ABSTRACT
The intrinsic ethics of actualized plurality, this chapter shows that plurality has its own "logic", which also demands and implies its own ethic. Hannah Arendt therefore presents two widely discussed remedies for the "calamities of action" that are themselves actions and that are rooted in the capacity of natality and the condition of plurality: forgiving and promising. In turn, the powers of truth can also seriously endanger the working-mode of actualized plurality, which calls as much for a limitation of the logic of truth as the former situation demanded a limitation of the powers of plurality. This chapter addresses the question of how plurality and alterity can work as alternative paradigms in the normatively dominated discourses on ethics and politics. It provides a final evaluation of what it means to have a phenomenological perspective on ethical and political issues. Ethics and political philosophy are disciplines that usually deal with the formation and justification of norms.
