Introduction
Modernity is grappling with a profound crisis of truth, which has ceased to be the foundation of community and instead become a subject of market play. This article analyzes how the erosion of objective values impacts our understanding of justice and ethics. You will learn why, in the age of algorithms and post-truth, returning to truth as a practical virtue is the only way to safeguard human agency. We will examine the diagnoses of the 20th century’s most prominent thinkers, from Arendt to Habermas, to understand the mechanisms governing our "life without foundations."
The Ritual of Truth and the Simulacrum: Life in a World Without Foundations
In archaic societies, truth functioned as a ritual, ordering chaos and connecting the community to a transcendent logos. Today, it has been replaced by emotional relativism, where personal feeling becomes the ultimate criterion of validity. Michel Foucault noted that every society has its "regime of truth"—currently, this has taken the form of a marketing pluralism driven by algorithms and information bubbles.
Jean Baudrillard warned of the simulacrum: a reality where a perfect copy hides the absence of the original, and aesthetic credibility replaces factual correspondence with reality. Hannah Arendt pointed out that pervasive lying destroys the public sphere, paralyzing institutions and making honest debate impossible. The author describes this state as an anthropology of sadness—the existential loneliness of individuals whose hearts beat separately, deprived of a shared rhythmic myth and an objective point of reference.
Justice in the Age of Algorithms: From Rawls to Walzer’s Spheres
The search for justice in a world without foundations begins with John Rawls’ "veil of ignorance." This is a thought experiment in which we design social principles without knowing our own position in the future structure. However, Amartya Sen proposes a more pragmatic approach: instead of building theoretical utopias, we should focus on removing specific, manifest injustices, which are easier to identify than an ideal of justice.
Michael Walzer complements this vision with a pluralism of autonomous spheres of goods. Justice requires protecting the boundaries between health, education, or money, so that one sphere does not colonize the others. This challenge becomes urgent in the era of artificial intelligence. Predictive algorithms, based on historical inequalities, force a new definition of algorithmic justice. Whether we choose equality of opportunity or equality of outcome is a decision about values written directly into the source code of the systems managing society.
Ethics as a Form of Dissent and a Tool of Resistance
Jürgen Habermas diagnoses that systemic rationality—the logic of profit, procedures, and bureaucracy—colonizes the "lifeworld," pushing ethics to the margins as sentimental dead weight. In response, Theodor Adorno argued that there is no right life in the wrong one. When immorality becomes systemic, ethics must become a negative gesture: a refusal to participate in the reproduction of evil and the trivialization of suffering.
A tool of resistance is Habermas’s discourse ethics, based on free dialogue and the conviction that norms derive their power solely from the consent of all those affected. In an age of automated moral decisions, we need an ethics of resilience—a decentralized opposition to structures that make injustice seem natural. This is an ethics that does not possess absolute knowledge but never ceases to ask questions about responsibility within the "iron cage" of modern systems.
Summary: The Path to Reclaiming Truth
Truth, justice, and ethics form an inseparable triptych of values. Each, when functioning in isolation, becomes a caricature of itself: truth without justice is a dry fact, and justice without truth is cynical manipulation. Reclaiming truth is not about returning to scientific dogma, but about cultivating it as a practical virtue.
This requires the courage to question the interests of one’s own group and humility toward cognitive limitations—what Simone Weil called the "mystery of seeing without violence." In a world of fractured foundations, these values are not given to us once and for all. They must become a daily practice and a conscious act of courage. Can we transform the longing for meaning into a force capable of building a decent world? The answer depends on our readiness for honest conversation and our resistance to systemic falsehood.
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