Search results for ""Author Avishai Margalit""

Adultery, treason, and apostasy no longer carry the weight they once did. Yet we constantly see and hear stories of betrayal, and many people have personally experienced a destructive breach of loyalty. Avishai Margalit argues that the tension between the ubiquity of betrayal and the loosening of its hold is a sign of the strain between ethics and morality, between thick and thin human relations. On Betrayal offers a philosophical account of thick human relations—relationships with friends, family, and core communities—through their pathology, betrayal.Judgments of betrayal often shift unreliably. A whistle-blower to some is a backstabber to others; a traitor to one side is a hero to the other. Yet the notion of what it means to betray is remarkably consistent across cultures and eras. Betrayal undermines thick trust, dissolving the glue that holds our most meaningful relationships together. Recently, public attention has lingered on trust between strangers—on relations that play a central role in the globalized economy. These, according to Margalit, are guided by morality. On Betrayal is about ethics: what we owe to the people and groups that give us our sense of belonging.Margalit’s clear-sighted account draws on literary, historical, and personal sources, including stories from his childhood during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Through its discussion of betrayal, it examines what our thick relationships are and should be and revives the long-discarded notion of fraternity.

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When is political compromise acceptable--and when is it fundamentally rotten, something we should never accept, come what may? What if a rotten compromise is politically necessary? Compromise is a great political virtue, especially for the sake of peace. But, as Avishai Margalit argues, there are moral limits to acceptable compromise even for peace. But just what are those limits? At what point does peace secured with compromise become unjust? Focusing attention on vitally important questions that have received surprisingly little attention, Margalit argues that we should be concerned not only with what makes a just war, but also with what kind of compromise allows for a just peace. Examining a wide range of examples, including the Munich Agreement, the Yalta Conference, and Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, Margalit provides a searching examination of the nature of political compromise in its various forms. Combining philosophy, politics, and history, and written in a vivid and accessible style, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises is full of surprising new insights about war, peace, justice, and sectarianism.

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Warum Verrat? Heute scheint die Vorstellung von Verrat kein Thema mehr zu sein. So bleibt heutzutage in liberalen Staaten etwa Untreue als Verletzung sexueller Monogamie auf die Privatsphäre persönlicher Beziehungen beschränkt. Apostasie ist in liberalen Gesellschaften von einem Akt des Verrats zu einem Grundrecht geworden. Avishai Margalits Interesse an Apostasie ist kein theologisches, sondern ein philosophisch-anthropologisches; es zielt nicht auf Gott, sondern auf Menschen. Seiner Meinung nach ist die größte Herausforderung für jeden, der an das Projekt der Ethik und an die Wichtigkeit und Brauchbarkeit des Begriffs des Verrats glaubt, den Begriff des Verrats von seiner feudalen Untermauerung zu befreien. Mit dem Entwurf einer anständigen Gesellschaft gelingt es Margalit, jedem politischen Pragmatismus eine unverzichtbare ethisch-moralische Dimension einzuzeichnen, die sich grundlegend und konsequent am Leitbild menschlicher Würde orientiert.

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