THE IDEOLOGICAL CAPTURE OF ETHICS: GROUP MORALITY, POLARIZATION, AND THE LIMITS OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL DISCOURSE

This article examines contemporary ideological polarization as a philosophical symptom of the loss of the structural autonomy of ethics, rather than as a conjunctural political phenomenon. It argues that what ideological camps call ethical debate is, structurally, a collision of particular moralities claiming the status of universal rational inquiry, an operation that is only possible because the distinction between ethics, understood as the rational inquiry into the common good, and morality, understood as the historically situated code of conduct of a particular group, has been progressively obscured in the Western tradition. The article demonstrates that the mechanism of ideological capture is an instance of a more general mechanism of capture by particular morality: in the absence of ethical repertoire, the vacuum is filled by the morality of the camp, presented in the language of universality. Applying a diagnostic criterion on the resolvability of ethical-political problems, the article classifies ideological polarization as a structurally irresolvable problem within the current system, because the leaderships that control the system are the primary beneficiaries of the conceptual confusion that sustains it. The article confronts this thesis with the agonistic objection of Carl Schmitt and Chantal Mouffe, according to which political conflict is a normal, not pathological, condition of democracy, and argues that the distinction between ethics and morality does not eliminate legitimate conflict, it only names the moment when conflict is disguised as ethical inquiry. The final section examines possible paths forward without romanticism: long-term education outside the captured system, crisis as a temporary window, and the individual with ethical repertoire as the minimum unit of resistance. The article concludes that the restoration of the structural autonomy of ethics is a necessary condition for genuine democratic dialogue.