moral blindness

Evil is not restricted to war or to circumstances in which people act under extreme pressure. Nowadays, evil is more frequently revealed in the everyday insensitivity to the suffering of others, in the inability or refusal to understand them and in the eventual displacement of one's own ethical outlook. Evil and moral blindness lurk in what we conceive as normality and in the triviality and banality of daily life, and not only in abnormal and exceptional cases. The characteristic type of moral blindness that defines our societies is what Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis brilliantly analyze based on the concept of "adiaphora": the act of placing certain acts or categories of human beings outside the universe of moral evaluations and obligations. Adiaphora implies an attitude of indifference to what happens in the world, a moral numbness. In a life whose rhythms are dictated by audience wars and box office revenues, where people are absorbed in the latest trends in technological gadgets and forms of gossip; in our "hurried life" in which there is rarely time to stop and pay attention to important issues, we run the serious risk of losing our sensitivity to the problems of others. Only celebrities and media stars can expect to be taken into account in a society exhausted by sensationalist and worthless information. This penetrating investigation into the destiny of our moral sensitivity will be of great interest to those who are concerned about the profound changes that silently shape the lives of everyone in our contemporary liquid world.

Evil is not restricted to war or to circumstances in which people act under extreme pressure. Nowadays, evil is more frequently revealed in the everyday insensitivity to the suffering of others, in the inability or refusal to understand them and in the eventual displacement of one's own ethical outlook. Evil and moral blindness lurk in what we conceive as normality and in the triviality and banality of daily life, and not only in abnormal and exceptional cases. The characteristic type of moral blindness that defines our societies is what Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis brilliantly analyze based on the concept of "adiaphora": the act of placing certain acts or categories of human beings outside the universe of moral evaluations and obligations. Adiaphora implies an attitude of indifference to what happens in the world, a moral numbness. In a life whose rhythms are dictated by audience wars and box office revenues, where people are absorbed in the latest trends in technological gadgets and forms of gossip; in our "hurried life" in which there is rarely time to stop and pay attention to important issues, we run the serious risk of losing our sensitivity to the problems of others. Only celebrities and media stars can expect to be taken into account in a society exhausted by sensationalist and worthless information. This penetrating investigation into the destiny of our moral sensitivity will be of great interest to those who are concerned about the profound changes that silently shape the lives of everyone in our contemporary liquid world.