Consensus and conflict in pluralistic societies

Lecture: Consensus and conflict in pluralistic societies

Lecturer: Beatrice Magni (Università degli Studi di Milano)

Date: Friday, March 21, 2025, 6:30 p.m.

Place: Monte Verità (Ascona), Auditorium and Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84729906708

Cycle: Eranos-Jung Lectures 2025 - A Jungian Lexicon for our Times: Guilt, Soul, Conflict, Time, Care, Knowledge

Language: Italian

Moderator: Fabio Merlini (Fondazione Eranos, Ascona / SUFFP, Lugano)

Followed by discussion with the audience and aperitif

The video recording of the conference will be viewable on the official YouTube channel of the Eranos Foundation.

Lecture Presentation

The field of ethics – understood as a philosophical reflection on morality, that is, on the values, principles and choices that guide interactions between individuals (or between an individual and himself) – is complex and plural. Public ethics helps us find tools and criteria for evaluating and justifying public choices and choices of collective relevance on fundamental issues of common life. The boundary between consensus and conflict, and the theoretical problems connected to the distinction between what is right and what is good, constitute a long-lasting line of argument in normative ethical and political reflection. Conflict, in particular, seems to be the irreducible core of our ethical and political lives: not a residual element, or an extreme risk, that politics and ethics must, or can, remove, but exactly their “fact”, their “matter”, which no “form”, no order, can ever renounce, under penalty of drying up the common world and society. Based on these premises, the topic of conflict will be examined by focusing attention on the following research questions: 1) the boundary between political consensus and moral dissent: in what sense should/should not (can/can not) a political society refer to an idea of good?; the conflict between private reasons and public reasons: from Antigone to J.S. Mill; conflict and tragic choices: the means-ends dilemma from Machiavelli to M. Walzer; starting points for a discussion: the case of bioethical dilemmas; starting points for a second discussion: post-conflict management in transitional justice.

Lecturer' Bio-bibliography

Beatrice Magni is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the Faculty of Political, Economic and Social Sciences (SPES) of the University of Milan, where she teaches public ethics, bioethics, theories of equality and rights. Co-director of Bdl - Biblioteca della libertà, at the Luigi Einaudi Research Center in Turin, she deals with normative political theory, and is mainly interested in the following areas of research: theories, problems, and practices of pluralism; theories of justice, theories of conflict; compromise (moral and political); gender studies; public ethics and just societies; bioethics. Her books include Conflitto è libertà. Saggio su Machiavelli (2012), Hannah Arendt et la condition politique. Le réel dans la pensée philosophique du XXe siècle (2018), Machiavelli. Sette saggi di teoria politica (2018), and Bisogna adattarsi. Un nuovo imperativo politico (2023).

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On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of C.G. Jung (1875-1961), the Eranos Foundation dedicates its Eranos-Jung Lectures - the public conferences held at the Monte Verità Conference Center in Ascona - to the exploration of a Jungian micro-lexicon, with which we wish to map some problematic nodes of our present. These are six words - Guilt, Soul, Conflict, Time, Care, Knowledge - to which Jung, during his intellectual and human journey, dedicated pages of great clarity and depth. For us today, they are precious notions through which we can shed light on ourselves, on our relationship with others and with the surrounding world. In this way, Jung will accompany us on a journey of discovery inside and outside ourselves, to help us better understand what went wrong in the process of civilization to which we owe both our power and our fragility, in the face of a reality that no longer seems to respond as we would like to our hegemonic designs.