On Friday 3 March Professor Jovan Babic, University of Belgrade, Serbia, and Portland University, U.S.A, lectured on "The ethics of space: Where? What does it mean, why does it matter?" in Theoretical Ethics II class.

Abstract: After few illustrations, the purpose of which is to demonstrate how important and delicate, in moral and political sense, is the place or location where we do what we do and how large the impact of space in human life and history is, the presentation proceeds with some intriguing and provocative issues of the spatial articulation of our collective life. The most basic of those issues here, it seems, is that the territory is needed, or is the best frame, for the articulation of laws, legal norms defining some rules as “our laws”. The idea of legal norms assumes the existence of sovereignty, a legislative will contained in a collective identity capable to issue norms with the biding power of laws. If laws are freely decided upon then the spatial scope of their validity entails that the world is divided in parts belonging to different peoples, with different legislative wills. This means that the world, although one, is not unified in the sense in which morality is unique and unified. The political heterogeneity of the world is connected both with the freedom to decide what “our laws” will be (including retaining the possibility to change them) and their capacity to give us the predictability in our joint endeavors. If so then the territory belongs to those who reside there, and “where” matters in most political matters, those matters that, in Millean terms, are “other-regarding”, whether individual or collective. Starting from that point we should devise a taxonomy of norms regulating presumed freedom, or right, to move, which should be based in the principle of universal hospitality, but also restricted by the same principle, implying an asymmetry between the right to leave, which might be among natural rights, and the right to come and stay, which depends on free acceptance of those residing there before.

See full text here.

Bio-note: Jovan Babić, Professor of Ethics at the University of Belgrade, and Visiting Professor at Portland State University, OR, USA. Author of books Kant and Scheller (1986), Morality and Our Time (1998, 2nd ed. 2005), and Introduction to Business Ethics (2000), as well as numerous papers in Serbian and foreign journals. Organiser of ILECS (International Law and Ethics Conference Series), 1997-present. Editor of "Applied Ethics" series, published by Službeni Glasnik Srbije.

Contact: jbabic[at]sezampro[dot]rs