Is it possible to strive for autonomy and diversity in society without weakening the common good? How much autonomy and diversity are possible without destroying social cohesion and human solidarity? And how much social commonality is necessary to be able to live an autonomous life and do justice to diversity?
Is it true that insistence on autonomy and diversity weakens social cohesion, or that striving for justice, equity and equality undermines individual freedom? A long tradition has seen the common good as the social order in which individuals and groups can best strive for perfection. Liberal societies insist that this perfecting must not be done at the cost of others or by restricting the right to such a striving only to some and not granting it also to others. However, in a time of growing social and cultural diversity and inequality the traditional tensions between individual freedom and social responsibility have increased to a point where the binding forces of our societies seem to be exhausted. How much individuality and what kinds of diversity are we ready to accept? How much autonomy and diversity are possible without destroying social cohesion and human solidarity? And how much social commonality is necessary to be able to live an autonomous life and do justice to diversity?
Table of contents:
I Autonomy and the Common Good
Clare Carlisle: The Virtue of Religion: Spinoza on Human Power and the Common Good -
Raymond Perrier: The Question of Autonomy and the Common Good in Spinoza's Ethics -
Yun Kwon Yoo: Hegel on Autonomy, Diversity, and the Common Good: A Dialectical Perspective and Its Contemporary Anthropological Relevance -
Jörg Dierken: Between Participation and Respect: Liberalism, Culturalism and the Common -
Andrew Bridges: Hegel's Law of the Heart and the Society of Singularities of the Future -
Graham Ward: Religious Hope at the End of Humanism
II Diversity and the Common Good
Elliot Wolfson: Heeding the Law beyond the Law: Transgendering Alterity and the Hypernomian Perimeter of the Ethical -
Josiah Solis: Beyond (the common) Good and Evil -
Nils Ole Oermann: About Diversity, Freedom, the Open Society and its Enemies -
Robert Overy-Brown: Questioning Values and Working for Freedom in a Time of Viruses and Bullets -
Deborah Casewell: On Decreation and Obligation -
Tad DeLay: When Forbidden to Think: Against Appeals to the Common Good -
Will Mittendorf: Reasonable Pluralism and the Procedure-Independent Standard in Epistemic Democracy -
Hartmut von Sass: On Cosmopolitanism: Its Precarious Relation to Religious Belief -
Marlene Block: Cosmopolitanism: The Irony, the Tension, the Reductio in Mysterium