When Famine Returns
Ethics, Identity, and the Deep Pathos of Things
1st Edition
Published in January 2003
Book
Paperback/Softback
VIII, 167 pages
978-3-8253-1123-0 (ISBN)
Description
Does everyone have a moral obligation to aid famine victims? Or do all persons have more basic ethical responsibility continually to assist such victims substantially, even "beyond the call of moral duty?" If so, then why? And how?
Making use of detailed case studies from the Great Bengal Famines of the 1940s to the recurring Ethiopian famines of the 1970s and 1980s and the Sudanese famines of today, Peter McCormick argues that famine is in part a philosophical issue. In the personal and tentative style of the short, classic reflective essay rather than in the impersonal style of the contemporary extended philosophical monograph, he proposes that "the problem of famine" cannot be understood as exclusively an economic or political problem. Rather, comprehending famine properly raises at least one quite fundamental ethical issue. For the basic ethical significance of famine is that seriously considering whether and just how one ought continually to assist the numberless victims of famine challenges our previous understandings of what it is both to be a person and to live fully, and rightly, the life of a person.
Making use of detailed case studies from the Great Bengal Famines of the 1940s to the recurring Ethiopian famines of the 1970s and 1980s and the Sudanese famines of today, Peter McCormick argues that famine is in part a philosophical issue. In the personal and tentative style of the short, classic reflective essay rather than in the impersonal style of the contemporary extended philosophical monograph, he proposes that "the problem of famine" cannot be understood as exclusively an economic or political problem. Rather, comprehending famine properly raises at least one quite fundamental ethical issue. For the basic ethical significance of famine is that seriously considering whether and just how one ought continually to assist the numberless victims of famine challenges our previous understandings of what it is both to be a person and to live fully, and rightly, the life of a person.
More details
Person
Peter McCormick (1940) is, since 1999, Prince Franz-Josef II and
Princess Gina Professor of Philosophy at the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of
Liechtenstein. A former Humboldt Scholar in Germany, American Fulbright Scholar in Paris, Canadian Killam
Scholar, and Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa, he holds a Doctorat d'Etat from the
University of Pars. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Bisherige Forschungsschwerpunkte des Autors:
- Modernitiy, Aesthetics, and the Bounds of Art
- Fictions, Philosophies, and the Problems of Poetics
- Heidegger and the Language of the World
Princess Gina Professor of Philosophy at the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of
Liechtenstein. A former Humboldt Scholar in Germany, American Fulbright Scholar in Paris, Canadian Killam
Scholar, and Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa, he holds a Doctorat d'Etat from the
University of Pars. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Bisherige Forschungsschwerpunkte des Autors:
- Modernitiy, Aesthetics, and the Bounds of Art
- Fictions, Philosophies, and the Problems of Poetics
- Heidegger and the Language of the World