayal and asserting a final truth for an event are

tantamount to producing evil, in Badiou’s conception. (Badiou, 2002).

As such, Badiou’s lesson is that evil is not absolute. Ethics is thus not an extension of religion. Indeed, ethics would always be an applied ethics, for ethics is always indexed to a given discursive condition, either: scientific, artistic, political or amorous. How to greet the radically new, the vastly different or the utterly other might lie at the frontier of ethics. But these are the moments when the subjective model bearing a theory by which conduct is justified exposes itself as either able or flawed to treat what is as yet unknown with the proper dignity and concern. It is the moment of either thinking beyond what exists and asking “why not?”, or delving into the realm of habit and passive pleading “why?”

II.3 Concluding Remarks

The models of subjectivity, or indeed of the subject, discussed in t h i s e s s a y a r e b e t t e r k n o w n terminologically speaking in the tradition of continental philosophy than in the Anglo-American tradition. In the latter, one perceives a move in the linguistic and cognitive turns of philosophy away from the general theory of subject towards a more naturalized model of mind and consciousness. In theory, we live at a


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time when the mind and subjectivity are treated as “folk psychology”, whereas, as genuine science would have it, the real question is how consciousness works as a brain function. Needless to say, it becomes difficult to infer a theory of ethics from such functionalism.

The purpose of this essay was to show how the concerned social and bus iness ac tor in add i t ion to brandishing the banner of ethics ought to consider the model of subjectivity

f rom which e th ics der ives i ts legitimacy. As we move into higher order linguistic-cognitive phenomena, we begin to see how subjectivity is a holistic mind-body phenomenon that reaps its structure from the social context, which can be ordered and distinguished into specific contexts. It has been the argument of this paper to stipulate that ethical theories derive considerably from the subjectivity theory we postulate. In a summarized table, the conclusions of this paper are as follows:

ConclusionsConclusionsConclusions

Concept of Subjectivity Truth Theory Action Theories

A Individual, atomistic Relativist, fragmentary Partial

B Individual, foundational Correspondence Impositional

C Intersubjective Consensual Negotiated

B$ Split, event-triggered subject

Collective, generic Faithfulness


Citation: This article may be cited as:

Madarasz, N. “The Subjective Field of Ethics: A Philosophical Panorama”, The Monarch Management Review, UGSM-Monarch Business School, Vol. 1, Num. 1, Oct. 2010, pp. 55-79

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London, UK: Wiley-Blackwell (4th edition).

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