300652 Ethics and Morality: Anthropological Perspectives (S) (WiSe 2022/2023)

From environmental crises to pandemics, poverty and war, the last years have thrown the need for global cooperation into sharp relief. At the same time, the rules and directions of such cooperation seem less and less certain. The emphatic emergence of countries whose governments oppose the moral hegemony of liberal democracy, as well as the apparent erosion of the norms of civil interaction in the age of the social media, have rendered the "end of history" on the terms of a cultural moralities transcending universal rationality, which Francis Fukuyama famously augured in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a distant prospect. As a consequence, questions regarding the role of ethics and morality for social peace and the global future take on an increasing urgency.

Even though this has always been an important subject of social anthropological research, our present times thus bestow the occupation with cultural conceptions of right and wrong with a renewed relevance. In this seminar, we will review some philosophical foundations and engage with a range of recent literature from the field of moral anthropology. In particular, our topics may include the origin and socialization of moral commitments; moral economy; the ethics of medical care; political violence; and the place of ethics in the context of the modern state. The social anthropological perspective means that we will approach these issues primarily through ethnographic examples from different parts of the world.