Forty years after May 1968, the issue of morals and ethics is raised in many ways in contemporary western democratic society. In this context, the question is how to found contemporary ethics or, to put it differently, how to identify which public and private morals can a democracy like ours, which was founded on the recognition of individual rights as the highest value, still accommodate.
Alain Renaut starts this book by establishing the terms of the debate, going back to the earliest choices made by our contemporary liberal democracy after centuries of religious warfare: thus we adopted a minimal ethic, reduced to the idea of not harming others. Is this option unsurpassable? Could we not conceive of a denser public ethic, one that wouldn’t challenge individual freedoms but would guide us on the ethical issues we face collectively and individually today?