French Ethics and the Economics of Freedom : From Politics to Moral Obligation

This book discusses the ethics of freedom in the context of race and argues that the question of injustice must be resolved not from a political angle, but from an ethical one. Drawing on the ideas expressed in Naomi Zack’s The Ethics and Mores of Race, Nathalie Nya explores the topic of race and its connections to morality and ethics. Building on Zack’s argument that what is ethical or good for White people may not be the same for historically colonized groups, showing the problem with cultural relativism, Nya develops a moral ethics of injustice around the history of race, politics, and colonialism. Justice historically occurs at the intersection of politics and ethics; for justice to occur in a society, politics and ethics must coexist. However, for the oppressed living in the modern age, this ideal has never been achievable. Oppressed groups recognize their human rights as almost non-existent simply because their political freedom is not aligned with their ontological freedom, and ontological freedom cannot be respected without political freedom. Nya refers to this concept as the “economics of freedom,” which creates problems in the conceptualization of real freedom as a form of moral obligation