Abstract: The article focuses on the ethical dimensions of the political narrative of climate change. The climate narrative turns out to be the only universal narrative that has the potential to produce political events, fuelled by a new union between statistics and ethics, which the text labels „statistethics“. The various strategies for dealing with climate change are also presented, formulated as narratives: the monastery narrative (climatic monasticism), which relies on degrowth, limiting consumption, renouncing the present in favour of a foreign future; the escape room narrative (adaptation to climate change), which requires changing the survival strategy, adapting and profiting from the new facts, turning the future into the present; and the casino narrative (climate gambling) that insists on taking the risk, betting on consumption and production now, fully consuming the present, whatever the future holds.

Abstract: This paper uses the moral feat of volunteer firefighters in Australia during the 2019‒2020 bushfires as an opportunity to discuss the concepts of responsibility, duty, initiative, altruism, sacrifice, social justice and ecological justice within the context of severe and prolonged natural disasters.

Abstract: The article explores the prerequisites needed for transforming individual and collective concerns about the environmental problems of the 21st century into moral action oriented toward the search for their sustainable solutions. The article uses explanatory models from the field of the ethics of care, as well as attempts to apply the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief, exploring the hypothesis of a similarity between the experience of losing a loved one and that of losing the familiar natural world. Finally yet importantly, the text presents a critical view of anthropocentric ethics, analysing some of its arguments related to environmental protection.

Abstract: This article reviews Ulrich Beck’s The Metamorphosis of the World, published in 1916 by Polity Press (Cambridge). The book is one of the most meaningful attempts in recent years at theorizing climate change from a sociological perspective. In essence, this text is a critical reflection on the sociological concepts that Beck uses to problematize climate change (and especially the concept of emancipatory catastrophism); on the adequacy of the conceptual apparatus which he applies to conceptualize the topic sociologically; and on the logic of transformation (which stays hidden from the author himself) of the main question from sociological to a logic of normative values. Despite this and other critical remarks, the book gives an impulse to sociological thinking on climate change and the relevant risks, mostly by provoking us to formulate alternative sociological questions, which require detailed empirical research.

Abstract: Sociology and Science, Philosophy and Experiment, Politics and the Theatre

Abstract: This paper analyses so-called points of intersection and short-circuits between homo hygienicus and homo hapticus. The global virus Covid 19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented hygienist obsession and a panic fear of physical proximity and contact. It has made clearly visible some longue-durée trends in European cultural history which I would summarize namely as a constant advancing of homo hygienicus at the expense of a steady declining of homo hapticus. Against this backdrop, I venture the hope of forming an ecological homo hapticus whose quintessence could be defined as follows: a touch that actively refrains from itself.

Abstract: The article explores the problem of the attitudes towards family and authority of the elderly shared in the Roma community and the changes in them. The example of two Roma neighbourhoods in regional cities (Sofia and Stara Zagora) seeks to answer the questions: how these values change over time; which social groups in the Roma community are the bearers of these changes; and what are the experiences associated with them. The article presents the results of two quantitative surveys conducted in „Fakulteta“ district in Sofia in 2002 and 2017, and a qualitative research in Stara Zagora within the action research approach. The main conclusion from the comparison of the two studies is that in the Roma communities in these two neighbourhoods there are social groups that manifest significant (and to some extent similar) changes in the understandings of family relations. The changes are in the direction of autonomy and detachment from tradition. The main social groups that show such a change in the direction of autonomy from community norms are young women and respondents with secondary education.