Reidar Due - The Ethics of Responsibility

Focusing on the works of Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida, these lectures present a tradition of philosophical ethics in France. This ethics does not concern what we should do. Ethics concerns responsibility in an extensive, immaterial sense: how can you be a person who takes responsibility beyond your immediate personal and social interests? We shall see how for Ricoeur this leads to a reflection on memory as a responsibility for the past and for Derrida it entails a conception of political utopia understood as responsibility for the unfulfilled hopes of history.