Comunicación en el 10th Braga Meetings on Ethical and Political Philosophy

1. MIGRANTS AND NEW
POOR, NEW SUBJECTS OF
HUMAN RIGHTS
The Tought of Zygmunt Bauman
By: Elena Álvarez Álvarez
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
International University of La Rioja

2. ZYGMUNT BAUMAN’S SOCIOLOGY
Utopian visión –
marxist
revisionism
Part of
Humanities,
moral science
Centrality of
Culture: values,
beauty

3. JUSTICE AS CORE VALUE
¿What is justice?
Equity: equal oportunities and Access to them, for all
¿How to detect the lack of justice?
Discovery of inequity
Mision of sociological analysis according to Bauman
Fin: recovery of the res publica, citizenship

4. CHALLENGES TO
JUSTICE
Continuous presence of
inequity
Tendency to
penalization
Social disgregation –
hides justice
requirements
Solidarity and group
cohesion trough
“scapegoat”

5. HUMAN
RIGHTS
AND
LIBERAL
REVOLUTIO
NS
First – privatization of salvation
Utopian promise: a Rule of Law
Scope: balance between freedom (individual,
groups) – security (State)
Failure – crisis of politics, requirement of
individual services
Second – disappeareance of salvation
The world: fragmentary, liquid, without a
human net

6. THE OPPORTUNUY OF
HUMAN RIGTHS
Able to provide a
foundation for building
a universal ethos
Need for concretion:
danger of “not having
more”
Contexto globalization
without institutions,
absence of politics

7. UNWERTES LEBEN: ORIGINS
Karl Binding - Alfred Hoche 1920: Die Freigabe der Vernichtung
lebensunwerten Lebens
Adiaphorization: lifes without moral significance,
Submited to calculation, usefulness parameters, supression not
punishable
Object of stigmatization and functional asessment

8. UNWERTES LEBEN: IN A
CONSUMERIST
CULTURE
Consumo generates
waste
¿Do we still use
unwertes leben
theoretically?
Strenght o societies, in
care for their weakest
members
Still existing:
- misery
- indignity
Society of fear: to be
unnecesary

9. MIGRANTS, JUSTICE,
LAW
Situation of “nothing more tan human
rights”
Category of the stranter: comes today,
stays tomorrow
Living in nowhere land: refugee camps
Situation of precariousness:
- lost their country
- not received yet
Political oportunism: “potential danger”
Attitudes: resentissement, lack of hope

10. MIGRANTS, JUSTICE, LAW
“Locks do nothing to tame or weaken the forces that cause
displacement. The locks may help to keep the problem out of sight
and out of mind, but not to force it out of existence”.
Zygmunt BAUMAN, The Fate of Humanity in the Post-Trinitarian World,
en Peter WAGNER - Bo STRÅTH (eds.), Between Two Wars. Janina and
Zygmunt Bauman’s Analyses of the Contemporary Human Condition,
European University Institute, Florencia 2002, 25-38 (28-32);
http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/1864/HEC03-04.pdf.

11. NEW POOR, JUSTICE,
LAW
The concept of “class” now irrelevant
New structuring concept: consumer / flawed
consumer
- Simbolic value of shopping and possession
- Access to certain godos as social ascent
¿What is going wrong?
- Precariousness – Young workers without
hope
- New work situation, unstable
- Life Project
Moral duty to take them off from poverty

12. NEW POOR, JUSTICE, LAW
In addition to living in poverty, or at least below the required level of
affl uence, people classifi ed as the‘underclass’ are condemned to
social exclusion and deemed ineligible for membership of a society
that requires its members to play the consumerist game by the rule
precisely because they are, just like the well-off and the rich, all too
open to the power-assisted seductions of consumerism – though,
unlike the well-off and the rich, they can’t really afford to be seduced
Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life

13. A DECLARATION OF HUMAN
DUTIES?
It would be equivalent to a universal ethics with values linking.
Recovery of ethical values:
- Citizenship
- Solidarity
- Responsibility

14. 1. CITIZENSHIP
Overcoming
individualism
Recovery of the sense
of community
Related to the effort to
build the common
good
Giving and receiving,
assuming duties

15. 1. CITIZENSHIP
the status of citizens, that is, makes them stakeholders in addition to
being stockholders: beneficiaries, but also actors – the wardens as
much as the wards of the ‘social benefits’ system, individuals with
an acute interest in the common good understood as a network of
shared institutions that can be trusted, and realistically expected, to
guarantee the solidity and reliability of the state-issued ‘collective
insurance policy’
Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life, 140

16. 2. SOLIDARITY
“First casualty of the
consumer market” (LL
76)
Overcoming the concept
of tolerance
Core in a net of shared
interests
Prompts to action
Reciprocity in
relationships, equity,
freedom
Fosters mutual
confidence

17. 2. SOLIDARITY
Inhabitants [of] a community, a neighbourhood, a circle of friends,
partners in life and partners for life: a world where solidarity,
compassion, sharing, mutual help and mutual sympathy (all notions
alien to economic thought and abhorred by economic practice)
suspend or elbow out rational choice and the pursuit of self-interest.
A world whose residents are neither competitors nor objects of use
and consumption, but fellows (helpers and helped) in the ongoing,
never-ending joint effort of shared life-building and making shared
life liveable
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love, 70

18. 3. RESPONSABILITY
TOWARDS THE OTHER
Foundation of morality
Inspired by Levinas
Manifestation: care to
the other in need
Awakens when facing
the other
Unconditioned,
unlimited by nature
Society can make it
limited and conditioned

19. 2. RESPONSIBILITY TOWARDS THE
OTHER
The human ability to live with risk and accept responsibility for the
consequences. It is these abilities that are the supports for the
'moral economy'- mutual care and help, living for the other,
weaving the tissue of human commitments, fastening and
servicing interhuman bonds, translating rights into obligations,
sharing responsibility for everyone's fortune and welfare -
indispensable for plugging the holes pierced. and stemming the
floods released by the forever inconclusive
enterprise of structuration.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love, 74.

20. REFERENCES
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN’s WORKS
Does Ethics Have a Chance in a Consuming World?
Work, Consumerism and the New Poor
Wasted Lives. Modernity and its pariahs
Moral Blindness
In Search of Politics
Liquid Love
Consuming Life

21. Elena Álvarez Álvarez
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
Universidad Internacional de La Rioja
OrcId: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6434-5150