Ph.d. prøveforsvar ved Anders Hee Nørbjerg Poulsen

Ph.d.-prøveforsvar 

Ved Ph.d.-studerende: Anders Hee Nørbjerg Poulsen 

Opponent:  Professor, Claudia Welz

Title: Ethics becomes ethics

When consulting the discipline called normative ethics, especially three views on ethics come to the fore. That is: Consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics.

Occasionally, one could get the impression that it has always been so. That is, the frame with these views “fell down from heaven”, outside history, outside time and place, ‘from nowhere’. That is not the case. The different views were worked out, elaborated by philosophers (cf., e.g., Aristotle, Bentham, Mill, and Kant) – they were worked out ‘from somewhere’. Does this amount to a relativistic take on ethics, i.e., that the validity, perhaps even the truth, of a certain ethics is relative to its genesis? Not necessarily.

In my PhD Project I suggest the idea according to which consequences, duties, obligations, and virtues came to be identified as ethics (ethically relevant). If that is correct, it seems to suggest that the scope of ethics can change. In other words, ethics becomes ethics.

My PhD project suggest, moreover, the idea according to which ethics becomes ethics not only through philosophical thinking, but also through Erfahrungen of certain events (e.g., Auschwitz, possibly also the climate change). Since Erfahrungen never cease to end, there is an everlasting possibility of Erfahrungen of something new that might be of relevance for ethics, which means ethics has the possibility to become ethics ad infinitum.

In my project I suggest a relevant concept of Erfahrung for ethics and suggest what such a concept of Erfahrung makes possible to ‘erfahre’: certain events. Lastly, I suggest what Erfahrungen of certain events amounts to in ethics. Put shortly, my suggestion sounds: the Geschichtlichkeit of ethics.