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Research and Education in ethics
Research project : Ethics and the family
The fondation Ostad Elahi: Ethics and Human Solidarity, recognized as a public interest group by the French State with special consultative status at the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, and CERCES, the Center for Research in Meaning, Ethics and Society (CERSES/ Paris Descartes University/CNRS/UMR 8137), are collaborating in a call for papers on the theme of “Ethics and Family”.
The objective is to gather papers from a range of scientific disciplines (ethics, anthropology, psychology, law, economy, sociology, philosophy, etc.) for a book that makes an inventory of current research both at a national and an international level on the following question: What are the ethical problems and the norms of moral behavior in contemporary families in the context of a globalized world?
It is within the family that moral sentiments as well as certain significant ethical expectations crystallize, whether it be moral motivations for forming a couple and founding a family based on a particular model, parent-child relations in all their complexities, or moral asymmetry in the relation to oneself as opposed to the relation to others. It is not an easy task to grasp and clarify that which is entangled in emotions, affects, and justifications. For example, the ordinary concept of fidelity oscillates between private virtue, social virtue and theological virtue.
The family, as most recently conceptualized, seems to be a source of new vulnerabilities requiring a reevaluation of the demand for autonomy based on consent as the ultimate criterion of legitimacy. This question may involve the choice of one’s spouse and the possible development of a sense of obligation in individuals unable to achieve autonomy and freedom. An individual’s choices are often a response to family pressure, pressure from the community, and even from society at large to do what is expected of him of her.
The status of the body and of sexuality within the family also raises questions of an ethical nature concerning one’s relationship to one’s body. Should one identify oneself with one’s body or is the body a person’s property? How does one accept one’s own body? – but also concerning the development of one’s relations to others. The question of personal identity, and of relations with others can be raised both from a moral and political viewpoint.
Conditions of procreation (generalized contraception, assisted conception), forms of kinship and paternity (the evolution of systems of name attribution, adoptive and artificial parenthood), and sexual identity itself are questioned in this debate on the family and reflect both individual practices and collective developments.
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