Solicitations

As the title of this companion set of essays in ethics to Modernities: Histories, Beliefs, and Values published at the same time, the expression “soliciting” is used more particularly than in ordinary everyday usage. For the most part “solicitation” here means a person or a group of persons seeking to obtain not just something generally. Specifically, “solicitation” here means persons’ seeking especially some fundamental ethical recognition in their evident destitution by entreating other persons both to recognize and to act upon their shared humanity. This more particular sense of “solicitation” corresponds to the now globalized awareness of very great numbers of persons today still continuing to suffer not just from poverty but from extreme poverty or destitution. Despite however the general decrease in the number of persons suffering from poverty, the number of those suffering from destitution has, as Essay Three documents in detail, largely remained stable. That is, the nature of the situations of very many persons persists in soliciting the moral and ethical effective concern of almost all. Responding not inappropriately to such solicitations in sufficient measure however would seem to require second thoughts about the nature of human beings and persons as fundamentally contingent beings. Such responses moreover would also seem to insist on distinguishing sharply between the moral and the ethical, between roughly what is mainly a matter of obligation and what is mainly a matter of value. Trying to understanding these matters less generally is the main point of the introductory and concluding essays about situations in Japan and the Sudan outside the more usual range of Western European reflection, together with the pairs of essays gathered in each of the three sections below.

The author:
Peter McCormick is a French and Canadian citizen working mainly in contemporary ethics, social and political philosophy, and the philosophy of art. He is Prince Franz-Joseph II and Princess Gina Memorial Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein, formerly he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. Among his impressive list of book monographs are Blindly Seeing. Essays in Ethics: Discourses, Sayings, Sufferings, and In Times Like These. Essays in Ethics: Situations, Resources, Issues both published in the libri nigri series as volumes 63 and 64.