Groundings for an eco-justice dialogical ethics of emancipation

Abstract

Through the eco-justice ethical criticism, which is the basic methodology of research in this paper, the authors attempt to weave the concept of personal identity as a dialogical virtue, while linked to the process of interaction with a human and, inevitably, more-than-human “otherness”, commonly referred to as Nature or the holistic other. Such a gesture serves to go beyond Humanism and turn to what Posthumanism could mean, in order to overcome the questionable narcissistic, supernaturalizing and predatory attitude of the latter. This gives way to seeking groundings for eco-justice ethics, by pointing to a dispossessment and dispossession of the self as a contribution to a new, after all, more intimate degree of relationship mediated by the forms the value love may assume. In line with these assumptions, a new paradigm of education for citizenship is proposed, with relation to alterity and an indispensable form of non-reproductive emancipation, not giving up on the critical exercise of unmasking the practices of naturalization of injustice, namely through carrying out the parrhesiastic function of telling a truth to power. This not only resituates the problem in the educational field, as in the awareness of the more-than-human to be considered, but it also looks for the caring about the natural and human (material and immaterial) “commons”. Finally, the main goal of this paper is to redress possible imbalances between the conditions provided by power and the legitimate expectations of peoples, including their eco-systems, without losing sight of the defined emancipatory ethical framework grounded in the values of love, peace, and hope.