Les Inquiétudes II seminar

Eethics, morals, deontology... To these words one could easily add or substitute, in the current state of language and systems of thought, five or six others (or more). In the course of their history, they have joined or separated, overlapped and evolved. But the first two concepts, to which the third was added late in the nineteenth century, are transformed according to the tropism that links them to each other. In Aristotle, the distinction between what we call morality and ethics is open to question; in our modern world, where the surprising oblivion of the greatest thinkers of ethics (such as Levinas) is silently sounding, ethics is linked to deontology, to the point of merging with and disappearing into it. At other times, Spinoza's ethics emancipated itself from both morality and deontology, moving towards an ontology of joy... Nietzsche's polemical essay on The Genealogy of Morality, in which the term " Moral " comes from the classical French conception of human psychology, leads to the ethical posture of transvaluation and the abandonment of (prescriptive) morality as a disease of the psyche and a major sign of human decadence. Genet constructs a phantasmatic ethic of the thief or even the murderer, or of the transvestite madwoman, which is constituted by the overthrow of bourgeois and Christian morality. Morality itself, in search of imperatives, has never ceased to change face. Ethics, even more mobile because circumscribed in the spheres of the intimate, oscillates between the search for universals and the anarchism of singular positions.

If we stick to the present times, two contrary readings can be made of the rapprochement between ethics and deontology. The first, optimistic reading, suggests that scientific disciplines, thinking of themselves through their application in the social field, are integrating ethical concerns into scientific consciousness. The second, pessimistic view sees this attraction as a trap that reduces the metaphysical concern underlying ethical concern to casuistry (a perspective opened up by the philosopher Habermas in his essay Éthe ethics of conversation) whose function is to maintain with less clash the (political and financial) logic on which it flourishes, without any concern other than the loss of profit.

The Poly&thique group at UPHF led by Matthieu Caron has, quite clearly, shown that colleagues at our university engaged in the question are positioned in the first of the perspectives (optimistic reading), which we might say green, if this term didn't refer precisely to the third term we're abandoning (morality). The researchers at DeScripto/LARSH would like to offer a polymorphous, multi-disciplinary seminar that is as much polytechnic as it is dynamic. At the end of a year of reflection since Les Inquiétudes, the work continues, seeking to interrogate concern/ethical concern on the one hand, and deontological questioning/decision on the other. This work must necessarily be open to dialogue with all the UPHF's scientific disciplines, with the support of the LARSH cross-disciplinary pole. It is undoubtedly where the distortions are greatest - between applied and speculative sciences, between disciplines with different competencies, temporalities and goals - that reflection can be deepened, from different logics and different ways of thinking. Ethical optimism (against the logic of disciplinary confinement) : thought and science are nourished by otherness, by taking into account who speaks, thinks and acts differently " To give head against language, that is ethics ", said Wittgenstein. Giving head against the order of disciplines could be, for a time, ours. To extend the metaphor, wouldn't it be useful to think about both the ethical problem of "artificial intelligence" as it works on facial recognition, and the very concept of visageness, from which Emmanuel Levinas reinvests ethical thought? We have here, in concrete terms, a meeting point or coincidence that could be rich in teaching, and to which we will devote this year's meetings.

In an attempt to understand how ethics and deontology can feed into each other, even though their relationship to the world, to practice, is distinct (deontology postulates the need for ethical concern to be translated into action, while ethics lives by not being reduced to a practical decision). This year, we propose to reflect on the various links that are woven between concern (through which the Anglo-Saxon care emerges) and worry : from concern for the self (where worry most often presents itself as anguish of the subject - towards the outside) and concern for others (where it becomes desire for community, sympathy, knowledge and recognition of the other.