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Can thinking prevent us from evildoing? A matter of conscience

ABSTRACT:

The human being’s current inability to be at home in the world has found expression in an “ecological” crisis which has ethical, political and ontological elements. Beginning with a brief elaboration on the meaning of that “ecological” crisis and its relation with the human’s own constitution of being, this paper aims at drawing a path, within Arendtian thought, between the meaning of the being of humans, the issue of the banality of evil, thinking and the emergence of conscience. To that effect, this paper uses phenomenological-existential tools of analysis and description to arrive at a type of normativity that emerges not from any kind of formal necessity, but from the existential factuality’s contingency itself, that is, from freedom, which is established as a condition for all action, thus finding it its own measure.

KEYWORDS:
“Ecological” crisis; Being of humans; Banality of evil; Thinking; Conscience


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