Ethics of Liberation

Enrique Dussel (1934–2023) taught philosophy at the Universidad AutÓnoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa, and at the Universidad Nacional AutÓnoma de MÉxico in Mexico City. He was the author of many books, including Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology and The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of the “Other” and the Myth of Modernity. His books Twenty Theses on Politics and Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (edited with Mabel MoraÑa and Carlos A. JÁuregui) are both also published by Duke University Press.

"Enrique Dussel is the towering figure in liberation philosophy. This long-awaited translation confirms his unique position in contemporary philosophy."-Cornel West "The most significant achievements of Enrique Dussel's Ethics of Liberation are the ways that it shifted the geography of reasoning and taught us that if ethics is universal, it is also geopolitical. Dussel shows clearly that ethics has a politics that demands the political to be ethical and the ethical to be political. He further demonstrates that the geopolitics of ethics can no longer be controlled and regulated by Eurocentrism. Epistemic, political, economic, and ethical arguments and advocacy are being built from within the 'Third World' and they have a global scope. Ethics of Liberation is a book for our time, an essential tool for building nonimperial ethical futures."-Walter D. Mignolo, author of The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options “Dussel invites ethicists and social and political philosophers to remove their cultural and intellectual blinders and attempt to understand the world from the perspective of the excluded, the oppressed, and the dispossessed. Few people have thought harder on these themes than Dussel and Ethics of Liberation synthesizes much of this intellectual trajectory, opening future lines of research explored in the two-volume Politics of Liberation (2007, 2009) and in other works. This is an overdue English translation of a major work from one of the most important philosophers of our time.” - Alex Sager (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books) “. . . the most compelling articulation we have of the map of power and powerlessness in which we live our lives. It is sweepingly comprehensive, a tsunami of thought. Dussel, a philosophy professor in Mexico City, ducks none of the major issues and none of the intellectual figures of the West as he develops his thought about liberation.”- Walter Brueggemann (Christian Century) "The importance of this work lies, on the one hand, in how it demonstrates the force of philosophical thought that reproduces itself in the periphery of the world-system and, on the other hand, in how it poses theoretical, ethical, and political questions radically important for humanity in this third millennium." - Luis Martinez Andrade (Hispanic American Historical Review) “[A] masterful translation of an important work. . . . Whether one agrees with Dussel’s position or not, the ideas presented in Ethics of Liberation are important, as they propose an alternative model to neoliberalism. The editor and the translators of the text have done a magisterial job of bringing this seminal work by a major world philosopher to the attention of an English-language reading public.” - Rolando Pérez (College Literature) “[A] tour de force both breathtaking and conceptually rigorous.” - Mark Lewis Taylor (Radical Philosophy Review)

• About the Series xiEditor's Foreword to the English Edition xiiiPreface xvIntroduction: World History of Ethical Systems 1I.1. Origin of the Interregional System: Afro-Bantu Egypt and the Semites of the Middle East 6I.2. Cultures without Direct Links to the System: The Mesoamerican and Inca Worlds 9I.3. The "Indoeuropean" World: From the Chinese to the Roman Empire 13I.4. The Byzantine World, Muslim Hegemony, and the East: The European Medieval Periphery 17I.5. Unfolding of the World System: From "Modern" Spain of the Sixteenth Century 26I.6. Modernity as "Management" of Planetary Centrality and Its Contemporary Crisis 32I.7. The Liberation of Philosophy? 40Part I: Foundation of Ethics 53I. The Material Moment of Ethics: Practical Truth 551.1. The Human Cerebral Cognitive and Affective-Appetitive System 571.2. Utilitarianism 691.3. Communitarianism 771.4. Some Ethics of Content or Material Ethics 851.5. The Criterion and Universal Material Principle of Ethics 922. Formal Morality: Intersubjective Validity 1082.1. The Transcendental Morality of Immanuel Kent 1102.2. The Neocontractualist Formalism of John Rawls 1152.3. The "Discourse Ethics" of Karl-Otto Apel 1212.4. The Moral Majority of Jürgen Habermas 1282.5. The Criterion of Validity and the Universal, Formal Principle of Morality 1413. Ethical Feasibility and the "Goodness Claim" 1583.1 The Pragmatism of Charles S. Pierce 1603.2. The Pragmatic Realism of Hilary Putnam 1673.3. The Functional or Formal "System" of Niklas Luhmann 1753.4. The "Feasibility" of Franz Hinkelammert 1813.5. The Criterion and the Ethical Principle of Feasibility 186Part II. Critical Ethics, Antihegemonic Validity, and the Praxis of Liberation 2054. The Ethical Criticism of the Prevailing System: From the Perspective of the Negativity of the Victims 2154.1 Marx's Critique of Political Economics 2184.2. The "Negative" and the "Material" in Critical Theory: Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Benjamin 2344.3. The Dialectics of Drive 2504.4. The Critical Criterion and the Material or Ethical-Critical Principle 2785. The Antihegemonic Validity of the Community of Victims 2915.1. Rigoberta Menchü 2935.2. The Ethical-Critical Process of Paulo Freire 3035.3. Functionalist and Critical Paradigms 3205.4. The "Principle of Hope" of Ernst Bloch 3345.5. The Critical-Discursive Criterion and the Principle of Validity 3426. The Liberation Principle 3556.1. The "Organization Question": From Vanguard toward Symmetric Participation-Theory and Praxis? 3596.2. The "Issue of the Subject": Emergence of New Sociohistorical Actors 3736.3. The "Reform-Transformation" Question 3886.4. The "Question of Violence": Legitimate Coercion, Violence, and the Praxis of Liberation 3996.5. The Critical Criterion of Feasibility and the Liberation Principle 413Appendix 1. Some Theses on Order of Appearance in the Text 433Appendix 2. Sais: Capital of Egypt 447Notes 453Bibliography 655Index 689