There is not a day when we are not given a dose of hatred like that of Hamas with the kidnapped Israelis and displayed, dead or alive, as trophies; or when we are not subjected to insolent provocations like the video of Gaza devastated by Netanyahu and turned into a Riviera by Trump, or when we are not struck by closer scenes like that of the hundred or so people sleeping in El Prat airport who have beenGueststo march, which are just a sample of the hundreds of settlements that every day seek shelter under the balcony of their home.
I was thinking about all this and I felt like I was swimming against the current as we began a new edition of the Pedralbes Dialogues, which we organised at the ARA with the Barcelona City Council. On Tuesday night we were talking about the good life (not to be confused with the easier meaning of the good life), in a dialogue between Professor Victoria Camps and Professor Daniel Gamper, and we immediately ended up with ethics. "Robinson Crusoe would not have needed ethics because he lived alone on an island, but we do because we live in society," Camps gave as an example of the need for self-control, of the balance between virtues and defects and of individual responsibility to make coexistence possible. At the end, one of the attendees asked himself how it was possible to live a good life in a world of savage capitalism like the one we have today. The answer was an invitation to act: ethics comes, precisely, from the awareness of personal imperfections and from the idea that a perfect world does not exist. And so if we were to conclude that the good life was not possible, perhaps we would let it go.
