Det etiska är politiskt!

Ethics. Ah yes, a county just outside London, the old joke goes. Tydligen är det dock allt fler som saknar en seriös samhällsdebatt om på vilka värden vårt samhälle skall vila. En samling brittiska intellektuella har nämligen gått samman för att stimulera en debatt om etik, politik och det gemensamma goda. Initiativtagarna till det mycket intressanta projektet Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis, skriver:

"... our idea is that in public life today we've almost forgotten how to talk about ethics. The financial and political scandals, and the looming issue of climate change, are all, in part, crises of ethics; no-one has done anything illegal, or at least hardly anyone. Our project is designed to address this hiatus, and that's why it's called called Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis."

Bland skribenterna i märks bland andra Rowan Williams, John Milbank och Michael Sandel:

"... today most of our political arguments revolve around welfare and freedom - increasing economic output and respecting people’s rights. For many, talk of virtue in politics brings to mind religious conservatives telling people how to live. But this is not the only way that conceptions of virtue and the common good inform politics. The challenge is to imagine a politics that takes moral and spiritual questions seriously, and brings them to bear on broad economic and civic concerns."
- Michael Sandel, We Need A Public Life With A Purpose

"Politics left to managers and economics left to brokers add up to a recipe for social and environmental chaos. We are all a bit shy, understandably so, of making too much of moral commitment in public discourse; we are wary of high-sounding hypocrisy and conscious of the unavoidable plurality of convictions that will exist in a modern society. Yet the truth is that the economic and social order isn’t a self-contained affair, separate from actual human decisions about what is good and desirable." - Rowan Williams, How To Live As If We Were Human

"Politics on both the left and right were once driven by competing accounts of human flourishing. Our challenge is to remake our own visions for today, and to debate them." (...) "The deeper, richer, noisier notions of ethics that once characterised politics have fallen way” - Adam Lent, Afterword

Jag längtar efter ett brett samtal som bland annat tydliggör vilken antropologi, som ligger till grund för samtidens olika ideologiska strömningar. I Sverige är de enda som mig veterligen sökt få upp dessa frågor på dagordningen Kristdemokraterna som redovisat för sin värdegrund och människosyn.

Föreställ er att nästa partiledardebatt inleds med att partiledarna i tur och ordning ombeds besvara frågan: Vad är det att vara människa?
Med den frågeställningen borde all politik börja!