Etica dell’accoglienza. Giustizia, compassione, speranza

While keeping in the background the supposition according to which emotions and feelings, compassion above all, are the most determinative factors of human solidarity, in their being transversal to the heterogeneous belonging of individuals, in the first part of this article attention is drawn to the instructions for education to the ethics of the intercultural hospitality contained in the White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue published in 2008 by the Council of Europe, as well as in other documents pertaining to particular European educational institutions for the training of the staff working in centres for the reception of migrants and asylum-seekers. The second part focuses on the ideas of good life implicit in some theories (R. A. Easterling’s, A. Sen’s, M. Nussbaum’s) on the issue of the subject’s rights to happiness and to the development of the human capabilities for expression and production. The third part lingers on the theory of emotions as judgements of evaluation, and, in particular, of the educated capacity for compassion as proposed by M. Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought. In this context, an interpretation of the Spinozian concept of love is proposed that is different from the one offered by Nussbaum. Finally, by evoking the ethical-reconstructive principle advanced by J.- M. Ferry as practice of reception in the intercultural dialogue of values connected to symbolic beliefs that are not universalizable, a “principle of auxiliarity” is suggested drawing from both secular and religious conceptions of compassionate hope with respect to those forms of tragic suffering that, like mourning, escape man’s pragmatic capacities for a solution.