Photo copyright: Tuula Sakaranaho
WP3 investigates how coping with extreme situations relate to fundamental ethical, legal and societal/political ideals such as human dignity, justice and equality, security and basic need, negative liberty and right, or well-being. When speaking about the meliorist idea of responding to extreme suffering in ethics, the focus also shifts from theory to practical moral responsibility. Both individuals and societies/institutions have roles in reducing suffering. We ask what kind of role our values and norms have in the face of predictable turmoil, extremities, and emergencies within and between societies. How are people’s distress and suffering heard?
Meliorism views suffering not as inevitable, but as a condition that can be mitigated through human action. Within the legal sphere, this perspective challenges us to see law not merely as a mechanism for assigning blame or adjudicating disputes, but as an instrument for preventing harm, alleviating suffering, and reforming the structures that produce injustice. We ask how crisis situations can be anticipated and responded to in legislation or politics. What, for example, does the right to life or subsistence practically mean in such situations? What actions do these rights allow us to undertake when they are violated?
In addition to legal history, WP3 examines these questions from the perspective of the history of ethics. The main research period extends from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, but we will of course take into account possible earlier and/or later influences. Using and further articulating the old philosophical and legal principle of extreme necessity (necessitas non habet legem, “necessity knows no law”) we explore how medieval and early modern jurists and theologians/philosophers responded to extreme suffering in their texts and what kind of active means they recommended to alleviate suffering. We will also consider how these responses to extremes reflect the meliorist stance of suffering.