Eduardo Infante, author of ‘Ethics in the Street’: “Forgiveness is the renunciation of legitimate revenge”

Here are three exercises that force you to think. Would you forgive a murderer with Alzheimer’s who doesn’t remember who he is? Would you genetically improve your child? If you had to install an ‘ethical system’ in the car and program the algorithms, what would you choose: save a young person who crosses the street incorrectly or an elderly person who crosses a zebra crossing?

These are just some of the dilemmas that the philosopher Eduardo Infante (Huelva, 1977) raises in his latest book, ‘Ethics in the street’ (Ariel). In the aforementioned and other examples that appear at the beginning of each chapter, the answer is not always clear because deciding what is fair is not so easy.

The author turns to the classics, from Socrates and Plato to Kant and Locker, to help us reflect. In these times when not everyone is willing to listen and dialogue, sometimes choosing the right action forces us to confront those closest to us, those who are ideologically close. “Many times acting ethically means having to confront the tribe in which one was born, questioning the morals that one has received. Sometimes, the trenches may have taught us well what is dignified and correct, but other times it is not like that,” he points out.

Why should we act ethically?

Because it is the only way to act freely. To act ethically is to do it after having reflected and having asked yourself if what you are going to do is the best that any human being can do. If you don’t think what you do, the alternative is that others think about it for you and usually do it against you.

I explain the second reason from an anecdote told by the philosopher Peter Singer. It tells how he has to say goodbye to a friend who is dying of cancer. He is someone who has dedicated his life to doing what is right, to imparting justice, dignity and truth. When she asks him the reasons why he has lived this way, the man answers that he would like to believe that his life has been about something more than consuming and producing garbage. It is about giving life dignity.

Ethics is the discipline that encourages us to have the courage to be autonomous. Following the differentiation that Kant made, we could divide people between those who are capable of thinking for themselves and those who renounce this and prefer to blindly obey. Does someone who renounces thinking act less ethically?

Definitely. And not only does it not act ethically, but it generates injustice, suffering and harm. Both to him and to third parties. When Hannah Arendt encounters Eichmann, with evil, she encounters someone who has not made any effort, who has given up thinking because she hides behind the fact that she was following orders. Many times acting ethically means having to confront the tribe in which one was born, questioning the morals that one has received. Sometimes the trenches may have taught us well what is dignified and correct, but other times it is not.

Can you learn to think?

Of course. The only way is with dialogue. Plato said that thinking is dialoguing with oneself. In the gymnasiums of Athens, citizens met to dialogue, that is, to confront. Furthermore, children learned to think by listening to others engage in dialogue.

There were no cell phones on the tables.

I was going there. Screens atomize and individualize us. It is no coincidence that today we do not know how to converse.

He highlights that philosophical dialogue is also political and points out that thinkers like Habermas considered that the triumph of totalitarianism was the German people’s renunciation of dialogue. Do you think that now with the triumph of Trump and others, something similar is happening?

I am totally convinced. A few weeks ago I was in the United States and one of the things that surprised me is how the discourse is advancing that democracy is something that has already failed and that we must overcome it. In that logic, if they deny the existence of the common good, why do parliaments need spaces for dialogue?

It is no coincidence that today we do not know how to converse

He paraphrases Newton to explain that there are those who argue that ethics has to be like physics and that it can be good in theory, but bad in practice. I don’t know if you have any examples that serve to illustrate this theory.

Any ethical concept, be it freedom, dignity or justice, if what it generates is suffering, pain or corruption, is useless. If we reduce freedom to drinking beers we are emptying the concept of meaning.

You warn of an issue that may seem obvious, but it is not. Remember that we have to be aware that the relationship between humans and Artificial Intelligence is not that of a person and a machine, but rather it is between humans ‘mediated’ by a machine. Will AI push the seams of ethics to the limit?

Artificial Intelligence cannot set limits on itself. The ethics of AI will be imposed by humans. The values ​​and their purposes will always be decided by a human being. The problem is who they will be, whether the parliaments in which these goals will have been debated or whether it will be decided by an oligarchy that will only seek purely economic and productive values.

In the book he addresses, based on dilemmas that we could describe as practical, how the decisions we make are often much more complex than we think. I ask you the first question you asked: would you forgive a murderer with Alzheimer’s?

That’s a big problem that requires a lot of time! The question is whether that person is the same person or not. Furthermore, there is the question of responsibility and blame. It would also be necessary to define what forgiveness is, something that is a voluntary decision. Forgiveness is the renunciation of legitimate revenge and if we delve deeper into what Alzheimer’s is, we will discover that the person no longer exists. It would be punishing a murderer who suffers from an illness that has destroyed his personality. It is the body, but it is no longer the subject.

Faced with anxiolytics, what we have to do is sit down again and reflect on what it means to live well because the truth is that we are not living well.

It also addresses questions intrinsic to the human condition that the philosophers of classical Greece were already asking. For example, what is a good life?

Today, the very way we live is what is making us sick. Faced with anxiolytics, what we have to do is sit down again and reflect on what it means to live well because the truth is that we are not living well. This, which was the great ethical question, was resolved by the classics. Seneca already talked about anxiety. Aristotle dedicates 10 scientific courses to ethics and, two of them, to friendship. What it tells us is that there is no good life without friends. And it is something that all classical schools agree on. Friendship is a virtue, something that is trained and learned. This must be recovered in the public square.

That leads us, in the end, to happiness. Aristotle also defended that it is only achieved in the polis, in community. Do you agree?

Happiness is what makes us human: thinking, living together, caring for each other… Individual good is linked to the common good, it can only be achieved within a good society. No matter how much rampant neoliberalism defends it, we do not survive alone.