If I may talk about myself (as usual), this interview with Jurgen Habermas caught my eye for personal reasons.
I organized my work around the concept of 'rational freedom,' tracing it from Plato and Aristotle into three branches of early modern German philosophy (via Rousseau), 1) the liberal strain in Kant, 2) the conservative in Hegel, and 3) the radical in Marx. I concluded with an examination of Jurgen Habermas as one who gave ‘RF’ a communicative spin. Years later, I came to appreciate the religious roots of the idea that the freedom/happiness of each and all are connected and form a unity of concern and value. The blend I have going on might look a bit odd, but there is a consistent rationale. It all depends. Some see the likes of Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx as a decisive break with natural law, others its realisation. There is an ethical underpinning, something which affirms transcendent standards against conventionalism. Habermas now gets it, too, and has done for a while. We work along the same lines, only I now explicitly affirm a religious ethic. I once thought the secularisation of the religious ethic possible (as in Kant and his categorical imperative). I now think that impossible, undesirable, and unnecessary - you cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too, when it is gone it is gone, leaving self-created gods/devils involved in an endless sophistic power struggle. Philosophical reason undercuts itself. This has practical consequences, as we see when attempting to deal with collective issues and forces - the self-choosing, self-possessing individual is always free to 'contract out,' ensuring common ruination when sufficient people do so. I quote from the German: "As a philosopher, I am interested in the question of what we can learn from the discourse about faith and knowledge. The problem of morality and morality pending between Kant and Hegel is precisely because this problem has peeled out of the simultaneously secularizing and radicalizing appropriation of the universalist core of Christian love ethics. The process of the conceptual translation of the central content of religious tradition is my theme - in this case the metaphysical appropriation of the idea that all believers form a universal yet sibling community and that each member, taking into account their acceptable and distinctive individuality, deserves just treatment deserves. This equality of everyone is not a trivial issue, as we see in the Corona crisis today." How do you know? "In the course of the crisis so far, one has been able to observe politicians in some countries who hesitate to align their strategy to the principle that the effort of the state to save every single human life must take absolute priority over utilitarian settlement with the unwanted economic costs that this goal may produce. If the state let the epidemic run free to quickly achieve sufficient immunity across the population, it would accept the avoidable risk of predictable breakdown of the health system and therefore a relatively higher proportion of deaths. My "story" also sheds a light on the moral philosophical background of current strategies in dealing with such crises." Jürgen Habermas on the Corona Crisis: The Different Manages of States (Accept my apologies for the translation, it may be a bit off, in the wording possibly and in the phrasing certainly. I have done my best. At school at 12 I had to choose from a range of "options." I wanted to do German but couldn't if I wanted to continue to do History (my best and most favourite subject by a mile). I needed the German for my later work. But no, I had to choose subjects I had no interest in and even less aptitude for, and so failed miserably (CSE 4 in Geography and Geometrical and Engineering Drawing says it all, a grade above moron level).