Omri Boehm: "What do we owe one another?"

What happens when everyone around us demands that we pick a side? What if the sides themselves are the problem?

a_void is a new event series by the Robert Bosch Academy about the questions we avoid – the elephants in the room, the conflicts we struggle to talk about, the assumptions we rarely question.

For our first conversation, Omri Boehm joins the writer Asal Dardan and ZEIT journalist Vanessa Vu for an evening about a deceptively simple question: What do we owe one another?

Boehm is one of the most provocative philosophical voices in current debates about democracy, human dignity, and moral responsibility. His argument: human dignity is universal, or it is meaningless.

But what does that mean when societies are deeply divided? What do we owe people we disagree with? What do we owe our enemies? How do we know what is right when there seems to be no common ground? Does defending universal principles, even when they become uncomfortable, require challenging our alliances? 

Where to begin? Where it hurts: Hamas’s massacre on October 7, Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the question of genocide, and the debates surrounding Russia’s war against Ukraine.  

a_void is a space for (un)asked questions, not ready-made answers. 

Join us at Heimathafen Neukölln in Berlin on 2 December, 7 PM.

Registration to open soon.