While cultural anthropology has a well-established tradition of studying armed conflict and postconflict societies, its consideration of morality in this context has hitherto been granted a tangential, rather than central role. Addressing this gap, the present thesis draws on qualitative data collected during four weeks of fieldwork carried out in the rural inland of Colombia’s Urabá region between June and July of 2018 to explore the ways in which morality is locally constructed in communities afflicted by a history of armed violence and rebel governance. Relying on the informal nature of networks and social relations identified by extant anthropological research, it develops an inductive analytical framework intended to examine the moral dimension of life in conflict-affected communities. More specifically, it explores how communities come to construct and share a moral framework passible of sustaining cooperative and interdependent relationships in light of the strain that protracted armed violence exertson social relationships and institutions. The obtained results highlight the existence of a binding sense of ‘moral intimacy’, which stems from the collective awareness of the contextual pressures that shape people’s moral judgments and often narrow the scope of personal agency. Individual morality and the constant challenges posed to it by life in conflict-afflicted areas are found to converge into a particularly adapted ‘extra-ordinary situational ethics of conflict’, characterized by ambiguity and mistrust, but also by tolerance and understanding for other people’s—and one’s own—moral shortcomings. Finally, the role of moral leaders is explored and differentiated with respect to its relation to the above-mentioned extra-ordinary situational ethics of conflict. The figure of ‘moral moderator’ is proposed in order to describe the articulating role of central figures that serve as reference points for the informal ethics that arise in surroundings characterized by pervasive and protracted violence. Overall, this thesis sheds light on the peculiar nature of morality in conflict-afflicted societies, and provides an empirical and theoretical contribution to its future systematic study.

This thesis contributes to a field of Kant’s practical philosophy that has received renewed attention, namely his moral anthropology. While it is true that Kant, in some of his best-known writings, literally says that the fundamental ground of morality must be pure and thus entirely free from admixture with anthropological principles, he nevertheless admits that these “subjective conditions” in human nature that “either hinder or help people in fulfilling the laws of the metaphysics of morals” make up the foundation of all applied ethics. In other words, in order to know if and to which extent human beings are susceptible to moral commands, we need to know our abilities as well as our limitations. Kant wrote several works about these topics and his long-term teaching of anthropology shows that he had a continuing interest in the theory of man. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that Kant, during the mid-1760s was highly influenced by Rousseau. It is hardly a coincidence that Kant’s first reference to the “unchanging nature of human beings” appeared at the same time as Rousseau proclaimed the need of finding the true nature of man – the unmasked being who has not been damaged by social prejudice. In order to understand man and his moral capacities we need to find his true essence or what really constitutes humanity. Accordingly, a careful examination of the multifaceted characteristics of human nature is needed in order to understand the very concept of a moral being and to account for his moral progress. I will argue that Kant’s early insights about this need runs like a thread through his entire course of philosophy and that Rousseauian ideas actually affect also his critical ethics. They agree that man is sociable, but also suspicious. He has good predispositions but is likewise susceptible to corruption. My analysis will shed light on man’s eternal balance between conflicting forces and on the means needed for the progress towards the vocation of humankind. This reveals the need of knowing oneself and explains why the question: “what is the human being?” ought to be taken seriously.