Ethics

The 9th International Symposium of the World Centre for Humanist Studies (WCHS) will take place the 28th, 29th, and 30th of April. Since the beginning of the WCHS international symposiums, 15 years have passed and the organisational deployment of volunteers around the world to make it happen has multiplied in each edition of the symposium.

Human rights do not have the universal validity that corresponds to their purpose.

To begin with, human rights suffer the physical, economic, racial, religious, sexual and psychological or moral violence strikes, considering violence as a methodology of the different forms of discrimination.

And there are wars, poverty and social exclusion, racism, religious intolerance, gender inequality, censorship, defamation and coercion, as concrete expressions of daily attacks on human rights around the world.

In the context of the 9th WCHS Symposium, dedicated to the limits to overcome in order to get out of the unprecedented crisis that affects us, the eradication of violence is obviously one of the issues at stake.

The persistence of political and economic powers in using violence as a means to maintain or extend their hegemony, and the generalisation of violence as a basis of expression for human existence, lock humanity into destructive, pusillanimous and dead-end patterns.

The dimension of the current crisis shows that the current economic system - based on a productivist and consumerist model dependent on the domination of the great international financial capital - does not work; that it is taking the terrestrial ecosystem that supports life to the limit of the point of no return; that is governed by the value of money; that it sits in the paradigm that grants capital the power to decide on the direction of profit, while the worker only receives the salary; that it has a skewed distributive matrix of capital and that leads to usury, speculation and the gene

The gender issue is crossing our borders of thought. Today the issue of gender raises not only sexual diversity, but also includes identity, the relationship between peers and with other generations, the relationship with the world, the interpretation of reality, etc.

In parallel, it is increasingly evident to society that violence against women is an undeniable historical fact over the centuries; An issue that, according to feminist currents, responds to the patriarchal structure of today's society.

In different regions of the world, entire towns were devastated by invaders who converted them into slavery and through territorial invasion and material looting, entire population strips remained submerged in poverty until the present.

But not satisfied with this type of holocaust, an attempt was made to suppress the Cosmogony of these Ancestral peoples with different campaigns of "Extirpation of Idolatry", as in the case of America.

The world is in crisis, however, there are overcoming actions that, driven by the people, cross borders. At the same time, the forces that are still dominant, responsible for the serious current social and environmental problems, seek to sustain discourses that slow down the processes of change and deepen conflicts, often reversing important achievements of social groups.

Since the dawn of human history, the human being has had to face what can be defined as the limit par excellence: death.

Science, technology, philosophy and religions have struggled and continue to struggle against what seems to be an apparently insurmountable limit. It is true that considerable progress has been made in the treatment of many diseases that used to lead to premature death, but inexorably this continues to occur for all human beings, without excluding anyone.

What is consciousness? In principle, it is something that can only be experienced by those who possess it. It cannot be "seen" from the "outside". One way of asking about the consciousness that can be in a given "object" would be to ask "Hello, is anyone there? This is intended to show that consciousness is what allows us to define ourselves as "someone", as a "person". Consciousness is thus the essence of our existence. Literally, without our consciousness we would not exist. We are, above all, bearers of consciousness. Of course, this is only a point of view....

The evident crisis of civilization that humanity is going through, as well as the reality of climate change, place the human species before ecological limits which, if they were to be exceeded, will continue to seriously disturb living conditions throughout the planet. Hence, without a doubt, it deserves deep reflection and action to face the future.