Saturday, January 24, 2015

What's wrong with the notion of the common good?

Slavoj Žižek, Demanding the Impossible, edited by Yong-june Park, Polity Press, 2013
pp.1-2


But for me, modernity begins with Descartes, and then with Kant—to be precise, with an ethics that is no longer an ethics of the common good. For example, in Kant, you find it is purely formal ethics: ethics of the moral law and so on. Here, ethics cannot be, in any way, politicized: politicized in the sense that you cannot simply presuppose some common good. Rather, it is a matter of decision. This is what I find problematic about the notion of the common good.

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