Victoria Camps: "Insults should not be banned, but perhaps we should moderate them"

BarcelonaThe good life and life are not the same thing. The latter is a philosophical expression that dates back to Aristotle and refers to "what is good in the behavior of people, what does it mean for a person to behave well, to be excellent, and therefore, what is the life that deserves the qualification of good." This is how the emeritus professor of moral and political philosophy at the UAB explained it. Victoria Camps in the first session of What is a good life? the cycle of Dialogues on Ethics and Moral Philosophy held at the Pedralbes monastery in collaboration with the ARA newspaper, under the intellectual direction of the UAB philosophy professor Daniel Gamper and moderated by the journalist Antoni Bassas.

"The good life is the life that seeks happiness, but happiness is not a woman or wealth, or honour, or success, but rather living a virtuous life," recalled Camps. This virtuous life should be individual and collective, and character should be forged from birth. "To form character, something very important is needed, which is self-control," Camps points out. "That is to say, we must be able to know how to choose the average between excess and defect. Above all in this highly polarised world, what prevents a virtuous life is polarisation."

Moving forward in the history of thought, Camps has pointed out how in modernity, with Kant, the fundamental concept is no longer virtue, but duty, and what to do to be a good person. "Philosophy can help, but only if we want to think," says Camps, who in 1990 published the book Public virtues. "From modernity onwards, we stopped talking about virtues as a central concept, because the great value is freedom and equality. From then on, what ethics should manage is the exercise of freedom," said Camps. According to the philosophy professor, the fact of being free does not give "carte blanche to do everything we want to do" within the law. "There are things that are not legally prohibited and that should not be done either," she stressed, although she finds that liberalism "thinns" the Penal Code. And entering into the subject of freedom of expression, Camps stresses that "insults, offences and blasphemies should not be prohibited, but perhaps we should moderate ourselves for ethical reasons, because internally we think that it is the best way to act."

Yes Public virtues were to be reissued today, it would probably address "the regulation of lies and fake news", as Bassas has pointed out. And Camps has warned that more "verification" is needed: "If we cannot trust the information, we cannot trust anything. The basis of communication is trust, and that trust disappears," Camps has stressed.

Ethics in times of wild capitalism

During the question period, Camps answered the question of how to achieve a good life in times of savage capitalism. "Ethics is based on dissatisfaction with a world that is not working as it should, because of capitalism and for other reasons, because today we have problems that are everyone's problems, including climate change, migratory movements and great inequalities," he warned. "We must change. I believe that ethics should not be utopian, we should not think of a perfect world, because a perfect world does not exist, but rather that it is based on the awareness of imperfection and that some imperfections depend on us."

The next dialogues in the series will be held on March 25, April 1 and April 8, with the writer Remedios Zafra, the philosopher Josep Maria Esquirol and the professor of social and political theory at the UB David Casassas, respectively. Admission is free (with limited seating) and the discussions can also be followed via the monastery's website and the centre's YouTube channel.