Ética de la contingencia para mundos incompletos

Abstract

Contigency is a concept that that has been taken up by the humanist tradition, social theory and the sciences. It reveals the absence of a necessary structure in the word and, because of that, its incompleteness. This raises the question about the patterns that orient behavior within a context where all normative aspirations are understood as necessary against the background of contingency. By researching into the historical and modern semantics of the concept of contingency, I identify the origins of the concept in Aristotle's modal logic, then the separation between the contingency of the world and the necessity of god in the scholastics, and highlight the modern turn towards an immanent concept of contingency in Hegel, Meillassoux and the theory of evolution. On this basis, I put forward the idea of an ethics of contingency that provides relevant orientations for a world that is devoid of ultimate necessity. Crucially, an ethics of contingency prevents necessity to prevail over possibility and intervenes, through strategies of increasing contingency when this takes place.