The Ethics of Ambiguity

As King avows in one of his religious sermons, “I do not pretend to understand all of the ways of God or his particular timetable for grappling with evil. Perhaps if God dealt with evil in the overbearing way that we wish, he would defeat his ultimate purpose.”84 Given this acquiescence of religious faith, the very idea of an “ultimate purpose” (a

Indeed, your world can break down precisely because you live on after the death of everything you love. This “death” can be much more painful and fearful than the prospect of your own death, not least because it is a death that you have to survive. Hence, as long as you are attached to someone or something that you can lose, you are susceptible to

It is difficult enough to think of oneself as free at all, but Sartre goes further by saying that I am literally nothing beyond what I decide to be. To realise the extent of my freedom is to be plunged into what both Heidegger and Kierkegaard called ‘anxiety’ — Angst or, in French, angoisse.

We should be the subjects of what we do and what we value, rather than being subjected to what we supposedly need to do and what we supposedly value. How such a revolution of our lives is possible—and what it requires of us—is specified by the principles of democratic socialism that I will articulate. The challenge of democratic socialism is to dev