Dr. Michael George was asked by the Croatian Philosophical Society in Cres, Croatia, to be one of the plenary presenters in “The Man-Made World” Symposium to be held on September 21 – 24, 2014, in Cres.

This conference is the annual Conference on the Croatian Philosophical Society, and it includes amongst the presenters, academics from Eastern Europe, Italy, Germany, Austria, England, Holland, and the Baltic countries. Dr. George submitted a paper entitled “World as Project: The Human Subject and Ethics.”

Bernard Lonergan contends that reality is constituted by human acts of meaning. Recognizing and appropriating this idea in a comprehensive manner is clearly a historical project that will require integrated sets of intellectual skills and disciplinary expertise that we are a long way from achieving. In the short term, however, the connection between responsibility and our world depends, at least in part, in developing an ethical sensibility that focuses on the implications of human activity. Central to the project of ethics, which is encapsulated in the question “what should we do?”, is the relationship of an adequate and correct understanding of what is actually going on, or current historical reality, which is demonstrated in factual judgments, to the project of discerning and choosing appropriate actions that will improve our situation, or, to projects of value that are constituted by collective and directed human agency. Ethics, then, is a matter of imagining, discerning, choosing and implementing actions that will reverse conditions of negativity and decline, or more positively, that will improve the possibilities of human growth and development. Clearly, ideological or narrow perspectives cannot provide a sufficient perspective that would allow for such social and cultural growth. I would suggest that a practical and immediate step would involve a series of comprehensive studies where responsibility (in all its forms), is being ignored or overlooked due to a personal, social/cultural and historical biases that collectively lessen the probabilities of an adequate appreciation of our current historical situation. Without such an appreciation of our world, the chances of making adequate choices to improve our situation are even less likely. In a very real fashion, then, developing appropriate ethical imagination is dependent on recognizing how actual conditions affect our sensibilities. In a peculiar fashion, recognizing the scale and significance of history points us back to the centrality of the individual subject, the necessary ground of ethics.