Ulrik Nissen, associate professor of ethics and philosophy of religion at Aarhus University, invites listeners to think about responsibility as something we carry, take on, are handed, or push away. Our lives are full of overlapping responsibilities, some of which may even pull against each other, and the talk asks how we balance them.
Nissen treats responsibility as a relational concept, rooted in our connections to one another, to nature, to culture, to science and to political society. His argument is that without responsibility we cannot speak of being human at all, since taking responsibility away reduces a person to a thing. He has written several books and articles on responsibility and Christian ethics, including the 2018 essay Tænkepausen om 'Ansvar' and its 2022 follow-up Kærlighedens ansvar.
