Responsibility in Context: Perspectives

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Responsibility in Context

Gorana Ognjenovic Editor

Responsibility in Context Perspectives

123

Editor Gorana Ognjenovic [email protected]

ISBN 978-90-481-3036-8 e-ISBN 978-90-481-3037-5 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3037-5 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2009938635 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

Responsibility – Preface Arne Johan Vetlesen

Ours is the era of globalisation. This means that the world is expanding; pressing a key, I can immediately reach persons living in another continent; products travel across the world to the store just around the corner from me; thanks to modern media, I am cognisant of events taking place right now thousands of kilometers away. The world is expanding in the sense that yesterday’s time-space limits are rendered irrelevant; my communications, my needs, my aspirations, transcend all such givens. Whatever confronts me as part of my here-and-now, as making up my present contextuality, I can – and will – easily transcend and leave it behind. That the world is expanding means I am expanding, insofar as my range of action, my horizon for thinking, indeed for existing, is perpetually expanding. Expansion as such is forever-happening; it is without limits. This is what we are being told about the nature of globalisation. It rings true; or more to the point, it sounds trivial. But perhaps it is neither. Let’s make a new start. Ours is the era of globalisation. This means that the world is shrinking. It is becoming smaller and smaller. It imposes itself upon me, wherever I go, whatever I undertake to do. It exerts all kinds of pressure from all kinds of directions, on all kinds of levels: psychologically no less than physically. I feel ambushed, or cornered, by the events of the world, by the insistence that everything count as “relevant”, as in some way or other impacting on me, on my here-and-now. I am surrounded by the world in its present shape; by its noise, which is becoming ubiquitous; by its sheer invasiveness, jealous at it were of all potential rivals, not least my aspiration to be left alone, to communicate with myself only, to enjoy silence. Is not silence a human right? So much for the philosophical – alternatively: existential – case for regarding the world as shrinking. Now consider the sociological one. The world is shrinking, is closing in on itself, insofar as I cannot escape locally the repercussions of developments inaugurated elsewhere yet travelling fast across the globe to catch up with me

A.J. Vetlesen (B) Department of Philosophy, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected]

v

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Responsibility – Preface

too, to impact on my planned action. Like skiing. Skiing is an action turning now into an imposed inaction; a centuries-old, taken-for-granted reality that is no longer an option, my option; a thing to do turned into an impossibility. There is no snow. The effects are here. Whence the causes? Here, there, and everywhere – to quote the Beatles, ahead of their times, as always. Global warming is on everyone’s lips these days, quickly becoming part of everyday reality, for everyone, everywhere. Unintended? yes; real?, yes. Enter the question of responsibility, this volume’s main topic. In a globalised world, we hear, responsibility is – or should be – globalised, so as to keep on track with events, so as to do them moral justice. The idea is that since everything else is globalised these days, responsibility needs to be as well. The first question to ask is: Who is the agent of such globalised responsibility? Responsibility, that is, presupposes but an object (what it is for) and a subject; and the subject must be a human agent, someone to whom the responsibility in question can be attributed in a meaningful way. Now of course, in today’s world there exist some agents with global reach: multinational corporations immediately spring to mind. Their reach is clearly global in the sense that their activities impact on millions of people – whether in the roles of employees or consumers. Beyond that, there will be people whose actions and lives are in some ways affected – whether for better or for worse – by the activities of the multinationals; for example, indigenous peoples whose resources are damaged by pollution caused by the establishment of chemical industries with little or no environmental regulations (which, by the way, may be part of the reason such industries are established in “underdeveloped” countries these days). What seems obvious in this far-from-transparent picture, is that responsibility needs to be tied to identifiable agents whose powers of action, hence of actionrelevant decision-making, crucially mark them as responsible. Morally speaking, responsibility turns on the agent’s possibility – hence power – to act, and so to act otherwise, meaning that he or she can be blamed for the actual choice of action. Scratch responsibility, and what you encounter is the assumption (or attribution) of freedom. As demonstrated by several contributions in this volume (in particular, Iris Young’s), however, this manner of conceiving of responsibility is too simplistic to do justice to the world as currently globalised. We need to loosen the age-old tight connection between responsibility and (moral) blameworthiness. We need to be able to talk about, indeed to ascribe and demand, responsibility also from agents who in doing what they did pursued no intention of wrongdoing. The category of (actual or potential) human sinners does not exhaust the category of responsible agents in the contemporary world – neither logically nor empirically. Onora O’Neill takes this reconceptualisation a step further when she helps us see that to act is to assume (be it unconsciously) other agents and so their actions within greater structures and institutions. To act is to set in motion, to be a beginner in the world, as Hannah Arendt famously said. But this does not capture the whole picture. To act is to insert oneself into a web of relationships, of actions already commenced; a web that comprises and makes up a perpetually changing set of structures within


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which both distinct “first-movers” and distinct “enders-of-movement” are hard, nay impossible to find. Am I making a case for complexity? Or am I merely muddling what used to be a pretty transparent picture, one containing distinct agents equipped with distinct powers and transparent intentions; powers and intentions for all to see and so for all to judge in their moral or not-so-moral characteristics? To put the point philosophically: The effort to make sense of responsibility – its subject, its object, its why – under present social and political circumstances needs to acknowledge that the ought is aligned to the is: the moral to the factual. If as a matter of fact, meaning an objectively verifiable fact, my action (buying a T-shirt produced in a sweatshop in China) helps sustain the conditions under which these workers make such T-shirts, then my willingness to buy such a product is a de facto condition for its continuing to be made under these circumstances – circumstances of structural injustice, that is. In other words, the idea is that responsibility – as a matter of fact – flows from matters of fact; inasmuch as the latter spell conditions of actual injustice, of something to be deemed immoral, something that is but ought not be, an ought not to help sustain such conditions is addressed to me. To be sure, I have not set in motion this state of affairs; I have harboured no intention to cause the workers in question such injustice, nor – for that matter – have I ever wanted to be part of a larger institutional arrangement – that of globalised capitalism in its present shape – that functions in a way inseparable from the day-to-day, more or less silent, more or less inconspicuous, infliction of such injustice. Yet, to recognise my part – however minor – in this larger arrangement entails that I recognise my share of responsibility for its future sustenance – or for it coming to an end. Responsibility, then, is shifted from the notion of someone initiating an action (first mover) to the notion of a subject able to recognise herself at a certain place within a certain wider arrangement – recognising herself, that is, as someone who has to ask herself whether this arrangement deserves to be kept in place, thanks in part to the role she plays in it. Responsibility, therefore, is not about having to answer for the whole. It is about being prepared – upon knowing the facts, the implications for those affected – to accept the part one – again as a matter of objective, indisputable fact – plays within the overall picture. Even though one often cannot do much; even though one almost invariably can do only very little, having taken in the greater picture of things in this globalised world of ours – one must do the little one can: answer fully for that, no matter how inconsequential it may seem. Let me add one distinctive feature. Perversely, responsibility these days tends to be demanded more readily from employees towards the bottom of the ladder than those at the top (say, the CEOs). Especially in the social services, indeed in the “modernised” public sector nowadays modelling itself on the market logic long peculiar to the private sector, there is a strong trend to the effect that responsibility for “output” is heaped upon the least educated, least paid, least organised, least powerful. How many patients did you attend to during your morning round? How many toilets did you clean? How many clients did you meet? So many quantitative requests meant to measure – again, perfectly quantitatively – so many (meaning ever-growing) tasks. More tasks distributed among fewer employees; more demands

viii


to be met within fewer hours. Call this “floor responsibility”, pedantically and mercilessly meted out by mostly unseen, high-up-in-the-intransparent-hierarchy at some far-off headquarters executives. The Levinasian appeal emanating from the face of the Other is felt most intensely by actors actually physically encountering the person whose face it is. To dismiss such an Other, such an appeal – for being seen, attended to, confirmed – for the imposed sake of moving on quickly so as to be able to attend to others, to more the better (according to the criteria enjoying hegemonic power), is not easy. It never was. True enough. But what is perhaps new, and on the rise, is the toll this is taking among the personnel affected by the obsession with increased output and productivity and profit that is the signature of New Public Management. In these circumstances, the appeal issued from the face of the Other may cease being the prerequisite of enacted responsibility; it may start to become its very opposite: a pain in the ass, a pricking source of bad conscience, an unwished-for reminder of what ought to be done – but can no longer be done, for lack of personnel and resources. “I should have wanted to heed the appeal, to follow up on what it silently asks of me; but there is no time, and anyway I am too exhausted.” Needless to say, there is no easy way out of this. What one can say, at least, is that such enforced dismissal of moral appeals – again, perversely, for the sake of the “greater” good, that of meeting purely impersonal, alienating, fetish, economic criteria and targets – goes to show that the very system within which such dismissal, such silencing of moral impulse (both in the object and in the subject), is presented as required, as part and parcel of the arrangement, is itself morally corrupt. To protest against policies rendering silencing of moral impulse “necessary”, is itself a moral act. It is evidence that, though morality may have been driven out structurally and from above, as it were, morality stubbornly insists on taking up residence in the margins, at the fringes, at the bottom – where the hurt is greatest, and the actors affected invariably weakest. Yet the weaker the Other, the more uncompromising the plea to assume responsibility by those addressed. Such is the blatantly uneconomical logic of morality, of responsibility. Levinas’ doctrine of the non-calculative and asymmetrical logic peculiar to the moral appeal of the Other is indispensable for recognising the core phenomenon of responsibility. Levinas helps us see why the appeal as well as the response to it – responsibility is re-sponse – involves a dyad, whereby the Other as well as the respondent is radically individualised. For the person addressed by the Other’s appeal, there is no one else to delegate the responsibility to; to be addressed means to be irreplaceable, without substitute. This is one aspect of the non-optional character of responsibility. Bearing in mind the ideology behind New Public Management alluded to above, we can see the limits of the Levinasian understanding of responsibility as per definition a strictly individual affair. The price paid by zooming in on what goes on between, say, a patient and a nurse, consists in loosing out completely on the bigger picture: on structure. As Brian Barry points out, “Almost every set of bad


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outcomes lends itself to two contrasting approaches: one that calls on individuals to adapt and one that demands changes in the environment.”1 Small wonder, then, that corporations these days spend a lot of money on promoting the cult of personal responsibility, while being at the same time “acutely conscious of their ability to manipulate individual choices and suppress information that is essential to responsible choosing”.2 In my view, what happens today is that the first alternative mentioned by Barry is the one preferred by dominant agents (corporations, institutions) not only in the private sector but – increasingly – in the public sector as well. Health care and education are two prominent examples. But it is not only that the first alternative is preferred to the second. More subtly, what happens is that the first becomes dominant, even omnipresent – the only game in town – so as to effectively suppress the second. To demand changes in the environment in which individual agents find themselves situated, which is to say to a greater or lesser degree constrained, would mean to encourage questioning of the rationality and legitimacy of these larger structural and institutional arrangements; questioning, that is, whether the latter really provide the individuals situated within them the resources, the information the overview they need if they are to act in a responsible manner. Today, the powers-that-be employ New Public Management precisely to make sure that such questioning of the larger institutional framework, indeed of the location of power, does not occur. The entire structural dimension and the power it exerts over its subjects is sought to be silenced. Zooming in on individual performance and its relative success or failure as the case might be proves an efficient means of effecting this silencing. In this manner, systemic contradictions are transformed into so many individual cases of choice, of someone choosing optimally or sub-optimally, to invoke the current administrative jargon whose function must be seen for what it is, namely ideological. In addition to the kind of shift referred to above – i.e., responsibility is moved top-down as it were, from employer to employee – there are two other shifts that likewise deserve critical attention. One has to do with the way in which social problems are now typically conceived. To cite Lawrence Mead, one of the architects of the current consensus: “Underclass poverty stems less from absence of opportunity than from the inability or reluctance to take advantage of opportunity”.3 The welfare state, the argument goes, has to be reformed – modernized – so that the recipients of state benefits cease to view them as entitlements with no strings attached. Those who believe that the state has an unconditional duty to provide all its citizens with welfare and security must be brought to see that they are wrong. Legislation and procedures need to be altered so that the point is made in unequivocal manner for all involved. In this spirit, Tony Blair’s hit-list of people who were going to have to dismiss that belief of yesteryear and from now on take on

1 Barry

(2005).

2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.,

150.

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“new responsibilities” consisted, not accidentally, of the unemployed, single mothers and the sick and disabled. Revealingly, the proclaimed success of the “Personal Responsibility Act” is measured solely by the number of people it gets off the welfare rolls. State benefits are no longer a right; they turn instead into charity, something to be dispensed in return for good behavior, for the individual’s demonstrated will and ability to make the right choices, even in times of extreme hardship due to factors completely beyond the control of the unemployed or sick person in question. The other type of shift to be added is that of shifting responsibility from the provider to the consumer. Again, health services and education are two apt examples. The rhetoric of choice that accompanies the implementation of New Public Management reforms in the public sector has proven a wonderful and most welcome cop-out for the government. As Barry4 observes: “Instead of being saddled with the responsibility for providing a uniform high quality of public services, it can substitute ‘choice’, thus transferring responsibility for their fate to the users of those public services.” During the last two decades, there are numerous illustrations of the abuse of individual responsibility as an excuse for system failure. As Blair was fond of saying: “The prime responsibility for people looking after themselves is people.” Once medical services (doctors, hospitals) and education (courses, schools, universities) are made into so many options or alternatives among which patients (oops, consumers) and students (oops, consumers) make their “free” choices, the implication – not always anticipated by the agents themselves – is that any lack of success that might ensue from the alternative chosen is regarded as reflecting on the chooser instead of proving that something is wrong with the hospital or the school. To any complaint filed, the rejoinder from the institution-cum-corporation (the latter being how the former are increasingly run) is the same: “Well, sorry to hear about your lack of success. But don’t blame us, because, as you know perfectly well, the choice was all yours; and you could have chosen otherwise, right?” The complaint is duly returned to sender; responsibility for “sub-optimal results” is shifted, beyond the right to appeal, to the individual consumer who remains the only one to blame insofar as the choice originally made was a choice to exclude alternatives (read: institutional-cum-commercial competitors) that could – and it now transpires, should – have been chosen instead. For remember, no one can make – or for that matter, unmake – your choices for you. In the name of autonomy and maximal freedom of choice, the individual’s lack of power is portrayed as his or her power. The trick works wonders and is truly ingenious. But we should be able to see it for what it is: a trick employed to secure, in the cherished name of equal freedom and responsibility for all, the power of those truly at the top.

Reference Barry, Brian. 2005. Why Social Justice Matters, 154. Oxford: Polity Press.

4 Ibid.,

159.

Acknowledgments

The making of this volume took a long time due to all the speed bumps and other mysterious obstacles that it ran into during its trip down the long and winding road. First of all I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to this volume. Thank you for recognising a good argument when you saw it and for providing me with the ammunition for arguing my point. Thank you Jasna & Josephine for putting up with me, especially during the times when the future looked rather bleak. Thank you Nicola for polishing the language.

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In Memoriam Iris Marion Young

Iris Marion Young was a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her writings include: theories of justice, democratic theory, and feminist theory. She taught on wide range of themes, including global justice; democracy and difference; continental political theory, including Foucault and Habermas; ethics and international affairs; gender, race and public policy. Youngs books include Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, 1990; Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy, Princeton University Press, 1997; Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2000; and On Female Body Experience, Oxford University Press, 2004. Iris Marion Young will always be remembered for her devotion to the pursuit of knowledge and her true and absolute commitment to “justice for all”.

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Contents

Responsibility – Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gorana Ognjenovic Question of Responsibility, a Philosophical Exchange with Zygmunt Bauman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gorana Ognjenovic Paradoxes in Kant’s Account of Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ronald Beiner Political Autonomy and Moral Self-understanding: Kant’s Justification of “Substantive Freedom” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ståle Finke

1

9 19

35

Responsibility and Global Labor Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iris Marion Young

53

A Theory of Indifference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Keith Tester

77

Media, Bystanders, Actors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Zygmunt Bauman

95

Temporality and the Culture of Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Espen Hammer

103

Moral Responsibility for Others: Why Does the “Being for” Always Precede the “Being with” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gorana Ognjenovic

125

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

141

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

143

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Contributors

Zygmunt Bauman Department of Sociology, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Ronald Beiner Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada Ståle Finke Department of Philosophy, University of Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway Espen Hammer Department of Philosophy, Oslo University, Oslo, Norway Gorana Ognjenovic University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway Keith Tester Department of Sociology, University of Hull, Hull, UK Arne Johan Vetlesen Department of Philosophy, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway Iris Marion Young Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

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Responsibility – Introduction Gorana Ognjenovic

This volume is a contribution to an ongoing debate concerning interpretations of the concept of responsibility and its practical implications within the historically dominant era of neo-liberalism. I am aware that there is a wealth of existing work on the subject of responsibility, however this volume differs on two levels: (a) it places the concept of responsibility back in the social context, something that is non existant in philosophy (b) unlike most contemporary moral theoretic discussions, it offers a multidisciplinary approach to the theme and relies on a wide variety of empirical contexts. In this volume, the concept of responsibility is interpreted through real-life situations, in contrast to most of the current philosophical literature on this theme, which does exactly the opposite. We take as the starting point the real lives of real individuals, real life situations, connecting interdisciplinary research in a systematic study of a single phenomenon from a social, historical and moral point of view. Placing the concept of responsibility in a social context is meant to challenge the widespread, current popularity of virtualism1 within philosophy, as well as science in general. Virtualism dis-embeds concepts from the social and other relationships in which they have occurred, and uses them in a context in which the only relevant relationships are defined by those creating the argument. A good example of virtualism within moral philosophy is the so-called trolley dilemma. A trolley is rolling down the street and will kill a number of people. We have an opportunity to change its course and therefore we have to make a decision as to which way it will roll. The number of people killed will depend on which course the trolley takes. There is no information concerning the agents or the possible victims; there is no information about the society, culture or era in which this is happening; there is no before or after. The whole context is deleted. Abstracting this example proves it is scientific. It can be used by anyone, anytime. This is a trendy construct, which forces the world in practice to conform to theoretical structures instead of forcing the theories

G. Ognjenovic (B) University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway 1 Carrier

(1998).

G. Ognjenovic (ed.), Responsibility in Context, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3037-5_1, C Springer Science+Business Media, B.V. 2010

1

2

G. Ognjenovic

to conform to the world as it is, and refers to the failure of the real to conform to the ideal as merely undesirable consequences. Within the context of moral philosophy, virtualism presents a fragmented vision of reality – a clear and firm separation of the moral and ethical from the political sphere. This is why, in this volume, we suggest no less than a need for a change of paradigm necessitated by historical developments, such as globalisation of the world economy, global warming, etc. The need for this paradigmatic shift reflects changes in the nature of challenges we face now and will continue to face in the future. This change in the nature of the challenges that lie ahead determines the nature of our approach. Unlike the challenges faced in the past, those of today, for example, global warming, affect all of humanity and will be solved only by shared effort. These are known problems that demand an understanding of responsibility based on the details of the situation rather than developed in a vacuum in response to hypothetical challenges. The question of responsibility is no longer about those challenges we imagine will occur, the question of responsibility is now about something that we all know is happening and that we all know will affect everyone. The change of paradigm requires adopting a new understanding of responsibility, a social concept of responsibility.2 This concept, with roots in Aristotle, Hegel and the modern theory of object relation, perceives the nature of humankind as that of a social animal. This concept of responsibility differs from social responsibility by virtue of the nature of the human condition, a plurality we are born into before any form of socialisation and in which choosing to either have or not to have responsibility for others simply is not an option. This concept stems from the plurality of the human condition, the condition which is conditioned by its aspect of the plurality of mankind that is a condition per quam of all political as well as ethical life, since the only way we can exist is in plurality and therefore by experiencing each other and being carriers of responsibility for each other, whether we like it, want it or not. Our condition of plurality is a condition of dependency on each other as human beings for the purpose of our individual self-realization that at the same time is also our self-realization in community with others. Plurality is the condition of human action oriented towards others without any mediation. This is a concept that arises from our need to address the predicament within the practical political context, highlighted in our times by the global challenges ahead of us. The nature of the problem itself forces the issue of social responsibility as not optional. To put it bluntly, it is only common effort that can give us a chance to overcome the concern. This volume as a whole consists of various perspectives on this particular aspect of the social philosophical sphere. An example of a challenge which I believe falls into the group of challenges we face is the current application of Kant’s concept of autonomy as a right,3 which

2 Ognjenovic, G. “Moral Responsibility for Others” and “Question of Responsibility” of this book. 3 Kant

(1996).

Responsibility – Introduction

3

has been used as fundamental premise for much of the recent policymaking and political reform. This, of course, is a consequence of Kant’s ideological role as the foundation builder of the liberal version of modern ideology, the equal opportunity for all. Within the context of dismantling the welfare state, privatization and the spread of a privatist mentality in the era of individualization, Kant’s political philosophy or philosophy of right has been viewed as having come into its own. This moral base for autonomy and citizenship and Kant’s view of autonomy as a right of citizen once introduced within the political sphere of policy making resulted in a drastic process of Ulrich Beck’s4 individualization that in turn provided society with the possibility of placing its own problems on the shoulders of the individuals. The growing problem of unemployment and societies’ inability to deal with it is dealt with by dismantling the welfare state instead of asking questions such as: Are all these people around the world unemployed because they made bad choices? Isn’t their unemployment also our problem? Based on a moral interpretation of Kant’s autonomy as a moral right, individual unemployment is presented as a personal failure (meaning the personal responsibility) and it is almost completely excluded from the public debate. So what is wrong with this picture? While citizen’s autonomy is the main concept behind any current policy making, autonomy today is socially imposed upon individuals, as opposed to being the right á la Kant. Therefore the only equity which Kant thought of at the time is today the one in which a person is the sole decision maker and therefore the sole responsibility carrier for the consequences of that person’s decisions. This split between the moral and political sphere within philosophy is demonstrated in the second article of this volume, which takes up the problem within one of the most powerful accounts of moral theory within the Western philosophical tradition, Kant’s concept of citizenship. The split between the spheres in Kant’s theory is demonstrated by the fact that an individual’s status as a citizen constitutes a nonmoral status. This is because the domain of politics per se refers to forms of civic behaviour that can be regulated by laws. Civic life therefore does not and cannot touch Kant’s moral experience or as he defines it, the quality of our intentions or of our ultimate motivation. According to this definition, as long as we pay taxes the political aspect of our life is complete. The problem is that as Ronald Beiner5 points out Kant’s concept of citizenship or civic equality systematically excludes large numbers of individuals. Kant argues for a very differentiated picture of who deserves to be a citizen despite the fact that in Kant’s moral theory citizens enjoy full egalitarian status due to his universalistic moral views. This contradiction is intensified further by the fact that the state is a “moral community”, a way since the exit from the state of nature is morally compulsory. In this way being a citizen, as well as recognition of the equality and moral autonomy of our fellow citizens, is a demonstration of our moral nature. Kant’s citizenship is divided into two separate types of political status: “active” and “passive”

4 Beck

(1992). R. “Paradoxes in Kant’s Account of Citizenship” of this book.

5 Beiner,

4

G. Ognjenovic

citizenship, where “passive” citizens are the ones who do not satisfy the standard of “being one’s own master”, meaning women, children, domestic servants. Kant distinguishes between the ones who deserve to be taken into consideration for participation in voting and those who do not even have the status as hypothetical citizens. For Kant, women simply “lack the nature of civic beings”. It is exactly this distinction between the active and passive citizens that bring Kant’s model to the verge of a spill over from his moral philosophy into the domain of civic life. The so called “apparent contradiction” between the two denotes that freedom, equality, and independence actually form an integral moral package, that they are bound up together as aspects of a single moral “package” which stems from the logic of the concept of citizenship. Further he associates freedom with humanity of members of the state and equality with their status as subjects so that citizenship in this way does not guarantee the full freedom and equality. As a result, independence becomes the condition of an experience of full citizenship that is available only to some. Therefore, Beiner concludes, to be capable of freedom, equality, and independence, that is, to enjoy Kant’s civil personality, is something many within the same model would never be able to realise. But is this the whole story? Hardly! As Ståle Finke6 in his reply to Ronald Beiner’s interpretation of paradoxes in Kant’s account of citizenship argues, the paradoxes in Kant’s concept of citizenship are nothing but a price Kant pays for trying to give a normative perspective from which it is possible to conceive of a realm of law and politics beyond the limited sphere of moral reflection. The paradoxes should not be seen as the result of a false exclusion of morality from politics. Instead, Kant’s paradoxes should be understood as conflicting tendencies that stem from the tension between the facticity of the political and the validity or legitimacy of political decision-making and law making. Kant’s goal was to give a normative perspective from which it was possible to conceive of a realm of law and politics beyond the limited sphere of moral reflection. Kant tried to give an account of substantive freedom or a conception of freedom and agency not itself to be derived exclusively from moral categories, yet still conceived of as normatively allowed for through the consent of its subjects, say, their united political will. Further he argues that for Kant the realm of substantive or political freedom can be achieved through an act of moral self-limitation. This act of self-limitation is the condition for the political as such, and for the discourse of Recht. For Kant there cannot be political specification of moral categories prior to the achievement of a political community under the rule of law. As Finke points out, for Kant the task of politics is to mediate between claims to legitimacy, also bearing upon moral claims, and the facticity of substantive freedom, embedded in a framework of subjective liberties and political rights. An attempt to integrate morality into politics would only compromise the substantive freedom.

6 Finke,

S. “Political Autonomy and Moral Self-Understanding” of this book.


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Full freedom presupposes a limitation on the moral point of view in favour of the political order of sanctioned law in order for such freedom to be possible. For Finke the ongoing crisis within the political sphere of action together with self-understanding and political subjects cannot be saved by dissolving politics into morality because morality is, after all, an arena for self-perfection while politics or citizenship is ultimately a politically embodied conception of freedom. So, then, what would be a practical demonstration of an agent’s substantial freedom for Kant? Iris Young’s concept of political responsibility7 is a form of Finke’s substantive freedom. The political responsibilities derive from the social and political structures in which they act and mutually affect one another, and political institutions are an important means of discharging those responsibilities. For Young, political responsibility is shared responsibility concerning where one should invest one’s individual power in coordination with others in order to regulate or transform some aspect of shared social conditions. Taking political responsibility means acknowledging that one participates in social processes. Political responsibility is the only way to change structural processes by reforming institutions or creating new institutions that will better regulate the process to prevent structural injustices that can occur. Political responsibility aims to bring about results and therefore it depends on the actions of everyone who is in a position to contribute to the results. This does not immediately mean that all those who share responsibility have equal responsibility. The power to influence the processes that produce unjust outcomes is an important factor distinguishing degrees of responsibility. Young bases her argument on the anti-sweatshop variety of arguments that are clear in their message when they argue that we have the responsibility for the kind of working conditions in which the products we consume are produced. By acting on this political responsibility we, the people in the United States or Europe, have responsibility for improving working conditions and wages of workers in Bangkok or Manila or Tegucigalpa who produce the products we, in the more affluent countries, are purchasing. Doing nothing about these structural international injustices by claiming that we are either not informed or do not have the proof, is no longer an option. How is it possible to watch all these people suffering, argue for human rights and still do nothing about it? How can it be that commitments to the principles of human rights can co-exist with indifference towards concrete human rights abuses? As Keith Tester8 defines in his article, indifference is a lack of concern on the part of those who are not sufferers towards the abuses and affronts, the insults and miseries, that are experienced by others. The problem of indifference is therefore a problem about the relationships between the by-standers, on one hand, and those who are the sufferers, on the other. There is the theory of human rights, and there

7 Young, 8 Tester,

I. “Responsibility and Global Labor Justice” of this book. K. “A Theory of Indifference” of this book.

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is the practice of human rights. Modernity is a hermeneutical culture, a hermeneutical project in which all ultimate authorities have been discarded and the ongoing questioning of why is this exactly? implies that everything is questionable, including principles such as human rights. Consequently indifference is an inevitable quality of modernity. The hermeneutical project is fragmented. It consists of multiple minidiscourses, which only legitimize themselves internally and against others so that indifference consequently multiplies. Within these mini-discourses, we humans are categorized by our It-ness, according to some category to which we belong (sexuality, social class, ethnicity, etc.), and therefore ultimately ignored as individuals. Our world, composed of all these mini-discourses, is a world of thriving indifference where the hermeneutic questioning of universal human rights has produced a lack of care about the suffering of others. Because the hermeneutic culture of minidiscourses is inescapable, indifference, being one of its side effects, is inescapable. At the same time, without hermeneutical culture we would not be able to ask questions, we would not be able to enjoy social understanding, we would not have a sign of human plurality. This is why, even though questioning is necessary, some questioning should be practised with caution, meaning it should not go as far as it does once it casts a doubt on, for example, the foundations of human rights. But how did we get here? According to Zygmunt Bauman9 the technological development of communication gave rise to an historical evolution, which has changed our relationship to the world around us. The continuing expansion of information technology and increased access to information about what is going on around the globe transforms us into by-standers and global actors with increasing global responsibility for others. As Bauman so eloquently reminds us, this issue is not a new issue; it first appeared in the form of the global radiobroadcasting network. The difference now is that our daily bombardment with information has become morally effective in constantly reminding us that there is more to all of this than is immediately apparent. The two basic feelings that currently drive us are anxiety and hope. Anxiety makes us wonder whether we are up to the new challenge: Are we able to have patience, integrity and dignity for handling the enormous burden of information, the knowledge of human misery, the evil being daily done and the pain the victims suffer? Hope makes us wonder whether now, finally, when we all know of each other’s pains and can no longer seek excuses in our ignorance, we will face up to our responsibilities and rush to help each other out of misery, whenever, wherever, whoever needs the help. Perhaps we will rise to the ethical challenge that our new knowledge contains? These existential feelings are cause by the quantity of available information, which is truly unprecedented; yet more consequential has been the change in the quality of information delivered. Taking a step further we can also ask ourselves:

9 Bauman,

Z. “Media, Bystanders, and Actors” of this book.


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Does access to information necessarily lead to awareness? In our case the amount of information is so huge that it approaches the border of what is comprehensible. We still cannot stop wondering whether there are any alternatives to this gloomy prospect out there, but still within our reach? As Espen Hammer10 points out in his contribution to this volume, the answer lies no more, no less than in the fact that post-modernity is focused on the present (the end of art, history, philosophy). This present when combined with the rationalpurposive action results in an obsession of finitude of the moment. In this finitude reality is a distorted experience of pass through chunks of time. This distortion, or as Hammer calls it: time-consciousness, leads to a loss of meaning because the passing through chunks of time essentially are empty moments by virtue of their dissociation (Keith Tester’s mini-discourses) from the structures of collective historical understanding. What this obsession essentially describes is what Fredric Jameson, referring to post-modern time, calls a time of repetition: the time of endless repetition in which nothing can essentially change. The way to challenge this obsession on an individual level is by carrying out meaningful practices which have an ability to transcend the post-modern terror of temporality on its own premises, namely to win the battle by making no real movement. Aesthetic experiences such as poetry and music provide the possibility to transcend the present moment, to travel without moving, to gain perspectives without ever physically moving. It offers the possibility to free ourselves from the chains of the post-modern obsession even if only for a moment by experiencing something uniquely irreplaceable and singular, by experiencing Bloch’s astonishment or wonder which provoked not only significant relations, but also by a leaf stirred by the wind, or by the beauty of a melody, or by a word. Even though this personal triumph in the battle against post-modern time is an abstract experience, it reminds us of the value that thinking and feeling in a perspective has, it reminds us of the importance of experiencing that which remind us of our freedom. Reaching out for this other sense of time, which we gain through aesthetic experiences, is essential to our sense of freedom; the aesthetic experiences seem to be the only ones able to point beyond themselves. At the end of the day, where does all this leave us? As I argue in my article, the responsibility for others is something we are born into by the nature of our existence. The responsibility for others is nothing that we can choose or not choose, ignore or postpone, cancel or delete. The Levinas’ revelation consists of no less than one more time going back to perceiving the nature of humankind as that of a social animal. The social aspect of our being is an essential aspect of our being which demands its own: the quality of our lives as well as the realization of our own selves can only happen through our realisation in togetherness with otherness. This togetherness on one hand, and responsibility for others on the other, on the moral and ethical understanding are just two sides of the same coin. The two sides of the same coin in this case, and in any circumstance, cannot be

10 Hammer,

E. “Temporality and the Culture of Modernity” of this book.

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flipped at will, even though these days we certainly behave as if the nature of our being and its future is something we comfortably gamble with.

References Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society, Towards a New Modernity, 131. London: Sage Publications. Carrier, James G. 1998. Abstraction in Western Economic Practice. In Virtualism, A New Political Economy, eds. James G. Carrier and Daniel Miller, 2. London: Berg Publishers Ltd. Kant, I. 1996. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, 81–86, 88–89, 92, 97–98, 166, 173–175. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Question of Responsibility, a Philosophical Exchange with Zygmunt Bauman Gorana Ognjenovic

Ognjenovic: Currently there are two types of responsibility, the ontological and the social. The ontological can be traced from Kant, over Husserl’s grounding of the absolute truth to Levinas’ “I” and “Thou”. This is a concept defined primarily by reference to ontology of humankind. The social concept of responsibility has its history in a long tradition beginning with Aristotle, Hegel to the modern theory of object relations. This is a concept primarily determined by the nature of humankind, which is the nature of a social animal. Apparently, your concept of responsibility essentially sides with the ontological understanding, which is then translated into a practical political context, skipping the entire theory of socialisation. In contrast to the theory of socialisation, you understand the process of socialisation as a system of jamming the process of becoming moral actor at all. For you, the driving force behind the inertia of moral development is an anxiety, a fear that one is never moral enough. If we accept the fact that one is driven by the anxiety of not being moral enough, what then are the barometers for an objective measure of my morality if not the social aspect of my morality, my life with others? Which moment in Levinas’ model provides you with the possibility of overriding this moment of socialisation? Bauman: Everyone has of course, every right to offer their own interpretation of my view of the status of morality and the moral self, and I presume that they’ve found in my texts some evidence validating the one they’ve chosen. This is not, though, how I would present myself, my intentions and their, perhaps inadequate, textual expressions. I did not intend my concept of responsibility to be viewed as “siding essentially with the ontological understanding”. My points are rather (1) that ontology is a social product and that (2) morality is a pre-social, and therefore pre-ontological condition (Levinas’ formula: “ethics precedes ontology” – which I interpret as a phenomenological statement, a postulate of phenomenological reduction and “bracketing away” of all and any later accretions). We are social (and we can be G. Ognjenovic (B) University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected]

G. Ognjenovic (ed.), Responsibility in Context, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3037-5_2, C Springer Science+Business Media, B.V. 2010

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social, and society can be thinkable) because we have been always-already shocked by the challenge presented by the Face of the Other. What philosophers call “ontology”, having in mind the structure of the socially structured world (recall that “ontology” derives its meaning from its opposition to “epistemology”, and casting it in opposition to the “social” is semantically hard to substantiate), is built from that primal shock, in two parallel processes: (1) making up for the inadequacy of the primal challenge (which results in the “moral party of two”) to accommodate, and deal with, the presence of the Third, and (2) making “livable with” the vexingly undefined and so, in principle, unconditional and infinite, and as such unendurable responsibility triggered by the Other’s presence (in other words your “anxiety arising from not being moral enough” – the answer of this query lying stubbornly in the future, that is according to Levinas in the absolute, unpenetrable and unknowable alterity) – by circumscribing the scope and codifying/spelling out the rules of moral conduct (recasting unconditional responsibility as a long series of conditional duties) and so making the infinite finite and ubiquitous condensed, and then deploying the products of recycling as its own building blocks (see for instance Niebuhr’s analysis of “recasting individual altruism into group egoism”). Ognjenovic: We are living in times where the question of responsibility has gone through a very peculiar development. Namely, responsibility for society’s problems is placed on the shoulders of its individual members. The individual is presented as a sole decision maker and therefore a sole responsibility carrier for the consequences of his or her decisions, a form of forced autonomy that the individual is expected to live up to. This type of prescription of “individualised society”, an atomised society, where no one is anyone’s concern, is a part of a general trend throughout the sciences. The “virtualism”, the “disembedding” of a concept; taking concepts out of their natural habitat for the purpose of manipulation of their content in other contexts (where the only valid determinants for each new model are defined by the creator of the model) has caused a lot of headaches lately. Routinely, new moral and ethical theories are expounded, that cannot be used for addressing moral dilemmas in our daily lives. What makes your method so exceptional is its execution “in reverse”: in contrast to the prevalent tendencies within moral and ethical theories, you make the theory fit the practice. You take this abstract concept, which has no historical, sociological, or cultural qualification and you translate it in the practical political context, letting the context determine the content of the concept. What was so appealing about this particular concept that you chose it from among so many others for this task exactly? Bauman: I’d rather say that what we are witnessing these days is not the abandonment, but “deregulation” and “privatization” of the two processes named in my answer to your first question. Churches under the aegis of God and modern governments in the name of the deified society used to aim at concentration and centralization of the management of those processes. This is no longer the case (with the grand exception of the umma and its rather pale and still rather marginal replicas in the orthodox Jewish sects and the US “Bible belt”). The task of cutting the ethical demand down to a liveable-with size and form has been shifted aside (“hived off”,

Question of Responsibility, a Philosophical Exchange with Zygmunt Bauman

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“subsidiarised”) to impersonal “market forces” and down to the individual managers of personal “life politics”. I keep repeating that for a moral self such a shift represents both a chance and a threat. The chance: the inalienable nature of moral responsibility no longer covered up (even in the case of fundamentalist, umma-like and reductive/simplifying creeds, the individual responsibility for choosing them in the face of intense competition becomes all but undeniable), the pain of making moral choices no longer mitigated, the stark reality of the absence of legitimate and uncontested authority able to absolve stares in the face (see Karl Jaspers’ 1952 thoughtful essay on authority and liberty entangled in the incurably Haßliebe relationship). The threat: heightened attraction of fundamentalisms, and more generally of the utopia of safety (as opposite to the feared arbitrariness). Another threat, gathering force by the day, is the market-specific form of adiaphorization. Are we facing here a new and novel edition of “commodity fetishism”? With the consumer syndrome (see the chapter “Consuming life” in my Liquid Life) invading and conquering successive areas of individual/social life, the Other as a moral challenge and object of responsibility doubles as aesthetic seduction and an object of consumption. Big guns are replaced by small arms: consignment to waste followed by exclusion from the realm of moral responsibility, once the prerogative of the political community, has been short changed into small weapons (of mass destruction and self-destruction!) deployed daily by individual “life politicians”. To cut a long story short: each arrangement of human togetherness presents, “protects” the moral self from the agony of moral responsibility in a different fashion. Each fashion carries chances and threats, but each one its own. The attraction/menace of “adiaphorization” is always around, but it takes up different forms. This is why I am wary of philosophical (universally valid in their ambition) solutions to the quandary of the moral self. They wish to apply to all forms of being-in-the-world, and so, as you rightly point out, apply to none. Ognjenovic: When Levinas writes about the moral impulse it is something that can be traced in us and, as I argue, it is a question of realising our nature as it is. As long as it is in us, we have the potential to unfold it continually, since we all desire the good life even though our individual independent definitions of the good life greatly differ. In your argument you take Levinas’ model a step further and argue that what is essential about being moral by nature, beside having the gift of being able to act on moral impulse, is that the nature of our minds gives us the possibility of choice, and moreover that by making moral choices we endlessly unfold our moral potential. You draw the distinction between acting on moral impulses and systematic unfolding of the moral potential via the possibility of choice. It is the choice, the possibility of making choices given to us by the nature of our minds, which takes us from being moral subjects to being moral actors.

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Can we interpret your distinction between moral subjects and moral actors as a distinction between moral theory and practice, a distinction between the subjective and objective experience of situations, which contain moral dilemmas? Is this an attempt to clarify that the choices we make that effect others are essentially our personal choices by which we unfold our moral potential, and therefore cannot be reasoned away as someone else’s moral choices through the endless forms of rules and regulation that govern our daily relationships with those around us? Bauman: A caveat first: The distinction between theory and practice is made by theorists (a gesture of self-estrangement and own superiority) and at best (or worse?) parroted by the hoi polloi (acceptance or defiance of their inferiority). A similar observation could be made about the distinction between the “objective” and the “subjective” (elevating one variety of subjective experience to the rank of the objective, an act invariably hotly contested as the selected variety is concerned). Neither distinction would hold much water, if not for the power-hierarchy that underpins their validity. In our liquid-modern times power is increasingly emancipated from/deprived of political tools, and so the “subjective” is increasingly on its own – unsupervised, unsurveilled, and incorrigible, in desperate and insatiable search for legible, and thus communicable, casings – yet resenting/transgressing/ exploding any on offer. . . As to the substance of your question: into the dilemma of good and evil we are thrown without asking (that is, our actions and inactions always/already have bearing on the condition and the fate of others), but our moral self is born the moment that dilemma is acknowledged and absorbed, and the responsibility for the effects of action or inaction is admitted and assumed. This is, so to speak, the primal or the original choice. Once it is made, the anguish is born that would haunt the rest of the moral self’s life. (We may surmise that the story of the “original sin” committed by eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, is the etiological myth meant to explain that vexing, incurable anguish that can’t be fully removed or fully silenced – neither exorcised by any amount of good deeds nor argued away by any self-apology. Note that the return to the Garden of Eden, that place free of the agony of choice, was according to that story barred to the sinners and their posterity once and for all). From this moment, choice is the fate – intractable. One may hide behind all sorts of excuses (“following the rules” or “fulfilling command” are the most common among the “states of denial”, to use Stanley Cohen’s expression) or one can chase the thought away into the subconscious; but the necessity to choose, and thereby to shoulder responsibility for the unknown, won’t go away. There is always an option to reject the rules or refuse the command. Innocence is a gift to the dead only. Morality is not a recipe for a happy life – even less for a good nights sleep. Ognjenovic: Max Weber’s “bureaucratisation” is a very good example of a very abstract concept that has extra-ordinary practical effects. The bureaucratisation of human relations is on the rise even in moral theory where legislation is drafted daily


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to coordinate the rules of behaviour between individual members of society. This is something that conforms with the argument in your masterpiece “Modernity and the Holocaust” – that one of the primary pre-conditions for the Holocaust having occurred in its era is still proliferating today. Endless over-bureaucratisation, legislation of moral-ethical human relations, very much kept up the importance of Kant’s fishing net which only fishes up whatever complies with the threads of the net, where the rest, the wholes remaining are to be patched up by an aesthetic interpretation. It very much describes what also happened to our moral theories, that they have become a matter of aesthetic interpretation rather than of practical usability. After some centuries, this practice of non-reflective, excessive exploitation of the very same threads has left us with a very little space for moral interpretation. The use of “reason” has been slowly replaced by endless legislation, descriptive sets of directions for our daily lives, straightforward net-threads, universal absolute norms that miss out on so much from our daily reality; and have robbed us of an essential characteristic of our existence as a kind, namely the moment of spontaneous experience of others. Why do we need all these rules? Why are we so ready to replace interpretation of symbols, metaphors, with a set of rules, a set of road signs that always direct our movements, tell us what to do and what not to do, while at the same time, reflexively leaving responsibility for our actions on our shoulders? Isn’t the current situation of institutions placing it “all on our shoulders” just another Beck’s “reflexive responsibility” that has caught up with us after centuries of our paranoid running away from ourselves, or the nature of our existence, a spontaneous experience of others? Bauman: All those human inventions are tranquilizers, welcomed by people torn by moral doubts and unable to swallow the hard residue of guilt left after all rules have been scrupulously obeyed and all commands diligently fulfilled. . . Just as routine dreams of freedom, freedom dreams of routine. In biblical myth, Adam and Eve’s non-negotiable freedom to wander their own way and earn their bread (and be free from the slavery to rules – at least until Moses’ fateful interview with the Mount Sinai burning bush) was a punishment and a curse. Bureaucracy is one of the manmade substitutes for the lost Paradise. Whenever faced with a decision, you may always refer to a statute book where all the answers are stored. We want freedom – but safe freedom. We like solving jigsaw puzzles if we can assume that they have been expertly cut and no bit is missing in the box. We enjoy leaping headlong from high platforms (“bungee jumping”) if we are sure that the elastic ropes fixed around our waists are of just the right length to prevent us from crashing into the ground. We delight in sex – if protected against the unwholesome consequences. And we savour our goodness if we know exactly when the exhilarating/exhausting state of being good may be stopped before the real discomfort sets in. We need rules. . . The more we need them the less there are of them – and particularly of such rules as are endorsed by an authority sufficiently awesome to make the excuse “I could not resist it” sound credible. Arbitrariness is a most prolific breeding ground of tyranny.

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Ognjenovic: The point of the faceless is where the moral jumps into the political; it is the face that represents the rest of human kind. By extension, in your theory of globalisation, while we are always faced with our responsibility for other members of the society in which we live, we are nevertheless responsible for all humankind. Despite Kant’s “getting lost in translation”, his model of the value of human life is still a valid one. Kant’s model outruns Hegel’s model, in which the value of one’s life depends on belonging to an institution. The problem is that even though we can see that Kant’s theory better represents the ideals of modernity, as for example the value of human life, in practice it is Hegel’s model that is reflected in our institutions. What we find on a global level today is very much a modern translation of Hegel’s problem, the fact that one’s life has a value if it is demonstrated by one having legitimate fulfilment of one’s rights, and that, of course, is taken into consideration only if one is part of an institution; this being a result of not leaving any “loose ends” in Hegel’s “closed system of dialectics” within communities. What I am talking about here is the number of tremendous refugee camps existing in different areas of Africa and Middle East, people trapped with no sign of return to the normal lives from which they were forced to escape. The fact that we allow all these horrors to exist is just another sign of our lack of feeling of belonging to the global community. This is what Ulrich Beck describes very well when he says that, true enough, we managed to release ourselves from the “imprisonment” of the primary groups while at the same time remaining unaware of how we just replaced that imprisonment with an imprisonment by secondary groups. Due to this sudden change in appearance, people really do feel that responsibility for others is none of their business, and in all of the Western world we are just building up a more complex hierarchy, a shield of protection against all those we feel are not our responsibility, while the queue of those in need of our help and our feeling of responsibility towards them is larger than ever and growing. The problem is how again legislation will be used to achieve this, but even if the legislation is not broad enough or it will take us some time to develop legislation that is, this does not mean that we do not have responsibility. The question here is how can we claim that progress has been made when the numbers of refugees in camps around the world with no rights whatsoever are constantly increasing? Isn’t the Schengen agreement just another form of institutional defining away, delegating away our responsibility for all those in need? Bauman: I tried to tackle these sorts of queries in the last chapter of the “Europe: an Unfinished Adventure”. Moral theorising is primarily an European invention – and for by far the longest part of European history, the universe about which the moralists theorised was considerably smaller than what we would now call “humanity”. It did not include heathens, infidels or heretics, Incas or Aztecs, North-American Indians or Australian Aborigines. Most of the time, it had no room for the closest neighbours . . .look at the First World War writings of most, with but few exceptions, luminaries of French and German moral sciences. . .


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The universe of moral obligations grew, as a matter of fact, following the changing relationship between space and time resulting from the expansion of the means of transport and communication, bringing in its wake – to deploy Hans Gadamer’s term “fusion of horizons,” – ever more and ever wider horizons. A great leap in the size of that universe occurred in the era of nation building – a passage from a local to the imagined community – and power-assisted bonding/ integration (Gleichschaltung?). By now the strings of inter-dependency are planetwide, though the expansion of dependency has not been thus far followed by a matching expansion of institutions. Humanity remains a project (just like the “nation” once was) – as yet not institutionally founded; a project in search of its carriers. It competes with the numerous projects of retrenchment that hope for local solutions to global problems (the project of humanity assumes, explicitly or not, that no locality can stem the tide of global forces at its borders and that solutions to global issues could be therefore only global; no chance for safety, freedom, justice, democracy unless the gains secured in one part of the globe turn from local privileges into planetary universals). Yes, you are spot-on: Schengen is one of the most prominent manifestations of the retrenchment strategy – in my view, a blatantly myopic strategy, bound to fail or at least to stop far short of fulfilling its ambitions. (Ironically, the Schengen idea was born of ostensibly much more modest intentions: it took inspiration from mergers followed by “asset stripping” with saving money as its ultimate – perhaps the sole – purpose. In practice, Schengen’s latent function makes its costs grow exponentially). Ognjenovic: But isn’t much of the problem our assumption that we know so much about everything? Talking of assumptions, for example when we are a product of the Western culture, one of our basic assumptions is that everyone in the world thinks of themselves as subjects. In other words, our assumptions are naïve, selective and committed with a clear case of blissful ignorance. For example, in Uganda some years ago they patented a development project with the title Change Agent Program (by Uganda Change Agent Association) based on group therapeutic conversations. This program for example had an immediate and lasting effect; people were working on their visions of themselves and the world around them trying to reverse the effects of the long-term colonialism by developing themselves. On the commercial video that has been made for the program it is very obvious that none of the individuals, before undergoing the process, actually thought of themselves as subjects. They only thought of themselves as objects of the situation they were in, passive receivers of whatever was going around them. That is colonialism; those are the long-term effects, the damage accumulated throughout centuries, by generations that went through the exploitation, battering and humiliation. The program had an immediate and lasting effect because they were for the first time feeling, talking, behaving like subjects responsible for their lives, simply being themselves. The paradox here is that exactly this product, this model of development program had difficulties gaining financing, means for developing and maintaining the program that later on was even “exported” to countries around Uganda and gave brilliant

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results exactly because it managed to make the immediate and lasting change in people’s minds. For the first time they were having greater life ambitions than merely getting metal roofs over their heads. Why is this? Is it really in our interest not to let them get out of the misery that we put them in? Bauman: For the second time I am sending you to Jaspers’ exquisite study of the complex relationship between authority and freedom. His point is that the state of liberty (as distinct from arbitrariness) is unattainable without authority (Jaspers uses the idea of “authority” in a sharply different sense than we commonly do when treating “authority” synonymously with power institutions; authority is for Jaspers an “inner control centre”: a power socially produced, but subsequently internalized and needing no further pressures, let alone coercive sanctions. A sort of gyroscope, one would say). What the well-wishers like those in your example do, is to try to “ennoble” or “uplift” the victims of the planet-wide wasted-humans industry by telling them that they are subjects – a truth they are bound to discover anyway having been forcibly recycled into “individuals by decree” once the self-sustaining way of life that supported them has been cast out of business. At the same time we – the well wishers, ill wishers, or just indifferent non-wishers in the affluent North cooperate knowingly or not in bankrupting all “authorities” without which the born-again “subjects” are much more likely to become life-long welfare clients, sell themselves to the sweatshops or massage parlours, or join terrorist gangs, than to become “free individuals” western-style. Cast in the whirlwind of liquid-modern life and blinded and deafened in the bazaar of short-lived fashions, such “individuals by decree” would in all probability remain “objects”, though this time after the pattern of a football in a soccer game, while being offered the certificate of subjecthood for consolation. The planet-wide spread of free trade and information flow (and the ensuing choice with which all forms of life have been confronted: to pass the test of the world-wide competition, or perish) has transferred millions from the condition of liberty deficit to that of security deficit. Many people so transferred will probably view the event as expulsion from Paradise. Some will try to build instead a private paradise inside a gated community. Liberation from the “objecthood” of a particular kind does not necessarily emancipate from “objecthood” as such; most certainly, it is a necessity, but not at all the sufficient condition for the birth of a subject. Ognjenovic: Another example, European examples of the helping programs that do not work are the programs undertaken in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. International conferences are organised, money is used for paying intellectuals from around the world to come and talk to people in bearly understandable terminology about reconciliation and “loving your neighbour like you love yourself”. This after the very same neighbour had wiped out thousands of people and ruined the country’s infrastructure, which has yet to be rebuilt so long after the war. The very same neighbour who, since the economic embargo was lifted, has received much more help than those they decimated ever will, even without having fulfilled the precondition for aid of delivering their main war criminals to The Hague. In other words, people are forced into reconciliation by economic blackmail and absolutely no prospects


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for a brighter future on the horizon. Does this mean that economic “measures” is a better term for good old blackmail, the only way we in the West can try and come to terms with what is going on in the rest of the world, especially when the rest of the world is, due to its immiseration and desperation, so much more willing to play along with any abstract inapplicable economic reforms we might come up with just for the sake of getting the essentials to keep themselves going? Is this the new form for a totalitarian system of absolutes that rule at any price since, as Stalin formulated so many yeas ago, “one cannot make an omelette without smashing some eggs”??? Bauman: An aside: I don’t recall as such Stalin’s statement – what you meant probably is what he could think, not what he said. But you are right in the sense that Stalin could say that, unlike most political leaders in our part of the world who do not intend and seldom promise to “make a pie for everyone”, exhorting people to make pies each one for himself and to hope that the sum-total of bakery products will thereby grow, and to vote for them for that reason in the next election. We don’t live in a totalitarian society – but mainly because totalitarianism has been proved to be a most inefficient form of domination. Dominating through contrived and perpetually intensified uncertainty, a job in which the deregulated market is a master supreme, has been embraced by the powers-that-be as the much more effective, and much less costly, alternative. As a side-effect, the task of smashing eggs, just like of making pies, has been sub-contracted. But you ask about the failure of the post-Yugoslav arrangement promoted by the well-wishers from abroad, who before that promoted the dismantling of the Yugoslav lame, but viable, settlement. (Drawing single-handedly the borders between republics, Tito made shrewdly sure that each republic was ethnically mixed and served as a “microcosm” of Yugoslavia as a whole; Helmut Kohl on the other hand is on record arguing that “Slovenia can be given independence because it is ethnically homogeneous”. Kohl’s hint was avidly embraced by the enthusiasts and practitioners of ethnic cleansing). Through most of their modern history, European nations sought (and thanks to their supreme might, found) global solutions to locally produced problems; as a rule, Europe exported its inconvenient minorities and its redundant population overseas (the deepest sense of the imperialism/colonialism episode). That option is not available to the newly born nations. They are forced to seek (but can hardly find) a local solution to what has become in the meantime a globally produced problem. Inter-tribal warfare and “ethnic cleansing”, in short the old/new strategy of “neighbourhood imperialism” and “next door colonialism” are the sole “solutions” plausible, as there are no “empty” (or amenable for emptying) continents left, and as redundant, unemployable at-home people, if travelling nearer livelihoods while unsupported by the marching armies, would be stopped at the nearest border and “returned home”. In short: I am surprised that you are surprised. . . Our problems, after all, are almost all “iatrogenic”: side effects of the problem-solving of yore. They are everything except surprising.

Paradoxes in Kant’s Account of Citizenship Ronald Beiner

What are we to make of Kant as a philosopher of citizenship? In order to begin answering this question, we need to determine how exalted a status Kant intends the status of citizen to be, especially in relation to the forms of moral experience that for Kant are decisive in conferring moral worth upon us as rational beings, and clarifying this turns out to be anything but a simple matter. In a very direct sense, our status as citizens constitutes a non-moral status, for the domain of politics per se refers to forms of civic behaviour that can be regulated by laws – i.e., state coercion – and therefore civic life doesn’t (and cannot) touch that which for Kant defines moral experience: the quality of our intentions or of our ultimate motivation. This is why Kant famously says that a race of intelligent devils could in principle devise a perfectly satisfactory political constitution: as long as we, for instance, pay our taxes, what is demanded of us in the political aspect of our life is fulfilled (even if the moral worth of these civic performances is precisely zero). Kant offers one of the most powerful accounts of moral equality available within the Western philosophical tradition. Yet his account of citizenship is anything but egalitarian or universalistic. On the face of it – and probably also with respect to our final judgment – this would appear deeply to discredit Kant’s moral egalitarianism. How can one coherently champion the radical equality of all rational beings (and therefore all human beings) while refusing to draw the entailment of a robust civic equality. But the issue of whether non-equality of citizenship poses a severe problem for Kant’s liberalism (or of how severe a problem it poses) hangs on where one locates Kant as a theorist of citizenship between what I’m going to call (adapting terms introduced by Richard Flathman)1 “high-liberal” and “low-liberal” interpretations of citizenship. According to what I’m calling the low-liberal view, politics is conceived as an instrumentality for securing a system of laws that allows each R. Beiner (B) Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada e-mail: [email protected] 1 See

Flathman (1995). Flathman presents Rousseau and Hannah Arendt as exemplars of “high citizenship,” and Hobbes and Michael Oakeshott as exemplars of “low citizenship.” (Flathman himself aligns himself with the low citizenship view.) G. Ognjenovic (ed.), Responsibility in Context, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3037-5_3, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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of us to get on with our individual purposes without unnecessary interference by the state, and citizenship is simply the title assumed by all those who participate in this arrangement. There is no “moral community” at stake in citizenship so conceived. According to what I’m calling the high-liberal view, our dignity as human beings is itself implicated in our civic identity, and hence our lives as citizens count for a great deal in establishing or expressing our moral status. For convenience, let’s assign the low-liberal view of citizenship to Hobbes, and assign the high-liberal view to Hegel.2 If the “intelligent devils” passage in Perpetual Peace exhausted Kant’s thinking about politics, then of course his conception of citizenship would fall four-square within the low-liberal view. But in fact I want to suggest that his conception of citizenship occupies an unstable position between Hobbes and Hegel in the relevant sense, and therefore it is not entirely easy to pin down how damaging or how damning his views about citizenship are in relation to his liberalism. Before turning to the texts where Kant addresses most directly the issue of citizenship, I want to look more closely at the “intelligent devils” text, which again presents, in a fairly stark depiction, the low-liberal side of Kant’s reflections on the meaning of civic membership. Kant writes: “the republican constitution is the only one that is completely compatible with the right of human beings. . . many assert it would have to be a state of angels because human beings, with their self-seeking inclinations, would not be capable of such a sublime form of constitution. But now nature comes to the aid of the general will grounded in reason, revered but impotent in practice, and does so precisely through those self-seeking inclinations, so that it is a matter only of a good organization of a state (which is certainly within the capacity of human beings), of arranging those forces of nature in opposition to one another in such a way that one checks the destructive effect of the other or cancels it, so that the end result for reason turns out as if neither of them existed at all and the human being is constrained to become a good citizen even if not a morally good human being. The problem of establishing a state, no matter how hard it may sound, is soluble even for a nation of devils (if only they have understanding) [selbst für ein Volk

2 As far as Hegel is concerned, consider his statement that “[t]he individual. . . finds that, in fulfilling his duties as a citizen, he gains protection for his person and property, consideration for his particular welfare, and satisfaction of his substantial essence, the consciousness and self-awareness of being a member of the whole” (Hegel 1991, 285; I have slightly amended the translation). The phrase “satisfaction of his substantial essence” [die Befriedigung seines substantiellen Wesens] clearly points to a quite elevated high-liberal view. As for contemporary theorists of citizenship, it’s possible to view Rawls as the exponent of a fairly ambitious version of high-liberal citizenship. Consider the suggestion by Rawls that what political liberalism basically means is that “the values of the special domain of the political. . . normally outweigh whatever values [associated with other domains of social life] may conflict with them,” where it can be presumed that citizenship is the specific status conferred and upheld by the domain of the political, over against subordinate moral identities made available within other subdomains. Rawls (1996, 139); cf. p. 157. I owe this citation, as well as the interpretation that highlights its importance, to Galston (2005, pp. 38–40). See also note 39 below.

Paradoxes in Kant’s Account of Citizenship

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von Teufeln (wenn sie nur Verstand haben)]. . .Such a problem must be soluble. For the problem is not the moral improvement of human beings but only the mechanism of nature.”3 This surely presents itself as a classic statement of the low-liberal view. But is Kant really as Hobbesian as he sounds in this passage? It would seem that his more standard line is that our dignity as human beings plays out strictly in the domain of private (especially moral) doings, and politics merely coordinates and regulates interaction in the society such that citizens don’t infringe on each other’s autonomous sphere of action in the private domain. This is still a lowliberal view, as I have defined it, for it sees little at stake with respect to the civic dimension of our lives in relation to what confers dignity and moral status upon individuals. Yet it is importantly different from Hobbes’s view, for Hobbes would of course regard it as a piece of silly superstition to talk of something like the dignity of human beings, whether located in the private domain or in the domain of civic life. The basic thesis that I want to explore, both in relation to this text and in relation to the other writings relevant to Kant’s doctrine of citizenship, can be formulated as follows: If, for political purposes, we’re all just atomistic monads trying to avoid colliding into each other, and thus we contrive a set of political arrangements that secures this objective, then Kant’s violation of his own egalitarianism through the denial of full citizenship to large classes of adult human beings seems somehow less egregious. If, on the other hand, citizenship is itself the affirmation of an important moral status, it’s hard to see how Kant could fail to discern that civic antiegalitarianism would taint or impugn his moral egalitarianism. The decisive issue, then, is whether citizenship is itself a form of moral community, and although Kant leaned heavily towards the view that it isn’t,4 there are significant intimations of the contrary view, which therefore suggests an important tension in Kant’s account of citizenship. There is at least a minimal sense in which the state is a “moral community” for Kant. It’s a crucial aspect of Kant’s version of social contract theory that the formation of a state is not the contingent outcome of reasoning about our best interests, as

3 Kant (1996c, 335) (VIII, 366). [All references in parentheses are to the Prussian Academy edition.] Hannah Arendt (Arendt (1982, 17–18) lets Kant off the hook much too easily when she interprets this passage as expressing Kant’s impulse to insulate public life from “moralistic” concerns (“he kept away from all moralizing”). For the question is why citizenship isn’t related to, or doesn’t participate in, the moral status, and therefore moral dignity, of human beings, and this question has nothing to do with the issue of how to avoid “moralism.” 4 Consider, for instance, Kant’s formulation in Kant (1960, 87): “In an already existing political commonwealth all the political citizens, as such, are in an ethical state of nature and are entitled to remain therein,” because one can gain entry to an ethical commonwealth only by a free exercise of virtue, by contrast to the coercive character of the state; “woe to the legislator who wishes to establish through force a polity directed to ethical ends!” (VI, 95–96).

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it is for Hobbes5 and Locke; rather, exit from the state of nature is morally compulsory.6 In that sense, membership in a political association, an association of citizens, is already an expression of our moral nature. Recognition of the equality and moral autonomy of our fellow-citizens is likewise a moral recognition.7 So the “intelligent devils” view doesn’t capture Kant’s broader conception of citizenship. If the state’s ultimate job is to acknowledge and protect the autonomy of its members, which is indeed Kant’s conception, then the state is doing more than just treating us as devils with understanding. As we move from the “intelligent devils” text to Kant’s discussions of citizenship proper, the “moral” relevance of civic membership comes more to the fore. Kant offers parallel analyses in the two works where our topic is addressed – namely, Sections 43–49 of the “Doctrine of Right” portion of The Metaphysics of Morals, and Part II of his essay on “Theory and Practice.” The texts here are compact but nonetheless damning. The basic thrust of both texts is to argue that while the civil commonwealth must respect the freedom and equality of all its subjects as human beings and as subjects of the state, this doesn’t necessarily entail equal rights as citizens. In fact, Kant’s main purpose in these texts is to argue that one must distinguish two fundamentally different kinds of political status within the state: “active” citizens versus “passive” citizens, or those who are recognized by the state as possessing civil personality versus those who are not recognized as being in possession of civil personality. “Passive citizens” include children, women, and those who are economically dependent on a “master” (e.g., apprentices or domestic servants).8

5 To be sure, we encounter a bit of a complication in characterizing Hobbes’s account of the social contract in this way, insofar as Hobbes has his own version of the Kantian doctrine that we are (morally) obliged to exit from the state of nature. This comes in Hobbes’s doctrine of the “law of nature,” which states precisely that we are obliged to move from the insecurity of the natural state to the security offered by the civil state: “men are commanded to endeavour Peace” (Leviathan, Chapter 14). But since Hobbes doesn’t really allow us to distinguish what is dictated as a matter of moral obligation from what is dictated by our interests, the appeal to “laws of nature” is something of a rhetorical trick, as I think Hobbes himself realizes (as he indicates at the end of Leviathan, Chapter 15). 6 In The Metaphysics of Morals [hereafter MM], Kant offers the following formulation: The constitution of the state “is that condition which reason, by a categorical imperative, makes it obligatory for us to strive after.” Kant (1996d, 461) (VI, 318). 7 This (not minimal but fairly robust) moral dimension of the state is acknowledged by Kant in the passage quoted above when he refers to the republican constitution as “a sublime form of constitution” because it expresses, uniquely, “the right of human beings.” One should add that, alongside Kant’s “low-liberal” and “high-liberal” conceptions of citizenship, there are corresponding “lowliberal” and “high-liberal” conceptions of right. In one place, Kant defines right as “the limitation of the freedom of each to the condition of its harmony with the freedom of everyone” – clearly a “low-liberal” definition. “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, But It Is of No Use in Practice” [hereafter TP]: Kant (1996b, 290) (VIII, 289–290); cf. p. 293 (VIII, 292). But if republicanism is a “sublime” form of constitution, then it must instantiate a more elevated conception of right than this definition conveys. 8 TP, 295 (VIII, 295); MM, 458 (VI, 314–315).


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Those who fail to satisfy the criterion of “being one’s own master”9 are entitled only to a subordinate form of citizenship: they are “subjects” of the state,10 “mere associates in the state,”11 “cobeneficiaries of [the state’s] protection,”12 reduced to the status of being a “part” [Theil] of the commonwealth without being a “member” [Glied] of it.13 On the other hand, “active citizens,” citizens in the full sense, are “colegislators” of the state.14 What’s most remarkable about Kant’s version of the argument in TP, as becomes evident from his discussion in the Conclusion of Part II, is that he’s not really talking about actual civic status, but merely hypothetical citizenship as providing a regulative idea for judging the legitimacy of laws or a legal regime that is not expected to emanate at all from the exercise of civic powers by citizens: What’s at stake is “only an idea of reason, which, however, has its undoubted practical reality, namely to bind every legislator to give his laws in such a way that they could have arisen from the united will of a whole people and to regard each subject, insofar as he wants to be a citizen, as if he has joined in voting for such a will.”15 What’s truly bizarre about the exclusions of citizenship laid out in TP, read in the light of the passage just quoted, is that they serve not to distinguish those who vote as citizens from those who don’t (and don’t have a claim to vote). Rather, what’s being distinguished, it seems, are those who deserve to be taken into consideration as if they participated in voting, as opposed to those who don’t even have status as hypothetical citizens! Conceding active citizenship to all adults would not actually confer voting rights on anyone, since Kant is more concerned with “binding the legislator” according to an idea of the will of an hypothetical citizen-body than with actually distributing civic powers – hence, Kant’s civic exclusions in the TP account seem utterly gratuitous. What matters is the judgment of the legislator, not the judgment of the citizens.16 In that sense, again, the impressive-sounding talk of citizens as “colegislators” of the state is really a kind of phantom citizenship.

9 TP,

295 (VIII, 295). 292–294 (VIII, 291–294). 11 MM, 458 (VI, 315). 12 TP, 294 (VIII, 294). 13 MM, 458 (VI, 314). It’s possible to interpret the last of these chacterizations as implying a lower status than the others. This is what is intimated in TP, 291 (VIII, 290), where Kant refers to “[t]he independence of every member of the commonwealth” [Die Selbstständigkeit jedes Gliedes eines gemeinen Wesens], which suggests that those who have not risen to independence are not really members of the commonwealth at all. Indeed, one way of formulating what the distinction between active citizens and passive citizens means is that the former are the real citizens (= law-givers), the latter, mere subjects of the commonwealth (= subject to the law and enjoying the law’s protection). So interpreted, this would be a real break with Rousseau’s idea of citizenship, since it would annul the reciprocity between being sovereign source of the law (at least in some sense – obviously in a more attenuated sense in Kant than in Rousseau) and being subject to its provisions. 14 MM, 458 (VI, 314). 15 TP, 296–297 (VIII, 297). 16 TP, 297n. (VIII, 297): “they [the subjects] are not entitled to appraise this] e.g., a war tax].” 10 TP,

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The MM version of the argument seems different: here Kant speaks of citizenship as “being fit to vote,” which entails “want[ing] to be not just a part of the commonwealth but also a member of it.”17 It implies “the right to manage the state itself as active members of it.”18 So in the MM account, by contrast to the TP account, it seems that real civic status is at issue. And tailors have it whereas woodchoppers don’t; wig-makers have it but barbers don’t; leasehold farmers have it but tenant farmers don’t; teachers have it but tutors don’t; men have it but women don’t.19 With respect to the second term in each of these pairs, Kant has made the judgment that they “are mere underlings [Handlanger] of the commonwealth because they have to be under the direction or protection of other individuals, and so do not possess civil independence.”20 In order to judge how dubious is the theoretical grounding of Kant’s distinction between active and passive citizens, it might be worth considering the fact that, in both the TP and MM versions of the argument, Kant takes care not to let go of his own civic status or civil personality.21 It’s obviously no accident that teacher versus tutor constitutes one of Kant’s active/passive pairs. But since teachers and tutors may have identical skills (many of the major figures within the history of political thought were tutors or secretaries for well-to-do families, including Kant himself!), it’s not at all obvious why teaching for the state makes one a citizen but teaching within a private household disables one for citizenship. Also, as several of Kant’s examples indicate, his account seems to privilege self-employment; but again, those who are on the payroll of the state are not self-employed. The implied technical reason why employment by the state doesn’t disqualify one from active citizenship is that one should be subject to no master apart from the commonwealth,22 and therefore if the state is one’s master, this doesn’t constitute serving two masters.23 Yet this strikes one as a bit of a dodge, since being a servant of the commonwealth qua employee of the state does run in some tension with the crucial qualification, which is: “being one’s own master.”24 It seems that part of what Kant has in mind is the notion that human beings who are basically unskilled sell in effect their brute labour power, and therefore they can’t help but be dependent: “being one’s own master [implies] having some property (and any art, craft, fine

17 MM,

458 (VI, 314). 459 (VI, 315). 19 MM, 458 (VI, 314–315); TP, 295n. (VIII, 295). 20 MM, 458 (VI, 315). The phrase “blos handlanger des gemeinen Wesens” can also be translated: “mere odd-jobbers of the commonwealth” – which reinforces the point that their status as “underlings” follows from their lack of an established (i.e., middle-class) trade. 21 Cf. Reiss (1999, 250); see also Reiss (1991, 257). 22 TP, 295 (VIII, 295): what makes the citizen fully a citizen is that “he serves no one other than the commonwealth.” 23 Note the crucial exemption, “except the state,” in MM’s account of how being in the service of others is a civic disqualification: MM, 458 (VI, 314). 24 TP, 295 (VIII, 295). 18 MM,


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art, or science can be counted as property) that supports him.”25 But how can we assess in the abstract whether day labourers, barbers, and tutors are bereft of skills in the relevant sense? Why does Kant say that wig-makers or tailors, by virtue of their craft, own property in their own person, whereas tutors, for instance, are mere servants? In any case, Kant is certainly aware that the whole analysis is rather shaky: “It is, I admit, somewhat difficult to determine what is required in order to be able to claim the rank of a human being who is his own master.”26 Perhaps the issue of how Kant’s own citizenship fares in relation to his status as an employee of the state is too ad hominem. A deeper objection is that his denial of civil personality to those who are economically subordinate betrays the principle that Kant himself articulated so powerfully in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone: “I cannot really reconcile myself to [expressions such as] ’The bondmen of a landed proprietor are not yet ready for freedom’. . . For according to such a presupposition, freedom will never arrive, since we cannot ripen to this freedom if we are not first of all placed therein (we must be free in order to be able to make purposive use of our powers in freedom).”27 Whatever one may make or fail to make of Kant’s arguments for the civic exclusion of those who are economically dependent, his treatment of the civic rights of women seems an even more blatant violation of egalitarian principles. Unlike the criterion of exclusion applied to apprentices and servants, Kant describes the restriction of the franchise to male adults as the “natural” quality requisite to full citizenship.28 With respect to the status of subjecthood (our subjection to shared coercive laws), Kant says that it would be an unacceptable injustice for facts of birth to be a ground of inequalities, since birth is not a “deed” for which we can assume responsibility but simply something that befalls us.29 Committing crimes may alter our equality as subjects, but differences owing to birth cannot do so.30 Yet it appears that the same principle does not apply to our claims to participate in full and active citizenship. At least in the case of men who are disenfranchised, Kant can claim that more concerted exercise of their talents might have qualified them for active citizenship, so to some extent, he could argue, they have themselves to blame for their limited citizenship. (He states that rising to a condition of independence is a matter of “talent,” “industry,” and “luck,” so the responsible actions of these individuals are at least part of the story here.)31 But this isn’t the case with respect to women: if they are denied full civic status for natural reasons, there is no suggestion 25 Ibid.

Applying this mode of analysis to the distinction between teachers and tutors, one would have to say that teachers have a skill that they own which can be sold like a commodity; whereas tutors, on the other hand, sell their labour, which is precisely tantamount to selling themselves. But again, one wonders: is Kant as a state-employed teacher fully master of his own labour? 26 TP, 295n. (VIII, 295). 27 Kant (1960, 176n). (VI, 188). 28 TP, 295 (VIII, 295). 29 TP, 293 (VIII, 293). 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid.

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that this has anything to do with deeds or omissions for which they are responsible: they simply lack the nature of civic beings. As Susan Mendus has highlighted well in her analysis of Kant’s account, all of this has the effect of rendering all adult men at least candidates for (eventual) full citizenship: the door is in principle unlocked and must be kept unlocked as a matter of liberal justice, which is not the case for women. This is in fact a key difference between the two main kinds of passive citizens (servants and women).32 A central component of Kant’s argument that the economically dependent are to be restricted to passive citizenship is Kant’s insistence on the right of the latter not to be hindered in their efforts to rise to civil personality through the winning of economic independence. This is where Kant gets to wave the flag of his own liberalism even within his doctrine of passive citizenship: an essential aspect of the universal moral equality that Kant affirms is “that anyone can work his way up from this passive condition to an active one.”33 No commonwealth can satisfy standards of right if its laws entrench perpetual economic subordination: “Every member of a commonwealth must be allowed to attain any level of rank within it (that can belong to a subject) to which his talent, his industry and his luck can take him; and his fellow subjects may not stand in his way by means of a hereditary prerogative (privileges [reserved] for a certain rank), so as to keep him and his descendents forever beneath the rank.”34 That is, not only must access to full citizenship remain open in principle to the economically dependent, but the state must see to it that institutionalized obstacles blocking such access are removed.35 Again, there is no corresponding notion of a right on the part of women to exercise future opportunities to ascend to civil personality. Their lack of citizenship, unlike that of social classes who are disenfranchised on account of their position within the economy, applies in perpetuity. Kant makes no effort to spell out the reasons why women as women are “naturally” excluded from active citizenship, but of course it’s implicitly related to his sexist arguments concerning marriage in Sections 24–27 of The Doctrine of Right.36

32 See Mendus (1992, esp. pp. 170–174). Cf. Okin (1979, 6): for Kant, “the only characteristic that

permanently disqualifies any person from citizenship in the state. . . is that of being born female” (my italics). 33 MM, 459 (VI, 315). 34 TP, 293 (VIII, 292); cf. p. 293 (VIII, 293): “there can be no innate prerogative of one member of a commonwealth over another as fellow subjects, and no one can bequeath to his descendants the prerogative of the rank which he has within a commonwealth. . .. [those who are economically superior] may not prevent [those who are economically inferior from exercising their right] to raise themselves to like circumstances if their talent, their industry, and their luck make this possible for them.” 35 On the other hand, Kant also insists that disadvantaged members of the society should expect no help from the state in raising themselves up to this condition of economic independence. As Roger Scruton has I think rightly argued, as a theorist of justice Kant is certainly far closer to Hayek than to Rawls. See Scruton (1992). 36 Also relevant, as Lucas Thorpe has helpfully pointed out to me, is what Kant sees as the differential attitudes towards work on the part of the two sexes: men need to be industrious, whereas women need merely to be “occupied,” that is, busied with amusements, however idle. See Kant (1997, 164–165) (XXVII, 396).


27

According to Kant, marital equality is not contradicted by the need for the wife to obey the husband as her “master.” The reason, such as it is, is that dominance by the husband is said to be based on the husband’s “natural superiority. . . to promote the common interest of the household”; and since the “unity and equality” of the marital relationship is constituted by this end, deference to the husband’s judgment in some sense serves rather than contradicts equality.37 Two observations are in order here. First, one may well conclude that this conception expresses a fairly perverse allegiance to the principle of marital equality, yet, however deeply it may violate egalitarian principles, it is distinct from the question of the implications of marriage for civic equality. Still, (and this is the second point), one can’t help noticing that with respect to both spheres of social life, domestic and political, Kant claims to be upholding the idea of equality (the equality of husband and wife, the equality of all subjects within the state) while nonetheless giving huge weight to notions of natural inequality between men and women. One cannot resist asking: If women are civically incapacitated insofar as wives are dependent upon husbands, parallel to the way in which servants are dependent on employers, why can’t women maintain their civil personality simply by refusing to marry? It’s striking that Kant nowhere considers this as a possibility. In the MM version of the argument, Kant specifies that “all women” [alles Frauenzimmer] are denied civil personality,38 which clearly suggests that the married or unmarried status of women doesn’t affect their prospects of full citizenship. Mendus writes: “Kant tells us that by entering into marriage the woman, unlike the man, renounces her civil independence.”39 If so, then the question “Why marry?” is a reasonable one, for loss of civil personality is a substantial price to pay for marriage. This indeed is what one would expect the structure of the argument to be, given the strong emphasis that Kant places on dependency as a disqualification from citizenship. Yet Kant nowhere states explicitly that marriage brings about a loss for women of antecedent civil personality – that is, he nowhere concedes that unmarried women have a civil personality that is forfeited in marriage.40 Again, the door to citizenship for women is locked shut, regardless of contingent circumstances. In this context, it’s interesting to consider Kant’s relationship to Rousseau, for of course Kant claimed that it was from Rousseau that he drew his appreciation of the importance of human equality. Rousseau, as he famously put it, “set me straight” [hat mich zurecht gebracht], because he showed Kant that the vanities of scholars

37 MM,

428 (VI, 279). Cf. TP, 292: “a wife [must obey] her husband” (VIII, 242). 458 (VI, 314); my italics. “Frauenzimmer” is a derogatory term for women in current German usage, but it was a neutral term in older German usage. (A rough counterpart in English would be “dame,” which is a coarse term in contemporary usage but a genteel term in archaic usage.) Mendus claims that Kant places a less severe clamp upon female citizenship in MM than in TP (Mendus (1992, 170–172), but this text suggests otherwise. 39 Mendus (1992, 176). 40 However, the view that Mendus attributes to Kant is expressed by Rousseau: see Okin (1979, 165). 38 MM,

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are as nothing in comparison with the common dignity of the ordinary man.41 Why didn’t this egalitarianism become an issue in a doctrine of citizenship that recognized men and women as equal citizens? When one asks of Kant, “How can a thinker who is the source of such an exalted egalitarianism and universalism in his moral philosophy rest content with such a stunted civic vision in his political philosophy?”, in a way the puzzle is even deeper with respect to Rousseau, for Rousseau also articulated an exalted civic egalitarianism, and still he excluded women from citizenship. Neither Rousseau nor Kant were as successful at applying their egalitarianism to the civic equality of men and women as one might hope, but ultimately, I want to suggest, Kant sins more grievously against egalitarian citizenship. Since it’s much more common for feminist theorists to target Rousseau than to target Kant,42 this requires some explanation. For all the feminist fire against Rousseau, it’s striking how little ammunition is drawn from the work of Rousseau’s that is the direct counterpart of Kant’s Rechtslehre, namely the Social Contract. Without doubt, feminists have found much to complain about in Rousseau’s political thought with respect to gender stereotypes. Yet they’ve had to content themselves with reconstructing his presumed exclusion of women from citizenship on the basis of other Rousseauian texts (especially Emile) because it is never spelled out as an element of his “official” doctrine of citizenship. For instance, Lynda Lange argues that participation in the general will requires meeting a high standard of rationality and autonomous judgment, and we know from the other texts that Rousseau had a very dim view of women’s capacity for rationality and autonomy; therefore he must have intended to exclude them from civic participation in the general will.43 But this is an extrapolation, rather than

41 “Bemerkungen

zu den Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen,” XX, 44. Kant says that prior to being inspired by Rousseau to become an egalitarian, he “despised” [verachtete] the “ignorant rabble” [den Pöbel der von nichts weis]. This phrase gives one a good sense of just how big a leap Kant needed to make in order to get from his pre-egalitarian self to his egalitarian self. 42 Okin, for instance, devotes no less than four chapters of Women in Western Political Thought to Rousseau, yet she makes only passing references to Kant. 43 Lange (1979). Carole Pateman makes a similar argument in Pateman (1988, 100–102). There is also a version of this argument in Schwartz (1984, 42–43). Lange refers to the unforgettable story of the Spartan mother narrated by Rousseau near the beginning of Emile (Lange 1979, 50), but, strangely, she doesn’t see this as evidence that Rousseau was able to imagine women as exemplary citizens. See Rousseau (1979, 40). Cf. Canovan (1987, 89, 90). The closest that Rousseau comes to an explicit exclusion of women from citizenship is in Emile, pp. 362–363: “In his Republic, Plato gives women the same exercises as men. I can well believe it! Having removed private families from his regime and no longer knowing what to do with women, he found himself forced to make them men. . .. [Plato’s fatal mistake consisted in] that civil promiscuity which throughout confounds the two sexes in the same employments and in the same labors and which cannot fail to engender the most intolerable abuses. I speak of that subversion of the sweetest sentiments of nature, sacrificed to an artificial sentiment which can only be maintained by them – as though there were no need for a natural base on which to form conventional ties; as though the love of one’s nearest were not the principle of the love one owes the state; as though it were not by means of the small fatherland which is the family that the heart attaches itself to the large one; as though it


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something explicitly professed as an article of Rousseau’s civic doctrine. If this was Rousseau’s view, why didn’t he spell it out?44 The same goes for other feminist critiques directed at Rousseau: theorists such as Susan Okin,45 Carole Pateman,46 and Jean Ehlstain47 analyze the sexism of Emile, La Nouvelle Héloïse, the Second Discourse, the Letter to d’Alembert, the Geneva Manuscript, and the “Discourse on Political Economy.” None of these critics of Rousseau cites the Social Contract as evidence of his sexism, for the simple reason that there’s nothing in the text that explicitly excludes female citizens. As Margaret Canovan says, “In The Social Contract Rousseau did not mention female citizenship even to refute it.”48 Why not? All of this serves to cast in an even starker light Kant’s categorical and incontrovertible statements of female subordination in his doctrine of citizenship. Now it may well be that for Rousseau and his 18th-century readers, the ineligibility for citizenship status of women was so obvious – as obvious as it was for Kant – that it seemed redundant to spell it out. On this interpretation, Kant, with his greater honesty and forthrightness, simply made explicit what to Rousseau seemed not to require articulation in his authoritative treatise on citizenship. (Or maybe Rousseau

were not the good son, the good husband, and the good father who make the good citizen!” Jean Bethke Elshtain’s summary of Rousseau’s teaching concerning gender in Book 5 of Emile is apt: “boys. . . are in training for citizenship, and girls. . . are preparing for their roles as virtuous and noble wives.” Elshtain (1993, 160). See also Rousseau (1968, 87): “Even if it could be denied that a special sentiment of chasteness was natural to women, would it be any the less true that in society their lot ought to be a domestic and retired life[?]” 44 The view that Lange and others attribute to Rousseau, namely that women are naturally incapable of autonomy, is made more or less explicit at the beginning of “What Is Enlightenment?” where Kant associates “the entire fair sex” with self-incurred tutelage: Kant (1996a, 17) (VIII, 35). The response to this passage by Kant’s friend, J.G. Hamann, seems on-target: Kant “slanders [women] like an old bachelor” (Hamann (1996, 148). 45 Okin (1979, Chapters 5–8, esp. Chapter 7). Okin (p. 167) highlights the text in Emile, p. 448, where Emile is informed by his tutor: “When you become the head of a family [chef de famille], you are going to become a member of the state” – implying that only heads of households (i.e., males) become citizens. 46 Pateman (1988, 53–54, 96–102). 47 Elshtain (1993, 148–170). Elshtain and Okin both cite a strong statement of female subordination from the Geneva Manuscript, which is clearly dropped from the final version of the Social Contract (the corresponding text in the latter refers only to the relationship between fathers and children). This in itself suggests that Rousseau thought that it was inconsistent with the purposes of the Social Contract to distinguish sharply between the status of men and women. The same text is used by Rousseau in his Discourse on Political Economy (in fact, Rousseau may have simply borrowed the passage in the Geneva Manuscript from the latter). In any case, in both works, the explicit context is the radical difference between relationships of authority in the household and those in the political community, so even if Rousseau had a sexist and patriarchal view of the household, by his own argument, nothing follows for principles of political rule from the fact that “the father should command in the family.” Rousseau himself makes this explicit: “Nothing of this kind [i.e., command by the head of the household over his wife, his children, and his servants] exists in political society.” Elshtain (1993, 158); Okin (1979, 146–147); Rousseau (1978, 170 (“Geneva Manuscript”), 47 (“On the Social Contract”), 210 (“Discourse on Political Economy”)). 48 Canovan (1987, 85).

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thought that while an understanding of deep gender differences was highly relevant to reflection on ways of living, it wasn’t relevant to a treatise laying out “principles of political right”?) In any case, I think it makes a significant theoretical difference when one makes a decision to lay down as official doctrine, so to speak (which Kant does but Rousseau doesn’t) a view of citizenship that so blatantly contradicts one’s moral egalitarianism. In omitting to spell out the limits of citizen-status in his doctrine of right, it’s as if Rousseau leaves room for eligibility for citizenship status to be re-negotiated at some future point in the history of citizenship.49 One could say that Kant does just the opposite: he tries to lay out a principled argument (however unconvincing) for explicit restrictions on citizenship. As Mendus points out, Kant himself more or less concedes, at the very point at which he first articulates the distinction between active and passive citizens in MM, that “the concept of a passive citizen seems to contradict the concept of a citizen as such” [mit der Erklarung des Begriffs von einem Staatsbürger überhaupt im widerspruch zu stehen scheint].50 Of course, he hastens to say that the apparent contradiction between the notion of passive citizenship and “the concept of a citizen as such” is a mere “difficulty” [Schwierigkeit] that can be “removed” [zu heben] by considering examples of these two categories of citizenship (full citizen and partial citizen). But really, the cat has been let out of the bag: although Kant denies it, the telling admission that passive citizenship stands prima facie in contradiction with “the concept of a citizen as such” lets slip that freedom, equality, and independence actually form an integral moral package. This is what the reference to “the definition of the concept of a citizen as such” conjures up – the inextricability of our moral status and our civic status. What generates the “apparent” contradiction that Kant acknowledges is precisely the intuition that freedom, equality, and independence are inseparably bound up together as aspects of a single moral “package,” built into the very logic of the concept of citizenship.51 Hence, in claiming that his examples “resolve the difficulty,” Kant is attempting to resist the implicitly civic implications of his own moral thinking – a kind of inevitable “spillover” from his moral philosophy into the domain of civic life. In order to resist or roll back this spillover from his moral philosophy to his civic philosophy, Kant must somehow detach independence from the broader egalitarian package: associating freedom with the humanity 49

Why would Rousseau implicitly leave space for citizenship to be later re-negotiated? Jean Elshtain provides a possible answer to this question. She argues that Rousseau knew that women would be unlikely to be happy in the private household to which he confines them, and that the patriarchal family, even as he celebrates it, is ultimately “doomed.” Elshtain (1993, 162). The question then becomes: if women themselves ultimately reject the domestic roles that Rousseau wants to persuade them to embrace, what do “principles of political right” say about refusing or conceding the civic rights they then demand? 50 MM, 458 (VI, 314). See Mendus (1992, 169–170). 51 It’s significant that in the MM account of citizenship, unlike the TP account, freedom, equality, and independence are all given a civic meaning. For instance, freedom is associated with “the attribute of obeying no other law than that to which [the citizen] has given his consent.” MM, 457 (VI, 314). If so, then those denied citizenship by virtue of lacking independence are also thereby denied freedom.


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of members of the state and equality with their status as subjects is Kant’s way of allowing for a mode of citizenship that is not a guarantee of full freedom and equality (hence: “this [civic] inequality is. . . in no way opposed to their freedom and equality as human beings”).52 Independence, rather than being an entailment of citizenship as a properly moral status, instead becomes the condition of an experience of full citizenship that is available to some but not available to others. This line of argument only works if citizenship is not itself implicated in our moral status as free and equal. We can sum up our suspicions about Kant’s theoretical strategy by saying that “civil personality” has the “look” of a moral status, or at least a quasi-moral status, hence it seems implausible that one could deny civil personality to members of the state without simultaneously detracting from their freedom and equality (i.e., their moral dignity).53 In conceding that the definition of the concept of a citizen as such appears to be in tension with the notion of a division into full and partial citizens, it’s as if Kant is anticipating the trajectory of his thought from moral to civic equality, and taking counter-measures to defeat this trajectory. Kant could perhaps respond that we’re interpreting freedom, equality, and independence as more moral than he intends; he could say that he’s using these terms in a political sense that’s strictly distinct from their meaning in his moral philosophy. Liberty – in the context of the doctrine of right – means that it’s not for the state to decide what will make its citizens happy. Equality means all subjects of the commonwealth are subject to the same system of laws defining a community of right. Independence means we’ve proven ourselves worthy of participating actively in the representation of our own civic personality. Insofar as these ideas compose a package, it’s a political package, quite distinct from autonomy, equality, and selfresponsibility in the sphere of morality. One’s moral status is not at stake in a set of arrangements that allow different individuals to pursue their own happiness in their own way, and that mandates shared subjection to laws that enable this scheme of reciprocal liberty. If Kant’s “low-liberal” account of membership in a state were the whole story, then I think this response might well be sufficient. But I’m convinced that there’s also a “high-liberal” dimension to Kant’s thinking about citizenship (even if he himself tacitly denies it) – that is, a notion of the dignity of the citizen as someone who belongs to the community of right, the notion of the inner worth of those who participate in a “sublime,” because rightful, organization of civic life. And we get a better sense of the latter by glancing sideways at what autonomy, equality, and inner worth mean in Kant’s account of moral life. The above analysis may prompt the following response: Why should anyone expect Kant, living in the non-liberal Prussian state of the late 18th century, to endorse strongly egalitarian civic norms? Offering one version of such a response,

52 MM,

458 (VI, 315).

53 This is expressed, for instance, in John Rawls’s account of personhood cum citizenship: “a person

is someone who can be a citizen, that is, a fully cooperating member of society over a complete life.” Rawls (1999, 397).

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Susan Shell argues that, relative to political norms then prevailing in Europe (apart from post-revolutionary France), Kant’s civic vision is still a radical one, for it defines self-employment (“labour[ing] at self-imposed tasks”) rather than leisure as the criterion of full citizenship; he thereby shifts the political horizon (in accordance with the spirit of the French Revolution) from the nobility to the bourgeoisie.54 This may well be true; yet the ultimate philosophical standard for judging Kant’s political philosophy is not whether it looks liberal or reactionary in relation to his own context, but the standard set by his own philosophy (i.e., the rigorously egalitarian principles of his moral philosophy). If there is an incoherency between his moral philosophy and his political philosophy, Shell’s contextualist defence of Kant’s liberalism doesn’t seem sufficient. One can also ask more generally whether Kant himself would welcome defences of his political thought that take the position that one must adjust one’s critical judgment of his politics in the light of what one could pragmatically hope for in Kant’s own (illiberal) political context. After all, Kant himself of course insists throughout his political writings that politics is not about pragmatism but about right – that is, timeless rather than context-bound principles of what is owed to citizens by virtue of the source of their moral dignity. “True politics can. . . not take a step without having already paid homage to morals. . .. The right of human beings must be held sacred. . . One cannot compromise here and devise something intermediate, a pragmatically conditioned right (a cross between right and expediency); instead, all politics must bend its knee before right.”55 To return to the argument that we started with: lack of full citizenship status may perhaps seem less of an injustice if citizens are merely devils with understanding who contrive a mechanism that allows them to pursue their self-seeking inclinations without colliding into each other. The injustice is substantially greater if citizenship is actually a crucial expression of our human dignity. Ultimately, it’s hard to see how Kant can avoid opting for the more elevated of these two conceptions of the civic condition. As we saw above, even in the “intelligent devils” passage itself, Kant speaks of the republican constitution as a “sublime form of constitution” [einer Verfassung von so sublimer Form] because it alone embodies “the right of human beings” [dem Recht der Menschen]. According to the civic vision laid out by Kant, the state acknowledges our freedom as human beings and grants us equality as subjects. But as for independence, the token of full civic status, it is something whose achievement or non-achievement reposes on us as responsible 54 Shell

(1980, 158). (1996c, 347) (VIII, 380). I’ve pushed this argument pretty hard. On the other hand, Lucas Thorpe has made the helpful point to me that if Kant’s sexism in his theory of citizenship is a case of “bad application of good principles,” then attention to Kant’s historical context might be a reasonable way of trying to understand why Kant didn’t apply his egalitarian principles more coherently. Cf. Taylor (2004, 146): “The people of [the late eighteenth century] can easily seem to us to be inconsistent, even hypocritical. Elite males spoke of rights, equality, and the republic, but thought nothing of keeping indentured servants. . . and kept their women, children, their households in general under traditional patriarchal power. Didn’t they see the glaring contradiction?” Taylor’s response is that our late-modern view of this expresses a failure to appreciate how deeply patriarchy shaped the “social imaginary” of that epoch.

55 Kant


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individuals. Therefore, unlike freedom and equality, independence is not a given but something that certain individuals achieve (although it seems that this achievement is, for reasons that Kant doesn’t specify, beyond the reach of women per se). To be capable of freedom, equality, and independence is what constitutes a complete civic existence for human beings, whereas many or most individuals even in a liberal society as Kant conceptualises it will have to satisfy themselves with an incomplete civic existence. This accomplishment of civic completion is what Kant calls civil personality [der bürgerlichen Persönlichkeit], and we are never given satisfactory reasons why any free and equal human being should ever settle for less than this.

Conclusion One hopes that Kant’s sexism is effectively dead as a theoretical option for political philosophers, and that no contemporary theorist would try either to justify Kant or to come up with their own version of his unattractive arguments. But what is perhaps not a closed question for political philosophers is the relationship between “civil personality” and moral personality, and it is on account of its relevance for that question that we thought it might be worthwhile to take one last look at Kant’s outmoded and discredited sexual politics.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1982. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. R. Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Canovan, Margaret. 1987. Rousseau’s Two Concepts of Citizenship. In Women in Western Political Philosophy, eds. Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus, 78–105. Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1993. Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, 2nd edn. Princeton, JN: Princeton University Press. Flathman, Richard E. 1995. Citizenship and Authority: A Chastened View of Citizenship. In Theorizing Citizenship, ed. R. Beiner, 105–151. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Galston, William A. 2005. The Practice of Liberal Pluralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamann, J.G. 1996. Letter to Christian Jacob Kraus. In What is Enlightenment? EighteenthCentury Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt, 145–153. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1960. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson. New York: Harper & Row. Kant, Immanuel. 1996a. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? In Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, 11–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1996b. On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, But It Is of No Use in Practice. In Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, 273–309. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1996c. Toward Perpetual Peace. In Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, 311–351. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Kant, Immanuel. 1996d. The Metaphysics of Morals. In Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, 353–603. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1997. Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J.B. Schneewind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lange, Lynda. 1979. Rousseau: Women and the General Will. In The Sexism of Social and Political Theory: Women and Reproduction from Plato to Nietzsche, ed. Lorenne M.G. Clark and Lynda Lange, 41–52. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mendus, Susan. 1992. Kant: “An Honest but Narrow-Minded Bourgeois”? In Essays on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Howard Lloyd Williams, 166–190. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Okin, Susan Moller. 1979. Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rawls, John. 1996. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Rawls, John. 1999. Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical. In Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman, 388–414. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reiss, Hans. 1991. “Postscript.” In Political Writings, 2nd edn., ed. Hans Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reiss, Hans. 1999. Kant’s Politics and the Enlightenment: Reflections on Some Recent Studies. Political Theory, 27 (2): 236–273. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1968. Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan Bloom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1978. On the Social Contract, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1979. Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books. Schwartz, Joel. 1984. The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scruton, Roger. 1992. In Essays on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Howard Lloyd Williams, 213–227. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shell, Susan Meld. 1980. The Rights of Reason: A Study of Kant’s Philosophy and Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Political Autonomy and Moral Self-understanding: Kant’s Justification of “Substantive Freedom” Ståle Finke

Kant’s political philosophy has been widely accepted as providing a moral basis for political autonomy and citizenship. However, as recent commentators have found, there seems to be no neat way of deriving a conception of Recht1 constitutional democracy or even political autonomy exclusively from within the framework of Kant’s moral philosophy.2 The political status of individuals is not even eligible for the sort of moral dignity which pertains to us as morally responsible persons in Kant’s sense, since politics is confined to the external regulation or enforcement of a well-ordered society. Ronald Beiner characterizes this classical view, which for him simply rehearses a Hobbesian model, as “low-liberal”, whereas a political philosophy with the ambition of making politics part of a moral self-conception is called “high-liberal”: “According to what I am calling the low-liberal view, politics is conceived as an instrumentality for securing a system of laws that allows each of us to get on with our individual purposes without unnecessary interference by the state [...] There is no ‘moral community’ at stake in citizenship so conceived. According to what I call the high-liberal view, our dignity as human beings is itself implicated in our civic identity, and hence our lives as citizens count for a great deal in establishing or expressing moral status”.3 There is certainly enough textual evidence to support the reading that Kant somehow lingers between a low-liberal and high-liberal conception of politics in a rather disturbing way. In particular, the famous passage from Perpetual Peace in which Kant seems to make it plain that a political state in accordance with Recht is possible even for a nation of instrumentally acting devils, seems to rule out any conception of citizenship and politics based upon the idea of moral autonomy.4 However, S. Finke (B) Department of Philosophy, University of Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway e-mail: [email protected] 1 I am using Recht here in Kant’s sense of an externally legislated external form of freedom. Kant’s

conception is probably best translated into English as “the rule of law”, but sometimes the English “right” is also appropriate. 2 See e.g. Maus (1994). 3 Beiner, R. “Paradoxes in Kant’s Account of Citizenship” of this book. 4 Kant (1996).

G. Ognjenovic (ed.), Responsibility in Context, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3037-5_4, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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as Beiner goes into detail in showing, the different discussions in the Doctrine of Right,5 and other places, where Kant takes pains to delimit the conception of citizenship to “active citizens”, thus excluding women, barbers and others, seem to contradict the idea that citizenship is implied in the idea of the united will of the people (vereinigten Willen), something which already must presuppose a general notion of political autonomy and moral personhood. According to Beiner, the idea of the political contract is only articulated when universality, equality and mutual self-respect is granted for those united under the idea of a sovereign political will, and when this is understood as part of a “moral package”: “[A]lthough Kant denies it, the telling admission that passive citizenship stands prima facie in contradiction to the ‘concept of a citizen as such’ lets slip that freedom, equality and independence actually form an integral ‘moral package’”. It will not be contested here that there are paradoxes to be found in Kant’s conception of citizenship. But, I want to argue these paradoxes are to be understood as conflicting tendencies which arise due to the tension between the facticity of the political and the validity or legitimacy of political decision-making and law-giving, and should not be seen as the result of a false exclusion of morality from politics.6 Kant’s aim was exactly to provide for a normative perspective from which it was possible to conceive of a realm of law and politics beyond the limited sphere of moral reflection. In other words, he wanted to provide for a conception of what I would like to call “substantive freedom” – that is, a conception of freedom and agency not itself to be derived exclusively from moral categories, yet still to be conceived of as normatively allowed for through the consent of its subjects, say, their united political will. In keeping with this, I take it that the paradoxes in Kant’s account of citizenship can be reformulated within an appropriate understanding of “the political” in its distinctiveness: The realm of substantive, that is, political freedom, is to be understood as achieved through an act of moral self-limitation. This act of self-limitation is the condition for the political as such, and for the discourse of Recht. This entails that there can be no political specification of moral categories prior to the achievement of – or conversion to – a political community under the rule of law. Politics in Kant’s sense, mediates between claims to legitimacy, also bearing upon moral claims, and the facticity of substantive freedom, embedded in a framework of subjective liberties and political rights. Kant’s insight, I want to argue, is that we cannot take recourse to a moral integration of politics. Substantive freedom would then be threatened by a tragic overburdening of the political realm by morality – threatening freedom as such as well as making morality powerless in a world left to the causalities of fate.7 5 In

Kant (1991). is the major topic in Habermas (1992). 7 I am using the Hegelian expression here as a means for articulating not merely the unwanted consequences of action (social, psychological, pragmatic etc.), but also the external meaning of actions embedded in relations of mutual interaction and recognition. I thereby hope to capture some of what is at stake in Kant’s conception of external freedom (without being committed to 6 Which

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In the first section, I will briefly deal with Beiner’s reading and criticisms of Kant. Thereafter, I turn to address the conflictual relation between morality and the political, beginning with Plato, before proceeding to Kant’s justification for the political. Finally, I shall briefly discuss how Beiner’s paradoxes of citizenship might be reconceived within a Kantian and post-Kantian understanding of civil society, democracy and political sovereignty.

Moral and Political Selves: Paradoxes of Citizenship? The disassociation of moral or ethical discourse from the political – that the part of the self expressing citizenship seems to be entirely unmediated by concerns reflecting the moral life-world of the same citizens – is not only a problem in Kant’s writings, but in many ways sets much of the agenda for present-day discussions concerning the relation between democracy, political participation and civil society. In particular, social movements oriented towards the achievement of political rights for women and minority-groups, together with heterogeneous cultural and religious practices, have challenged the liberal paradigm of politics and rights, making it clear that ethical and moral concerns of mutual recognition and self-respect are intrinsic to political legislation and law.8 This challenge, even in some cases aiming at overcoming the individualistic premises of a liberal justification of rights and liberties, has renewed the discussion concerning the political in its own right, and thus, prompted a recovery of the normative basis for political deliberation and rights-based participation.9 From a different perspective, the current situation of international politics has provided an urgent motif for a debate concerning the possible implementation of universal rights and global citizenship – questioning the nature of the relationship between state-sovereignty and universal rights.10 How is “the political” to be understood as a separate sphere of action? And how does it reflect the moral outlook of a culturally differentiated public sphere? Is politics – and, thus, the role of citizenship – merely defined by the abstract form of an external legislation of strategically acting individuals (as in classical liberalism from Hobbes and onwards)? Or, can we conceive of a form of republicanism in which the political is part of the overall ethical expression of a community, alternatively a community of autonomous and self-determining agents in either Rousseau’s or Kant’s sense? Alternatively, is the political community expressing Kant’s explicit formulation). The causality of fate yields an intrinsic nature, material logic and end to actions, which is only revealed through the course of action itself. For a brief account, see Bernstein (1995). 8 Cf. Benhabib (1992). 9 Cf. Gutman (1992). 10 In particular, the so-called neo-conservatives have brought the question of state-sovereignty, power and decision-making into the centre of political analysis by stating the historical exceptionality of political judgements with the result of downplaying the constitutional and rights-based confinement of power in the tradition from Kant. See for instance, Kagan (2002).

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what Hegel called Sittlichkeit, that is, the overall ethical framework of a community externalised in binding institutions (family, work, state, public-sphere etc.). If the latter, autonomous morality pertains to little more than a powerless form of inner self-reassurance, or, as Hegel argues in his Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §140, even hypocrisy (Heuchelei) is hopelessly exposed to the actual fate of individual actions and their social meaning within concrete and factual historical circumstances.11 This being acknowledged, how is it at all possible to think of political deliberations and actions as being normatively sanctioned by the overall participation of citizens so that their political self-understanding and freedom is not to be disassociated entirely from moral worth and self-esteem?12 How is autonomy pertaining to the freedom of self-determining agents to be recognised within the presumably alien facticity of political life – or what I have referred to as the causality of fate? Beiner’s answer to the above concerns takes the following form: Any conception of citizenship that comes as part of a “moral package” must be able to reflect specific moral categories pertaining to personhood within the political sphere of action. If there is something Kantian to Kant’s conception of citizenship, then we must correct Kant’s political understanding of citizenship, and allow for it to be determined by pre-political or moral obligations towards the idea of humanity or autonomy as such. As Beiner states: “Recognition of the equality and moral autonomy of our fellow-citizens is likewise a moral recognition”. Thus, “If the state’s ultimate job is to acknowledge and protect the autonomy of its members, which is indeed Kant’s conception, then the state is doing more than just treating us as devils with understanding”. The attempt to hold citizenship apart from moral discourse will only affect our overall sense of moral autonomy in a damaging way – as is the case when Kant distinguishes “active” from “passive” citizens, claiming that women, children, servants, and so on, somehow contingently depend on others so as not being able to fully exercise the capacity of an active citizenship. From the point of view of the low-liberal conception of politics, the separation of the political (and the domain of law) from morality, and the wider sense of an ethical self-understanding, does not even need to be disputed. According to Beiner, Kant goes beyond such an understanding of the political, since the very purpose of politics and law is to be conceived as an integrated part of a normative selfunderstanding according to which political power obtains procedural authorisation

11 Hegel

(1955). I do not consider here Hegel’s recourse to an overall state-organization determining the meaning of the whole, but rather presuppose that the issue concerns the way in which a conception of autonomous and self-determining agency can be expressed in normative binding terms at the political level (in order to oppose the contingencies of ethical life). In short, the question is how “substantive freedom” can be given a meaning and normative sense independent (in terms of mutually constraining subjective rights) of the contingencies of concrete or de facto acts of individual recognition, their interpretations and consequences.

12 Hence,


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from the united will of autonomous agents who already make a claim upon moral recognition. Beiner has his own explanation for why Kant somehow retreated from the original moral idea of citizenship – e.g., why he makes the independency of selfdetermining agents, defined as property-owners, out to be originally (or naturally) acquired or distributed rather than being a purely morally assigned status to begin with. According to Beiner, Kant was afraid of the radical consequences of a “spillover from his moral philosophy to his civic philosophy”, so that he saw himself forced to put a wedge between the two domains of legislation – that of the moral will in its constitutive sense (concerning the meaning of agency and the idea of humanity as such) and that of a factual legislation of external relations between strategically acting individuals: “[A]ssociating freedom with humanity of members of the state and equality with their status as subjects is Kant’s way of allowing for a mode of citizenship that is not a guarantee of full freedom and equality”. As a consequence, Beiner argues, moral freedom can never become substantive in the sense of being expressed in relations of reciprocal recognition that are institutionally embedded within a given framework of liberties and political rights, but will remain a powerless image of the moral world hardly to be realised at all in a concrete political sense. The problem, though, is not that Kant’s conception of freedom remains restricted to an abstract idea of humanity in one’s own person, and that the political thus becomes a mere question of legislating a realm of mere strategic action. Rather, for Kant the nature of morality, and the conditions of moral judging and deliberation, is such that it requires a transition to a sphere of action which deals with “the external and indeed practical relation of one person to another, insofar as their actions, as facts, can have (direct or indirect) influence on each other”.13 Hence, there is something about the full sense of freedom which transcends pure morality, and which constitutes the determinate sense of our actions from a substantive, intersubjective and external point of view. Practical Reason must perform what Wolfgang Kersting has called a Standpunktenwechsel14 or a transition to the political which discloses a conception of freedom in substantive terms, in need of immediate sanctioning. In contrast, moral judgment and deliberation remain indeterminate and dependent upon inner conviction. To be sure, Beiner does take notice of the possibility that there might be specific reasons for Kant’s apparently strict separation of morality from politics, but does not recognise how the shift of perspective is itself required by practical Reason: Kant could perhaps respond that we’re interpreting freedom, equality, and independence as more moral than he intends; he could say that he is using these terms in a political sense that’s strictly distinct from their meaning in moral philosophy [...] Insofar as these ideas

13 Kant

(1991). (1993).

14 Kersting

40

S. Finke compose a package, it’s a political package, quite distinct from autonomy, equality, and self-responsibility in a sphere of morality. One’s moral status is not at stake in a set of arrangements that allow different individuals to pursue their own happiness in their own way, and that mandates shared subjection to laws that enable this scheme of reciprocal liberty.15

The problem with this is the following: For Beiner the alternatives are either a strong moral integration of political status, and thus, of politics, or one has to admit a disassociation of politics from morality on the basis of a low-liberal commitment to the rule of law, merely assigned to protect individuals in their pursuit of happiness. A high-liberal justification of politics (beyond the confines of morality) – enabling substantive or external freedom in Kant’s sense – is thereby overlooked as a normative possibility sui generis. Surely, Beiner has correctly spotted a serious problem in Kant’s conception of what amounts to citizenship in terms of political participation. The problem is that he does not account for why Kant holds citizenship, and the subjective and objective freedom pertaining to it, distinct from the context of moral judgement. The remedy Beiner suggests for the paradoxes in Kant’s view, thus breaks off from the Kantian conception of politics altogether in aiming for an integration of the political virtues of freedom, equality and independence into a moral conception of the self. I shall elaborate on this insufficiency along two mains lines of argument: first, I want to claim that Beiner’s account stands in danger of neglecting the specific justification for the distinctness of the political in Kant’s writings. Secondly, in order to avoid the uneasy consequences of Kant’s strict separation of political and moral concerns, it is of little help simply to define citizenship in accordance with a moral self-conception; what must be questioned is instead Kant’s reluctance to mediate between what he calls the external law-giving of political institutions and the inner law-giving of moral conscience. Yet, I want to argue, such mediation must not confuse morality with the political – and for good Kantian reasons, since the exclusive domain of politics, and the rule of law, defines and enables an important dimension of freedom which according to Kant (and some of his adherents), is not itself available from the point of view of moral reflection alone.

The Political Taming of the Causality of Fate Kant’s distinctive understanding of the political sphere of action inherits a tradition of political philosophy, which is strongly influenced by Plato. Although Plato cannot be said to be concerned with the liberal conception of subjectivity and external freedom, The Republic16 might be said to be the first attempt to deal with the political as a differentiated sphere, requiring its own justification and delineation. What we take to be the modern conflicting tendency between morality and politics was 15 Beiner, 16 Plato

R. “Paradoxes in Kant’s Account of Citizenship” of this book. (1991).


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arguably Plato’s main issue. Taking a brief detour into Plato’s conception of the political will prove to be fruitful in order to get a clearer grasp of what Kant is up to in his Doctrine of Right. In the first book, Socrates enters into a dialectical argument concerning justice and virtue, which can never be decided or completed, since the unity of the idea of justice is deferred or put into the open. From the point of view of the pure logos, of pure conversation, the issue between Socrates and Thrasymakos is unsettled – and this seems itself to be the consequence of the nature of the philosopher’s logos, that of the endlessness of philosophical striving. The dialectical insight Socrates thereby exposes is the following: Logos – and the discourse constituting the very form of possible virtue and good living – is powerless in the face of the concrete particularities and circumstances of community-life, indeed powerless when it comes to decide on specific issues, where judgments upon concrete actions are to be made, and not only approximated in striving. The idea of justice itself requires an actuality, a sense of fulfilment in practice, which it will not achieve through the logos of the philosopher, as it sets everything into the open in questioning all biased particularity. Hence, a conflict appears between enlightened political rationality and the traditional authority of myth, which will require a solution if the philosophical form of life, and the attempt at approximating justice, is not to be put into jeopardy or become a marginal part of the life in the polis. The factical and practical necessity of acting in keeping with justice must be given a political meaning that will disclose the realm of public practice and life as itself being reasonable, and not merely subjected to the causality of fate. This is the cause against tragic view of politics. The struggle with the poets over the right to instruct or educate (padein), or provide for the right paradigms of human civic life, must end in favour of enlightened insights into the essential otherness of political being, being itself a realm of external authorisation and insight, and not of poetic imagery. The task of founding the political in words, not by tragic drama, amounts to a conversion to the political as a separate domain of legislation. This is also the reason why Socrates must take on a different role in The Republic: Instead of returning to the cave by the means of mere critical irony, the task is now to instruct through phronesis in political matters. Thus the familiar end to Plato’s dialogues, concluding with the doctrina ignorantia, is resisted and figures instead as an opening, motivating political commitment. As the first book concludes: “[N]ow as a result of discussion I know nothing. So long as I do not know what the just is, I shall hardly know whether it is a virtue or not and whether the one who has it is unhappy or happy”.17 It is because the dialogue exhausts all justification, and thus leaves the individual with a never-ending task of obtaining virtue reflectively, that an acknowledgement on behalf of the limits of the philosophical stance must be made. Only in virtue of a moral self-restraint is political friendship possible at all. Yet, this return or conversion to the political is not merely decisionistic, but preserves the ambition

17 Ibid.,

354a.

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S. Finke

to articulate justice and goodness from within the realm of actual friendship and practical necessity. I take it that this is the meaning of the passage in the third book where Socrates suggests a shift of perspective in the conversation – leaving the point of view of the individual and its conception of happiness in favour of the “large letters” of justice and virtue in the city: “So then, perhaps, there would be more justice in the bigger and it would be easier to observe it closely. If you want, first we’ ll investigate what justice is like in the cities. Then, we’ll also go on to consider it in individuals”.18 The ethical priority of the individual is thereby reversed in favour of a new sense of the political: The distinctiveness of political conversation and legislation entails a renouncement upon any individual interpretation of the good: “My friend, you have forgotten”, Socrates says to Glaucon, “that it’s not the concern of the law that any one class in the city fare exceptionally well, but it contrives to bring this about in the city as a whole, harmonizing the citizens by persuasion and compulsion [...] And it produces such men in the city not in order to let them turn whichever way each wants, but in order that it may use them in binding the city together”.19 One might say that Plato is here considering or taking into account the skeptical nature of philosophical self-reassurance, of logos itself, thus establishing the return to the political and the city as itself the end of philosophy – an end, then, stated and acknowledged as the limiting possibility of the philosophical form of life, and thus of all search and striving for happiness. Yet, this return into the dark waters of political action and navigation preserves the philosophical stance – and the claim to justice – to the effect that it retains its commitments to form and legislation. The causality of practical life is indeed to be given a form in accordance with the large letters of political virtues, themselves mirroring the proportionate harmony of a balanced soul, articulated in terms of a substantive embodiment of a politically organised division of labour, an executive power and a legislative thought.20 This latter dimension of Plato’s Republic anticipates political modernity not only in its disclosure of the problem of the political as such, but equally in making the transition to the political depend upon the acknowledgement of each subject conceived as taking part in the conversation. The city is founded in words. Hence,

18 Ibid.,

368e–369a. 519b–520b. 20 In this sense, Plato’s Republic ought to be conceived as an early justification of the constitutional state (Rechtsstaat). As according to Ernst Cassirer: “[Gerechtigkeit] ist ein allgemeines Prinzip der Ordnung, der Regelmäßigkeit, der Einheit und der Gesetzmäßigkeit. Innerhalb des individuellen Lebens manifistiert sich diese Gestezmäßigkeit in der Harmonie all der verschiedenen Seelenkräfte; innerhalb des Staates manifestiert sie sich in der ‘geometrischen Proportion’ zwischen den verschiedenen Klassen, auf Grund welcher jeder Teil des Gesellschaftskörper das ihm zukommende erhält und an der Aufrechterhaltung der allgemeinen Ordnung mitwirkt. Mit dieser Konzeption wurde Platon der Begründer und der erste Verteidiger des Rechtsstaates”. Cassirer (1985). 19 Ibid.,


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the conversion to the political is conceived as an act made in order to found a well-ordered community-life, a sanctioned realm of justice and virtue enforced by a sovereign state. In this act the political appears as a realm of public participation in which one’s actions are given an external or determinate sense. True self-determination, freedom and happiness, then, requires one to admit the priority of the political re-definition of virtue, being itself a condition for the individual’s conception of happiness, endlessly deferred through striving. It is hard to see how this will entail a submission to the contingencies of arbitrary tyranny, something which would only make the political appear as fate once more; the philosopher is committed to a form of legislation which has justice and proportionate harmony as its end, not to the mere ends of persuasion and the noble withdrawal from public opinion.21 The point, I take it, is that political justice must be kept separate from the ethical or moral stance – constituting two different realms of questioning, going in different directions and requiring different answers. The transition to the realm of political justice is achieved spontaneously in a conversion to an external sense of action, articulated and embodied in the community-life with others in the city. The boundaries of the city, then, constitute the only determinate form that can be given to justice in a post-traditional culture of logos. The justice exhibited within the city is the sole justice to be expected for finite beings, whereas the philosopher might continue to perfect a different articulation of the same in the infinite striving towards inner self-reassurance, reconciling the individual to the world, elevated above the contingencies of fate.

Sovereignty and the Rule of Law Kant’s justification of the rule of law – and his conception of justice – is modern22 in the sense that it is concerned with the distribution of individual rights and liberties between equal individuals, rather than being concerned with social and natural divisions within a political economy (and their proportionate harmony). As according to Kant: “Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law”.23 The nature of the

21 This

stands in contrast to Leo Strauß’s otherwise brilliant reading of the Republic according to which the problem of the political is indistinguishable from the art of persuasion and noble deception: “The problem of the best city would be altogether insoluble if the multitude were not amenable to persuasion by the philosophers. It is in the context of the assertion that the multitude is persuadable by the philosophers that Socrates declares that he and Thrasymachus have just become friends. Thrasymachos must be integrated into the best city because the best city is not possible without the art of Thrasymachus”. Pangle (1989). 22 Cf. Cassirer (1985, 213ff). 23 Kant (1991).

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transition to Recht, though, retains a classical political insight: The political is something achieved, and not given, on the basis of a renunciation upon the standpoint of morality for the sake of a sovereign order granting a regulation of external, or what I have called substantive, freedom: “Ethical law-giving is [...] that which cannot be external; juridical law-giving is that which can also be external”.24 The domain of the political, granted by an independent sovereignty enforcing an external legislation among citizens, is won by the practical insight into the necessity of having a conception of substantive freedom, not itself derivable from moral discourse. And this is the Platonic dimension in Kant’s political philosophy: The transition to Recht entails “an authorization to coerce someone who infringes upon it”.25 It thus concerns a perspective upon actions, and their socially embedded meaning and nature, according to which one restricts oneself to the external dimension of actions in reciprocal relations to others. Considering this aspect of action as social “facts” or realities means to take into account the causality of fate, and the practical necessity of developing a well-ordered regulation of external freedom and independence. In the conversion to the political, the will of each is bound by that of all; the political contract requires mutual respect for one’s external freedom as a result of mutual dependency. As such, acting within the realm of external (and, thus, negative) freedom does not require an internal conviction in the sense of committing oneself to moral duties; the very conception of external freedom gives admission to regard one’s actions as merely obliged to conform to positive law: “[T]hat law-giving which does not include the incentive of duty in the law, and so admits an incentive other than the duty itself is juridical”.26 It should be clear from these formulations that the very idea of Recht in Kant’s sense transcends the standpoint of morality. The universality reflected in the principle of right (Recht) does not bear upon the categorical imperative as such (or any internal divisions within it, say, such as that between strict and wide duties), but is at the outset an articulation of the rightful and possible co-existence of externally determined free actions: “Right is therefore the sum of the conditions under which the choice (Willkür) of the one can be united with the choice of another in accordance with a universal law of freedom”.27 To be sure, Kant’s argument in his introduction to the Doctrine of Right is extremely convoluted and complex, and we will not attempt to provide an exhaustive account here. Yet, following the suggestions already given, it will suffice to recognise that the transition to the political cannot rely on exclusive moral resources, since morality concerns the inner motivation and obligations which are themselves the result of duty, and the deliberations and judgements made in accordance with the universality-claim of morality. From within the confines of this latter perspective the external determination of actions, and of freedom – the very concept of external freedom – is not found (as it cannot

24 Ibid.,

47. 57. 26 Ibid., 46. 27 Ibid., 56. 25 Ibid.,


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be seen as an instrument for moral education); and, the idea of an embodiment of external freedom within a lawful and sovereign constitutional state is, as such, not part of a strictly moral discourse. Moreover, the failure to concede the political and the realm of substantive freedom a legislation of its own, would be a disaster for freedom as such, and leave self-determining agency exposed to the contingencies of the natural state (Naturzustand) that is, the state in which all actions are morally problematic, and all claims to right merely provisional, and never externally conclusive (sanctionable in a rightful sense).28 As Kant points out, dissolving externally enforced obligations into morality, would make e.g. contractual obligations a matter of mere promising, and, thereby, “faithful performance (in keeping with promises made in a contract) would be put in the same class with actions of benevolence, and this must not happen”.29 In keeping with this, without undertaking a shift of perspective upon the conceptions of freedom related to external Willkür, practical Reason will stand in danger of not being able to legislate at all, and will instead retreat into the mere inner realm of private duty. Freedom in the broader or substantive sense would be only an indeterminate or provisional idea, and maybe even impossible, given that the freedom of self-determining individuals is also dependent upon externalities – natural, cultural and social (or as Kant puts it, in so far as actions externally influence each other) – something which yields an “objective sense” (in the Hegelian manner of speaking) to self-determining subjectivity. Full freedom thus presupposes a limitation of the moral point of view in favour of a political order of sanctioned law in order for such freedom to be possible. In this way, the withdrawal of the moral perspective together with the mere provisional and subjective claims to rights (themselves only sanctioned by morality and inner conviction) in favour of a civil state under the rule of law is itself an insight obtained by pure practical Reason. In the external realm of law, it is not the categorical imperative, but the original contract, which articulates the formal and procedural principle of universality with regard to the implementation of rights and liberties.

The Contingency of Right In Kant’s conception of the political, the sovereign of the state is conceived of as in a mutually binding relationship with his or her citizens by virtue of the 28 Ibid.,

85.

29 Ibid., 47. The claim might seem peculiar given Kant’s distinction between wide and strict duties.

But, I would suggest, the point is perhaps that even strict duties do not determine the full meaning of, e.g. a promise (but only negatively, what it would mean to transgress it in given circumstances, e.g. in terms of giving priority to self-interest), so that what counts for it to be made in different contexts, and fulfilled, is a matter of judgement or, say material inference, giving the result that all fulfilment is the accomplishment of benevolence and good judgement. And this is just what a substantive conception of freedom cannot allow for.

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idea of a contract in which the autonomy of the individual, and the individual’s self-understanding as a co-author of the state is central. In this way, the state is subjected to a normative perspective of a mutual contract requiring the authorisation of its citizens: “The act by which a people forms itself into a state is the original contract. Properly speaking, the original contract is only the idea of this act, in terms of which alone we can think of the legitimacy of a state. In accordance with the original contract, everyone (omnes et singuli) within a people gives up his external freedom in order to take it up again immediately as a member of a commonwealth, that is, of a people considered as a state (universi).”30 It is the perspective of the unified will of all, in the transition from the natural state to the civil condition, conceived of as a procedural principle,31 which constitutes the normative dimension of politics. Without the idea of the mutuality of the contract, Recht is dissolved. How is this idea of the contract itself to be implemented? On this point, the paradoxes of citizenship re-surface in Kant’s treatment of the political since he seems to one-sidedly favour any historically given sovereignty to public participation. The problem is not that the conception of the original contract is thought to be merely an idea – but that there is nothing that makes it necessary from the perspective of practical Reason to embody or translate the acts of the united will into constitutionally guaranteed forms of democratic participation. As Wolgang Kersting makes clear: “Kant’s proceduralism in the theory of justification makes the democratic formation of the will in a contractual community into the rule for tests in justice. But what is decisive [...] is that for Kant this procedure of a genesis through a democratic plebiscite can be simulated and replaced by the thought-experiment of universality. By this means Kant makes it possible for non-democratic rulers to provide just laws without having to give up power”.32 This limitation of the procedural normativity embedded in the original contract certainly comes as the result of a compromise between the historical conditions of right and its normative claim to universality. For Kant, though, the conversion to the political – as itself containing a political insight allowed by pure practical Reason – admits a priority to the judgment of the sovereign, since all right must depend upon the facticity of the given historical situation, making sanctioned law possible at all. Whether the ideal of republicanism is going to be a historical reality or not is for Kant a matter of reform and the invisible hand of history. The problem with Kant’s justification of political sovereignty is the following: not only is the deliberation and specification of what amounts to a fair distribution 30 Ibid.,

127. the original contract serves as the procedural principle with regard to the regulation and legislation of the realm of external freedom (and not the categorical imperative) simply reflects the shift of perspective with regard to morality. This does not exclude moral concerns for being fused with claims to Right, but the perspective from which issues of Right are sanctioned concerns merely the dimension of a distribution of external freedom in view of the principle of Right. 32 Kersting (1992). 31 That


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of subjective liberties constrained by the contingent and pragmatic concern defined by the sovereign, but the generation and implementation of right as such is subjected to the facticity of the sovereign’s judgment and will. This surely raises the paradox of citizenship, even though the solution to this paradox cannot be that of a return to a moral package, since this would be incompatible with the admission of external freedom as such. A different formulation of the paradox of citizenship is thus needed in order not to loose sight of the main idea of Kant’s justification for external freedom. Within such a reformulation the paradoxical nature of citizenship should be preserved and not entirely resolved – reflecting the conflicting tendencies of morality and the political.

Participation as Procedural Constraint Even if preserved, the paradoxical nature of citizenship cannot be considered as grounds for a total exclusion of the moral standpoint from the realm of politics and positive law without threatening the self-understanding of citizens as authors of the political constitution. The possibility of such exclusion and marginalisation stems from the nature of Kant’s reconstructive argument for the political: Since the conversion to the political is a practical insight each individual assures herself of through reflection, in foro interno, there is no need to consider this act other than in purely ideal terms. Hence, Kant’s justification for the domain of Recht is premised upon a monologically conceived conception of practical Reason at the outset, which fails to take into consideration its necessary implementation through concrete acts of mutual recognition.33 If one, by contrast, conceives of the transition and justification of right as inherently inter-subjective in character, the constitutional state must already at the outset embody a system of laws granting the regeneration of rights through the active discussion and participation of its citizens in order for substantive freedom to become formative for the self-conception of each. This latter approach was developed in detail by Kant’s immediate successors, who wanted to preserve Kant’s original conception of Recht while at the same time allowing for participatory political rights being equi-primordial to private or subjective rights. But what consequences does this inter-subjective framework have for our understanding of Kant’s paradox of citizenship? Before returning to address Beiner’s problems with Kant, let us briefly recapitulate some of the postKantian developments with regard to the justification of external or substantive freedom. In his Grundlage des Naturrechts (1796), Fichte develops an argument for the negative regulation of external freedom and the rule of law on the basis of a 33 As Ingeborg Maus observes: “Das faktische Legitimationsverfahren nähert sich dem foro interno

simulierten moralischen Begründungsverfahren an. Die antidemokratische Konsequenz der gegenwärtigen Entdifferenzierung zwischen moralischer Begründung und demokratischer Legitimation des Rechts kann nicht deutlicher demonstriert werden alos an dieser obrigkeitsstaatlichen Konzession Kants”. Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie, 322.

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conception of mutual recognition, which retains an understanding of the factual conditions of an embodied freedom in a finite world. The argument for the distinctiveness of the political is strictly Kantian. Yet, the difference to Kant is clear in the emphasis upon the inter-subjective nature of the self-limiting acknowledgement of freedom. This entails for Fichte that the rule of law must be seen as the very form of mutual recognition according to which freedom can achieve factual determinacy, and thus the form of law-giving which makes independent agency possible: “I must recognize the free being of the other as something different from myself as such, that is, I must limit my own freedom by virtue of the possibility of the freedom of the other [...] that each limits his freedom through the possibility of the freedom of the other [...] constitutes the very relation of right (Rechtsverhältnis)”.34 According to Fichte, since the transition or conversion to a politically determined external law-giving – granting the private freedom and independence of each (in the absence of any acts of concrete acknowledgement of others, requiring mere conformity to law) – is itself achieved through an inter-subjective or mutual acknowledgement of the necessity of an institutional and externally sanctioned realm of freedom, the continuous self-understanding and self-respect of politically autonomous subjects will also require inter-subjective practices in which this self-understanding is expressively manifested and confirmed. In this way, certain institutionally guaranteed political or participatory rights must be equally fundamental to the distribution of private rights, substantiating the legitimacy of political power. As a consequence, the contract granting the legitimacy of political power cannot be merely simulated. Indeed, legitimate political power will depend upon the regeneration of the political self-understanding of the individual subjects and their contributions to – or check upon – political deliberation and law-giving. The paradox which remains in Kant is that the attempt to avoid the causality of fate, being an opposing force to freedom, could only succeed if the primacy of the political was admitted so as to allow for an external law-giving, sufficiently implemented through the simulation of a procedural legitimisation. In fact, Kant was suspicious of actual participation as this could bereave the political of its intrinsic nature and justification. Yet, without any mediation between the private self-understanding of the citizens and factual legal and political decision-making, the political self of each would yet again be surrendered to the causalities of fate in terms of the historical contingency of sovereign judgment and will, only to be redeemed by the invisible hand of history. In this situation, Fichte’s alternative proves promising as it tames the contingency and historical exceptionality of political power by means of the reflective mediation of forms of mutual recognition, and, thus, at least potentially provides for a conception of democracy and civil society embedded in a framework of political rights. A beginning is thereby made for a political thinking that attempts to mediate between civil society and the political domain of Right. Anything else,

34 Fichte

(1979).


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Fichte argues, amounts to despotism: “Every individual entering the state must be able to be convinced about the impossibility of him being treated contrary to law or unfairly. This impossibility can not exist, however, without making those governing the law responsible. A constitution where those exercising public power have no responsibility in this regard, is despotism”.35 Accordingly, legitimate political power and decision-making must draw its resources from the participation of individuals in forming a public will, expressing their political autonomy and selfunderstanding. In this way, the Kantian paradox of citizenship can be reformulated and preserved, yet at a level other than the moral one: Instead of dissolving the political into a moral definition of citizenship, political rights are granted by means of a political package of subjective and objective rights delineating substantive freedom. What is high-liberal in this is that subjective rights and negative liberties are already conceived of as part of a general conception of external or substantive freedom (in terms of negative independence) which affects the person as such in so far as he or she is externally related (that is, contingently, finite and embodied) to other persons in relations of reciprocal recognition. The selflimitation required of each for the sake of such freedom entails a withdrawal of one’s original claim to pure moral perfectibility and judgement. The political makes moral existence and perfection a paradoxical endeavour of expressive claiming and limitation. One might say that this idea of the primacy of the political, and the paradoxical limitation of morality, is the achievement of the Verrnunftrechtstradition36 from Plato to Kant and Fichte, and, further onwards to its contemporary defence in Jürgen Habermas. In view of this tradition, the paradox of citizenship is itself felt as part of the inner tensions between the liberal constitutional form and its procedural and expressive manifestation in the culture of civil society. Democratic and procedural forms of political legitimisation must always take the form of a regeneration and continuous reinvention of citizenship – limited only by the pre-given form of constitutional law, granting the very idea of substantive or external freedom. In this sense, political discourse and right must always retain its claim to selfsufficiency.37 When moral intuitions, arguments and experiences become politically relevant, they are always to be understood as filtered through a political self-understanding which makes up the culture of a civil society.38 The articulation of moral claims

35 Ibid.,

157–158. a good synopsis of the development of the idea of a mutual relation between the conception of a contract and that of political sovereignty, see Cassirer (2001). 37 As Habermas contends: “Due to the mutual relation between modern right and political power, the principle of democracy which regulates law-giving (Rechtsetzung), enjoys a self-sufficiency with respect to the principle of morality”. Habermas (2005). 38 For a discussion of the relevance of the conception of “civil society”, see Cohen and Arato (1994). 36 For

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thus undergo a shift of perspective in which the delineation of the external independence and subjective freedom of each is already a determining premise. Or as Jürgen Habermas makes clear: “The realm of right is a selective and non-holistic form of the regulation of action, and does not apply to the individual as a concrete manifestation of a person individuated by its life-history, but only in so far as natural persons take on the artificial and narrowly delineated status of being bearers of subjective rights”.39

Conclusion There has been no dispute above, over Beiner’s general political outlook, and some of the concerns underlying his critique of Kant’s conception of the political are surely well founded. Yet, the contemporary disintegration of the political sphere of action, and together with this perhaps even the self-understanding and political autonomy of its subjects as well, cannot be restored by means of sublating politics into morality. The tendency towards a return to pure morality is increasingly felt as part of the domination of the causalities of fate – most probably prompted and intensified by, say, the dysfunctional effects of a rapidly expanding commodity and labour-market, the rapid exchangeability of visually formed identities through advanced media-technologies, the disintegration of stable social and traditional forms of upbringing and narrative self-formation (under the demand or spell of an ever-flexible adaptation to new and globalised environments) etcetera.40 Not only do modern liberal democracies face great internal problems of motivation and legitimacy, but we might also sense a retreat from the project of an institutionalisation of political and human rights, in particular at the level of international politics. In this situation, both the exclusive affirmation of the sovereignty of political power, what has been called exceptionalism,41 as is the tendency within the so-called neo-conservative thinking, as well as the attempt to dissolve politics into morality (which I do not claim is Beiner’s political remedy, of course, only a tendency in his Kant-reading) are false alternatives. Neither can aspire to master the causality of fate in the dialectics between autonomous citizenship, law-giving and political decision-making, but will only confirm to its predominance. The neoconservatives have correctly seen that the political has priority over morality for factual and historical reasons: The historical contingency of power constitutes the capacity to act and transform the world independently of agreements reached, settled or postponed in moral discourses, however formalised. Yet, the exceptionalist embracing of the historical singularity of the power to make sovereign judgements has the disadvantage of breaking off from the initial form of the institutionalisation of the rule of law acknowledged by mutually recognising individuals for the sake 39 Habermas

(2005, 97–98). e.g. Sennet (1998). 41 See my (Finke, 2005). 40 See


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of the substantive freedom of each. The sphere of political action thus becomes a mere contingency – friendship as the result of arbitrarily construed affinities, not to say fear. The Schmittian turn to political existentialism can only result in turning morality, and our sense of being self-determining, into a powerless and purely inward sense of selfhood facing the otherness of the political, and its unmasterable horrors.42 The retreat to the moral package entwines itself within the same dialectic of fate as it makes substantive freedom and factual citizenship a matter of unbounded normative chance. Moral claims and discourse with direct political implications, are, as Kant saw, either tantamount to tyranny, or remain within the realm of the pure heart, in the case of which political life will take care of itself while the just ones turn into beautiful souls. Following the tradition from Plato to Kant it seems more apt to let morality in the narrow sense become an issue for self-perfection, whereas citizenship remains a politically embodied conception of freedom. Within the political, moral issues of tolerance, self-respect, recognition of other religious communities, cultural differences and the like, attain to an entirely different dimension in the sense of being transposed to the conditions of personhood and freedom in the external or substantive sense. The faith of others, its symbolic articulation and practice, say, is not to be respected for the sake of mere moral recognition, but because a rights-based form of respect is central to a fully articulated substantive conception of a person, exercising his or her external freedom. If respect is also, morally speaking, required (which indeed does not necessarily have to be the case), this requirement is a matter of the perfection of each. Political virtues are required in order to develop a political culture in which this two-fold sense of self-determination can be recognised, judged upon and articulated. And one of the most important virtues in this context is moral self-limitation – required for political citizenship to be possible at all. To return to Beiner’s initial concern: there is a sense in which we can be devils and still retain our sense of being politically autonomous citizens after all – when evil here is understood merely as one aspect of what it means to be radically independent, exercising a capacity for choice, granted as part of the political package of substantive freedom. As Hannah Arendt recognised: “[T]respassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s consistent establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly”.43 Forgiveness for such trespassing or evil is indeed an issue of moral self-perfection, and required both for humility and solidarity, as well as for preventing the private self not to fall into endless despair. However, reconciliation and forgiveness are not as such political affairs.

42 For an account of the recent developments within neo-conservative thinking, and its indebtedness

to Carl Schmitt, see McCormick (1997). (1959).

43 Arendt

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References Arendt, Hannah. 1959. The Human Condition, 216. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books. Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bernstein, Jay M. 1995. Recovering Ethical Life, 82 ff. London: Routledge. Cassirer, Ernst. 1985. Der Mythos des Staates, 91. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag. Cassirer, Ernst. 2001. Freiheit und Form, 319 ff. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Cohen, Jean L. and Arato, Andrew. 1994. Civil Society and political Theory. London: The MIT Press. Fichte, Johann Gotlieb. 1979. Grundlage des Naturrechts (1796), 52. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Finke, S. 2005. Amerikansk eksepsjonalisme – Carl Schmitt og den neokonservative begrunnelsen for politikkens suverenitet. Retfærd 109: 30–50. Gutman, Amy. ed. 1992. Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ. Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. Faktizität und Geltung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Habermas, Jürgen. 2005. Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, 102. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Frederich. 1955. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821), 128. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Kagan Robert. 2002. Power and Weakness. Policy Review, June 2002. Kant, Immanuel. 1991. The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor, 56. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Toward Perpetual Peace. In Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, 335. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kersting, Wolfgang. 1992. Politics, Freedom and Order: Kant’s Political Philosophy. In The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer, 355.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kersting, Wolfgang. 1993. Wohlgeordnete Freiheit, 126. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Maus, Ingeborg. 1994. Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. McCormick, John P. 1997. Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pangle, Thomas L. ed. 1989. The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 159. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Plato. 1991. The Republic (Trans.). Chicago: Allan Bloom, Basic Books. Sennet, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character – Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Responsibility and Global Labor Justice Iris Marion Young1

Socrates thought that, for the agent himself, doing wrong is more harmful than suffering wrong. Well, so long as it is merely a matter of ‘wrong’ done or suffered, thus a matter essentially existing in the perception of the parties, the proposition may stand. . .But the objectified wrong creates a new, external causality, and we are inquiring about its moral harm to the suffering side. And we ask the question not, as Socrates did, for the single actions committed and suffered here and there, but for the constant effects on the victims of a system of justice. And there the main point is that, in a system of ruthless exploitation, those objective effects mean abject poverty with all the degradation, external and internal, which this entails. – Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility.2

Do people in relatively free and affluent countries such as the United States, Canada or Germany have responsibilities to try and to improve working conditions and wages of workers in far-off parts of the world who produce items those in the more affluent countries purchase? In recent years the “antisweatshop” movement has gained momentum with arguments that at least some agents in these relatively free and affluent countries do have such responsibilities. They have had rallies and press conferences, staged sit-ins and hunger strikes, all with the aim of convincing consumers, corporate executives, union members, municipal governments, students, and university administrators in the United States or Europe to acknowledge a responsibility with respect to the working conditions of distant workers in other countries, and to take actions to meet such responsibilities. Those to whom these appeals are made often find them absurd. We who got to work and school here in Chicago have no connection to workers in Bangkok or I.M. Young (B) Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA 1 Jonas

(1985). Iris Marion (2004) “Responsibility and Global Labor Justice”. The Journal of Political Philosophy Volume 12, Number 4, pp. 365–388. Reprinted with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2 Young,


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Manila or Tegucigalpa. However awful the conditions under which they work, we have not caused them, and we are not in control of the factors that would remedy them. Thus it makes no sense to claim that we have moral responsibilities to try to change them. In this article I theorize a conception of responsibility that can make sense of the claims of the anti-sweatshop movement, or indeed, any claims of responsibility that members of a society might be said to have toward harms and injustices of distant strangers. Objectors to the anti-sweatshop movement are right to argue that these claims make little sense within a dominant conception of responsibility as liability. I propose and elaborate a different conception of responsibility, political responsibility, to correspond to these claims.

Claims of Responsibility for Working Conditions Many of the goods sold by some of the most high-profile retailers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan and Germany are made in small factories far away in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and other countries whose governments offer tax and other incentives to foreign investors. Others are manufactured in small production facilities in the United States employing immigrants. The American or Japanese brand name companies rarely operate the factories themselves, but rather place highly specified orders with other companies, who themselves often contract out the work to local entrepreneurs. Education and publicity about conditions under which much apparel sold in affluent countries is made in less developed countries has led to awareness that similar conditions in often illegally operating apparel manufacturing facilities exist in many cities closer to home – in Chicago, Los Angeles or New York, for example. The arguments I mean here about responsibility apply to relations between strangers in the same country or city as much as transnationally. They are part of a connected global apparel industry system that produces both. In this paper I nevertheless concentrate the argument on transnational connection, because many people question that responsibility extends so far. It is not hyperbole to label these factories “sweatshops.” The vast majority of garment workers worldwide are women, often young women, who are readily accessible and relatively pliant from the employers’ point of view. Shifts are commonly at least ten hours, six days a week, and forced overtime is common. Factories usually have strict rules, which often include restrictions on talking and going to the bathroom, and supervisors are often abusive as a matter of policy. Working conditions are often dangerous, with poorly ventilated, overheated spaces and little protective equipment. Women workers often suffer sexual harassment or verbal abuse. Workers who protest their exploitation or attempt to organize unions are typically intimidated, beaten, or fired. Wages for these workers are often below the local legal minimum wage, and even when they are not, the wages fall below what the workers need for subsistence. Health benefits and pension plans are a fantastic dream, and there is no job security. Indeed, workers are often defined as temporary workers just so their employers can legally escape the requirements of labor laws. According to

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a report from the International Labor Organization, dozens of millions of workers worldwide toil under such conditions.3 In the mid 1990s in the United States and Europe, activists began campaigns targeted at consumers of some of these products, to urge them to think about these far-away workers, not buy the products, and put pressure on the retailers that contracted their manufacture to change the working conditions. Leafleting and demonstrations at outlets of Gap, Disney, Nike and Victoria’s Secret caught the attention of some activists and consumers, and eventually succeeded in moving corporate leaders to take some actions in response, although some have described these as cosmetic. Initially, however, the global companies’ response was to deny responsibility for the workers, saying that they did not themselves operate the factories in which the goods were produced. In the meantime, students at colleges and universities raised questions about the conditions under which the garments worn by their sports teams and sold in their bookstores are made. They called upon their university administrators to terminate contractors with sportswear companies that refused to take responsibility for such conditions. The height of the student anti-sweatshop movement came during the 1999–2000 academic year, when student groups on hundreds of campuses held rallies and campus education events, occupied administration buildings and staged hunger strikes. Most of the student groups were demanding that their universities join the Worker’s Rights Coalition, a student-initiated independent organization to monitor working conditions in apparel factories overseas, and to put pressure on manufacturers to change poor conditions. Many students and college administrators responded to these demands with incredulity.4 It is not the business of universities and their students to get involved in labour regulation, especially of conditions so remote. We are not the cause of the injustice the workers suffer, and we do not control those who are. The Owners and managers of the factories clearly have a primary responsibility for the treatment workers receive, the hours they are required to work, their wages and benefits, and the safety of the work environment. They make specific cost minimization decisions that result in sweatshop conditions, they make the rules that prohibit bathroom breaks or days off, they lock the doors and verbally abuse workers, they or those they hire threaten and beat workers who try to organize unions. If there are any agents to blame for the plight of these workers, surely the owners and managers must be first in line. Inasmuch as its primary recommendation for action to improve the workers’ situation is that universities and corporations should monitor factory conditions and pressure owners and managers to change their policies, the antisweatshop movement recognizes that those agents have a direct responsibility. Such a rejection of movement claims of the responsibility of university administrators and consumers assumes a liability model of responsibility. On the liability

3 For an account of working conditions, see Rosen (2002); Bonacich and Richard (2002, Esp. Chap. 6); Klein (1999). 4 Fetherstone (2000).

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model, it is indeed implausible to hold there remote agents responsible for the workers’ situation. The anti-sweatshop movement must implicitly be relying on another conception of responsibility. My project here is to construct a conception of responsibility that corresponds to their institutions, which I call political responsibility. My argument is not that the concept of political responsibility should replace that of a fault or liability model, but should supplement that model in analyses of responsibility in relation to structural processes. The most common model of assigning responsibility derives from legal reasoning to find guilt or fault for a harm. Under the fault model, one assigns responsibility to particular agents whose actions can be shown as causally connected to the circumstances for which responsibility is sought. This agent can be a collective entity, such as a corporation, but when it is that entity can be treated as a single agent for the purposes of assigning responsibility.5 The actions found causally connected to the circumstances are shown to be voluntary. If a candidate for responsibility can successfully show that their causal relation to the circumstances was not voluntary, that they were coerced or otherwise did not evince free choice, then their responsibility is usually mitigated if not dissolved. When these conditions do exist, however, it is appropriate to blame the agents for the harmful circumstances. A concept of strict liability departs from a fault or blame model in that it holds a person liable for an action that caused a harm even if they did not intend the outcome, or holds a person or institution liable for a harm caused by someone under their command.6 I include both fault liability and strict liability in the liability model of responsibility, because they share other features that I will use to distinguish this model from the model of political responsibility. The liability model is primarily backward looking in its purpose; it reviews the history of events in order to assign responsibility, often for the sake of exacting punishment or compensation. Assigning responsibility to some agents, on this model, finally, usually also has the function of absolving other agents who might have been candidates for fault. To find this person or group of persons guilty of a crime usually implies that others who were accused are not guilty. Because their decisions and actions are the immediate and repeated cause of factory conditions, the owners and managers of these factories are certainly the prime candidate for blame if these conditions violate minimal standards of decency and human rights. Local firms that directly buy from these enterprises, who presumably are the most likely to know about such violations, probably should also be held responsible. When confronted with accusations that they wrongly exploit and oppress their workers, however, some of these agents are likely to try to mitigate their responsibility by appeal to factors outside their control. They claim that they have little choice about the wages they pay, and cannot afford to give workers time off or invest in better ventilation and equipment. They operate in a highly competitive environment, they say, where other operators constantly try to undercut them.

5 See 6 On

also French (1984). concept of fault and liability see, for example, Feinberg (1970); Tony (1999).


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They can stay in business only by selling goods at or below the prices of worldwide competitors, and they can do that only by keeping labour and other production costs to a minimum. Apparel dealers who sell to American wholesalers are looking for the best deal, and they will take their business elsewhere if these employers raise their prices. Surely it cannot be better for the workers that they have no job at all, these employers are likely to claim.7 Such an appeal to mitigating circumstances can only go so far, of course. No employer can legitimately excuse making people work sixteen-hour days, refusing them bathroom breaks, or beating them, as necessary for keeping the costs of production competitive. Nevertheless, there is a good measure of truth to the claim that these employers themselves operate under considerable constraints. Many of these factories do operate on the edge of solvency, in a highly competitive environment. Under such circumstances of anarchistic competition, labor right advocates might turn to the states in whose jurisdictions the factories operate. A typical justification for state-enforced labour standards appeals to the need to maintain a level playing field among competitors. If there is a human rights floor below which wages and working conditions should not be allowed to fall, the state is the proper agent to guarantee such a floor through regulation. In this way those employers who wish to be decent to workers need not fear being undersold by more unscrupulous employers. Certainly the states in which sweatshops operate must be blamed for allowing them to exist. Many of these state agencies are inept and corrupt, and often enough some of their officials directly profit from the system and exploits their poor compatriots. As the movement uncovers sweatshops in the United States and other states with supposedly high labor standards and good enforcement processes, it should certainly blame these agencies for not doing their jobs. Some states not unreasonably say, however, that they themselves are under severe constraints that prevent them from improving working conditions. Many governments of less developed countries have indirectly encouraged these very practices by constituting special export processing zones whose factories are exempt from taxation and regulation that apply to other enterprises in the country. We are desperately need investment and jobs, they say. To get them we are forced to compete with other poor states to promote a “favourable” investment climate, which includes low taxes and minimal regulation. To avoid or pay down balance of trade deficits they need companies that produce for export. They have never had a strong enough public sector properly to monitor and enforce compliance with their regulations, and it is difficult to create one with their low tax base. Their bureaucrats and inspectors are overworked and underpaid themselves, and thus easily succumb to bribe offers. Pressures for reduced public spending by international financial institutions such as the International Monetary fund have further weakened public sector capacity.

7 See Rosen (2002, Chap. 11); Bonacich and Richard (2002, Chaps. 2 & 5, Berkley: University of California for an account of constrains on actors in the system).

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Owners, managers and local states are the agents that should be held liable for superexploitative and oppressive working conditions in which many items consumed by people in North America and Europe are produced. When these agents claim that they operate under constraints beyond their control that give them few options to operate under constraints beyond their control that give them few options to operate factories differently, however, there is some basis for their excuses. They point to structural economic and political processes involving actors and institutions both inside and outside the countries that host the factories, whose processes and effects both enable and provide incentives for some actions at the same as they block or constrain alternatives. The factories where the workers labor operate within a dense system of investment, production, credit, exchange and profit which connect direct producers to far away consumers, and link local brokers and middlemen to multinational corporate marketing plans. Activists in the anti-sweatshop movement claim that we relatively affluent people in the global North share responsibility for the fate of the faraway workers because these structural processes connect us to them. What does such connection mean and why does it bring responsibilities? What is the nature of these responsibilities? In the next section I will build on analyses some oral theorists of international justice have offered of transnational connection that bring with them moral responsibilities. Then I will explain how these are political responsibilities, as distinct from liabilities, and explain differences in these two concepts of responsibility. In the final section I will explain how the model of political responsibility might be applied to reasoning about how particular agents should respond to structural injustices.

International Justice Activists’ claims that university administrators, corporate executives, students and consumers in Europe and North America have responsibilities toward workers in faraway lands excite controversy partly because they presuppose a strong notion of moral responsibility between agents in different nations and political communities. Many people reject the idea of such transnational responsibilities, believing that the requirement to rectify injustice toward others extends only to those who live within the same political jurisdiction and/or share a sense of common national membership. Are there grounds for the assumption that some obligations of justice extend globally and that therefore better-off people in some parts of the world have responsibilities toward globally worse-off people wherever they are? I will build on arguments of Onora O’Neill and Thomas Pogge that there are.8 Onora O’Neil argues that the scope of an argument’s moral obligation extends to all those whom the agent assumes in conducting his or her activity. Each of us acts according to interests and goals we set within the frame of specific institutions

8 I have discusses the same authors’ arguments at some more length and in a wider context of global justice in Young (2000).


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and practices, within which we know others act. Our actions are partly based on the actions of others, insofar as we depend on them to carry out certain tasks, and/or insofar as our general knowledge of what other people are doing enable us to formulate expectations and predictions about events and institutional outcomes that affect us or condition our actions. In today’s world of globalized markets, interdependent states, rapid and dense communication, the scope of the actors we implicitly assume in many of our actions is often global. The social relations that connect us to others are not restricted to nation-state borders. Our actins are conditioned by and contribute to institutions that affect distant others, and their actions contribute to the operation of institutions that affect us. Because our actions assume these others as a condition for our own actions, O’Neill argues, we have made practical moral commitments to them by virtue of our actions. While it is not possible to trace how each person’s actions produce specific effects on others, because there are too many mediating actions and events, we have obligations to those who condition and enable our own actins, as they do on us. There is an asymmetry in these obligations, however, O’Neill argues, insofar as some people are rendered more vulnerable to coercion, domination or deprivation by institutional relations. While everyone in the system of structural and institutional relations stands in circumstances of justice that give them obligations with respect to all others, those institutionally and materially situated to be able to do more to affect the conditions of vulnerability have greater obligations.9 Important for O’Neill’s analysis and the use I want to make of it, these presuppositions of activity need to be present to an agent’s consciousness in order to hold as assumptions. These relationships are objective. Although most of us are often unaware of or indifferent to the situation of those whose activities condition our own options for action, this does not erase the potential obligations we have toward there others. It is not uncommon for agents to deny the connection to others their actions assume, but such efforts at bad faith are pragmatically inconsistent. If I implicitly depend on anonymous others to fulfil their roles or occupy their statuses as I conduct my business, I cannot deny this connection if they should make claims upon me to redress injustices they claim to suffer in the institutions we inhabit together. Moral critique of both individuals and institutions consists to a significant extent in bringing to consciousness the assumptions about others that agents make in their activities, and exposing the inconsistency between these assumptions and the denials of connection.10 This method of discovering responsibility to others applies easily to the context of apparel purchase. When I buy a sweatshirt or a pair of shoes, my action presupposes the actions of all the persons connected with the process that transforms raw materials into clothes and brings them to my local store. When I look for low-priced clothes, I presuppose that actions of those who make decisions to minimize costs of production, decisions like failing to equip garment factories with smoke detectors

9 O’Neill

(1985, 1996); compare Goodin (1985). (1996, Chap. 4).

10 O’Neill

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and sprinklers. On O’Neill’s account, because I am connected to all these people through my consumer actions, I have obligations of justice toward them. I cannot escape these obligations by claiming that I have not participated in design of the relations of production and distribution, nor by saying that I do not know where or who all these people are. I know that they are others elsewhere, that I am connected with them in these institutions and processes, and that especially workers in these processes are vulnerable to harm from employers and others. My first responsibility may be to acquire more specific knowledge. As I will discuss shortly, I share responsibility with the many others who also contribute to their actions to the processes and connect us. Just because I cannot disentangle my particular actions from the complex process in which some people are made particularly vulnerable to deprivation or domination, to identify which specific actions of mine affect which specific individuals in particular ways, I have a relation of responsibility to the processes itself. Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge also offer accounts of the bases of a claim that people within one nation-state have responsibilities of justice toward many people in other nation-states. People in relatively affluent countries act within a transnational system of interdependence and dense economic interaction, which has systemic consequences for the relative privilege and disadvantage that people experience in different parts of the world or within particular locales. The grounds of moral responsibility lie neither in political structures of the nation-states nor in people’s awareness and affirmation of a connection to others, but in the objective systemic institutional relations in which they dwell together with distance to others. Pogge in particular argues that persons who live in more affluent industrial parts of the world act within a common institutional scheme with persons who live in less industrialized parts of the world. “The global poor live within a world wide states system based on internationally recognized territorial domains, interconnected through a global network of market trade and diplomacy. The presence and relevance of shared institutions is shown by how dramatically we affect the circumstances of the global poor through investments, loans, trade, brides, military aid, sex tourism, culture exports and much else. Their very survival often crucially depends our consumption choices, which may determine the price of their foodstuffs and their opportunity to find work. . .This does not mean that we should hold ourselves responsible for the remoter effects of our economic decisions. . .But we must be concerned with how the rules structuring international interactions foreseeable affect the incidence of extreme poverty.”11 Later I will argue that some of Pogge’s formulations of the moral relationships between such agents in the global North and some of the world’s poor and working people are somewhat misleading. To summarize so far, these philosophers theorize a complex set of structural relations across the globe which condition the material circumstances and possibilities for action of most of the world’s people. Reciprocal obligations of justice obtain

11 Pogge

(2002a); Beitz (1979).


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between most if not all of these people not simply because they are human nor because they live under the same political constitution, but because they all depend to some degree on schemes of social cooperation which they presuppose in making their own plans or to which they contribute by their actions. Within this global “basic structure,” however, some people have significantly more power than others, not only over the conditions of their own lives, but also over decisions and processes that affect others. Within the structures, furthermore, some people occupy positions of privilege while others are relatively or absolutely deprived. Samuel Scheffler suggests that facts of global interdependence like these make fundamental features of the common sense conception of responsibility problematic. That common sense conception of responsibility is restrictive; it aims to delimit a relatively circumscribed sphere of circumstances and persons toward which agents have responsibility. This conception tends to restrict responsibility to what individuals themselves do, as opposed to what they fail to prevent. It also tends to restrict responsibility to those persons with whom an agent has special or relatively immediate connection-members of one’s family, one’s workers, one’s neighbors, and others with whom one has ongoing interaction.12 A particular phenomenology of agency underlies this conception of responsibility, according to Scheffler, which gives experiential primacy to near effects rather than remote effects of action. When “an outcome is the joint result of the actions of a number of people, including ourselves, we tend to see our own agency as implicated to a much lesser extent than we do when we take an effect to have resulted solely from our own actions.”13 This phenomenology of agency and the conception of responsibility it supports, Scheffler argues, does not correspond well to the issues that face moral agents because of the density of communication, economic exchange, technological effects, migration, and political interaction among the world’s people. Because the common sense conception of responsibility, which corresponds in significant ways to what I call the liability model, has little to say in relation to such massive global issues, Scheffler suggests, we are in danger of losing a sense of individuals as bearers of responsibility altogether. “What we appear to lack, in other words, is a set of clear, action-guiding and psychologically feasible principles which would enable individuals to orient themselves in relation to larger processes, and general conformity to which would serve to regulate those processes and their effects in a morally satisfactory way.”14 I am not convinced that what we need to respond to this predicament is a set of principles to which individuals might look fro guidance about what to do in relation to global social processes. Scheffler has nevertheless identified a key problem in contemporary moral theory and practice. People have difficulty reasoning about individual responsibility with relation to outcomes

12 Scheffler

includes members of the same nation-state in the category of these special relationships, but I think this is a mistake. 13 Scheffler (2001). 14 Ibid., 39.

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produced by large-scale social structures in which millions participate, but of which none are the sole or primary cause. When these structures are transnational, as many of them are, the difficulty is compounded by a relative lack of regulatory institutions through which these millions might engage in collective action. It is this difficulty that accounts for our continuing to rely solely on a liability model of responsibility for harms, I suggest, as in debates about transnational labor conditions. In the following section I begin to articulate a model of political responsibility which goes some distance toward ways that individuals can think about their responsibilities in relation to global social structures.

Political Responsibility I have argued that local owners and managers of factories with superexploitative working conditions should be held responsible for those conditions. Their actions causally contribute most directly to the workers’ situation, and they should be blamed for it. I have also argued, however, that workers, owners and even the nation-states have jurisdiction over them are embedded in transnational economic structures which connect individuals and institutions in faraway corporate boardrooms and retail outlets to them. These structural conditions provide incentives for setting up and buying from manufacturing operations that violate worker rights. Blaming and punishing a few factory owners, while often appropriate, does not remedy the general problem so long as that incentive structure is in place and sanction is not routine. These economic structures constrain the options of owners and managers in the less developed countries, and implicate many others in the world in the processes that produce those constraints. Because of these connections, activists claim that consumers, corporate executives, university administrators and others in Europe, North America, Japan, and other relatively well-off places have responsibilities toward the working conditions of apparel factories in South Asia, Latin America and elsewhere. The claim only makes sense, I suggested earlier, if the faraway consumers, executives and administrators bear responsibility in a different sense from the owners and managers of the factories. Earlier I said that the owners and managers are responsible for the working conditions in the sense of liability. The liability model of responsibility causally connects the circumstances for which responsibility is sought with specific actions of particular agents. In this sense the liability model individualizes even when the agent it identifies is a corporate entity. The liability model is backward-looking; it seeks to lay blame for harms that have occurred, often for the sake of exacting punishment or compensation. The many agents whom O’Neill or Pogge would identify as connected with the transnational institutions and structures that help bring sweatshop conditions about have responsibilities for harmful or unjust conditions in a different sense, which I call political responsibility. Hannah Arendt distinguishes between moral and legal responsibility, on the one hand, which embody what I have called the liability model, and what she calls


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political responsibility, on the other. On her account, political responsibility is a kind of collective responsibility, and one where the responsibility borne collectively is not dissolvable to the self-conscious collaborative acts of individuals. Whereas responsibility as liability assigns responsibility according to what particular agents have done, on the model of political responsibility individuals are responsible precisely for things they themselves have not done. The reason to assume political responsibility involves not individual fault, but derives from “my membership in a group (a collective) which no voluntary act of mine can dissolve, that is, a membership which is utterly unlike a business partnership which I can dissolve at will.”15 Arendt clearly takes the political community of a nation-state as her paradigm of such a collective. “We can escape this political and strictly collective responsibility only by leaving the community, and since no man can live without belonging to some community, this would simply mean to exchange some community for another and hence one kind or responsibility for another.”16 As a member of such political community we are bound to acknowledge that we bear responsibility for things our government does in our name or supposedly on our behalf, even though we ourselves have not done those things, and even though the actions may not be connected to any process of authorization that even indirectly links them to us. Arendt seems to think that being members of a national or political community jut in itself is the ground of this responsibility. Along similar lines, some political philosophers as well as many political actors distinguish the kind and level of responsibilities people have in relation to one another precisely on grounds of being members of the same nation-state or not. Whereas people owe only the thinnest form of respect and decency to one another across borders, the fact of shared national membership puts special responsibilities on persons to be concerned for the welfare of their fellow countrymen, and that they live together on terms of justice. This manner of viewing responsibilities for promoting justice and the wellbeing of others reasons backwards. If there are denser and more demanding responsibilities between members of the same nation-state than between members of faraway societies, this is because the processes and structures in which they are embedded more tightly connect them, and the consequences of their actions affect the more local others than those far away. Common polities form or ought to form in these situations of dense structures in order that people may collectively regulate those interactions in ways they judge most just. The political responsibilities derive, that is, not from the contingent fact of membership in common political institutions. Instead, the political responsibilities derive from the social and economic structures in which they act and mutually affect one another, and political institutions are an important means of their discharging those responsibilities.

15 Arendt 16 Ibid.,

(1987). 47.

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Much of the sociological and moral theoretical literature on processes of globalization aims to show that the structural connections among persons in the world have both widened their scope beyond nation-state boundaries and become more dense across the boundaries. To the extent that people here participate in the production and reproduction of structural processes that condition the lives of people far away, however, the sort of political responsibilities that Arendt invokes exist for them in relation to those distant others. While they probably have not intended that the social processes in which they participate and from which they benefit have harmful consequences to others, and they should not be blamed or found guilty for these consequences, they are responsible under a different conception. Despite my disagreement with Arendt on the question of whether the ground of this form of responsibility lies in being members of the same nation-state, I continue to follow her in labelling this political responsibility for the following reasons. As does Arendt in many contexts, I mean by “political” something broader than government. In addition, by politics or the political I am reffering to the activity in which people organize collectively to regulate or transform some aspect of their shared social conditions, along with the communicative activities in which they try to persuade one another to join such collective action or decide what direction they wish to take it. The sort of responsibility that anti-sweatshop activists claim that they, their fellow consumers, and specific institutions of manufacture or distribution of goods have is political responsibility in this sense. Now I will detail the features of this conception of responsibility, especially as distinct from the fault or liability model of responsibility. (1) Unlike a blame model of responsibility, political responsibility does not seek to mark out and isolate those to be held responsible, thereby distinguishing them from others, who by implication then are not responsible. Such isolation of the one liable from the others who are not is an important aspect of legal responsibility, both in criminal and in tort law. Because they argue that organizations or collectives of persons can be blamed for harms, as well as individual persons, most accounts of collective responsibility aim to distinguish those who have done the harm from those who have not. In the discussion cited above, Arendt says that political responsibility, on the other hand, is a responsibility for what we have not done. This may be a mystifying and even misleading way of putting the point, which I take to be the following. Many causes of harms, wrongs or injustice have no isolatable perpetrator, but rather result from the participation of millions of people in institutions and practices that result from the participation of millions of people in institutions and practices that result in harms. Endemic large-scale homelessness in an otherwise affluent society might be an example of such an injustice without an identifiable perpetrator. In many cases where perpetrators of specific crimes can and should be identified, moreover, as in the Nazi Holocaust Arendt has in mind, the makers of genocidal policies and those that directly implemented them are enabled and supported by wider social structures and which many participate. I have suggested already that


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the injustices of inhumane labor conditions should be analyzed on these two levels. In the conception of political responsibility, then, finding that some people bear responsibility for injustice does not necessarily absolve others. (2) In a liability conception of responsibility, what counts as a wrong for which a perpetrator is sought and for which he or she might be required to compensate, is generally conceived as a deviation from a baseline. Implicitly we assume a normal background situation that is morally acceptable, if not ideal. A crime or an actionable harm consists in a morally and often legally unacceptable deviation from this background structure.17 The process that brought about the harm is conceived as a discrete, bounded event that breaks away from the ongoing normal flow. Punishment, redress, or compensation aims to restore normality or to “make whole” in relation to the baseline circumstance. A concept of political responsibility in relation to structural injustices, on the other hand, evaluates not a harm that deviates from the normal and acceptable, but rather often brings into questions precisely the background conditions that ascriptions of blame or fault assume as normal. When we judge that structural injustice exists, we are saying precisely that at least some of the normal and accepted background conditions of action are not morally acceptable. Most of us contribute to a greater or lesser degree to the production or reproduction of structural injustice precisely because we follow the accepted and expected rules and conventions of the communities and institutions in which we act. Usually we enact these conventions and practices in a habitual way, without explicit reflection and deliberation on what we are doing, having in the foreground of our consciousness and intention immediate goals we want to achieve and the particular people we need to interact with to achieve them. The anti-sweatshop movement well illustrates this challenge to normal structural background conditions. It asks consumers, universities and other institutions that contract with retailers, brand name apparel companies, and many other agents, to reflect morally on the normal and hitherto acceptable market relationships in which they act. It challenges all the agents that are part of the economic chain between the workers who make garments and the people who buy and wear them to bring into question whether “business as usual”, which hitherto has been understood as within the bounds if moral acceptability, should in fact be thought acceptable. (3) Political responsibility, furthermore, differs from a liability model of responsibility in being more forward-looking than backward-looking. Blame and praise are primarily backward-looking judgements. They refer back to an action or an event assumed to have reached its terminus. More often the purpose of assigning responsibility as fault or liability is to sanction, punish or exact compensation from them. To

17 See George Fletcher’s discussion of the way that the assignment of criminal liability must distin-

guish between foregrounded deviations from background conditions assumed as normal. Fletcher (1998).

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be sure, such backward-looking condemnation and sanction may have a forwardlooking purpose; we may wish to deter others from similar action in the future, or we may wish to identify weak points in an institutional system that allows or encourages such blameworthy actions, in order to reform the institutions. Once we take this latter step, however, we have left a liability model and are moving toward a conception of political responsibility. The reform project likely involves responsibilities of many people to take actions directed at those reforms, even though they are not to blame for past problems. Political responsibility seeks not to reckon debts, but aims rather to bring about results, and thus depends on the actions of everyone who is in a position to contribute to the results.18 Taking political responsibility in respect to social structures emphasizes the future more than the past. Because the particular causal relationship of the actions of particular individuals or even organizations to the structural outcomes is often not possible to trace, there may be little point in trying to blame and exact compensation or redress only from a few who have caused the outcome. The point is not to blame people participating in the institutions and structures and produce injustice, because in many cases avoiding such participation is difficult or impossible. Having understood that structural processes cause some injustices, those participating in the production and reproduction of the structures should recognize that their actions contribute along with those of others to this injustice, and take responsibility for altering the processes to avoid or reduce injustice. Such a project cannot be undertaken, of course, without reflection on the past in a different way. In order to take forward-looking action aimed at changing the way that people’s actions in the context of accepted institutional practices contribute to harmful outcomes, we must understand more about how the structural processes work. This usually requires understanding the history of social processes and practices as they have emerged, changed, influenced one another, and often produced unintended outcomes. The primary purpose of such backward-looking analysis in the context of political responsibility, however, is not to debate fault, which can divert those who share political responsibility from the forward-looking tasks of trying to alter the processes. (4) Political responsibility is relatively open with regard to the actions that count as taking up the responsibility. In this respect, as Joel Feinberg discusses, responsibility is distinct from duty. Like duties, responsibilities carry a burden and an obligation; carrying our responsibilities carry considerable discretion; one must carry out one’s responsibilities, but how one doe so is a matter for judgement according to what the responsibilities are for, the capabilities of agents, and the content of action.19 Similarly, Robert Goodin argues that responsibility differs from duty in being more outcome oriented. A duty specifies a rule that an agent should follow. One has fulfilled the duty if one has performed the required actions. Carrying out

18 See

Jonas (1984). (1980); cited in May (1996).

19 Feinberg


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a responsibility, on the other hand, consists in seeking to bring about a specified outcome. It is very possible to act in accord with rules of morality and yet not have discharged one’s responsibilities, because one has not achieved the required outcomes even though it is feasible to do so.20 (5) Political responsibility, then, is a shared responsibility in specific ways. As Larry May theorizes, the concept of shared responsibility is distinct from the concept of collective responsibility in that the former is a distributed responsibility whereas the latter is not. A collective of persons, such as a corporation, might be said to be responsible for a state of affairs without any of its constituent individuals being responsible for such. Shared responsibility, on the other hand, is a personal responsibility for outcomes or the risks of harmful outcomes, produced by a group of persons. Each is personally responsible for the outcome in a partial way, since he or she alone does not produce the outcomes; the specific part that each plays in producing the outcome cannot be isolated and identified, however, and thus the responsibility is essentially shared.21 May’s treatment of shared responsibility is largely backward-looking. He reflects on how persons who have not themselves been directly guilty of a harm such as a hate crime may nevertheless contribute by their attitudes and actions to fostering a social environment in which such harms appear more acceptable than they might otherwise. If we follow my claim that political responsibility is more forwardlooking than backward-looking, then the shared nature of political responsibility refers primarily to the relationships with others that the responsibility involves. Taking political responsibility means acknowledging that one participates in social processes that have some unjust outcomes, and one participates with many others. Discharging the responsibility entails enjoining collective action with at least some of these others. My responsibility becomes to enjoin others to reflect on and acknowledge their participation in the structural processes, and to listen to their account of how they work and our role in them. We share responsibility to fashion organized means of changing how the processes work so they will issue in less injustice. Our working through state institutions is often an affective means of such collective action to change structural processes, but states are not the only tools of effective collective action.22 The form of responsibility, then, is political in these senses that acting on my responsibilities involves joining with others in a public discourse where we try to persuade one another about courses of collective action that will contribute to ameliorating the problem. An important corollary of this feature of political responsibility is that many of those properly thought to be victims of harm or injustice may nevertheless have 20 Goodin

(1995a). (1993). 22 Melanie Beth Oliviero and Adele Simmons recommend uses of civil society organizations for addressing issues of labour standards; see: “Who’s minding the store? Global civil society and corporate responsibility,” Glasius, M., Kaldo, M., and Anheier, H. ed. 2002. Global Civic Society, of improving labor conditions that combines state institutions and decentralized deliberative civic organizations, including those involving affected workers; Fung (2003). 21 May

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political responsibility in relation to it. In a fault model of responsibility, blaming those who claim to be victims of injustice functions to absolve others of responsibility for their plight. In a conception of political responsibility, however, those who can properly be argued as victims of structural injustice can be called to a responsibility they share with others in the structures to engage in actions directed at transforming the structures. In the case of labor exploitation, the workers themselves ought to resist if they can by means of their own collective organization. Without the support of others taking responsibility for working conditions in ways that support them, however, they are less likely to succeed. Conceptualizing political responsibility as distinct from blame is important not only philosophically, but also for the sake of motivating political action. Frequently the reaction of people being blamed for a wrong is defensive- to look for other agents who should be blamed instead of them, or to find excuses that mitigate their liability in those cases where they must agree that their actions do causally contribute to the harm. Such practices of accusation and defense have an important place in morality and law. In many contexts where the issue is how to mobilize collective action for the sake of social change and greater justice, however, such rhetoric of blame and finger-pointing displacement lead more to resentment and refusal to take responsibility than to useful basis of action. If corporate executives or shoe buyers hear the claims of anti-sweatshop activists as laying blame on them personally for the conditions under which the shoes are produced, they rightly become indignant, or scoff at the absurd extremism of the movement. A concept of political responsibility separate from and additional to responsibility as liability allows us to call on one another to take responsibility together for the fact that our actions collectively assume and contribute to the complex structural processes that enable the working conditions we deplore and make them difficult for any single agent to change.23 As I discuss in the next text section, this does not necessarily imply that all who share responsibility have an equal responsibility. The power to influence the processes that produce unjust outcomes is an important factor distinguishing degrees of responsibility. Earlier I suggested that some of Thomas Pogge’s formulation of the responsibilities of global justice wrongly slip into a blame-oriented language. Briefly examining how can help clarify why the distinction is important. In some of his discussions Pogge conceives the institutions and social processes in which most of the world’s people are embedded as a system that is imposed by some on others. He finds a small global elite – affluent citizens and holders of political and economic power in resource-rich developed countries-who “enforce a global poverty

23 William

Conolly makes a distinction similar to Arendt’s between responsibility as blame and political responsibility. For him the resentment and count-accusation dialectic that accompanies blame on a discourse of public affairs makes political identity overly rigid and paralyzes action. This he recommends a notion of political responsibility without blame and with a more fluid and ambiguous understanding of sources of wrong than the implicitly Christian identification of the sinner. See Connolly (1993). Melisa Orlie also distinguishes between a sentiment of resentment exhibited in blaming and holding oneself and others politically responsible. See Orlie (1997).


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regime under which we may claim the world’s natural resources for ourselves and can distribute these among ourselves on mutually agreeable terms.”24 He refers to “the design of a global economic order” which is determined by a tiny minority of participants, and finds that a global economic order is being imposed on people in developing countries by Western governments acting in the name of their citizens, which presses many people into grinding poverty and exposes them to domination.25 The language of design, enforcement and imposition in these formulations encourages a reversion to a liability model of responsibility for global economic relations. If “we” impose an unjust order on “them,” then we should be blamed for this wrong. Certainly some particular agents can and should be blamed for specific decisions they make and actions they take whose consequences in worsening the lives of poor people can be traced. Perhaps we should blame decision-makers at the International Monetary Fund, for example, for the consequences on poor people of the harsh conditions they impose on states in the service of structural adjustment. It is not helpful, however, to construct the entire network of economic interdependence that links North American consumers to East Asian workers as a design wrongly imposed on the others for which some people can be blamed. Implicitly such a formulation absolves too many ordinary people, in the South as well as the North, of responsibilities they should take up, if only responsibilities to organize pressure on powerful global actors. So how does the model of political responsibility apply to the claims of the antisweatshop movement? I said earlier that local owners and managers, and to some extent the local state, should be held responsible in the sense of liable for the miserable pay and working conditions of factories where many consumer goods exported to the United States and Europe are produced. Political responsibility adds to rather than replaces this first layer of responsibility. Because corporate executives, university administrators, retailers, and consumers act within a set of structures that materially connect them to one another and to factory workers, they have responsibilities to concern themselves with the wellbeing of those workers. Acknowledging such political responsibility does not imply accepting blame for being a direct cause of the poor conditions. It does not mean acknowledging that they contribute by their actions to perpetuating the structural conditions, incentives and constrains that condition the actions of the owners and managers whose actions are the most immediate cause. None of these more distant agents can act alone to improve working conditions, however. Instead they must act collectively. Thus taking responsibility for distant sweatshop conditions involves recognizing a shared responsibility, persuading others that they share it as well, and organizing forms of collective action designed to change the incentive structures, alter the constraints, or shift the distribution of benefits in continuing to buy and sell goods manufactured by superexploited workers.

24 Pogge 25 Pogge

(2002b). (2003).

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Reasoning About Political Responsibility Some people might object to the conception of political responsibility I have outlined on the grounds that it seems to make nearly everyone responsible for nearly everything. Most of us participate in a number of structural processes that arguably have disadvantaging, harmful or unjust consequences for some people in virtue of our jobs, the market choices we make, or other activities. Surely it is asking too much, the objection runs, for each of us to worry about all there modes of participating in structures and how we might adjust our lives and relation to others so as to reduce their unjust effects. Our relation to many of these structural processes is so diffuse, and the possibility that our own action can effect a change in outcomes is often so remote, that it is more reasonable to limit our moral concern to matters where we stand in direct relation to others and can see clearly the effect of our action on them. Before attempting to quell this fear that accepting a concept of political responsibility makes everyone equally responsible for all injustices, let me dwell for a moment on this anxiety. Part of the purpose for noticing structural injustice and theorizing responsibility in relation to it is precisely to question the common intuition that the moral claims of justice ought not to be too demanding on individuals. Many philosophers and citizens reject as unreasonable moral arguments whose conclusions would require decent law-abiding persons to give up very much time, energy, or resources in the effort to right wrongs. Within a different paradigm of moral responsibility, however, which I will call existentialist, the claims of justice unavoidably create anxiety. Yes, there are more and greater needs, harms, and social problems than we feel our puny efforts can respond to. Just because we might find overwhelming the objective problems that call for responsibility and may feel ourselves inadequate to this call is not a reason to trim down moral claims to a more emotionally manageable size. I argued above that the structural injustices for which we share responsibility occur through ongoing and normally accepted institutional relations and actions. Taking political responsibility thus often entails bringing what is normal and acceptable into question, to the extent that it produces or reproduces injustice. As Liam Murphy argues, so long as the society in which we live is far from the ideal of justice, moral demands on individuals will be rather stringent and perhaps difficult to meet. They do not amount to every individual taking on the personal burden of righting all wrongs, however, which is unreasonable, but persons jointly working to make better institutions.26 If the motive for the objection is not to reduce the idea of political responsibility to absurdity, but rather to ask how a person should reason about his or her own action in the face of structural injustice, then the question is reasonable. While I cannot answer the question adequately in the space remaining in this essay, I will indicate some parameters for reasoning about a particular agent’s responsibility in relation to structural injustice.

26 Murphy

(2000).


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Robert Gooding theorizes a conception of social responsibility which attends more to outcomes than to the causal production of harms. In answer to the question, how then do agents know what are their responsibilities, he proposes a notion of task responsibility. A person’s position in an institution or the relationship in which he or she stands with others implies certain duties to see to it that specific ends come about; the performer of a task has come discretion about how these responsibilities will be discharged, as long as these ends are achieved. If other people do not discharge their responsibilities, moreover, he or she may have responsibilities to try to make up for their laxity from their own position, even though there may be no extra reward for doing so.27 The idea of task responsibility may e good starting point for responding to the above stated fear that political responsibility makes everyone responsible for everything. A concept of task responsibility highlights the fact that many people share responsibility for producing acceptable outcomes. There is thus a division of labor in political responsibility; each of us must look to our own institutional positions, skills and capacities, and the other responsibilities that come to us, to assess our tasks that will most effectively coordinate with others to help bring more just outcomes. If task responsibility refers to the way existing institutions assign responsibilities to persons, however, this concept will often fall short as a guide to reasoning about action in relation to structural injustice. For one of the causes of structural injustices is the way at least some institution assign tasks. A spokeswoman for a major retailer’s job is to issue statements of concern about sweatshop working conditions which deflect responsibility onto faraway subcontractors. A lawyer’s job in the same company is to prepare and review documents that ensure that the multiple contractual relationships the retailer has conform to law in every jurisdiction under which they fall. The sales clerk’s job in an outlet store that sells the company’s clothes is to flatter me when I try on the clothes. By hypothesis here, the problem is not that people are failing in their performance in their tasks; on the contrary, they are doing their jobs very well. The problem is the way that the institutions are defined, their power, purposes and interactions with one another, as well as how they define tasks to fulfil those purposes. While the performance of certain institutionally defined tasks contributes to the perpetuation of injustice, at the same time there may be tasks that could be performed for which there is no place in existing institutions. It is no one’s job to protect workers who try to organize a union in their hidden production facility, no official well-resourced government or international agency has assigned members of its staff the task of reducing the perceived need for export processing zones or changing incentives for small factory owners in the developing world. Political responsibility in respect to structural injustice, in other words, often requires transforming institutions and the tasks they assign. This is everyone’s tasks and no one’s in particular.

27 Goodin

(1995b).

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Thus we may have arrived again at the question, given that there are many institutional situations that should be transformed in order to further social justice, how should individuals think about their own responsibilities? One parameter of thinking here refers to the degree of injustice. Where basic rights are violated in a widespread fashion over a long term, world citizens have grater responsibility to take action directed at redress than for lesser injustices. The anti-sweatshop movement has succeeded in promoting widespread public discussion of labor conditions precisely because the working conditions it exposes are both gregious, widespread, and predictable. Approaching such structural injustice, we can appeal not to pre-assigned tasks that people have, but rather to their institutional or social position. What might be required from one’s position is doing something different from or additional to the tasks normally assigned to that position, but different persons nevertheless stand in differing positions in different structures that produce unjust outcomes, which afford them different opportunities and capacities for influencing those outcomes. I suggest that persons can reason about their action in relation to structural injustice along parameters of connection, power, and privilege. Connection – Earlier I argued that moral agents have responsibilities in relation to any and all of those whose participation in institutions one assumes by one’s own actions. This conclusion generates the problem now under discussion, because most of us are connected to too many people mediated by too many institutions to be able to take active responsibility in respect to all of them. One way to prioritize among these is to give specificity to some connections that are easier to discern as implicating institutions in which one is directly involved. Tracing particular connection between my own action locales – my workplace, my city, my church – and distant strangers potentially affected by or related to the activities of these institutions helps to de-reify the anonymous structural processes that mediate between us. The antisweatshop movement has had some success in reducing the anonymity of market processes by demanding that universities and other bulk consumers, as well as large retailers, identify the sites where particular items sold in particular places to which they are connected are manufactured. Giving such pragmatic priority to connections that I can discern between my institutional participation and faraway others carries the danger, however, that severe injustice will be ignored because people have not seen, or have chosen not to see, this sort of connection between themselves and this injustice. Recognizing the importance of connection in locating responsibility, some people decide that the way to exercise this responsibility is by trying to disconnect. They choose not to buy certain products or brands, for example, because they have reason to think that they are manufactured under unjust conditions. Where such boycott is individual it has no effect on those conditions, however. It is nearly impossible in the contemporary world for a person to remove herself from implication through her actions in structures that produce injustice. To the extent that this implication is a ground of political responsibility, then, the responsibility cannot be removed by attempts at withdrawal; it can only be taken up. Organized boycotts involving masses of people can be one effective means of exercising political responsibility.


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Power – A person’s position in structural processes usually carries different degrees of potential or actual power or influence over the processes that produce the outcomes. Organizations and institutions, moreover, vary in their power and ability to influence structural processes. Some of the large major clothing retailers, for example, such as Benetton, Gap, or Guess?, have built transnational systems not only for retails outlets, but directly contract with small manufactures. Because of the size, reach and relative influence of such organizations, it makes sense to expect major decision-makers in them to take responsibility for working conditions.28 The anti-sweatshop movement recognizes this criterion of power or influence often by targeting its actions on corporate or regulatory bodies arguably with power to change structural processes. The power and influence parameter for reasoning suggests that where individuals and organizations do not have sufficient energy and resources to respond to all structural injustices to which they are connected, they should focus on those where they have more capacity to influence structural processes. More powerful individuals and institutions, of course, often have more interest in perpetuation of the status quo than change in the processes and their outcomes. For this reason individuals and organizations with relatively less power but some ability to influence the powerful individuals and institutions can take responsibility actively to pressure the more powerful to take responsibility for change. Privilege – Where there are structural injustices, these usually produce not only victims of injustice, but persons who acquire relative privileges by virtue of the structures. Most who occupy positions of power within mediated institutions or processes that harm some people or make them vulnerable to harm also derive privileges from this power. In most situations of structural injustice, there are relatively privileged persons who have relatively little power as individuals in their institutional positions. North American college students or European office workers who buy shirts or shoes made under sweatshop conditions have little power by virtue of their position. They are privileged, however, both in relation to sweatshop workers and to many other people in the world. Persons who benefit relatively from structural inequalities have special moral responsibilities to contribute to organized efforts to correct them, not because they are to blame for them, but because they have more resources and are able to adapt to changed circumstances without suffering serious deprivation. From this point that privilege generates special responsibilities, however, it does not follow that victims of injustice do not share responsibility for contributing to the alteration of the circumstances that constrain their options. On the contrary, I pointed out earlier that one difference between liability mode of responsibility and the concept of political responsibility consists precisely in that those who suffer 28 Major

retail firms have increasingly gained control over a vertically integrated global apparel industry. See Bonacich and Richard (2002, Chaps. 2 & 5); See Rosen (2002, Chaps. 10 &11); Some Lawyers argue for a legal strategy that would extend liability for violations of labor standards to the manufacturer who contracts out work, and not only to the contractor. See Lam (1992). Such a strategy must be pursued within a single legal system, of course, and cannot cross justifications between say, Thailand and the United States.

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injustice share responsibility for helping to bring about change. This in the example of sweatshops, the specific position of the workers carries unique responsibilities. Their conditions are likely to improve only if they organize to demand and monitor such improvement. Victims of injustice, however, usually can only succeed in their own efforts to change the structural conditions of injustice if others in a position to support them take responsibility to do so. Political responsibility, I have argued above, is necessarily a shared responsibility both because the injustices that call for redress are the product of the mediated actions of many, and thus because they can only be rectified through collective action. For most such injustices, the goal is to change structural processes by reforming institutions or creating new ones that will better regulate the process to prevent harmful outcomes. Thus a final consideration in reasoning about where a person might put her practical energies in taking political responsibility involves coordination with others to achieve such change. Just as a person can make almost no difference by trying to disconnect from the processes, so an individual can rarely decide to act alone or with just a few other people to change it. Thus sometimes the fact that there is a promising movement to join can be a reason to give priority to some issues over others. Movements always need beginnings, of course; so in the absence of coordinated action involving significant numbers of people, but where other considerations ought to make a particular issue of high priority, a few individuals can try to persuade others of it importance and enjoin them to become organized. Like some other forms of responsibility, political responsibility is open about what actions count as discharging it. While in this paper I have endorsed the claims of the anti-sweatshop movement that apparel manufacturers, institutional purchasers of apparel, and individual consumers have responsibilities toward faraway workers who produce these goods, I have said nothing about what ought to be done to improve those conditions structurally. The antisweatshop movement has had some significant successes in its short life, not only in raising consciousness and motivating some people and institutions to assumer responsibility, but also in increasing transparency of the connecting among factories and firms in the industry and in supporting unions of affected workers. Nevertheless, there are significant disagreements both within and outside the movement about whether some tactics do more harm than good and thus about what are the best ways in the long run to encourage and enforce decent working conditions.29

Conclusion The main purpose of this essay has been to begin an answer to the questions: how should agents think about responsibility in relation to structural social injustice? I have proposed a concept of political responsibility which is distinct from a 29 For

one set of debates, see Fung et al. (2001).


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liability model of responsibility in five respects. (1) Unlike responsibility as liability, political responsibility does not isolate some responsibility parties in order to absolve others. (2) Whereas blame or liability seeks remedy for a deviation from an acceptable norm, usually by an event that has reached a terminus, with political responsibility we are concerned with structural causes of injustice that are normal and ongoing. (3) Political responsibility is more forward-looking than backwardlooking. (4) What it means to take up or assign political responsibility is more open and discretionary than what it means to hold an agent blameworthy or liable. (5) An agent shares political responsibility with others whose actions contribute to the structural processes that produce injustice. I have elaborated this concept of political responsibility through the example of the apparel industry and the social movement seeking changes in working conditions in it for at least two reasons. This example exhibits structural injustice where some of the social positions in the structure are fairly easy to identify. Because in this case the structure cross nations and boundaries, moreover, it well illustrates that the scope of issues of justice corresponding to political responsibility derives not from the boundaries of a state or political jurisdiction, but from the connections generated by the structural processes. Where this scope is beyond existing regulatory and political institutions, there may be need to construct some to correspond to that scope. While in this essay I have focused on political responsibility for labor conditions in a global industry, my claim is that the concept is generalizable and applies to any structural social injustice.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1987. Collective responsibility. In Amor Mundi: Explorations on the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt, ed. James W. Bernauer, 45. Boston: Martinus Nijoff. Beitz, Charles. ed. 1979. Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bonacich, Edna and Richard P. Appelbaum. 2002. Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry, Chaps. 2, 5 & 6. Berkley: University of California Press. Connolly, William. 1993. Identity Difference, Esp Chap. 4. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Feinberg, J. 1970. Collective responsibility. In Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility, 222–251. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Feinberg, J. 1980. Duties, rights and claims. In Rights, Justice and Bounds of Liberty, 137. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fetherstone, Lisa. 2000. Students against Sweatshops. London: Verso. Fletcher, George. 1998. Basic Concepts of Criminal Law, Chaps. 3 & 4. Oxford: Oxford University Press. French, Peter. 1984. Collective and Corporate Responsibility. New York: Columbia University Press. Fung, Archon, O’Rourke, Dara and Sabel, Charles. eds. 2001. Can We Put an End to Sweatshops?. Boston: Beacon Press. Fung, Archon. 2003. Deliberate democracy and international labor standards. Governance 16, 51–71. Goodin, Robert. 1985. Protecting the Vulnerable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goodin, Robert. 1995a. Responsibilities. In Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy, 81–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Goodin, Robert. 1995b. Apportioning responsibilities. In Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy, 100–118. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Honoré, Tony. 1999. Responsibility and luck: the moral basis of strict liability. In Responsibility and Fault, 14–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jonas, Hans. 1984. The Imperative of Responsibility, 90–120. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jonas, Hans. 1985. The Imperative of Responsibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Klein, Naomi. 1999. No Logo, Esp. Chap. 9. New York: Picador. Lam, Leo L. 1992. Designer duty: extending liability to manufacturers for violations of labor standards in garment industry sweatshops. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 141, 623–667. May, Larry. 1996. The Socially Responsible Self-Social theory and Professional Ethics, 90. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. May, Larry. 1993. Sharing Responsibility, Chap. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Murphy, Liam B. 2000. Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oliviero, Melanie Beth and Simmons, Adele. 2002. Who’s minding the store? Global civil society and corporate responsibility. In Glasius, M., Kaldo, M., and Anheier, H. eds. Global Civic Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Neill, Onora. 1985. Faces of Hunger. London: Allen and Unwin. O’Neill, Onora. 1996. Towards Justice and Virtue, 99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orlie, Melisa. 1997. Living Ethically, Acting Politically, 169–173. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pogge, Thomas. 2002a. A universalistic approach to international justice. In Internationale Gerechtigkeit und Interpretation, ed. Giuseppe Zacarra, Section 2.1. Munchen: WT Verlag. Pogge, Thomas. 2002b. World Poverty and Human Rights, 142. Cambridge: Cambridge Polity Press. Pogge, Thomas. Jan, 2003. Priorities of global justice. Metaphilosophy 32, 43. Rosen, Ellen Israel. 2002. Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the U.S. Apparel Industry, Chaps. 2, 10 &11. Berkley: University of California Press. Scheffler, S. 2001. Individual responsibility in a global age. In Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Responsibility and Justice in Liberal Thought., 39. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Young, Iris. 2000. Inclusion and Democracy, Chap. 7. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A Theory of Indifference1 Keith Tester

This paper seeks to develop a theoretically based explanation of how it can be that commitments to principles of human rights can co-exist with indifference towards concrete human rights abuses. The paper opens with a discussion of a reflection by Jacques Maritain, one of the French delegates to the congresses which lead to the Universal Declaration. The argument moves on to suggest that indifference is an integral dimension of the human condition and that indifference is exacerbated by the dominance of a hermeneutical culture in modernity. It is proposed that since the hermeneutic culture is inescapable (and that escape from it is in any case dangerous and illicit), so indifference is also unavoidable. Social actors are faced with the problem of having to choose how to act morally in the conditions of this paradox. The French philosopher Jacques Maritain was heavily involved in the early deliberations of UNESCO and the discussions that led to the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In an essay that reflected on the philosophical lessons of those events, Maritain made an extremely sharp observation. He commented that nearly all of the participants in the discussions were able to agree about what human rights ought practically to be established but that, if the participants had been asked the questions why human rights should involve this and not that, they would have all given wildly discrepant answers. Maritain wrote that when the members of the French delegation were asked how they could have possibly reached agreement given their wholly different political and ethical commitments, they replied that, “we agree on these tights, providing we are not asked why. With the ‘why,’ the dispute begins”.2 The point Maritain was making was that, in the field of declarations of human rights at least, there is a divide between practice and theory. He noted that, in K. Tester (B) Department of Sociology, The University of Hull, Hull, UK e-mail: [email protected] 1 Tester,

Keith (2002) “A Theory of Indifference” Journal of Human Rights Volume 1, Number 2, pp. 173–186. Reprinted with permission of the Publisher (Taylor & Francis, http://www.informaworld.com). 2 Maritain (1954). G. Ognjenovic (ed.), Responsibility in Context, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3037-5_6, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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practice, everyone can agree about certain fundamental truths. This practical agreement is expressed by the very existence of the Universal Declaration which showed that, “it is doubtless not easy but it is possible to establish a common formulation of . . .practical conclusions, or in other words, of the various rights possessed by man in his personal and social existence”. But, Maritain went on, “it would be quite futile to look for a common rational justification of these practical conclusions and these rights”. After all, “these justifications are basically different, even opposed to each other”.3 When Maritain’s observation is read in the contemporary context, his equanimity in the face of what he rightly saw as the inability to agree over justifications seems astonishing. When contemporary analysts make a broadly identical point about the state of the rational justification for moral argument, they tend to write in a different mood. Most obviously, Maritain’s statement that the justifications for moral statements are different if not in opposition to one another can be read as an anticipation of the condition of incommensurability that has been stressed in recent years by Alasdair MacIntyre. Notably in his book After Virtue4 , MacIntyre has diagnosed the present as bedevilled by the impossibility of arbitrating between different and competing moral claims about common issues. For example, around the abortion debate it is possible to identify a number of competing positions, each of which is completely rational taken on its own terms but each of which builds upon initial premises that are in opposition to those of competing positions. Arbitration is impossible because even though the substantive issue is the same, each position approaches the issue from a different route. There is no Royal Road to moral agreement. In the end, MacIntyre believes that there is a choice to be made between a new Saint Benedict, establishing a rule according to which all individuals might live as men and women of virtue, or barbarism.5 MacIntyre’s sense of impending moral apocalypse is almost entirely absent from Maritain’s reflections, even though the latter knew full well that there can be extreme dispute over initial premises. Maritain was a lot more relaxed than MacIntyre. The reason for Maritain’s equanimity in the face of theoretical dispute was that he never doubted that practical agreement would emerge in the end. This is precisely what MacIntyre does doubt. Maritain could afford to be slightly relaxed because his analysis operated within a tradition of natural law philosophy which meant that he could make confident statements of the order that: “there is a sort of vegetative development and growth, so to speak, of moral knowledge and moral feeling, which is in itself independent of philosophical systems” which means that, “these various [philosophical] systems, while disputing about the ‘why’, prescribe in their practical conclusions rules of behaviour which appear on the whole as almost the

3 Ibid.,

69–70. (1985). 5 Ibid., 263. 4 MacIntyre

A Theory of Indifference

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same for any given period and culture”.6 In other words, theoretical disputes (much of the order of what MacIntyre was later to call incommensurability) should not lead to a distraction from the truth of a more or less universal practical agreement as to what is right and wrong. None of these conclusions are shared by MacIntyre. Maritain’s division between practice and theory consequently enables him to discuss the disputes between philosophical systems. It also enables him to see those disputes as endemic and ongoing, perhaps wholly irresolvable. But he seeks to avoid falling into a trap whereby theoretical disputes will be read as signs of substantive practical agreement. According to Maritain, practical agreement can occur and has occurred. That is what agreement over fundamental human rights demonstrates, and that is because of the anchor of certainty that is lent to his thought by the natural law tradition. But, nevertheless, Maritain is aware that this practical agreement can be made a long time coming. That happens as soon as theoretical disputes move outside of their sphere amongst the philosophers and begin to cast a shadow of confusion over the possibility of practical agreement. He believes that the confusion begins to emerge when the basis of practical agreement itself begins to become an item to be interrogated, interpreted and treated with a degree of suspicion. The problems begin when the question “why?” is asked out of its proper place, which is the sphere of theoretical argumentation. For Maritain then, so long as the question “why?” is not asked too insistently, and so long as theoretical disputes are seen in terms of systems of thought rather than compulsion for living, all will be well. Universal Declaration and the like thus become practically possible. It is the thesis of this paper that the modern situation regarding human rights is much closer to that which is implied by MacIntyre than it is to that depicted by Jacques Maritain. Maritain assumes that in the end there will always be found some authoritative foundation for statements and declarations of human rights (or for the reconciliation of any moral disputes for that matter). The foundation will be represented in practical agreement and common “rules of behaviour” which he believes hold good irrespective of the contingencies of social specificity. MacIntyre, by contrast, points to a world in which that kind of foundation has been eroded to such an extent that, if his claims are pushed to conclusions that he does not himself reach, any practical agreements are likely to be little more than temporary, politically motivated treaties between particularistic positions which are bound to fall into a condition of mutual antipathy or, at best, mutual incomprehension, in the not too distant future. More specifically, it is the thesis of this paper that the question “why?” is indeed asked insistently and that, with that continued asking, statements of human rights have been deprived of any universal foundation. When the question “why?” is asked too often and too much, universal values of any order collapse and binding claims

6 Maritain

(1954), Man and the State, 72.

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are replaced with a resigned or cynical “why should I care?”. The foundation disappears or is destroyed so that there is no definite grounding for declarations of human rights. As such it is precisely this lack of a foundation which explains the peculiar phenomenon of indifference in the face of human rights abuses and affronts. As Maritain would point out, there is indeed widespread practical agreement about human rights. Everyone wants them, everyone claims to have them. One would be hard put to find anyone prepared to denounce human rights. But the practical agreement over principles seems to be a remarkably weak basis upon which those who are abused or insulted might be able to expect some defence, care or restitution. The papers structured around a paradox. First, it is argued that indifference – a lack of care and action in relation to the suffering of some others – is an inevitable and inescapable dimension of social relationships and arrangements. Second, it is suggested that human rights are means by which indifference can be overcome or condemned but the sociological conditions which make human rights so necessary are also their greatest threat. The paper is an attempt to develop a theoretical analysis that might be applied to concrete examples of indifference and to debates about the validity of human rights. The second part of the paper offers an explanation as to why the question “why?” is asked so insistently. In order to develop that explanation, the paper has to take what might seem to be something of a diversion away from the theme of human rights and, instead, towards a discussion of hermeneutics. It is proposed that the question “why?” is asked because the present is dominated by a hermeneutic culture in which the tendency is not to accept claims at face value but, instead, to interpret them in order to try to find what are taken to be their hidden and secret meanings. A hermeneutic culture is one in which everything is interpreted and treated with suspicion; by extension, it is also one in which the trap of relativism opens up and universal – and universalizing – principles like human rights are thus presumed to be questionable. Before these themes are explored, it is first of all necessary to examine the meaning of the word “indifference” in a little more detail.

What is Indifference? At its most obvious, the word “indifference” implies a lack of concern or interest. By this definition, then, the phenomenon of indifference involves a lack of concern on the part of those who are not the sufferers towards the abuses and affronts, the insults and miseries, that are experienced by others. The crucial point to stress in that definition is that the problem of indifference is therefore a problem about the relationships between those who are neither the sufferers nor the perpetrators of insult and misery on the one hand and those who are the sufferers on the other. Indifference is about what it means and entails to know that cruelty is being perpetrated upon others and then do little or nothing about it. The word consequently opens up a moral terrain in so far as morality can be defined as an orientation towards others that is subjectively meaningful through


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notions or practices of the right and good. Indifference is therefore a serious moral problem – and a problem of and for moral relationships – because it means that the social actors who are indifferent are either ignorant of, or ignoring, orientation towards others who ought to be compelling thanks to certain practices and principles. This is undoubtedly the dominant, everyday, use of the word indifference.7 In terms of analytical themes, the definition of indifference as a lack of interest opens up questions about the subjective interpretation of moral demands. It also makes it possible to ask significant (and hitherto rather neglected) questions about the impact of media, and especially television, in the communication of insults and miseries. But whatever analytical agenda thus emerges, indifference is identified as a more or less contingent response or reaction to the insult and affronts endured by others. It is assumed to be independent of the moral demands and compulsions themselves. Indeed, the lack of concern or interest is seen as a state of affairs which prejudices orientations that are taken to be normative (as such, analysis which operates in terms of this definition starts from the a priori that there ought to prevail some kind of orientation on the part of social actors towards those who are suffering). The identification of indifference as contingent in relation to moral demands themselves serves to create an analytical dualism in which moral orientations and the lack of care and concern are taken to be opposites. Yet this definition cannot really appreciate Maritain’s observation. If indifference is epiphenomenal to morality, then it would not be the case, as Maritain rightly notes, that the difficulties begin as soon as the question “why?” is asked. After all, if indifference is contingent in relation to morality, then the orientation is taken to be binding and viable left to itself. In this context, the question “why?” can only be asked of the causes of indifference. As soon as the question is asked in that way, the sources and causes of indifference can be analysed away, thus restating the integrity of the moral orientation (which thus remains after the account of the sources and consequences of indifference). Similarly, the condition of incommensurability which so concerns MacIntyre would, by this account (but not MacIntyre’s own account), simply be the representation of a state of ethical confusion (of a confusion over initial premises) which, once rendered transparent, will drift away leaving only clarity and an ability rationally to arbitrate between conflicting positions. If that was all there were to indifference, then the moral and ethical situation would be easy to resolve indeed. It would simply be a case of leaving everything to the philosophers who, as in the Platonic model, would be able to see the sun and not the shadows. In view of these kinds of lacunae with everyday meaning of indifference, this paper seeks to build upon a more coherent, conceptual understanding of the significance of the word. This means that indifference will be understood less as a phenomenon and more as a condition. This definition of the condition of indifference can be developed through some themes in the work of Hannah Arendt since,

7 For

an expansion of this line of argument see Mestrovic (1997) and Tester (1997).

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like the word indifference itself, Arendt’s work emphasizes the question of the relationships between social actors (between the individual actor or a group of actors, and others). She does this with the category of plurality. The category of plurality is one of the component parts of Arendt’s dissection of the human condition. She mentions it in the context of comments about action and says that: “Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world”.8 That passage has a number of implications. First, it is noteworthy that Arendt appears to understand action in a way that is comparable with Max Weber’s definition of social action as an orientation towards others9 . As such, her philosophical anthropology points towards a definite sociology. Second, Arendt stresses the relationships between actors in such a way that the experientially objective world becomes an It which is ontologically distinct from the fundamentally moral relationship between the “I” and the “Thou” (that is, the orientation on the part of the social actor towards the other as an independent actor on her or his own account.) Third, even though the concept of the “human condition” might imply a certain abstraction of philosophical categories,10 Arendt absolutely avoids the trap of reifying or abstracting some category of “Man” or “humanity”. She emphasizes the point that men and women (as, it can be added, social actors implicated in I-Though relationships) exist in the world and not the construct of Man (which thus becomes an It to be repudiated11 ). Now if, following Arendt and reading her through the sociological prism of Weber, social action is defined as orientation towards others and without any mediation via the It of things, then indifference can be defined as the inversion of that condition. By this token, then, indifference can be defined as a preclusion, ignoring or ignorance of the other on the basis of either the allocation of the other to some category of the It (which typically takes the form of an establishment of some category of “Them”), or the insertion of a mediating It between the social actor and the other. In the former case, indifference takes the form of a turning away from the other on the grounds that whatever insult or injury they are suffering is their fate, destiny or an excusable occurrence.12 In the latter case, indifference takes a form of a denial on the part of the social actor that she or he need act because institutions or organizations will carry out the necessary action instead. Both of these forms are linked, however, in that they similarly identify the other as an object-like, reified thing (precisely an It) to which things happen as from outside. The other is not

8 Arendt

(1958). (1968). 10 This tendency is only partly avoided in Heller (1990). 11 It is possible to read Zygmunt Bauman’s important sociology of adiaphorization as a study of the transformation of the potential Thou into It, The social manipulation of morality: moralizing actors, adiaphorizing action. Bauman (1991). 12 This involves the strategy of “blaming the victim”. For more on this see Tester (2001). 9 Weber


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identified as a subject of independent and voluntaristic action on her or his own part. Indeed, these two forms of indifference similarly constitute a basis for the repudiation of any social action whatever. As Arendt wrote: “Action would be unnecessary luxury. . .if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing”. The forms of allocation or the insertion of a mediation between the actor and the other can serve to make action seem to be this “unnecessary luxury”. But, Arendt continues: “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live”.13 Plurality establishes the foundation of the other in an orientation on the part of the actor towards the unique integrity of the Thou. Consequently, plurality places morality at the heart of all social action and all social relationships. Meanwhile, indifference is the destruction of the foundation of the other in the contrary assertion of the validity of reifying categories of the It which deny uniqueness and which make all others seem to be predictable and alike. It therefore follows that all social relationships can be understood as involving a tension in the status of the other as either a Thou or an It. The devil in social relationships is derived from the fact that, as Georg Simmel14 showed in his sociology of dyadic and triadic forms, all relationships necessarily imply some kind of predication and prediction of the other. In other words, all social relationships contain the problem of indifference in embryo. One of the spheres in which the embryo comes into something like full maturity is that of principles of human rights. Declarations and principles of human rights necessarily imply the establishment of an “It-ness” about the individual human subject. First, they make the individual the material bearer (and to some extent representative) of certain moral compulsions and demands that are taken to be independent of, and standing over and above, any given individual. Second, human rights emphasize an It in that they necessarily establish, and operate on, the terrain of an abstract moral category of the Human (which, as Arendt would remind us, does not exist; only humans exist). But without such an intimation of an “It-ness”, it is impossible to accord any compelling moral integrity to others who are not present within the immediacy of the here and now (that is to say, without some “It-ness” moral integrity becomes proportional to spatial and temporal proximity in such a way that those who are furthest from the actor matter the least and cannot be made to matter more). The paradox, then, is that the It is implicit in all social relationships and that the It also mediates and potentially orients relationships between the actor and the others. As such the It is a principle of indifference and the precondition of predictable social relationships at one and the same time.

13 Arendt

(1958), The Human Condition, A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man, 10. 14 Simmel (1950).

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A focus on the orientation towards the other through categories and strategies of the It makes it possible to rethink Maritain’s observation about the practical agreement over the principles of human rights going hand in hand with theoretical disagreement about the reasons why these principles ought to be established and upheld, and not others. In these terms, it can be suggested that the practical agreement reflects the social fact of plurality. Plurality is a fact for the simple reason that in social relationships the actor is necessarily, inevitably and always required to orient her- or himself towards others who are present in those relationships as independent agents of their own voluntaristic subjectivity.15 Meanwhile, theoretical disagreement reflects the difficulty that the necessary It is in abstraction and therefore without a firm foundation (it is, in fact, an abstraction away from the absolute foundation of morality which is established by the integrity and presence of the other). The It of the abstraction called humanity or human rights is itself without a foundation. After all, from the point of view of the clarity of the abstraction, existent men and women are thoroughly contingent. They necessarily fail to live up to what the abstraction requires and the expectations of valiant victimhood that it rather tends to imply (for example think of the shift in definitions of Kosovar-Albanians from 1999 to 2000; from a people living under the yoke of Serbian imperialism to drug-running gangsters). But, if the declarations or principle are to possess any justification it is precisely a foundation that they need. As Jacques Maritain wrote: “From the point of view of intelligence, it is essential to have an accurate justification of moral values and ethical norms. With regard to Human Rights, what matters most to a philosopher is the question of their rational foundation.”16 Hence, the question that needs to be asked is exactly the question which, Martain says, starts all the problems. That question is: “Why?” The quest for foundations destroys its own chances of success. It erodes certainty and confidence rather than creates them. And therefore the question “why?” is itself complicit in the condition of indifference.

The Hermeneutic Mainstream The first part of this paper explained the linkage between human rights and indifference. I would like next to focus on the context of that linkage. In this section the explicit focus on indifference takes something of a back seat, to develop an explanation of why the question “why?” is asked so relentlessly. As we shall see, the question is asked so much because it is so deeply woven into the fabric of the modernity which is, itself, the context for the emergence of human rights.

15 This

is a point which is stressed in Weber (1968). Typology of social action which is, itself, explicit within the sociological account of morality that underpins and informs this paper. 16 Maritain (1954), Man and the State, 73.


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The rise of the question “why?”, and therefore of theoretical disputes over foundations, can be identified as one of the historical signs of the emergence of modernity. Modernity, meanwhile, can be identified with the rise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the idea that this world of the temporal everyday is a secular realm, independent of the sacred and in principle amenable to wholly transparent understanding through the application of this-worldly reason. That reason was taken to be universal and, therefore, the project of the rendering transparent was identified as universalist and universalizing. In some fundamental sense, modernity is the asking of the question “why?”. The problem is, of course, that the question is destructive, not creative. Premodern culture was not dominated by that kind of interrogation and, consequently, it was less marked than modernity by disagreements over foundation. This is not to deny that theoretical disputes were prevalent before modernity. Of course there were such controversies. But they were disputes about the proper meaning and implications of foundations which were not themselves ever subjected to questioning and which were assumed to be external to the secular-social. For example, pre-Reformation theology involved profound controversy, but the foundational assumption of God’s Creation was never itself questioned. The foundation remained intact and external. In these terms, it might be possible to distinguish the premodern from the modern through the reversal of Maritain’s formula. If, following Maritain, the present is characterised by an agreement over practical principles but by theoretical disputation about the meaning and basis of those principles, then the premodern might be identified with an agreement over theoretical assumptions but a disagreement over the practical principles that ensue from those commonly accepted foundations. Modernity represents the moment when the foundation has been undermined and thrown open to doubt if not, indeed, suspicion. If it is assumed that the temporal world is an independent secular-social realm and entirely intelligible in this-worldly terms, then any foundational assumptions that are not susceptible to reason are made uncertain. Furthermore, if the guiding principle of the understanding of this secularsocial realm is one of rendering transparent that which was previously clouded in mystery or unknowing (which consequently becomes identified as superstition or a sign of the immaturity of those who so believe), then the nominating question “what?” is entirely replaced with the interrogative “why?”. The question “why?” ties the task of understanding to interpretation rather than revelation. By this token, modernity is a hermeneutic culture. According to Ferenc Feher, hermeneutics is the main stream culture of Europe.17 I will focus on Feher because he offers an analysis that is compatible with the account of indifference which was developed above. For me, Feher makes it possible to uncover the relationship between modernity and indifference and, moreover, to understand quite where that relationship has led. In the following discussion, Feher is read and extended through the prism of the themes and concerns of this paper. As such, it is possible

17 Feher

(1989).

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that the discussion will be carried out in ways with which Feher would no have agreed. It is proposed that European hermeneutical culture is at once the context of the need for human rights and the source of the impossibility of finding a foundation for them. But what is Europe, and what is hermeneutics? Although his analysis might be accused of containing a fairly considerable measure of Eurocentrism (Feher himself can explain why this is so), it is clear that Feher does not understand Europe in spatial or geographical terms. Rather, he understands Europe as a project that encompasses America as well as Britain or France. Typically, then, Feher calls American politics and culture as a “branch” of the European project. The justification for this cultural and political, not spatial and geographical, understanding of Europe is derived by Feher from an essay by Agnes Heller to which he refers in glowing terms.18 Heller equates Europe with Modernity and contends that: “The new world of modernity. . .has been termed ‘Europe’ or ‘the west’ only from the eighteenth century onwards. The project ‘Europe’ in this sense is thus rootless”.19 By this reading, the word “Europe” can be used as a shorthand for modernity irrespective of its spatial location. Consequently, in so far as the European project was universalized during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a combination of emulation, encouragement and imposition, the culture of that project similarly possesses an almost universal relevance. Or, put another way, the problems with Europe are also the problems of the world. According to Feher, the defining characteristic of this project of Europe is its hermeneutic culture. Europe is hermeneutic culture in two respects. And it is clear that these two respects both involve an unprecedented (and distinctly modern) asking of the questions “why?”. First, Feher says that this hermeneutic culture “questioned the institution qua institution as the source of the authority of interpretation”. This questioning had its roots in the Reformation assault on the claim of the Catholic Church to be the possessor of a sediment of tradition which defines its readings of the text as authoritative. In this way, the text was made freestanding and independent. It became something to be interpreted by the reader, not just accepted by the obedient: “The Protestant initiative of making le travail du texte, the individual and critical reading of the normative code an indispensable precondition of deciphering, even constituting the text’s meaning, was the initiating gesture of hermeneutic”. Second, “it followed. . .that the existence of a variety of heterogeneous texts was recognised as beneficial and thus variety and plurality were increasingly promoted”. Each and every text was accepted as containing some potentially useful insights, even if only through their self-evident error. Feher notes that this acceptance of variety was more than Luther, for example, would have countenanced (for Luther, the truth is to be found in the correct interpretation of the one true text), but his attack on the connection of truth with institution and tradition meant that: “The hermeneutical reader-actor could no longer a limine deny that

18 Ibid.,

79, 84. and Ferenc (1988).

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valuable findings might be hidden even in such texts whose ultimate untruth was for him a foregone conclusion”.20 But there is a third dimension to this hermeneutical culture that Feher does not draw out, even though it is explicit within the two strands that he does outline. The point that Feher does not emphasize is that since this hermeneutical culture understands the world through the strategies of the reading of the text, and therefore as like a text, it also approaches the world as a thing out there which requires reading and interpretation but not necessarily the active engagement of social action. The world becomes It and potentially it can therefore be regarded with a measure of indifference. Of course, it was this reading of the text of the world which Marx condemned in his famous theses on Feuerbach. Yet, notwithstanding Marx’s repudiation of reading alone, he was absolutely unable to counter the hermeneutical insight that this European project (that is to say, modernity), turns the social world into a thing which it is legitimate and reasonable to submit to theoretical interrogation and ask the questions “why?”. The reading of the text of the world, the interrogation of it, represented and propelled a sense of confidence in the ability of the secular-social to be self-constituting. More importantly, the strategy also expressed a faith in the ability of the secularsocial to be free from the weight of the past or of the supernatural and, instead, to be transparent to the understanding. But Feher points out that this self-confidence quickly led to doubt and uncertainty. This was because the pursuit of hermeneutics – the relentless asking of the question “why?” – undermined all authority. According to Feher, pre-hermeneutic (premodern) cultures base authority on the assumption that any given text is the expression of some authorative and authorial voice. It has an extra-textual substantiality. The text is taken to be a revelation of authority: “The ultimate authority was vocal, not textual. The writing is only a trace of this vocal authority. The laws emanated from the Voice and they found their ultimate justification in its unquestionable authority”.21 But hermeneutical culture interrogates the text to try to find the truth that it contains. In this way, the assumption of some authoritative authorial voice becomes either a quaint anachronism or, more problematically, a superstitious obstacle standing in the way of the achievement of a fully transparent understanding. The old authorities are interrogated away and new ones (constitutions, penal codes, bills of rights and the like) are offered by way of social replacement. Similarly the possibility that humans possess some authority in and of themselves gets lost. What becomes more important is the project of understanding why and how those humans are presumed to have moral significance. The dull fact of suffering becomes less important than an inquiry which is groundless by its own admission. However, these replacements are the product of the hermeneutical destruction of previous authority and, so they are themselves without any authority beyond assertion. As Feher says, for the European project, “the vexing question has remained:

20 Feher 21 Ibid.,

(1989, 81). 83.

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whose is the authoritative voice behind the text? What is the source of its authority?”.22 The relentless march of the question “why?” means that no stable and binding answers can be given to those desperate questions. The self-confidence of the European project thus becomes a principle of the erosion of any confidence in what Europe might mean or involve. The hermeneutic culture interprets away the basis of its own authority to interpret. When hermeneutics is tied to the assumption of an independent secular-social realm, there is no barrier to stop the asking of the question “why?”. This point is represented quite well by the distance between the Maritain and MacIntyre. Since Mariatin operates in terms of pre-hermeneutic natural law assumptions, his thought contains a barrier of the natural beyond which the interrogative “why?” might not proceed. MacIntyre is much more modern, much more a product of hermeneutical culture. His thought does not contain that natural base and, therefore, he is quite incapable of imagining or importing into his analysis any definite barrier. Maritain sees the question “why?” leading ultimately to the revelation of the bedrock, and MacIntyre sees it leading only to the erosion of the cliff, with all the buildings toppling over the precipice. Feher talks appositely about “the hermeneutical self-erosion of the ‘European project’”.23 He identifies the historical realization of this self-erosion as the basis of the peculiarly European inventions of hero worship and the aestheticization of politics, inventions which reached one high point and a synthesis in Nazism. Hero worship and aestheticization similarly represent attempts to establish a secular social barrier beyond which the hermeneutical question “why?” might not proceed. The hero is accorded the possession of the authoritative voice and aestheticization means that interpretation is overwhelmed by the spectacular. Yet, precisely because of their attempt to build a barrier against the eroding “why?”, it can be seen that both hero worship and aestheticization also represent contradictions of the modern assumption that the secular-social sphere is transparent to the understanding. They both announce that there are some principles in the secular-social sphere which are actually beyond what the reason can explain and which are, therefore, mysterious forces. Following on from the Nazi lead, there has also been a turn to the pre-hermeneutic of purported ethnic “purity”. It was that particular pre-hermeneutic – which necessarily implies indifference towards those who can be tarred as the “impure It” – which underpinned so much of the violence in the Balkan War of the 1990s and, moreover, enabled Western powers to turn away from the conflict because it was allegedly “inevitable”. Certainly, these inventions solve the problem of hermeneutics but, in so doing, they emphasize a pre-hermeneutical strategy which is incompatible with the demands and ways of proceeding which are specific to modernity. Of course, none of this is to seek to deny their essential European-ness. By way of strong thesis, it might be proposed that if Europe were not a hermeneutical culture, neither would there have been Nazism or contemporary variants of fascism. In any case, it is beyond

22 Ibid. 23 Ibid.,

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question that these attempts to constitute a barrier against hermeneutics (against the remorseless “why?”), and thereby to re-establish some kind of authority in the ostensibly transparent world, led to cataclysm and, as Feher says: “Cataclysms teach modesty, sometimes even excessive modesty. This is how European hermeneutic, this intellectual product of the European project, turned against the very project after the fall”.24 The question “why?” saps away at all foundations and the problems it creates have been met historically (in Nazism, fascism and Stalinism) with a turn to the pre-hermeneutic. This was the historical situation in which human rights became something more than philosophical speculations about the reconstitution of authority. Instead, human rights became a necessary statement and defence of the integrity and significance of the human subject. Human rights codify the authority of the other. They connect the text of the insulted and injured person to the authority of the voice that can be made to scream but which ought to be able to speak of relationship. Principles of human rights represent an attempt to put up a barrier against the destruction of all foundations. That barrier has humanity itself on its safe side. But if this might make human rights seem to be a necessary pre-hermeneutical solution to the cataclysm of the world which hermeneutical culture helped to make, the difficulty is that the implication of the solution is offered in a situation that nevertheless remains hermeneutical. Despite everything, the question “why?” continues to be asked (it has never stopped being asked), and so human rights is itself implicated in a world which continues to undermine and to try to render transparent all claims to extra-social foundation. However, the question “why?” is now asked in terms of a lesson taught by the history of cataclysm. Whereas, at the dawn of the European project, the question “why?” subjected tradition to the light of transparency, after the fall the question “why?” had sought to reveal the power, mystification and perhaps even violence which is now presumed to be the ultimate foundation. Indeed, the question “why?” is now harnessed to a commitment to defend the particularity which any and all statements and principles of universality are supposed to demean or deny. The result has been the emergence of a state of moral relativism. First, since the cataclysm of the project, it has become accepted that the world accommodates not one text but many and that no text is necessarily in error (this, then, is the post-cataclysmic interpretation of one of the originating strands of hermeneutic culture as identified by Feher). The lesson of cataclysm has been that: “the European text transpired as being not better, not worse than the other but simply different”. Perhaps that sentence assigns to the European project too many shreds of a tattered legitimacy. After all, if validity is measured in inverse ratio to the number of deaths caused or murders committed, perhaps the European project really is worse than those others. This realization of the existence of a multiplicity of texts (of projects) means that: “For a typical new kind of advocate of hermeneutical (anti-European) anti-ethnocentrism, preoccupation with the European text meant

24 Ibid.

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hidden cultural colonialism”, within which “an attempt at upholding at least some of the battered European universals implied a version of gunboat diplomacy”.25 After the fall, the authority of Europe was read by anti-Europeans to be exclusion and violence. The hermeneutical project therefore became tied to the unmasking of this force. Behind the statements of universality evidently lurks nothing other than a particularistic power-principle. That, evidently, is the European secret and the secret of the secular-social realm. It is the secret which, it is alleged, needs to be rendered transparent and which some intellectuals who display their distance from Europe sought to achieve when Nato bombing – however mendacious its justifications might have been – finally started to unsettle Milosevic. But the proponents of the European project cannot carry out that unmasking for themselves. This external relativization of the European project necessarily puts a question mark against meaning of Europe. It means that Europe, the project of the question “why?” itself becomes something to be interrogated: “Europe: why?” Second, relativism has emerged because of the internal problems of the European project. The history and experience of cataclysm has resulted in a turning away from attempts to build the “better” world for the abstraction of All Men and Women. It has also meant a collapse of attempts to create the “better” Men and Women who would be suitable to live in that world. Those kinds of universalist pretensions have fallen into disrepute and disrepair. The present “wishes to replace them by ‘minidiscourses’ which are self-sustaining and self-legitimating (from within)”26 . It can be added that this turn to what Feher calls “mini-discourses” undoubtedly represents another attempt to overcome the hermeneutical problem of the destruction of the authority of the text. “Mini-discourses” possess the authority of the voice of the immediate enunciator who is assumed to be her- or himself authorative to the extent that the “mini-discourse” facilitates the expression of her or his own particular “truth”. When the “mini-discourse” is not experienced by the actor as permitting that expression of particular truth, it is condemned as one more universal and its adherents are revealed as being just one more group of oppressors. This is a different way of appreciating the world of incommensurability which is identified by Alisdair MacIntyre. Feher, just like MacIntyre, identifying the emergence of situation in which there exists a plurality of discourses, each of which is rational and legitimate in its own (internal) terms, and none of which can stake any claim whatever to be universally binding. Indeed, it is likely that the opponents of these “mini-discourses” would abhor any attempt by the speakers of any other “mini-discourse” to claim universal legitimacy and significance. Instead of toleration there is a splenetic violence in which “mini-discourses” seek to promote and defend themselves in the only which has credibility. The only other possibility seems to be a world in which each position turns inwards and tries to overcome the difficulties that are created by the existence of other, discrepant, positions by steadfastly ignoring them (this might be called the “exit solution”). Proof of this tendency was

25 Ibid. 26 Ibid.,

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provided by the speed with which closure has been carried out in Western Europe against Kurds oppressed in Iraq. Western European states carried out a literal and metaphorical closure as soon as the Kurds sought to escape and, so, the victims of human rights abuses quickly became “bogus asylum seekers”. Rightly, Feher point to the possibility of “the (Pyrrhic) victory of a dubious kind of hermeneutics, a world order in which the communication between mini-discourses. . .breaks down”.27 The result can only be indifference and the emergence of a situation in which the abuse of the human rights of others is given less weight than the “right” of the speaker to enunciate her or his particular truth. This is precisely the situation which has emerged in the modern university and which dominates the asylum debate in the West. For Feher, the post-cataclysmic continuation of hermeneutics implies that any possibility of moral judgement might tend to collapse as well. And so the cataclysm which was one of the spurs for the establishment of the universality of human rights might cease to be seen as a cataclysm at all. By extension therefore, human rights might tend to become identified as confections that hide illicit power relationships and which seek to mask violence rather than denounce or prevent it. After all, relativism tells us to look not at the statements of human rights but at the particularity of the speaker. Feher concludes his essay by drawing out some of the possible implications of the situation of relativism. He says that if it is allowed to prevail and pass unquestioned: “we will no longer have concepts to explain why the Holocaust was more than an unpleasant event for one mini-discourse demolished by another, considerably larger mini-discourse which without doubt justified its acts ‘from within’”. Feher goes on: “We will no longer be capable of theoretically justifying our practical and emotional judgement that the Holocaust, the Gulag, the colonial genocide was the negative limit of human performance, and as such, infinitely evil”.28 After all, Pol Pot doubtless had his reasons, just as Saddam Hussein presumably and his all the time Iraq seemed to be assisting Western goals in its long war with Iran. Consequently, and by reverse, neither will we be able to justify any universal declarations or principles of human rights. All that will remain will be particular rights in competition with one another. They will be (are) upheld with increasing desperation and therefore by reference to the only authority that seems to remain: the authority of the voice and practices which express personal preference.29 Zygmunt Bauman has written that human rights have been “refocused”, “on the right of the individuals to stay different and to pick and choose at will their own models of happiness and fitting lifestyle”.30 So much then for Auschwitz, the Gulag, Srebrenica. And so much also for a compelling humanity.

27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.,

91. as MacIntyre (1985) points out, the elevation of preference to ethical importance heralds the condition of emotivism. 30 Bauman (2000). 29 And,

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Let me pull these points together and relate them back to the discussion of indifference which was developed in the first part of this paper. Building on the insights of Feher, it can be proposed that indifference is an inevitable quality of modernity precisely because, in its history, the universalist ambitions of modernity have collapsed into a plethora of mini-discourses, each of which validates itself internally and by closure against the “outside”. The consequence of this is that in a situation of mini-discourses there is also a multiplication of the categories of the “It” into which human beings can be placed (for example, my “It-ness” can involve my sexuality, gender, ethnicity, social class, national identity and so forth). In this way, the splinters of indifference are multiplied and magnified. We are all wrapped up, put into little parcels and entirely divorced from others because we only recognize their It-ness; an It-ness which is, itself, identified with a tendency towards the oppression and silencing of others. Just as it is true to say that all social relationships contain en embryo of indifference, it is much more true to say that in the world of mini-discourses the embryo turns into a living monster. The world of mini-discourses is a world of indifference running amok. The suspicion towards the foundation of universal human rights leads directly to a lack of care about the misery of others.

Conclusion Socially produced and practised cataclysms eroded the self-confidence of the hermeneutical project. All that remains is relativism and a quest to uncover the secrets of particularity which are presumed to be behind the claims to universality. Even the principles of human rights, which appeared after the cataclysm as a kind of guarantee that, although abuses might well happen again, at least they will be called by their proper name, can be subjected to that erstwhile unmasking. After all, it is indubitably the case historically that some groups have argued the case for human rights much more strongly than others. And, as the hermeneutic culture would ask: “Why is this exactly?” The project has collapsed into a state in which a variety of mini-discourses all approach one another with suspicion and in terms of struggle to cast doubt before doubt is cast. In all of this, the voice which is the expression of the authority of the other is shouted down, ignored, silenced. (But it must be emphasized that the voice is only the expression of the authority of the other. The fully compelling authority is derived from the otherness of the other in conditions and experiences of plurality). After all, that other becomes an It which stands in the way of the full and untrammelled expression of the rights of the individual. It becomes a thing in the way, to be got out of the way. At best she or he occasions mere indifference, and there is no universally legitimate foundation that might enable her or him to assert anything else. If this account of the linkage between human rights and indifference is accepted, the conclusion seems to be clear: put a halt to hermeneutics. But of course, that can


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never happen. The logic of the hermeneutical culture, which goes on even though it has lost the first flush of innocence, is that such an imposition of authority would inspire nothing more than another round of asking of the question “why?”. It would also become clear, probably sooner rather than later, that the agents of that erstwhile imposition lack any authority whatsoever. Once the genie of hermeneutics has been let out of the bottle of understanding, it can never be forced back in. In any case, would a cessation of hermeneutics be desirable? Undoubtedly not. The hermeneutical culture might well have undermined all foundations and it might well have led to violence and relativism (perhaps inevitably, or perhaps contingently – that is another story), but it has also been one of the greatest and most profound demonstrations of the practice and theory of human freedom. Without a hermeneutical culture, the world would be absolutely beyond social understanding and influence. It would be confronted as a reification and the place of the human and of humanity within it would be established once and for all, without the chance of any questioning. Moreover, the ability to question (the ability to ask “why?”) is itself a sign of the plurality of humanity. Social actors are forced to ask the question “why?” as there is an orientation towards the other as a Thou and not as an It, and the orientation is established when, despite the logic of the It, there is the realization that actors are not all endlessly reproducible casts from the same mould. Social actors are different and yet they are in some fundamental way the same. This is the understanding and appreciation (it is the moral insight) that hermeneutics permits. Consequently, hermeneutical culture is at once the greatest hope for, and greatest threat to, human freedom. That is the ambivalence which is summed up in the question “why?”. It is also the paradox in which principles of human rights are inextricably trapped. In a sentence, then, what have I argued? That the hermeneutic culture is a mark of human freedom, that indifference is inescapable, but that common humanity demands that hermeneutics not be allowed to cast suspicion on the foundations of human rights.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition, A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man, 9 & 10. New York: Doubleday. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1991. The social manipulation of morality: Moralizing actors, adiaphorizing action. Theory, Culture & Society 8, 137–151. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity, 29. Cambridge: Polity Press. Feher, Ferenc. 1989. Hermeneutic as Europe’s mainstream political tradition. In Thesis Eleven, no 22, 79–91. Heller, Agnes and Ferenc Feher. 1988. The Postmodern Political Condition, 147. Cambridge: Polity Press. Heller, Agnes. 1990. Can Modernity Survive?. Cambridge: Polity Press (important development of the theme). Maritain, Jacques. 1954. Man and the State, 70. Original emphasis, London: Hollis & Carter. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1985. After Virtue, A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn. London: Duckworth. Mestrovic, Stjepan. 1997. Postemotional Society. London: Sage.

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Simmel, Georg. 1950. The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff. New York: Free Press. Tester, Keith.1997. Moral Culture. London: Sage. Tester, Keith. 2001. Compassion, Morality and the Media. Buckingham: Open University Press. Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society, An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 1, eds. G. Roth and C. Wittich. New York: Bedminster Press.

Media, Bystanders, Actors Zygmunt Bauman

About half a century ago, when watching the emergence of the world-wide network of radio broadcasting, Alfred Weber (Max Weber’s younger and less famous brother, but an astute sociologist himself) observed that the world had become a much smaller place and so it became scarcely possible honestly to maintain any kind of pretence of ignorance of what was going on. I did not hear Alfred Weber speak, I can only read his words in print. And yet when I read them, I hear a mixture of two emotions in Weber’s voice: anxiety and hope. Anxiety: would the admittedly frail humans be up to the new challenge? Would they prove able to carry with patience, integrity and dignity the enormous burden of information – all that knowledge of human misery, of the evil being daily done and the pain the victims suffer? Would not they rather – cowardly, basely, despicably – seek escape from that burden behind mutual slanders, vilifications, petty squabbles and outright hostilities, spying the culprits and the villains everywhere except in their own homes? And hope: perhaps now, when we all know of each other’s pains and can no longer seek excuse in our ignorance, we will face up to our responsibilities and rush to help each other out of misery, whenever, wherever, by whomever help is needed? Perhaps we will rise to the ethical challenge out new knowledge contains? I wonder what Alfred Weber would have said were he aware of what was to happen fifty or so years later; were he to know that the time would come when a billion of TV screens, or more, would be switched on around the globe at any moment of the 24-hour long day; if he imagined a time when one could say of the planet-wide TV empire what had been said in Weber’s time of the British Empire: that the Sun never sets on its round-the-globe expanses. It is not just that the sheer volume of information produced, broadcast and delivered has grown in the last decades exponentially. The quantity of information “available” (the word “available” must be, indeed, written in inverted comas, as the moment when human mind could still hope to ingest and assimilate all the information on offer and, tantalizingly, “within reach”, has been long passed) is fully and Z. Bauman (B) Department of Sociology, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK


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truly unprecedented; but yet more consequential has been the change in the quality of information delivered to the family homes around the planet. Radio, as the newsprint, told stories; stories that one could believe or not, feel strongly about or not, take to heart or not. Television supplies images – crisp, bright, sharp, lucid, dramatic, spectacular images; images “more real than reality”, certainly more technically perfect than any reality can dream to ever be. It is now the televised images that set the standards by which the quality of the “real thing” is measured. You find above the goods displayed on shop shelves the label “as seen on TV” – as the most authoritative, ultimate confirmation that the thing you are looking at is the real stuff you are looking for. What confirms the quality of the goods in shops, applies as well to the standards of human self-affirmation. Descartes could now perhaps modify his cogito: I have been seen on TV, therefore I am. . . As the “other reality” that television cameras were originally thought to be grasping and representing has been slowly, but relentlessly downgraded by the cameras’ technical perfection and their operators’ skills, one can no longer ignore, let alone to depreciate or disdain the images on the screen on the authority of (as Ranke, the great historian, famously postulated two hundred years ago) wie es ist eigentlich gewesen (“how did it truly happened”). For all we know, what you’ve seen on TV is precisely what did truly happen. And so we all are now – consciously or not, willingly or not – global bystanders; eye witnesses to the wrongs done to human beings everywhere in the world. We do not just hear of evil – we see evil being done, though we do little, if anything at all, to repair the damage, let alone to ward off the damage before it be done. In the daily replayed world-wide drama of human misery we are cast in the role of spectators. We have been shown evil in action, we have seen the terrifying outcomes of evil action and we can no longer claim ignorance: lack of knowledge would testify solely to the absence of good will, since we could and would know, if we only wished. Being a bystander means being exposed to enormous ethical challenge. Seeing evil in action pricks and hurts conscience. Could I do something to stop it? Did my actions (or my inaction, for that matter) make a difference? Did they perhaps help, however indirectly, the evil to be done? We feel guilty, even if the feeling is vague, difficult to pinpoint, and even if we would not admit the guilt if charged; and we have good legal reason to deny the charge – in most cases the charge would not stand in any court of justice – and even if it stood a chance to convince the jury clever lawyers will find convincing arguments to prove our innocence. But conscience is quicker, subtler and more obstinate than even the most rational arguments of reason. The sense of guilt won’t go away. The lines dividing bystanders from perpetrators and their collaborators are drawn firmly and clearly only in law courts. In moral consciences boundaries are dim and easy to erase. . . It may be proven in the court of law that what the defendant did or refrained from doing made no difference. Moral conscience won’t be placated. The gnawing suspicion that difference could be made, if we have only tried strong enough, will stay. And inability or unwillingness to make a difference would not assuage the moral pain: if anything, it would add to the guilt. Despite all explicit

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denials of guilt, one would recognize guilty consciences by the passion with which guilt is denied. There are other symptoms as well; for instance, the spectacular career made by the title of a paper published in an obscure journal by Edward Lorenz a couple of decades ago: “Can the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” The “butterfly effect” has become since a household terms and is nowadays on everybody’s lips. To reach such celebrity status, the term must have struck a sensitive chord and bring into light something exiled to the dark depths of the subconscious. Are we not all like that Brazilian butterfly? Happy-go-lucky to flap our wings, only to learn a few days later of the Texan tornado, but never guessing the connection between the two events? With such suspicion, one can hardly live in peace; would not one rather seek, keenly and desperately, the way to exile the suspicion again? And what way is better to the banishing it out of sight and out of thought than to deny, all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, its truth? Short of that – to deny suspecting, let alone knowing, that truth? Once a most popular form of the denial of guilt – “I did not know” – the communication explosion of our times has made all but unfeasible. And so its status of the most common form of denial is taken over by casting the sufferers outside the realm of moral duty: they suffered indeed, but they brought the trouble upon themselves – through their sloth or ill will, indolence or foul intentions. They are not really human, not “fully human” at any rate, not the human beings of the kind we are – and so they do not deserve the treatment owed to human beings. Doing nothing to mitigate their pain is not therefore a sin or a moral defect, quod erat demonstrandum. The attraction of such an excuse is strong, and grows stronger with the rising volume of victims of which, thanks to the ubiquitous and obtrusive images, we are aware. The temptation is overwhelming. It is also an invidious temptation that needs to be resisted, lest the outcome of information explosion shall be adding an insult to injury, spawning yet more inhumanity and more of the bystander-style callousness. In as far as it prompts such excuses and makes them a seductive option, the celebrated information explosion presents a danger to humanity and may well portend ill to the prospects of human community. Rather than adding to our understanding, more information may well make the understanding yet more difficult to attain. Another popular way of denying the guilt is a “there is nothing I can do” (or “I have done all I could”) formula. Such an excuse is by no means fanciful. It is corroborated daily by the common experience of men and women of our individualized society, a society that renders human bonds frail and volatile, and presents commitments (particularly long-term and unconditional commitments) as inadvisable, treacherous step to take. In this kind of society most people at most times find themselves obliged to act under conditions of acute uncertainty and feel their own condition as insecure and difficult, perhaps impossible, to control. They live, as Pierre Bourdieu described it, in the atmosphere of continuous and apparently incurable precarité; and people who feel precarious, unsure of their own actions and distrustful of other “people’s like them” actions (people who, to quote Bourdieu once more, “have no grip on the present”) are unlikely to muster enough courage and

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determination to confront reality in a struggle for a better, more humane alternative. Instead, they are nudged to seek, as Ulrich Beck suggested, biographical (private) solutions to systemic (socially produced) troubles; a task for the great majority of people impossible to handle, let alone to handle effectively and to their satisfaction. Such necessity encourages a “wait and see” attitude: keep both your hands free, beware of mortgaging your future, remember that teaming up with others is good only if the contract includes an “exit on demand” clause. The excuse “there was nothing I could do” reflects that attitude. Once that attitude is taken, the verdict “I can not” derives its apparent self-evidence from its tacit, yet firm assumptions: I should better not – and so I would not. . . That attitude does not encourage the search for means and ways to do more than has been done – that is, more that one thought could be done by a “sensible and prudent” person. And so it does not prompt to seek a deeper understanding of what has been “seen on TV”. Indeed, what purpose such a deeper understanding would serve? It may require more commitment; it may require assuming more responsibility; it may create more constraints; it may prove counterproductive to the job of “seeking biographical solutions to life troubles”. These are indeed formidable obstacles to the recasting of knowledge supplied by the flow of information into the understanding of the world of which that information informs; and so also obstacles to the transformation of bystanders into actors, able to repent the neglect of responsibility and repent the guilt feeling that, however ingenious the excuses, can only be silenced for a time, but would not go away. These obstacles make yet more difficult the task of facing up to the ethical challenge set by (to quote the words of Hannah Arendt written down in connection with German war crimes) “the century of bystanders”: “To assume responsibility for all crimes committed by human beings, in which no one people are assigned a monopoly of guilt and none considers itself superior, in which good citizens would not shrink in horror at German crimes and declare ‘than God, I am not like that’, but rather recognize in fear and trembling the incalculable evil which humanity is capable of and fight fearlessly, uncompromisingly, everywhere against it.”1 Let us not confuse seeing with understanding; seeing sometimes bars understanding instead of helping it. Information flooding from TV screens blinds as it dazzles. Swimming through the information tide leaves no time to pause and reflect, to put two and two together and to draw conclusions. All that is particularly irksome and potentially devastating when it comes to lifting the bystanders from their plight of passive and speechless spectators. Connections between the “events”, each shown on TV for a brief time until the next episode fills the screen, are almost impossible to trace. They are neither shown nor implied. Pictures of hungry people hide rather than expose the livelihoods destroyed by free market competition and hightech “improvements” that make traditional way of existing unviable and redundant. Pictures of corpses strewing innumerable battlefields of tribal wars conceal rather than reveal the “aggressive selling” of ever “new and improved” weapons. Pictures of emaciated or bleeding bodies cover up rather than unravel the need to heal the

1 Arendt

(1994).


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wounded souls and rescue human dignity from humiliation. This may be in part an editorial fault – the news could be composed and edited differently. But depthanalyses do not make “good television”. As the head of one of the broadcasting giants put it – news need to be served as coffee: hot and strong. News are of no use once they stop entertaining, and they do not hold the entertaining power once they cool down. Like all of us when facing charges, television also has its valid excuses. TV companies operate in a hotly competitive market; high ratings (that is, pulling viewers to the screen and keeping them there) are for them, with but little exaggeration, a matter of life and death. Besides – in rushing from one episode to another and stopping at none, people in charge of broadcasting only follow the general trend of culture that had already primed and tuned their viewers well before the TV operators learned the art of survival. We live, as George Steiner, acute observer of contemporary fads and foibles, put it – in a “casino culture”, where time is sliced into separate games and one game has no bearing on another. In such culture, all offers (not just the televised offers) are calculated “for a maximal impact and instant obsolescence”. In such culture, time is the most precious of commodities. Whatever takes more time than the casino-trained viewers’ attention may endure, is doomed. And the permanent shortage of time, that bane of all media vying for attention, privileges banal ideas – sound-bites that appeal to the ubiquitous yet un-reflected upon commonsense and to popular uncritical beliefs. And it casts into disadvantage all critical, unorthodox thoughts that always demand time, and ever more time, to ponder and reflect. In the war of ratings, human critical faculty is the first casualty. The odds against understanding are overwhelming. All too often speeding up the flow and expanding the volume of information portends ill for the chances of understanding. In this, the media – the way they are positioned in contemporary social and economic settings – can be seen as accessories to misdeed. True, their great merit is to present (even if by default rather than design) the ethical challenge which may, in principle, lead to the moral awakening. But in their present practice they did little (and not as much as in principle they could) to prompt such awakening. Understanding, poorly served by the media, is a preliminary condition of lifting the bystanders to the level of a moral actor. One should beware however from laying the blame solely at the media’s door. Conceivably, there is more that TV can do to assist understanding; it does not do nearly enough, and more often than not it does the opposite to what could and should be done. But there are limits to what media can do. Understanding is indeed the preliminary condition of moral action – but not the only one; a necessary, but not sufficient condition. There are other conditions as well, for whose absence media could not be blamed since they have little control over their shape and dynamics. Crucial among those other conditions of moral action on a societal (presently planetary) scale is an effective agency able to make the word flesh – to reforge moral intuitions and ethically inspired designs into effective resistance against evil and successful struggle against human deprivation and misery. Since the beginning of the modern era the role of such agency was played, though with mixed success, by the institutions of the nation-state. The present-day

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globalization manifests itself however in the divorce between power (ability to do things) and politics (going about doing them), once locked in a “till death do us part” wedlock inside those institutions – the democratic institutions of territorial states. Life conditions of contemporary men and women depend now on powers roaming the planetary, extraterritorial expanses free from all effective political control and effective ethical supervision – while all political instruments developed through the modern era and receptive to ethical principles remain, as before, territory-bound; their jurisdiction and sovereignty remain local. Power and politics no longer overlap – and the traditional question “what is to be done?” is increasingly elbowed out by another: “if we knew what needs to be done, who would do it?” The acting capacity of extant agencies is not up to the task. There is a yawning gap stretching between planetary spaces of free power flow and the fenced-off places administered by nation-states and their subsidiaries; a gap that the states, whether singly, severally or collectively, cannot bridge. The alternative – non-governmental – agencies, which reject the misleading and incapacitating policies of “thinking globally, acting locally” and instead aim at actions as planetary as the global powers that need to be bridled, tamed and subjected to a democratic control, are yet to learn, through a long series of trials and errors, how to act effectively – in view of the solidary resistance of global powers jealous of their spoils and local political agencies jealous of their administrative entitlements. Media can do quite a lot (even if doing it won’t come to them easily) to help us to understand this state of affairs. But the world wouldn’t change simply because we understand its working better. Understanding does not suffice to remake the world more amenable to humanity, to fight back oppression, deprivation and humiliation and secure the triumph of ethical demand over selfish preoccupation with local, tribal or other sectional interests. The other gap, that between understanding and effective action, needs yet to be crossed, and this won’t occur just thanks to the rising volume or even wider content of communication. And by no stretch of imagination this can be done by the media on its own. Divorce between power and politics portends “privatization” of morality – and in its effect the disempowerment, the incapacitation of human resistance against evil. This situation spells out trouble to the moral self. Mind may be clearer, the eyes sharper – but the hands are too short to reach where the hearts want them to. We face the prospect of a planet inhospitable to morality. But there is hope as well. On a crowded planet, where all of us depend on each other, where we all, so to speak, mutually assure vulnerability of each of us, where we are all in the same boat and must sail together unless the boat flounders and we sink together – for the first time in human history the instinct of survival and the ethical commands point in the same direction and advise the same conduct. This is an unprecedented chance to morality. Starting with the abominable Cain’s challenge to God “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (the question from which in Emmanuel Levinas’ view all immorality began), Cain’s demand of an explanation why should he feel and care for another human (What is there for me? What has he done to deserve my care? What would I profit from caring?) ethical philosophers went out of their way to demonstrate that self-interest and morality do agree –


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or at least could coincide if you thought hard and tried harder yet. None of the solutions they proposed proved to be however truly satisfactory. None escaped criticism, none was uncontested. In a human species sliced into tribes each trying and hoping to eke out their existence and make it blissful on their own, care for others meant more often than not compromising once own well-being. Moral duty called for self-sacrifice which self-interest emphatically, and stoutly, rejected. Where philosophers failed, history has finally succeeded. Once you find yourself with the rest of humanity in the same (planetary) boat, the choice is between talking with, and caring for, each other – or going jointly to the bottom. Immorality may promise short-term gains, but even that promise is misleading and if believed would in all likelihood spell trouble. In the long run (and the “long” is in our high-tech era getting abominably short), it can be only suicidal. One may fear for the human species that never before faced a similarly awesome challenge. But we may also hope that never before our shared humanity stood a better chance. The choice is ours – and media can go a long way towards inspiring us to choose the right one.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1994. Essays in Understanding, 132. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Temporality and the Culture of Modernity Espen Hammer

It is often claimed that the emergence of a post-modern or post-historical culture carries ramifications for how contemporary agents conceive time. While as Fredric Jameson and others have argued, the culture of modernity was temporally structured around the emergence of a commodified, linear and homogeneous time, the culture of post-modernity is geared towards the present. Post-modern culture has achieved something that lay dormant as an expectation in modern culture but was never fully actualised: namely, the creation of a more or less complete break with the continuities and expectations of tradition. Post-modern culture thus sparks off a crisis of historicity that itself seems to be registered in ideas like the end of art, the end of philosophy, the end of politics, and so on. It also, however, involves a rejection of any narrative of progress around which the pursuit of transcendent goals can be organised and thus – in stark opposition to modern culture – a loss of any determinate sense of futurity together with an almost complete disappearance, it would seem, of the utopian horizon that remained a hallmark of all the great modernisms since the French revolution. In this paper I will first offer an account of how the classical linear temporality of progressive modernity can be understood. I will then provide a critical look at two philosophical responses to it – one Kantian, the other Aristotelian. In the final part of the paper, I will go on to discuss Jameson’s conception of a specifically post-modern form of temporality and try to suggest ways to point beyond it. My central claim is that post-modern culture desperately needs to be more successful in incorporating spaces for the exercise of ethical and political responsibility. The only way it can do so, I will argue, is to retrieve elements from a modernist account of experience and temporality.

Modern Time Since the generalities which we inevitably must invoke are rather abstract and schematic, we should not hope to obtain an altogether satisfactory answer to the E. Hammer (B) Department of Philosophy, Oslo University, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] G. Ognjenovic (ed.), Responsibility in Context, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3037-5_8, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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question of how modern agents experience time. What can be said, however, while not precise in the sense required by a physicist or even a historian is, I believe, neither empty nor meaningless. There are various connections between modernity and time-consciousness that are neither contingent nor trivial but highly expressive and indicative of what being a modern agent involves. In exploring some of them, I will outline something of a phenomenology of modern time-consciousness – a set of distinct conditions that form the structure or essence of time-consciousness in modernity. My talk of “structure” or “essence” should not be taken literally. We are after all referring to an historical phenomenon, and to a configuration of conceptual relations that, while authoritative, are not without an unruly history and hence subject to change. My argument is that, despite their historical nature, these relations can be understood as making up a structure or an essence. As such I loosely rely on Michel Foucault’s notion of an “historical a priori” – a set of meanings beyond which members of a specific culture cannot go without becoming unintelligible. I start by taking a clue from the German historian of ideas, Reinhart Koselleck, who in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time and draws on his semantic studies of linguistic behaviour to argue that the onset of modernity, or what he refers to as Neuzeit, brought about a dramatic shift in lived time.1 Koselleck’s method consists in studying how historical events are semantically articulated. He is not arguing that history and language coincide in the sense that events or experiences are exhausted by their linguistic articulation. Nor is he holding that the linguistic articulation is necessarily “correct” in a realist sense. His fundamental claim, rather, is that the study of historical concepts is bound to reveal important facts about the interconnection between history and language, historical events and self-interpretation. These facts point two ways: that historical events would be impossible without articulation, and that language, or rather our concepts, reflect historical experience. In studying the eighteenth century emergence of the concept of Neuzeit, or modernity, Koselleck finds that it embodies several important characteristics. One is that the use of this concept, particularly in historiography, makes reference to a conception of history not as static and repetitive, as did the pre-modern historians who saw all histories as structurally similar, but as fundamentally allowing for contingency and radical change. From having thought of history as a particular ordering of events that only subsequently occur in time, modern historians see history as unfolding both in and through time. Suddenly the grasp of the present and its capacity to be portrayed both as a beginning and an end became more important to historians than the mapping of the present onto a distant past which could serve as its framework of interpretation. In particular, as the notion of progress started to make its impact with Kant and other thinkers of the Enlightenment, history could be seen as the

1 Koselleck (1985). Among philosophers I am not alone in taking Koselleck as a guide to the timeconsciousness of modernity. While drawing a different conclusion, Jürgen Habermas does the same in the opening chapter of Habermas (1993).

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progressive unfolding of events leading into the present, which now, in its orientation towards the new and the unprecedented, could be set apart from the rest of history and be designated as Neuzeit. The concept of progress is equivocal. It may, as in Condorcet, Marx and Comte, be understood as progress from a particular state towards a fixed, utopian state in the future. On such an account, every moment belongs to, and obtains its meaning from, a continuous history directed towards an end. The present is an accumulation of the past and the future, the necessary result of all the accumulated moments in history. However, more radical and modern conceptions of progress tend to shun teleological considerations and simply see history as permanently advancing without a final destination.2 On this latter account, which only makes sense insofar as a principle of progress (technological innovation, man’s moral perfection, and so on) has been identified, the individual moment cannot be given meaning in terms of its twin relationship to the past and the future. There can be no historical masternarrative. Instead, history becomes an endless interlacing of the repetitive and the irreversible – a permanent renewal. However, for such a conception of history to be acceptable and authoritative, a modern, secularised time-consciousness has to emerge. The Copernican revolution, the developing new technology, the discovery of the globe, the creation of new and more mobile instruments of political power, as well as the emergence of industry and greater concentration of investment capital – all of these were factors that, in the period between the fifteenth and eighteenth century from the Renaissance and the Reformation to the French Revolution, opened a gap between what Koselleck calls “the space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation.” Whereas the peasant-artisan world of the medieval period, existing largely within the cycle of nature, “subsisted entirely on the experiences of their predecessors,”3 the early modern agents found themselves forced to bracket traditional knowledge in favour of directing themselves towards an active transformation of the world. From letting the horizon of expectation be a function of the space of experience, it increasingly became the case that “the limits of the space of experience and of the horizon of expectations diverged.”4 “The burden of our historical thesis is that in Neuzeit the difference between experience and expectation is increasingly enlarged; more precisely, that Neuzeit is conceived as neue Zeit from the point at which eager expectations diverge and remove themselves from all previous experience.”5 A new form of futurity, marked by a sense of openness, uncertainty and contingency, opened up. Slowly but persistently, modern agents had to get used 2 When

I ascribe such “teleological considerations” to Condorcet, Marx and Comte, I do not mean to claim that they follow Aristotle in believing that everything, including a complex phenomenon such as human history, develops according to an objectively existing telos. I only take such considerations to entail the postulate of a beginning and an end to history, as well as the principle of perfectibility as history’s explanans. 3 Koselleck (1985, 277). 4 Ibid., 280. 5 Ibid., 284.

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to a much greater speed in both social, political and technological transformation. Not only did Neuzeit introduce constant renewal but it drastically accelerated the tempo of change. These agents witnessed this acceleration as a feature of the process of modernisation, and these agents affirmed it in various ways (and with various degrees of allegiance and success) by shaping their attitudes and mindsets so as to be in conformity with the requirements imposed on them by this process. The key to Koselleck’s account of modernity is his thinking about the development of a new conception of contingency. In this regard, he is wholly in accord with the classical understandings of modernity espoused by Schiller and Max Weber, where modernity means “the disenchantment of the world,” the loss of intersubjectively validated and instituted forms of value and interpretation, authorised in acts of ancestoral-worship and religious practices. When the social order comes to reject past authorities and embrace the pursuit of a projected future, a completely new form of contingency has to be accepted. No longer a natural continuation of past cycles and taken-for-granted practices, the social order becomes permeated with a sense of risk, the kind of strategic calculation of uncertainty that is being undertaken in capitalist investment and technological innovation.6 Of course, every social order is faced with its share of contingency, and Koselleck’s claim is not that pre-modern societies did not experience suffering and want, fears and catastrophes. What is new in modernity is not that empirical life-chances have worsened and are more prone to be diminished as the result of unforeseen events happening (they clearly are not); rather, it is that the representation of them has been transformed.7 In markets, democracies and scientific-technological environments, we must (and indeed can) take ourselves as being engaged in conduct oriented towards prediction, where the effort to calculate, control and dominate goes hand in hand with an awareness of risk. Koselleck puts great emphasis on the idea of the present as involving transition. As the space of experience and the horizon of expectation get disentangled from one another, the experience of the everyday is increasingly marked by expectations of change and a heightened acceptance of transience. Indeed, as socio-political and scientific-technical renewal become institutionalised in forms of democratic representation and organised research, a sense of acceleration starts to make itself felt: the temporal rhythms and intervals that in pre-modern society were embedded in unchanging natural cycles can now be patterned on the basis of imperatives formed with reference to values set by the rational agent herself.8 Change thus gradually becomes more rapid, and the present as the thing that distinguishes the past from

6 Beck (1986). Central to Beck’s account is his claim that modernisation brings about a transformation from collective to individual risk. 7 For more on this particular point, see Clark (1999). 8 For an important study of the notion of social acceleration, see Rosa (2005). See also Virilio (1980).


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the future becomes progressively condensed.9 Around 1750, with the invention of the steam engine, the spinning-machine, and the telegraph, a new compression of both space and time, a new capacity and desire for speed, started to transform the structures of everyday life.10 As “everything which is solid melts into air,” however, it becomes increasingly difficult to entertain the idea of a non-temporal, immutable contrast to the finite, temporal world of objects. While obviously not the only cause of secularisation (the rise of scientific rationalism being at least just as important), the intensified sense of transience – that nothing that can be an object of human experience is lasting, that everything in the empirical world is radically finite – is likely to have played a major role in the slow, yet persistent disintegration of organised religious activity in Europe from the time of the Enlightenment. According to Sylviane Agacinski, “modern consciousness is one of passage and the passing. From now on we think that everything arrives and passes. Nothing permanent gives things any kind of anchor against time.”11 The kind of semantic analysis we find in Koselleck is highly useful for historical research. It demarcates a separate object of study, provides a method for exploring it, and throws genuine light on the development of historical time. Koselleck is, however, reticent about the underlying forces of change. To be sure, he mentions as explanatory factors political, intellectual, economic, and technological transformations. What he does not do, however, is to identify the fundamental logic which can be said to lead to the uprooting of traditional time-consciousness. As a student of semantic alteration, he tends to delimit his research methodologically from any kind of serious engagement with the impacting causes. Thus like much of the hermeneutic tradition from which it springs, his work might be said to suffer from a certain idealistic prejudice. I would like to argue that in order to understand the logic behind the new time-consciousness, we need to focus on two crucial dimensions of the emerging modernity: on the one hand, the rise of capitalism with its free markets and general commodification, and on the other, the distillation of an autonomous technological or instrumental rationality. At least analytically, the two are distinct phenomena or

9 In

the Preface to the Hegel (1977). Hegel writes that “it is not difficult to see that ours is a birthtime and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation. (. . .) The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.” 10 Harvey (1990). See also Koselleck (2000), “Es gehört (. . .) zu den Befunden unserer Epochenschwelle, dass schon vor Erfindung der Dampfmaschine, der mechanischen Webstühle, des Telegrafen, die den Verkehr, den textilen Leitsektor der Produktion und die Nachrichtenübermittlung beschleunigten, eine zunehmende Schnelligkeit des ganzen Lebens registriert wird.” 11 Agacinski (2003).

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processes and can be theorised separately. It is possible, as under the former communist systems in Russia, China and Eastern Europe, to have a highly technological society without capitalism. What is not possible, however, is capitalism without a considerable or even pervasive orientation towards instrumental rationality. We need to understand what this instrumental rationality amounts to and how it can be said to generate its own form of temporality. The classical statement of the normative orientation underlying technology (and, as we will see shortly, of capitalism as well) is that of Max Weber, who spoke of a purposive-rational (zweckrational) form of rationality.12 Purposive-rational action for Weber is action oriented towards the realisation of a given end. The action is rational insofar as the agent manages to identify and make use of the most effective means available to secure it. Weber emphasises that from the purposive-rational standpoint, no end can be rationally adopted. It is only when a given end is viewed as a means to secure a further end, or when an end has been adopted on the basis of considerations of absolute value, that it can have this status. He also claims that in purposively rational conduct, the agent will be weighing the alternative effectiveness of each possible means of attaining the end. In technology, purposive-rational action is action according to a rational plan or procedure which is rational to the extent that it maximises the desired result all cases being equal. Weber contrasts this with other forms of rationality that are less prevalent in modernity. Value-rational (wertrational) action is action directed towards an overriding ideal, recognising no other considerations. The ideal may be of duty, honour, or devotion to a cause or a faith. The essential point is that the outcome of the action is subordinated to the interest in affirming the ideal through one’s action. While value-rational action is rational insofar as it involves the setting of coherent objectives to which the individual channels his activity, “affective” action is action which is undertaken under the influence of some sort of emotive state. Like value-rational action, the basis for an adequate assessment of the rationality of the action is not located in the instrumentality of means to ends, but in whether or not the act is carried out for its own sake. The act we might say is autotelic. Its purpose or telos is inherent to the action itself. Weber finally identifies a fourth type of action-orientation, namely “traditional” action, which is carried out under the influence of custom and habit. You here act in a specific manner because it is socially expected of you in a given situation, and the outcome of the action is assessed in terms of a shared and authoritative framework of value that objectively provides meaning to the action. Although value-rational and traditional action may seem similar in that both presupposes the existence of an established framework of symbolic value, Weber stipulates that the meaning of traditional action does not require the coherent, defined and shared understanding of value that we find in value-rational 12 Weber

(1966). On p. 117 Weber writes that “Action is rationally oriented to a system of discrete individual ends (zweckrational) when the end, the means, and the secondary results are all rationally taken into account and weighed. This involves rational consideration of alternative means to the end, of the relations of the end to other prospective results of employment of any given means, and finally of the relative importance of different possible ends.”


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action. Traditional action is unreflective; value-rational action, on the contrary, is highly reflective, and is undertaken out of explicit allegiance to the ideal or value in question. The point of rehearsing this familiar typology is not to get lost in exegesis. I am not interested in following Weber’s own use of it, except to note that his own account of how the so-called spirit of modern capitalism grew out of an initial commitment to ascetic Protestant ideals of work as a duty, the exercise of which proves the worthiness of the individual to obtain salvation, and can be understood as pointing to a transformation from value-rational to purposive-rational action. Early modern capitalism for Weber, with its rational planning, its perpetual postponement of gratification, and its disengagement of the individual from the wider concerns and symbolic authority of the community, involves the institutionalisation and endorsement of purposive-rational action as the only available form of rational action. Indeed, as the rationalistic work-ethic of capitalism spreads to other spheres besides that of the economic (e.g. to politics, law, science and art), it brings about a more or less complete loss of the religious ideals which spurned it, leaving the individual faced with the “iron cage” of instrumental rationality and, when it comes to adopting ends, the exclusive option of a mere arbitrary and subjective decision. In the large economic and bureaucratic organisations of more developed forms of capitalism, the purposive-rational action becomes increasingly a matter of collective planning and large-scale management with the individual being incapable of engaging in value-rational or traditional action. In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács argues that, while highly suggestive, Weber’s account of purposive-rational action as the key to theorising modernity needs to be supplemented by a theory which describes the operations of capitalism as a distinct historical and social formation. Drawing on Marx’ theory of commodification, Lukács claims that capitalism transforms both the subject and the object in accordance with the logic of the commodity. Unlike Weber, who idealistically explains the domination of purposive-rational action in modernity as the result of the rise and influence of religious ideals, Lukács insists that acting rationally under capitalism necessarily is to act in accordance with the principles of purposive-rational action. In particular, as capitalism with its great emphasis on monetary value or exchange value and hence quantification, both makes possible and requires an orientation towards calculation, it is inevitable that agents will have to take up a purposive-rational stance towards their environment. For Lukács, the theory of purposive-rational action must be amalgamated with Marx’s view that under capitalism both subjects and objects have to relate to determinants over which the labourer has no control – the inexorable laws of the marketplace as they structure human relations. When human beings relate via the market they can only be fully rational insofar as they accept the need to act purposive-rationally. It is impossible to act rationally in a market without calculating costs (means) and the likelihood of their generating specific benefits (ends). Acting traditionally or in a value-rational mode, while perhaps not impossible, is to counteract the fundamental laws of capitalist exchange. Rational behaviour on a market is geared towards maximising efficiency (in order to lower the costs), downplaying the use value (or intrinsic value)

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of an item in favour of its susceptibility to be exchanged, rejecting traditional values and ideals as relevant constraints on action, and seeking ends that satisfy wants and desires while being both logically and pragmatically separated from the action itself. According to Lukács, while the attitude of calculation draws labour out of “the organic-irrational,” that is, the natural cycles of pre-modern production, it requires an increasingly specialised labour-force geared towards dealing exclusively with only fragments of the complete process of production and exchange. On Lukács’ account, these mutually dependent aspects of social rationalisation lead together to a transformation of lived time. In particular, as labour becomes commodified and thus made measurable in units of time, the pre-modern embeddedness of time in cycles of natural reproduction and labour gives way to a conception of lived, everyday time as inherently quantifiable – that is, as essentially an indefinite repetition of commensurable unities. According to Lukács, time is thereby understood in analogy with, or even becomes a function of, space. For just as physical space is abstract and measurable so now is time, and duration becomes a matter of mere quantifiable length, with length (the length of time) being understood in terms of standardised temporal succession: “Thus time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality): in short, it becomes space.”13 Lukács’ analysis is by no means without problems of its own. It rests heavily and to some extent dogmatically on Marx’ highly controversial theory of value, and its historic-philosophical categories, when not offering social analysis by means of its peculiar blend of Marx and Weber, are largely directed towards employing an outmoded Hegelian scheme of objective and necessary development. Moreover, since its object is organised industrial capitalism, it is not clear how far it can be generalised to serve as anything even remotely qualifying as a “theory of modernity.” In the co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment, for example, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno do seem to argue that it can be generalised far beyond Lukács original estimates. Adorno in particular draws on it in order to elucidate crucial features of late modern society as well, including its system of cultural reproduction. My purpose, however, in bringing the early Lukács to the table is not to defend this particular theory as such, but to draw on his observations to formulate two theses. First (and this should be fairly non-controversial), purposive-rational action cannot be limited to the technological domain but should be seen as the predominant form of rational action in modern society. It is predominant not only in the sense that it conforms to the requirements of technological development and progress, but because a capitalist system presupposes and could not function without the intensive exercise of such rationality. In a highly commercialised society, it is likely, as both Lukács and later Horkheimer and Adorno argue, that the purposive-rational attitude

13 Lukács

(1971). For a different approach to the notion of time becoming, like space, a container, indifferent to what fills it, see Taylor (2007).


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associated with commodification will come to dominate most, or probably all, major parts of society, including even the most intimate lives of individuals. Second, the dominance of purposive-rational action means that – and this is the claim I need to flesh out in much more detail – there must be something inherently new and distinctive about the modern conception of time.

The Temporality of Purposive-Rational Action I would now like to bring what has been said so far into a more systematic framework. My hope, then, is to provide a theoretical reference-point for assessing some of the possible intellectual responses to the modern disenchantment of time. What is the temporality of purposive-rational action? In order to relate to this question, it is required that we look closer at its actual structure. A purposiverational action is undertaken in order to satisfy a particular desire, and its purported end is its satisfaction. The agent is free to decide which desires he will want to satisfy, and in deciding how he will order his priorities. The end is a product of the will, and as such arbitrary. Its adoption may be constrained by further rational considerations (moral, political, epistemic, and so on), but on the basis of the conceptual resources available to the purposive-rational agent, the only relevant constraint is the end’s liability to function as a means to procuring further ends. Obviously, this means that ends are either set dogmatically, on the basis of the desires one happens to have or find oneself willing to entertain, or they are grounded in further acts of calculation, in a conception of them as being means to achieve further ends, which immediately leads to an infinite regress: our end becomes the next means, but only because there is a new end which demands a new justification, ad infinitum. It is with this kind of action always possible to specify and determine before the action is undertaken what the ends are supposed to be; the ends are separated from the means and can be reached via the implementation of an indefinite number of means. When the agent chooses between possible means, he will, if rational, search for the one which most effectively will bring about the desired ends. The rationality of purposive-rational action consists solely in the ability to maximise effectiveness – that is, in identifying and implementing the most effective means to achieve one’s given ends. Outside the consideration about effectiveness, which is performed by applying technical criteria to a problem or a situation, there can be no other rational estimates of worth. The decision to employ a particular set of means may have all sorts of moral and political consequences, yet these are of no intrinsic relevance to the purposively-rational agent. All that he can care about is how well the application of the means will maximise the achievement of his goals. If he has adopted a particular goal, the commitment to a particular set of means follows from a consideration of what that goal is and what its actualisation, if brought about most effectively, requires. The ends are what is to be realised – it is the future the agent wants to put at his disposal; the means are justified by being shown to be the best way to achieve the realisation of the ends.

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Purposive-rational action, when embedded in a general orientation towards utility and technical control, such as the one I have suggested we find in the modern world, involves looking at the world as composed of possible means. As Heidegger puts it, the world, rather than being composed of objects that are valuable on their own terms, is reduced to a set of resources – the Bestand (standing reserve) of which he speaks in the “Essay Concerning Technology” and elsewhere. The traditional values that once were accepted as constraints on action are here set aside in favour of the application of impersonal procedurality and utility-maximising. The ends are thus shorn from traditional contexts of meaning and made to be a function of individual will. How is time experienced on this picture? For one thing, since it is the moment of satisfaction (the realisation of the ends) which matters, the time which separates the agent from it must be a dead or meaningless time – a time to be overcome.14 The purposive-rational agent is seeking to conquer time. He knows that the total amount of time at his disposal is limited (and that life is radically finite); thus purposiverational action can serve as a way to deny, or at least control, this finitude. Acting instrumentally for the sake of obtaining a future end is, on the one hand, to accept uncertainty and contingency, and, on the other, to try to bring it under one’s control. Speed here is crucial. If the means are employed effectively, they will be speedy. They will help the agent “to save time” – to eliminate as much as possible of the dead and meaningless time between the action and the realisation of the ends. Of course, the clock is the pre-eminent instrument for keeping track of the time which is sought overcome. The clock tells the agent how much time has passed from the action’s inception, and how much is left according to one’s stipulation until the realisation of one’s end. If the purposive-rational agent is aware of his finitude and struggles with it, then the clock, with its incessant ticking away of seconds and minutes, heightens it and expresses it. Clock-time is essentially linear and irreversible. Any given moment of time is gone forever, being unremittingly replaced by new moments that themselves disappear. The purposive-rational agent is future-oriented. While his technical-pragmatic knowledge (his ability to predict an outcome on the basis of insight into the lawlike relations holding between causes and effects), which is all he can recognise as binding and relevant when it comes to assessing which action to take, is necessarily derived from past experience and accumulated information, his project is to bring into existence a specific state of affairs. In doing so, he will neither ask what his chosen means may have meant to people in the past, nor whether the ends he sets conform to traditional value-patterns and self-interpretations. The future he is facing is open (not constrained by past horizons of experience) and ready to be given a specific direction by the ends sought actualised. This of course is historically understood in terms of the notion of progress – the ideal of human life itself as a process of ever-lasting change and improvement. For the proponent of progress, the world is never settled; rather, there is a fundamental restlessness involved in it, a restlessness

14 For

an excellent account of what this implies, see Simpson (1995).


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which can never be neutralised but will, since the principle of utility does not permit the acknowledgment of ends that are sought for their own sake (utility is always for something else), incessantly drive one from one action to the next. The time until the realisation of the ends, however, is presented as calculated beforehand: not only is it linear and irreversible, but it is, according to the planning, a time which is parcelled out and quantitatively reckoned. The pursuit of efficiency means that time is treated as composed of quantitative units (seconds, minutes, hours, and so on), each of which is assigned a specific value, making time itself, as Marx claimed when he defined value in terms of the time it takes the worker to produce it, a commodity. A commodified time, such as we see for instance in Taylorist attempts to minutely control and standardise the worker’s activities, is of course regulated by the clock, which itself radically increases the possibility of coordination and social control. From the standpoint of commodified clock-time, all events are commensurable and located within the same set of coordinates. Purposive-rational action is not just the kind of action we find in technology and science but, if we are to believe Koselleck, Weber, Lukács, Heidegger and Adorno, the dominant form of action in a modern society organised around the imperatives of bureaucratic management and economic calculation. It is obviously not the only type of action that modern agents dispose of. The claim is just that it is the dominant one, that it is the action corresponding to a highly technical, bureaucratised and economically rationalised everyday life, and that other forms of action are inevitably being marginalised as the process of modernisation moves forward. If we take into account the understanding of lived time which was sketched earlier, the implication of this is that rationalised modernity may be said to confer upon agents a particular practice of temporal schematisation. We may, if inclined to take a critical view of it, refer to this practice as distorted. It is for one thing distorted because the inferential relations, referring to both past and future, which make temporal schematisation and synthesis possible (and hence intentional action intelligible), can only be realised in a stultified and incomplete form. As actionorientation, for example, becomes increasingly geared towards purposive-rational intervention in an ethically neutralised environment, the ability to base its definition and intelligibility on narratives and inferential relations that refer to the past, which is crucial in order to provide sense to particular actions, is radically weakened if not lost altogether. Actions lose their determinacy in abstraction from traditional contexts able to provide meaning, coherence and motivation. Thus, as Weber points out, the ends, rather than being a function of pre-given and authoritative values with reference to which the agent negotiates his position and defines his stance, become arbitrary, a means to satisfy desire or to achieve further ends, but unintelligible or arbitrary from the point of view of traditional, ethical value-commitments. However, for another thing, there is distortion in two interconnected senses. First, as we have seen, the time-consciousness of rationalised modernity exacerbates a sense of transience. If once a transient world was juxtaposed to a world of immutable existence, thus generating worry about the finitude of this life and this moment as opposed to eternity, the modern, secularised world universalises time to become the experiential form of everything that can exist, and it then transforms time into a

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linear, irreversible succession of moments each of which appear as radically transitory. Modern disenchanted time, the time of purposive-rational action, does not have any intrinsic value. Rather, through the implementation of apparatuses of acceleration and speed, we seek to pass through chunks of time in order to arrive at our goals. However, secondly, such a time-consciousness will also have to be faced with what is essentially a loss of meaning. The moments in time to which the purposiverational agent is relating are empty. Far from being related to structures of collective historical understanding, they become viewed as fragmented, isolated now-points linked together not via a meaningful narrative, but in infinite linear progression toward an unknown future.

Modern and Anti-modern Responses to Alienated Time The philosophical responses to this predicament, starting with Kant and Hegel, have been both varied and vigorous. One such position is espoused by philosophers committed to some form of neo-Kantianism. The strategy on their part is to accept modernity’s consciousness of time as an unavoidable fact while rejecting a purely instrumentalist interpretation of it. In a lecture entitled “Modernity’s Consciousness of Time,” published as the opening chapter of his much debated 1987 study The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Jürgen Habermas refers to the well-known claim in Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life” that the erosion of social convention which, among other things marks the onset of modernity, makes possible a strange new perception of especially aesthetic objects as being both transient and immovable. Modernity is emblematised in the transitory presences of modern art and fashion. More pressing for Habermas’s own concerns, however, is an understanding of modernity (which he reads out of Blumenberg, Koselleck and the early Hegel) as being geared towards a continuous breaking with the past: “Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself. Modernity sees itself cast back upon itself without any possibility of escape.”15 For Habermas and other contemporary neo-Kantians, the alienated and alienating character of the time of modernity can be overcome insofar as we find ways to see ourselves as subjects – that is, as self-determining agents capable of acting on principles that are praiseworthy independently of mere instrumental considerations. What makes these principles praiseworthy is that they identify ends that have value for us, or matter for us, only because of the quality of the reasons involved in setting those ends. However, the master principle behind this conception is the value of one’s humanity, the capacity to set ends as such. For Habermas, in particular, the setting of ends is a matter of collective reflection – of rational endorsement as the result of a dialogically conducted testing of controversial validity-claims. In 15 Habermas

(1993, 7).


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participating in rational dialogue, one must not only take oneself to be a responsible subject, but all the other participants must be viewed as being equally able to respond reflectively to reason. The Kantian interprets the notion of progress in moral rather than instrumental terms. Progress is the process of reflectively moving from states of subjection to arbitrarily willed law to states of subjection to self-legislated law.16 It is to become the subject of one’s deeds, a subject which orients its thinking and judging fully, freely, and wholly according to the commands of reason. For such a subject, it seems as though there can be no radical alienation between itself and its rationally endorsed projects, on the one hand, and the time in which these projects are unfolding, on the other. The practice is mine regardless of its temporal structure. However, on reflection it should be fairly obvious that the purportedly autonomous Kantian subject is just as vulnerable to the problems of transience and existential meaning as the purely purposive-rational agent turned out to be. As Habermas emphasises, a rational discourse can only proceed insofar as its participating agents accept that beliefs must be de-contextualised and their identities disconnected from the substantive contents of a particular form of life, including its vision of the good life.17 Thus, the conception of moral Enlightenment progress which informs this picture of rational autonomy must itself be geared towards a continuous and progressive disentangling from traditional values and their unquestioned claim to validity. As a consequence, the exercise of rational autonomy becomes radically forward-looking. Rather than drawing on the ethical substantiality of the tradition, the “force of the better argument” commands agents to burst every provinciality asunder and only consider as possibly valid those principles and ends that accord with reason’s demand for universal acceptance among all rational agents.18 Thus, Habermas understands cultural modernity in light of the idea of continuous renewal – that is, as a perpetual period of transition, whether instrumentally or morally.19 As such, it poses no challenge whatsoever to the homogeneous, linear, future-oriented and essentially technological time of the clock. Another and more promising response to the crisis brought about by this modern form of temporality is to argue that rather than focusing on the formal constraints 16 Kant

himself has many ways of capturing this idea. In his Smith (1978): Peter Smith, he writes that “Man must give [the] autocracy of the soul its full scope; otherwise he becomes a mere plaything of other forces and impressions which will withstand his will, and a prey to the caprice of accident and circumstance.” 17 See Habermas (1991). 18 In his Bernstein (1995): Routledge Jay Bernstein takes this to mean that there ultimately is no difference between instrumental and communicative reason. Both are formal and procedural; hence communicative reason is “a component of the very disintegrative process it means to remedy.” Although I do suggest that there are parallels in terms of how both regimes of reasoning presuppose similar types of time-consciousness, I would not go this far. Communicative reason is capable of setting rational ends. That makes it radically different from instrumental reason, which limits reasoning to items that are good only as means, thereby occluding the possible goodness of the actual ends of human action. 19 Habermas (1993, 7–8).

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on rational action (the requirements of autonomy), we should turn to the precise features of a practice itself. Thus in Technology, Time and the Conversations of Modernity, Lorenzo C. Simpson sets up a contrast between what he calls the time of ends and the time of meaning (or, alternatively, the time of praxis). The time of ends is essentially the time I have already been discussing: the reified time of technology and purposive-rational action which becomes transformed into a commodity to be quantitatively calculated. Such a time is radically future-oriented; the future is defined as the time when the provisional and, from the point of view of traditional value-orientation, arbitrary ends set by the agent are meant to be achieved, and hence the present is a time of empty waiting. The time of meaning, however, is a time of meaningful praxis. Drawing in part on Aristotle’s account of action, Simpson sees meaningful praxis as essentially identity-defining: engaging in such praxis, the agent, rather than seeking to obtain some external end, acknowledges the action to be its own end, an end through which the agent confirms himself as someone in particular. Unlike purposive-rational action, meaningful praxis does not take place in a historical and cultural void. On the contrary, it represents an application or repetition of the past understood as an historical legacy composed of socio-cultural norms and value-laden patterns of interpretation. For such an agent, temporality involves both preservation of the tradition and invention insofar as, in drawing on the horizons of the past, he will not only repeat but creatively continue what has gone before. According to Simpson, we may think of such a praxial temporality as effecting a fusion of the horizons of the past and the future. It presupposes “an applicative recollection oriented toward future action,” thus being “at once the time of preservation and invention.”20 Where the significance of purposive-rational action lies solely in its consequences, the significance of praxis lies in its doing. It is through the doing, the performance of the action, that the agent affirms her essential connection to a meaning-providing shape or form of life: “Meaning has its natural locus in the phenomenon of world or form of life, and when meaning is made explicit, it emerges from the cognizance of a world.”21 Yet the doing also discloses the subjectivity of the agent, her character, to others, thus creating the possibility of entering into concrete relationships of certain kinds to others who share the cultural background of the agent. Since the action is its own end, the agent engaged in praxis will not experience the present as transitory or empty. On the contrary, as the meaningful meeting-point of sedimented layers of past expectations and mediated readiness for innovation, the present promises both fulfilment and satisfaction. As an example, Simpson considers eating. If eating takes place within a purposive-rational framework, in a time of ends, “worldless” requirements such as fulfilling the nutritive function and being cheap, as well as being speedily consumed and digested, may take precedence over traditional requirements such as participating in a codified ritual of eating and enjoying the taste, smell, form, colour and texture of the food. The convenience of the

20 Simpson 21 Ibid.,

45.

(1995, 57).


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lonely drive-through or of microwaved food consumed at different times by the various members of a family becomes more highly regarded than the ritualised family meal with all the socially encoded bonds and symbolisations it involves, enacts and effects. However, if eating takes place within a framework geared towards praxis, then qua action it will be inserted into meaning-providing practices in the world in which it figures. The eating will then be its own meaning, a meaning which, while dependent on a tradition and the narratives that connect individuals with it, will always involve an element of change and innovation. The idea of “slow-eating,” which has gained some following in Europe, thus represents a rebellion against the hegemony of the time of ends: slow-eating is eating for its own sake, rather than for external ends that subordinate the eating to a logic of mere means while calling for speed and efficiency in the execution of it. Through slow-eating, agents achieve a harmonious synthesis of traditional belief and anticipation in the present. The present becomes what the Greeks called a kairos, the “right or opportune time,” interrupting the homogeneous flow of sequential time or chronos. Simpson’s attempt to link time and praxis is highly suggestive. On his account, Western civilization needs to regain its erstwhile relationship to symbolic authority embedded in meaningful practices. We need to rethink the shape and texture that we give to the time in and through which we live, thus accepting our finitude as beings who, rather than desperately trying to surpass it, accept time as the unfolding of tradition and our individual insertion in it. For Simpson, this ultimately means that we need to challenge technological rationality, and most likely also capitalism itself, insofar as they promote and effect the uprooting of action from concrete forms of life and their traditions. Indeed, the only consistently promising way out of the time of ends consists in some form of leave-taking with modernity as such. At this point, Simpson’s position starts to become deeply conservative. Invoking cultural resources against capitalism and technology, he seems to yearn for a temporal configuration that is pre-modern. There is a Luddite side to Simpson’s critique that sits uneasily with his interest in progressive politics. He has not done anything to demonstrate that his politics will remain responsive to modern concerns with justice and equality. That noted, it is also highly unclear how any such concerted leap out of modern conditions could even start to be imaginable.

Post-modern Temporality and Its Other In contemporary debate the claim is often made – and I think it deserves to be taken very seriously – that today such forms of critique of the temporal regime of modernity are anachronisms, and regardless of their argumentative and diagnostic merits, must at best be viewed as remnants of a social and cultural configuration that simply is bygone. In his 1996 study The Seeds of Time, Fredric Jameson makes the following claim.22 With the advent of the post-modern – which for Jameson involves the 22 Jameson

(1994).

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period from the mid 1960s to the present – a profound change has occurred in our socially endorsed conception of time. From having revolved, as I have already outlined, around the values of progress and instrumental reasoning, themselves being functions of modernity’s more fundamental drive towards dashing traditional life ways and transforming the world into a set of raw materials to be reconstructed rationally and in accordance with the imperatives of commerce and technology, socially endorsed time is now devoid of its erstwhile temporal ecstasies and becoming a kind of endlessly protracted present. According to Jameson, we need, on the one hand to recognise that post-modern societies have done away with every vestige left over from modernity of a relationship to the past. These are societies that have broken completely with the continuities and expectations of past times. The sense of the future, on the other hand, as implying a set of promises and projects to be realised has equally been eradicated. From having in classical modernity understood the future to be the rational realisation of present plans, formed and executed to match up with given values and preferences, agents in post-modern societies can only conceive of the future vaguely, and not as a time to be conquered and shaped but more often as a time of inevitable catastrophe. Jameson adduces a number of thoughts and arguments to back up this claim. One is an appeal to the paradox of there being an unparalleled rate of technical change and innovation while at the same time an unparalleled rate of standardisation. As the example of fashion demonstrates, much technological change is such that, rather than implementing genuine social and political change, it recycles old ideas, caters for mass-markets, and plays up to unquestioned assumptions. A lot of technology does not meet existing demands and needs but can only be generated through the creation, mainly through advertising, of new ones. These new demands, however, will inevitably be indexed to, and satisfied by, the production and distribution of the specific commodities that are designed for these demands. Hence the consumer is simply responding to the system of production and its demands for further sales and profits. The cycles of contemporary consumption do of course demonstrate a tremendous amount of apparent change: every year there are new car models, and so on. However, in the middle of all this consumption – all these new products – it becomes virtually impossible to present something as essentially new – that is, as something which does not simply fit in with the familiar pattern of commodification and advertisement but which reconfigures the fundamental parameters of human experience and self-interpretation. The very idea of being modern, Jameson argues, dissipates when modern technologies are everywhere, and when the life world is thoroughly technicalised. This observation finds theoretical support in Jameson’s (and Lyotard’s) claim that the grand frameworks of modern temporal organisation and legitimation – the metanarratives, as Lyotard calls them – have withered, leaving only a sprawling plurality of pragmatically functional, yet externally unauthorised, systems in their wake.23 While classical modernity appealed to various narratives of progress

23 For

Jean Francois Lyotard’s claim, see Lyotard (1984).


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and demystification, the post-modern condition involves absorption in the present and a complete loss of modernity’s utopian promises – of nature, objectivity, the unconscious, or unconstrained subjective experience and expression. The ubiquity of simulacra – commodified, depthless and mass-produced items for which there is no clear origin – means that, even if they were attempted, metanarratives of the classically modern sort would have nothing to refer to and thus be illusory. They would belie the fact that postmodernism is the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” and that, given the pervasive nature of this system, there can be no alternative. Jameson therefore thinks that with the crisis in historicity, and with the loss of a collectively binding ability to place oneself and one’s projects within a larger historical framework constituted by narratives that appeal to transcendent goals, post-modern culture tends to obtain its markers of identity and coordination in the spatial rather than the temporal realm. “The crisis in historicity now dictates a return, in a new way, to the question of temporal organization in general in the post-modern force field, and indeed, to the problem of the form that time, temporality, and the syntagmatic will be able to take in a culture increasingly dominated by space and spatial logic. If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but “heaps of fragments” and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory.”24 For Jameson, the dominance of space over time implies both an eclipse of inner time and the pervasiveness of technologies that offer speed to the point of eliminating waiting completely. Lived time stands no longer in opposition to clock time; instead the two have merged into one. While clock time was always spatially inflected in that it is a time subject to the measurement of the relation between two objectively existing systems or processes (most obviously the sun’s movement vs. the earth’s), time has now become identified with space. In our eternal present of ultra-fast imaginary and real movement, it has no separate meaning. However, as the speed – such as with the availability of air travel and broadband connectivity – increases, space becomes compressed. According to Paul Virilio, the most far-reaching consequence of this compression is a severely distorted ability to experience the world as an extended, complex whole.25 When continents are crossed no longer on foot or on horseback, in trips lasting weeks and months, but in a few hours plane-ride, the experience of their very materiality, the forests and the lakes and the cultures and the weather, is replaced by exposure to bits of abstract information: the map on the in-view screen indicating the aircraft’s progress, or the captain’s detached announcements. As the latter are based on procedures that are set in advance, they essentially function so as to repeat the events which the procedures regulate. For Jameson, the substitution of singularity for procedurality creates a time

24 Jameson 25 Virilio

(1991). (1980). See also Rosa (2005).

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of repetition: post-modern time is a time of endless repetition in which nothing can essentially change. In line with the increasing “virtualisation” of reality, which radically makes possible an increase in the speed of human projects and exchanges, experience becomes more fragmented. Thus, as people strive to achieve ever greater speed in their everyday lives (taking on more activities per day, covering longer distances more frequently in their travel, meeting more people, buying more things, and so on) they also experience – and this is one of the many paradoxes of the post-modern time-consciousness – a kind of qualitative decrease in their sense of mobility and movement. Suddenly, and despite the virtual speed, it is as if one is standing still. “We run as fast as we can in order to stay in the same place,” writes the cultural historian Peter Conrad.26 At the jogging machine, for example, when time is wholly calculated and commodified, and when the pulse is kept in check while watching TV and listening to one’s iPod, while speed and efficiency are heightened to the extreme, there is no real movement: the personal triumph is abstract, the mere saving, possibly, of a few minutes of time that would otherwise have been “wasted” by running in the park instead. As early as in Simmel and Benjamin, the inability of achieving a sense of direction and movement, despite one’s speed and the concurrent frequency of experiential episodes, was theorised in relation to the rise of metropolitan living and its many violent stimuli.27 Since it is impossible to integrate these stimuli into a stable narrative pattern that provides coherence and meaning, as well as relate them to existing horizons of experience, they can never constitute genuine forms of experience (Erfahrung) but will remain disconnected and essentially meaningless bits of experiential intake (Erlebnis). Thus, while for Simmel the subject responds by taking recourse to abstraction, Benjamin sees the player – a person who loves to immerse himself in the immediacy of non-cumulative “kicks” – as the most iconic representative of this historically new and emerging form of life. Like the contemporary viewer of television or videogame fanatic, the player is not involved with his identity and his life-history. All he does is to let himself be carried away by the intensity of the moment; thus, no genuine experience can arise. However, many thinkers of the twentieth century, including Benjamin, Bloch, Adorno and Levinas, have tried to excavate and develop notions of another time – involving experience in the most emphatic form – a time of transcendence or difference capable, they argue, of escaping the logic of repetition. Consider the following passage from Levinas, in which he tries to interpret Bloch’s notion of astonishment: “Astonishment or wonder stems not from the quiddity of what astonishes but from a certain moment. What is able to provoke it is found not only in highly significant relations, but also in the way in which a leaf is stirred by the wind, in the beauty of a melody, the face of a young girl, a child’s smile, a word. It is then that astonishment

26 Conrad 27 See

(1999). Simmel (1971) and Benjamin (1969).


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comes in, which is a question and a response, the hope for a home and for Dasein, where the Da might be fully realized, and not simply Dass-sein.”28 The connection which Levinas is forging between astonishment, suddenness, ephemeral fragments of experience and hope may seem arbitrary. However, both Benjamin and Adorno invoke similar experiences – Benjamin most memorably in his childhood recollections, Adorno, in an equally Proustian vein though at a far more abstract level, most succinctly when elaborating upon his notion of metaphysical experience. One point to take note of is that Bloch attempts to articulate for the acting agent a temporal relation to the future which is radically different from that of the Kantian vision of rational self-determination. Astonishment opens a horizon of possibility neither by bracketing past demands and affiliations, nor by being an element of the subject’s self-affirmation in rational, autonomous decision. Unlike the Kantian emphasis on activity, futurity is here considered as being passively achieved, in an act of receiving. At the same time both surprising and fragile (“a leaf stirred by the wind”), it thus figures a time not of domination and instrumentally achieved progress but of hope and the promise of fulfilment. A second crucial point in this regard is that astonishment breaks out of linear, homogenous time, while nevertheless resisting the Platonic urge to set up a counter-world of pure immutability. Unlike the Platonist quest for the timeless, for a transcendence that escapes the temporal altogether, amazement, on Bloch’s account, effects a transcendence within the temporal realm itself, a kind of bifurcation or divergence which, while surprising, does not imply mere becoming, randomness, unpredictability or chance, but a concrete relationship to an imagined other. It effects such a transcendence by reconnecting the subject with the transient particular that both Platonism and Kantianism fail to account for. Suddenly there is an experience not of the already classified object – the repeatable, homogenous object appearing within homogeneous time – but of something uniquely irreplaceable and singular which nevertheless carries a specific significance. Third, by breaking out of repetition on the basis of encounters with past fragments that point beyond themselves, amazement escapes the fateful dialectic of mourning and melancholia. The kind of aggressive mourning that one sees in the late Nietzsche prevents the subject from being addressed by demands existing outside its own experimental deliberations. Bloch’s astonished subject, however, does not seek to break with the past so much as to uncover its utopian potentials. Rather than mourning the past, it wants to resurrect it from the destructive consequences of the imposition of linear, homogenous time. On the other hand, because astonishment is not rebelling against time’s passing but affirming it, it harbours no inherent desire for an identification with the bygone. It thus resists the melancholic attachment that one encounters in someone like Schopenhauer. Michael Theunissen has introduced some distinctions that may serve to clarify the precise meaning of this peculiar form of futurity.29 We need, Theunissen argues,

28 Levinas

(2000). (1992).

29 Theunissen

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to distinguish between three fundamental ways of relating to the future. In what he calls “propulsivity” (Propulsivität), we are futural simply by virtue of life’s inherent forward-moving character. Our biological make-up is hardwired to grow, change and transform itself until life comes to an end. In “protensivity,” (Protensivität) on the other hand, we are intentionally directed to the future: we desire that so and so will be the case, we expect that so and so will be the case. “Protensivity” connects the present (and past experience) to the future in that we desire what we now want, or expect what we now have reason to think will happen. It thus attempts to make the future a function of present plans, desires and beliefs. “Prospectivity,” (Prospektivität) however, relates to the future in the mode of a constitutive passivity or receptivity. It is, Theunissen maintains, an openness towards the future which is akin to waiting, a letting-oneself-be-exposed-to-the-very-possibility-of, a modus of temporal existence in which the elements of the present are not being reproduced or projected into the future. By means of prospectivity, we let (in the German meaning of Verweilen and Erwarten) the future arrive in its full openness and difference. Bloch’s account of amazement seems to fall under the heading of what Theunissen calls “prospectivity.” It signals a break with a homogeneous or repetitive temporal structure and a sudden emergence of the new or utopian content. It is crucial, however, that one distinguishes between, on the one hand, mere chance and arbitrariness, and, on the other, the kinds of anticipatory consciousness that Bloch and Theunissen seek to define. For Nietzsche, a proper commitment to the value of affirmation requires the willingness to see the random event being repeated over and over again indefinitely. Likewise, in Bergson’s account of creative evolution, the openness of any living being to becoming is extensionally equivalent with an acceptance of interruptive invention and radical contingency. For these thinkers, the time of difference is, as Elizabeth Grosz puts it, a time of “excess, superfluity, of causes, the profusion of causes, which no longer produces singular or even complex effects but generates events, which have a temporal continuity quite separate from that of their ‘causes.’”30 While Bloch shares the emphasis on time as a force of change (rather than as a mere medium of movement), he seeks to link temporal experience to a broader and more classical problem of experience, rather than the simple promotion of arbitrariness and random becoming. Indeed, for Bloch as a Marxist, capitalism itself has contingency as one its most fundamental operative principles. Capitalism is a system that, while allowing for calculation and measured risk-taking, not only permits but encourages a historically unprecedented degree of contingency. In Bloch’s view, however, the changes taking place within this system displaces experience outside the individual. They tend, as Benjamin and Baudelaire would emphasise, to take the form of shock, and of shock-experiences that cannot be integrated within an authoritative narrative framework that would make them appear meaningful. Bloch’s account of amazement is, in other words, an account of experience, and in particular of the crisis of experience that the German Romantics, Hegel,

30 Grosz

(1999, In her own edited volume).


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Nietzsche and Heidegger, saw as an inevitable consequence of rationalised modernity. Amazement is a sudden foreshadowing of what unconstrained, undistorted experience would amount to, if it existed. Unless the question of medium with all its challenging institutional ramifications is raised, such references to another time, a time of redemption, a Messianic time, may seem like pure fantasy – at best involving a vacuous romanticism, at worst being merely compensatory and thus affirmative. Adorno, for one, did argue that certain artistic media, especially poetry and music, are in fact capable of at least holding up for us the hypothetical (or semblant) experience of such transcendence. Although high modernism of the kind Adorno defended has long since been relegated to the museums and the boardrooms, it seems to me that Jameson and Theunissen, each from their own perspective, are right in arguing that we need to retrieve a sense of this other time in the midst of rampant post-modernity, although the danger that it in turn will be transformed into a consumer item is very real. We are all likely to feel that not only punctual and local countercultural forms of cultural resistance, but also even overtly political interventions are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it. Perhaps what will ultimately testify to the possibility of dislocation and otherness will be the pure and random play of signifiers that we call postmodernism itself, which as Jameson puts it, “no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of pre-existent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage.”31 Perhaps some of them can act as what Bloch calls “the leaf stirred by the wind” and invoke a sense of transcendence, or at least prefigure some kind of disintegration of the apparently seamless whole of late capitalism. One of our basic tasks as theorists and critics of culture might thus be to track down and make conceptually available the experiences designated by such bricolages, and to show why they in some instances may be able to point beyond themselves.

Conclusion Temporality is a fundamental component in any assessment of modernity, and we do need a discussion that is capable of bringing issues of modernisation, subjectivity, and time together. If we are to learn anything from the way such a discussion has been conducted in the post-Kantian tradition, then it should be conceived as a decoding of the imminent promises of modernity rather than as a transcendent critique of it. Its subject matter, ultimately, should be the time of our lives – what it would take for time to be transformed from being an alienated source of domination to being a constituent of real history.

31 Jameson

(1991, 96).

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References Agacinski, Sylviane. 2003. Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia, trans. Jody Gladding, 11. New York: Columbia University Press. Beck, Ulrich. 1986. Risikogesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, 155–200. New York: Schocken Books. Bernstein, Jay. 1995. Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory, 33. London/New York: Routledge. Clark, T. J. 1999. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, 11. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Conrad, Peter. 1999. Modern Times and Modern Places: How Life and Art were Transformed in a Century of Revolution, Innovation and Radical Change, 13. New York: Alfred Knopf. Grosz, Elilzabeth. 1999. Becoming. . . An Introduction. Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, 4. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. A Reply. In Communicative Action, eds. Axel Honneth and Hans Jonas, 219. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1993. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, 6–7. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Harvey, David. 1990. The Conditions of Post-modernity, An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, 240 f. Oxford: Blackwell. Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, 6–7. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 25. Durham: Duke University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1994. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2000. Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik, 157. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2000. God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo, 101–102. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, 90. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lyotard, Jean Francois. 1984. The Post-modern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rosa, Hartmut. 2005. Beschleunigung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Simmel, Georg. 1971. The Metropolis and Mental Life. In On Individuality and Social Forms, 324–339. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Simpson, Lorenzo C. 1995. Technology, Time and the Conversations of Modernity, 51-52. London: Routledge. Smith, Peter. 1978. Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield, 140. Gloucester, MA. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age, 58-59. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Theunissen, Michael. 1992. Negative Theologie der Zeit, 63. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Virilio, Paul. 1980. Esthétique de la disparition. Paris: Editions Balland. Weber, Max. 1966. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, 115–118. New York: The Free Press.

Moral Responsibility for Others: Why Does the “Being for” Always Precede the “Being with” Gorana Ognjenovic

This article represents a short debate between sociological and ontological conceptions of moral responsibility for the Other, which results in a third alternative, a sum of the two and some more. I shall analyse the three distinct aspects of an agent’s moral responsibility for the Other. First, I shall explain what it means to be moral by nature, that we have the natural capability to behave morally because we are emotional as well as rational beings, but that this capability, again due to our nature, always remains in potentia. Secondly, I shall present a view that our moral capacity for practicing moral behaviour is and can only be developed dialectically through our relationships with others. Thirdly, I shall argue that both of these premises need to be understood in light of my alternative argument: we primarily have responsibility for others due to the plurality of our human condition, where choosing to either have or not to have responsibility for others simply is not an option. The three aspects of moral responsibility for others in relationship to the article, “Why Does Proximity Make a Moral Difference?”1 , Arne Johan Vetlesen’s critique of Zygmunt Bauman’s sociological theory of morality for a lack of sufficient argumentation or rather a straightforward assumption of what a human moral capacity might be. Bauman argues in three phases for the radical idea of our moral capability as a pre-given. First, Bauman departs from an underlying assumption of all previous sociological accounts of morality, which is that “morality” is a product of society. For Bauman “society promotes morally regulated behaviour and marginalizes, suppresses or prevents immorality.”2 Also, “. . .morality is something society manipulates-exploits, re-directs, jams.”3 Secondly, Bauman argues that, morality is something “given” prior to man’s social experience. “Every society faces such an

G. Ognjenovic (B) University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail:[email protected] 1 Vetlesen

(1993). (1989). 3 Ibid., 183. 2 Bauman


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ability (i.e., to tell right from wrong) ready formed, much as it faces human biological constitution, psychological needs or psychological drives”. . . “The factors responsible for the presence of moral capacity must be sought in the social, but not societal sphere. Moral behaviour is conceivable only in the context of coexistence, of ‘being with others’, that is, a social context”.4 Thirdly, Bauman praises Arendt for raising the question of “moral responsibility for resisting socialization”. “The moral capacity that is manipulated entails not only certain principles which later become a passive object of social processing: it includes as well the ability to resist, escape and survive the processing, so that at the end of the day the authority and the responsibility from moral choices rest where they resided at the start: with the human person.”5 This is, of course, because “in the aftermath of the Holocaust. . .moral theory faced the possibility that morality may manifest itself in insubordination towards socially upheld principles, and in an action openly defying social solidarity and consensus.”6 Our capacity for being morally responsible agents includes also a capability to break with society at large in order to preserve a moral point of view, as well as to act morally. Vetlesen7 criticises Bauman’s view that the moral ability of an individual is to be “there” prior to the various processes of socialisation, that societal processes start when the structure of morality is there already, tantamount to inter-subjectivity. In Vetlesen’s argument if the ability (i.e. its possessor) is to be accorded a capacity to “resist” and “escape” the societal forces in question, then it is very difficult to imagine under what circumstances such resistance would be conceivable, and it is difficult as well to see what the conditions might be for this ability to arise in the first place. In my view Bauman’s steps one and two clearly indicate that by refusing to see moral “ability” as the result of social interaction, Bauman actually refuses to reduce moral “ability” to processes of socialisation. Morality for Bauman8 stands as something innate in us as human beings. We as human beings have a natural potential for acting morally even though acting morally in itself is a matter of choice, since one can always choose not to act in ways that might harm others. This choice according to Bauman implies moral responsibility as our responsibility for the dignity and well being of others. This choice implies responsibility as something existential, pre-social as well as unconditional. This choice implies morality as a primary structure of the inter-subjective relation. It implies morality as reaching beneath as well as beyond any form of social arrangements, such as structures of domination or culture, due to its pre-social duty character. Here I read Bauman as if he makes a clear distinction between a natural potential for acting morally and the matter of having responsibility for the choices that we make due to the very same

4 Ibid.,

178–179. 178. 6 Ibid., 177. 7 Vetlesen (1993). 8 Tester (2001). 5 Ibid.,

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potential. In this way we can say that while we all are naturally moral beings, the choices we make (and for which we are bearers of moral responsibility) will show how well we are able, in practice, to actually unfold our natural potential for being morally responsible agents. Bauman’s reference to a natural potential is a reference to human beings’ basic potential for being rational as well as emotional beings, a potential that provides us with a possibility of making moral choices followed by responsibility for those choices. Once asked to define what he meant by “moral by nature”, Bauman’s9 reply was that he sees us as never moral enough, as constantly in the process of endlessly improving our moral conduct. His view therefore resembles Aristotle’s10 development of virtues as well as Hegel’s11 self-realisation. Being morally responsible is never a finished or completed act, we continue to learn and improve our practice of virtue in our search for happiness. This improvement is an ongoing process where we as individuals are seeking our own individual good, where our individual search for our individual good is a part of our search for our common good as a community. This way of interpreting Bauman’s words, in fact, corresponds well to Vetlesen’s12 own model of moral capacity, where in order to be seen as making our own individual rational choices we must have our emotional as well as our cognitive sides fully developed. For Vetlesen, moral capacity is fostered, cultivated and exercised within the social environment of the small-scale setting – or it is not acquired at all. In the case where moral capacity is not developed, reasons have to be traced back to the individual’s human environment during his or her formative years, i.e. during childhood and early socialisation. Vetlesen13 focuses on the pre-oedipal mother – child dyad instead of Freud’s oedipal triangle. It is in this setting of proximity that the capacity for developing empathy with others is fostered. Empathy is a basic emotional faculty that underlies and so facilitates the entire series of specific, manifest emotional attitudes and ties to others, such as love, sympathy, compassion, or care. Here Vetlesen and Bauman are in agreement since, in other words, the capacity for empathy is inevitably developed while “living with others”. The key for Vetlesen is “being the addressee”. The individual first has to be an object of the primary caretaker’s empathy in order to become a subject capable of the same act. This development can only be sabotaged by Heinz Kohut’s14 “empathic unresponsiveness” of the primary caretaker. Vetlesen names the British object relations school, especially Bowlby’s15 attachment theory, as a main reference and source of the insights into the psychological dynamics of human proximity which, in his view, are the preconditions of moral capacity. This is also why Vetlesen cannot see these

9 Private

correspondence. (1996). 11 Franco (1999). 12 Vetlesen (1994). 13 See also: Klein (1988); Winnicot (1971); Benjamin (1988). 14 Kohut (1977). 15 Bowlby (1971, 1989). 10 Aristotle

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conditions as “given” or a priori. For Vetlesen these conditions are unavoidably an accomplishment of living with others. Moral capacity presupposes the faculty of empathy as indispensable and as a completely human accomplishment. “Living with others”, crucial to morality, is fostered in the human environment of the smallscale setting, whereby responsibility for others, also known as a capacity, follows from, and is the accomplishment of, living with others. One’s experience of “living with others” as a we-experience, in the formative years consequently results in one’s emotional abilities. Moral capacity, while an inter-subjective rather than a subjective accomplishment, is a joint accomplishment, one involving cognitive and emotional abilities alike. At the same time, another point that the paragraph above clarifies is that Bauman’s and Vetlesen’s references also simply pass each other, without having the same point of reference as a meeting point. On one hand, Bauman is interested in finding out where an agent’s potential for moral responsibility in general comes from. Vetlesen, on the other hand, is interested in denoting the developmental process necessary for any morally responsible agent who, in practice, will be capable of making the right moral choices. The possibility of interpreting Bauman in this way becomes even clearer once Bauman takes the further step explaining that for the potential to come into realisation there are the two conditions that need to be fulfilled: “First, the moral potential hidden in human beings should be revealed to them; people had to be enlightened as to the standards they were able to meet but unable to discover unaided. And second, they had to be helped in following such standards by an environment designed to favour and reward genuinely moral conduct.”16 In this way, wanting to be moral has to be seen as a rational choice of someone desiring a good life; rational because of the rewards it brings and therefore brought about by the “interest” and “self-love” that, by our nature, guides what we do. “When confronted with facts of the matter, every reasonable person must accept that doing good to others is better than doing evil. In this acceptance, reason comes to the aid of self-love, and their encounter results in acting upon one’s properly understood self-interest. . .. Re-personalize morality . . . means . . . unless moral responsibility was ‘from the start’, somehow rooted in the very way we humans are. . . It is the primal and primary ‘brute fact’ of moral impulse, moral responsibility, moral intimacy that supplies the stuff from which morality of human cohabitation is made.”17 By arguing this I don’t mean to say that the resistance to the “worst case scenario” type of socialisation, that only manipulates the individuals into committing misdeeds, is possible without a positive form of socialisation such as Vetlesen18 argues. I also strongly believe that proximity is a major factor in having the capacity to develop empathy with others, man’s basic emotional faculty that underlies and so facilitates the entire series of specific, manifest emotional attitudes and ties to others, such as love, sympathy, compassion, or care. My point here is that this

16 Bauman

(1993). 32–35. 18 Vetlesen (1994, 382). 17 Ibid.,


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type of progressive socialisation based on proximity is only possible because we as human beings are already in possession of certain potentials before we even enter the societal stages of our lives. Potentials are one of the categories that define us as human beings even before we are born and enter the world with others, the social world. Potentials are what we bring with us into the world as a form of human luggage that follows us non-optionally throughout the various stages of our human existence. More precisely we are already in possession of our capability to feel and reason before this process of development of our moral capabilities can even start to shape us into responsible moral agents. This process of developing our moral capacities, in other words, would never be possible unless we as human beings were in possession of these qualities before the socialisation process starts via the prime caregiver, as Vetlesen describes it. This is why it does not seem to me that the ability in Bauman’s argumentation is deprived of its possibility condition. The possession of this natural potential consisting of our cognitive as well as emotional nature is, in my opinion, the necessary condition for the process of proper socialisation to take place and through which the individual’s ability for moral actions could be further developed. For Bauman,19 moral capacity will always in practice manifest itself in a form of moral behaviour that is, of course, always dependent on the factors that are obvious only in the societal sphere. But, this does not mean that the moral capacity is dependent solely on social factors as such. If there is nothing there from before for the social factors to get hold of in an attempt at socialisation, then there is nothing there to socialise either. Consequently, the reason Bauman stands firmly by his argument that reciprocity is again her/his affair appears to be a logical result of the described context. Reciprocity simply follows only if the other is aware of the extension of the Face that he actually meets, in other words if he is able to unfold his own moral capability by acting responsibly in return. But when Bauman argues in agreement with Levinas that reciprocity is his (i.e. the other’s) affair, I read him as meaning that the only thing I am responsible for is my own actions towards the Other, meaning my responsibility for being able to unfold my moral capability, by for example in this case, taking responsibility for the Other while not having the means of demanding the same in return, even though by implication the invitation for the “return” is indicated. This is because “[i]f the idea of supra-individual totality may at all apply to the world of morality, it may only refer to a whole knit together, and continuously knit together, out of the commands that are given and received and followed by selves which are moral subjects precisely because each of them is irreplaceable, and because their relations are asymmetrical. . .Face is encountered if, and only if, my relation to the Other is programmatically non-symmetrical; that is, not dependent on the Other’s past, present, anticipated or hoped-for reciprocation. And morality is the encounter with the Other as Face.”20 Our commitment to the community of others is commitment without which we could never be able to realise ourselves as human

19 Bauman 20 Bauman

(1989, 179). (1993, 48).

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beings capable of moral conduct. Our commitment is endless and infinite because our morality always remains in potentia, it always remains an ongoing process of developing our potential to become a morally responsible agent, which on the other hand, can only take place in community with others. Where does the normativity come into this picture? I argue that normativity is the result of our inherent dependency as human beings on each other for the purpose of seeking our self-realisation as human beings. This is where Bauman and I very much agree when he claims that our moral ability always remains “in potentia” while I add that our moral ability is also always conditioned by our dependency on others for developing this potential into capability, as I have already argued above. At one end of this normativity we are conceived as human beings with all our human potentials to develop into morally responsible agents. At the other end, we have our inherent human dependencies on others for living a good life and realising ourselves as moral agents in the world as we know it. The socialisation of each and every one of us is a very necessary part of the same process, but this is a process that takes hold of us (according to some when we exit the womb, while according to others even while we are still in the womb) much later than assumed by the hard core theory of socialisation that assumes “social processes” as primary factors for the development of one’s moral capabilities that eventually enable one to behave as a morally responsible agent in practice. The “social processes” grip us only after we are already defined via our potentials to become a human capable of moral acts. As further illustration of my point I refer to Vetlesen’s21 critique of Bauman (as he refers to Arendt in his book on Perception, Empathy and Judgement) for “stopping short of” exploring the nature of the specific cognitive-emotional preconditions of moral capacity. According to Vetlesen the moral neutralisation that Bauman analyses is the result of the Nazi’s successful attempt to neutralise the perpetrators’ emotional abilities, in this case empathy in particular, that would restore the relationship between the perpetrator and victim as a human relationship. Empathy would disclose the victim as my victim, the invisible other as a unique human co-subject. The question that we can ask ourselves is whether this also means that all the feelings that belong to the human emotional repertoire are included in the emotional faculty that underlies, and so facilitates, the entire series of specific, manifest emotional attitudes and ties to others, such as love, sympathy, compassion, or care? If not, the next question we can ask ourselves is: where do they come from then? An illustration of my point can be found in Hannah Arendt’s22 “animal pity” by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. Arendt’s clear choice of vocabulary when she names this pity as “animal pity” leads me to believe that Arendt refers to this pity as if it had not been formed through one’s relation to another in the small scale environment. Arendt’s pity is ontological pity, pity that does not result from our being-with-others à la Rousseau’s pity. This pity has its source in our human condition. It is in Arendt’s book On Violence, when

21 Vetlesen 22 Arendt

(1993, 377). (1965).


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she describes rage as a natural human reaction, that I find more concrete material to support my argument. “That violence often springs from rage is common place, and rage can indeed be irrational and pathological, but so can every other human affect. It is no doubt possible to create conditions under which men are de-humanized – such as concentration camps, torture, famine, but this does not mean that they become animal like; and under such conditions, not rage and violence but their conspicuous absence is the clearest sign of de-humanization. Rage is by no means an automatic reaction, to misery and suffering as much; no one reacts with rage to an incurable disease or to an earthquake or for that matter, to social conditions that seem to be unchangeable. . .. Only where there is a reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not, does rage arise. . .. Only when our sense of justice is offended do we act with rage, and this reaction by no means necessarily reflects personal injury.”23 The rage described here is ontological rage that is also part of our human condition, that makes us not only into human beings capable of moral acts, but also into human beings capable of moral reaction, such as rage that reflects personal injury for example. This rage is something we are capable of as human beings prior to any form of socialisation that we might have experienced. This rage has its source in our human condition rather than our learned relating to others. This rage is just another aspect of our existence as human beings in Arendt’s24 human condition. The condition again is conditioned by its aspect of the plurality of mankind that is a condition per quam of all political and ethical life, since the only way we can exist is in plurality and therefore by experiencing each other and being carriers of responsibility for each other, whether we like it or want it or not. A very specific aspect of Levinas’ concept of responsibility is an underlying motif for the earlier described discussion. In order to avoid undermining my argument at the beginning of my reasoning I choose to start with two epistemological interludes. First, I wish to clarify that the basis of my understanding of Levinas’s ethics is not in any way theological even though I understand his ethics to be religious. Here I see “religion” in more general terms – as a system of absolute values that one allows to rule one’s life without compromising it (as the reason why exactly those values are absolute), even though the source of those values is not by any means theological. Therefore I argue that Levinas’ ethics can be interpreted as a form of “ethical religion” that has the human condition, rather than theology, as the source of its values. In Levinas’ ethical religion for example one such absolute value, in my opinion, is one’s belief that we have an unconditional and pre-given responsibility for the other, and that one should also demonstrate this in one’s practice. In this way, Levinas would still be able to claim such values and beliefs as absolute and pre-given, even though their source is not the divine G-d, with all the theological luggage that follows. For Levinas G-d remains, at all times, secular or as I will argue further on, G-d for Levinas always is a metaphor.

23 Arendt 24 Arendt

(1970). (1970).

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Second, it is a well known psychological phenomenon that we can be aware of things (in Gestalt psychology defined by Daniel Stern25 as a perceptual conscience) without having to draw on either observation or rational justification to know that something is the case, as in the case of how we can be aware of the presence of distant others. If we now translate this into the terms of Levinas’ ethics we can argue that we can be aware of others without either observing them or having to rationally justify our knowledge of their existence. This is how we are also aware of our relations with others, which according to Levinas is our duties and responsibilities for others, even though we do not directly observe the others. Now, getting back to our original discussion where, according to Vetlesen, the unacceptability of Bauman’s a priori moral capability results from his praise of Levinas’ ethic of unconditional responsibility for the other. Bauman’s sources are historical-empirical and his sociological theory of morality is therefore for Vetlesen, a descriptive and not a normative one. True enough, Bauman follows Levinas when he elevates responsibility to the “existential mode of the human subject” whereas “morality is the primary structure of the inter-subjective relation in its most pristine form”. . . “The substance of morality being a duty towards the other (as distinct from an obligation), and a duty which precedes all interestedness – the roots of morality reach well beneath societal arrangements, like structures of domination or culture. Societal processes start when the structure of morality (tantamount to inter-subjectivity) is already there”.26 Bauman in other words sees moral capability as something peculiarly pure and innocent, a kind of duty towards the other is said to “precede all interestedness”. I do not see any difficulties with Bauman’s view because I understand our relationship to the world (for-the-world and therefore for-the-other) as starting when we are conceived as human beings, before exiting the mother’s womb. We are formed as capable of moral acts much earlier than the moment of our physical entry into the world. Our relationship to the world (for-the-world) begins as innocent and pure, as a moment when we are conceived in the form of a human being with all our human potentialities to exist and behave in practice as fully developed morally responsible agents. I agree with Bauman when he says how responsibility for the other is “inextricably interwoven in human proximity, in ‘living with others’”.27 This is a social category, which involves, presupposes and (re-) produces reciprocity. This is “living with the other” in practice, in the world as we know it, as the essential moment for our experience of our responsibility for others. But this experience is possible if and only if we already are conceived and eventually born as human beings with all the potentialities that pre-define us as human, with all the potentialities that pre-define us as beings capable of moral conduct. Our potentialities are the “luggage” that we carry with us into this world, the luggage that serves as a base for building something that will eventually and gradually also make

25 See

also: Stern (2000); Stern (2002). (1989, 183). 27 Ibid., 188. 26 Bauman


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us into what we can become, human beings as developed moral agents capable of moral acts. This is the luggage that pre-defines us as beings of a certain kind, the luggage that pre-defines us as beings capable of certain kinds of acts, which in this particular context are moral acts such as having and acting on our responsibility for the other. Understood correctly, then, the phrase “living with others” unmistakeably situates the human individual within a social, inter-subjective context. It is thanks to his embeddedness in such a context that the individual is both socialised and individualised, that the individual develops his identity qua person. In my view, Bauman, by shutting off from his concept of morality as inter-subjectively situated (interestedness, domination, culture), invokes the distinction between the “social” as a pre-given factor of our condition of plurality, and the “societal” that refers to exactly those aspects of our after-birth societal development and existence. The way I read Bauman, this distinction has always been a part of his discourse since he speaks of the “social” as pre-given, while the “societal” all the time refers to all the social processes that grip one once one enters the societal sphere, or the world as we know it. Therefore when referring to us as “social beings” he is referring to something that we are by nature and not something that we develop in the aftermath of our physical entrance into the world as we know it. On the other hand, even so apodictically Levinas’ concept of responsibility has been socially assumed and practiced in the sense that this assumption had a deep “material social function” due to its “material manifestations” in the history of humankind just as it does today within certain social contexts, namely the Christian tradition. I agree with Richard A. Cohen28 when he argues that meeting the others face in Levinas is meeting a dimension of the divine or a “height” that can only be found in the human face. The dimensionality of the divine found in the human face is a moral dimension of moral height or goodness that is also a dimension of G-d, (the revelation of G-d, prophecy, revelation), which can only occur between the two figures involved in this form of dialogue. For Levinas29 this relationship is a matter of height, meaning that the two are related asymmetrically because of the inevitable difference in power in the face-to-face relations. Also, one’s relation to the other person is not at all the same as the other person’s relation to me. Such relationships can be “understood” only through the experience, since by “height” Levinas means the moral force encountered in the other’s face as the subject’s obligation to and responsibility for that other person. So, on one hand, formally, moral obligation and responsibility for the other is the opening up of the subject’s natural, self-oriented being for other: The “I” goes from being “for-itself” to being “for-the-other”, or as in Levinas’s words the “one-for-the-other”. Or as Vetlesen30 also describes it, Levinas’ ethical experience is like Hegel’s Erfarung, experience happens to us. An event takes us; it changes us so that we see the world differently, so that we see ourselves as changed, as different from before. Even though

28 Cohen

(1994). 185. 30 Vetlesen (2003). 29 Ibid.,

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the experience is enriching, the experience in itself is painful, because we still are trying to hold on to our previous ideas, learned ideas that are about to disappear. This is influenced by Hegel’s experiencing negativity, and Fichte’s Other “acting on self”. The self does not discover itself as free through reflection (in foro interno), but thanks to the others Auffprderung. The other has the power to change an I. My being-for-others is surrounded by being-in-the-world, surrounding that which can’t be controlled by subject; that as touched, moved becomes aware of the limits for its free movement, its sovereign authorship of meaning, value and meaning. This is also what according to Vetlesen provides Levinas with the possibility of claiming that responsibility for the other, besides providing one with moral status, is unconditional and absolute. Responsibility is unconditional because it comes before whatever might represent any form of calculation or contract. Responsibility is absolute because it implies a subject that is an agent in contrast to being an addressee of the action, even though the relationship in itself is an asymmetrical or one-way relationship (1. asymmetry). I have responsibility for the other, even though the other’s responsibility for me in this case is irrelevant. On this point, as we already know, Levinas’ view differs from views of other ethical theorists. Instead of the ethics of inter-subjective symmetry, Levinas opts for the ethics of inter-subjective asymmetry. Further, I agree with Cohen31 when he claims that for Levinas historically or concretely, obligation and responsibility are to feed the hungry, to protect and provide for the widow and orphan and the like. (2. asymmetry) Here he steps it up: weaker the other, more intense the subjects responsibility is. Also, responsibility and obligation to the other, is infinite and “one-way” where the one-way responsiveness of the ethical subject means that the self is obligated to the other all the way, which also implies being responsible for the other’s responsibility, one is one’s brother’s keeper. But, my reading of this moment introduces a twist: As we already know, it is not in any way accidental that Levinas uses the human Face as his metaphor to demonstrate the place where the “height” as a dimension of the divine is to be found. In my opinion, this “point of meeting the height” is the point of meeting that which is unavoidably our own but also shared with others: the human condition that we remain within at all times. The fact that we are created in God’s image is an argument from Plato that was taken up by Christianity and redefined as a metaphor for the purpose of explaining the creation of humankind. More explicitly, in Christianity the metaphor of the Face had been used as a bridge between the idea of our coming into existence and the idea of one’s relation to the Other as a representative of all of the Others. In this way there is an endless extension of the Face that we meet in the One. In meeting God’s image in the Face that we meet, we also meet all the other individual faces that we relate to via our awareness of their existence, an awareness that we gain by facing just one of them, the Face we actually meet. (3. asymmetry) Technically speaking we meet the “type” of all the other “tokens” with whom we share our original human condition. The asymmetry in my interpretation comes as

31 Cohen

(1994).


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result of the point where our relation to the “height” is a relation to the overwhelming divine power that, for Levinas, remains non-optional at all times. The asymmetry (all 3. asymmetries) here is the asymmetry between me as an individual that meets the other, and the other that is at the same time the other and all the others that the other represents and with whom I share the condition that we are all unavoidably in as human beings. This is because the Face at the same time is society at large (as in the human condition), the cradle where everything begins and ends. The Face is used figuratively in Christian tradition to enforce every individual’s awareness of others on a deeper level, that is, on the level of the self-conscience of one who is in debt to everyone around him because of the endless chain of tokens of the image of THE Face, the Face in whose image the One also is created. The Face itself represents society at large and not only the other person that we actually meet. I agree with Levinas, in interpretation of Adrian Pepperzak: “the idea of the infinite is the social relationship”32 which results from the fact that “The word God is an over-whelming semantic event”33 . This is the moment in which Levinas’ “ethics as religion” (in my understanding as explained above) is made possible due to the very basic category of Gestalt awareness shining through his argument. I agree with Cohen34 when he claims that for Levinas moral dimension, the height of the other person, the religion, is understood in a broad non-denominational sense. For Levinas the ethical face-to-face relationship is “religion”. Levinas takes the asymmetrical moral imposition affected in the inter-human relationship to be a “dimension of the divine”, “the height in which God is revealed”. As a result, inter-subjectivity is raised to the status of religion, and the awareness of this inter-subjectivity is seen by Levinas as religion that should be practiced by all of us. When Levinas argues that G-d imposes Himself on humankind, commands humans, exclusively by way of inter-human relationships, what I see here shining through is our awareness of our condition; our awareness of our human condition that overwhelms us, that imposes itself on us through our awareness, through our experience of all others, and therefore results in our experience of our responsibility for others. The infinite therefore is the infinite in which each of us forms this inter-subjectivity that for Levinas is G-d’s detour. For Levinas, G-d is the inter-human relation of morality, and only of morality, the face-to-face, that overwhelms the very intentional character of experience. In my interpretation it is our awareness of others, or our awareness of our being-stuck-in our condition of plurality (as the inter-subjective) that overwhelms us. We are in it and there is no way out of it since this is a captivity which is true to our mode of being. This captivity in the human condition is our captivity in our mode of being that we cannot avoid. It is the captivity that defines our mode of self-realisation, which cannot be achieved any other way, a mode that is un-realisable unless we remain in the company of all the other members of our mode of being, the mode peculiar for us as human beings, our mode of plurality. Levinas is very explicit about this when he claims that inter-human relations are the zero point of religion: 32 Peperzak

(1993, 92). (1981). 34 Cohen (1994, 187). 33 Levinas

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“Everything that cannot be reduced to an inter-human relation represents not the superior form but the forever primitive form of religion”.35 Now we can ask ourselves together with Cohen36 whether the ethical dimension, the ethical demands expressed by the other’s face is therefore G-d’s revelation? Whether the wider impact of this dimension, meaning the spread of morality, up to its social and political institutionalisation (in other words, the spread and establishment of justice) is the spread of G-d’s presence on earth or redemption? My philosophical answer to this question is YES, but only as a metaphor, of course. Levinas’ “redemption” of G-d is our individually living up to the demands of our human condition that is conditioned by yet another condition, that is the condition of plurality. Our awareness of our plurality is a non-optional condition of our existence as human beings, which again is, in my opinion, conditioned by yet another condition that is drawn out of our plurality. Our condition of plurality is, in my view, also the condition of our mutual dependence on each other as human beings for the purpose of our individual that at the same time is also our communal self-realisation. Our awareness of this fact, of our condition is something that, even though only a metaphor in Levinas’ theory, could be practiced on earth as a form of not any but Levinas’ G-d’s “revelation”. This would demonstrate itself as our complete awareness of our condition of dependency on each other, where justice rules, where we act on our unconditional responsibility for the other which is inclusive of our self-realisation as individual human beings in community with others. In order to determine some answers to the question of how Levinas’ abstract concept is realisable in our daily practice, after of course shifting over from the epistemic to the ontological discussion of this specific matter, we have to ask ourselves: what makes it possible to actually have an experience without willingly taking part in it? For Vetlesen37 the answer to what makes the “un-willing” experience possible lies in Levinas’ discussion of three forms of openness as the subject’s capability for receptivity of the Other, in his essay “Without identity”. Levinas stresses the third meaning of openness, openness as vulnerability in a skin that risks itself, vulnerability that lets us be influenced by something and feel powerless and humiliated due to pain that arises from being subdued by an experience. It is in this vulnerability that the relationship to the other lies, a relationship that causality cannot predict, a relationship that comes before any stimulus or cause. This vulnerability is at the same time passivity from which nothing is more passive since responsibility comes before my freedom. It is the vulnerability’s passivity that allows this “something” to appear before me as a being rather than just an object amongst all other objects. Here, ethical subjectivity is understood as receptivity, receptivity as passivity that precedes the option active/passive.

35 Levinas

(1985). (1994, 188). 37 Vetlesen (2003). 36 Cohen


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This concept of openness is in my opinion an exact demonstration of our nonoptional condition of our human condition or condition of plurality. My openness to reception of the other as the other is the point at which my perspective on things outside of me starts. It is the opening or my openness that makes my experience of the other possible. This openness also is a vulnerability that makes the experience of the other in itself possible. Ethical subjectivity, in other words, is receptivity to the experience of our plurality; it is what essentially forms our moral capability as human beings. This no-choice situation of vulnerability as receptivity towards the other is just another aspect of our existence as human beings in Arendt’s38 human condition. The condition that again is conditioned by its aspect of the plurality of mankind that is condition per quam of all existing political as well as ethical life, since the only way we can exist is in a plurality and therefore by experiencing each other and being carriers of responsibility for each other whether we like it or want it or not, which is again conditioned by vulnerability for change by experience. This is also why I am rather puzzled when Pepperzak39 labels as problematic the sentence that Levinas so often quotes from Dostoyevski’s “Brothers Karamazov” in which we all are responsible for everything and everyone in the face of everybody, and I more than the others. Apparently, the meaning of “more” in this sentence is not clear, it does not justify a rejection of all symmetry because, if it is true, it is valid for all possible egos, who, therefore must confess that they are more obliged than all other egos. For me this sentence is absolutely consequent with the whole of Levinas’ argument. I understand this sentence as claiming that my responsibility for the other is something that can only have its source in me, while all the others can only be and should be concerned with the same source within themselves, since we can never change places with others except as in a metaphor. My responsibility is a result of my subjective perspective on the state of affairs in the world that I am a part of. I can never be responsible for others’ actions even though I am responsible for the other. In the same way, the other can never be responsible for my actions even though some other is responsible for me as his other. On first level we are all responsible for others, on the second level my responsibility is always bigger than others. This is because I always act from my own subjective perspective, my own subjective starting point, peculiar to me, that is a consequence of my experience of the other “as for me”. As much as no one can see my view, my perspective of my starting point is the weight that only I can carry. I am the primary carrier of moral responsibility for others that starts from this, my point in the world, which is only mine and nobody else’s in our shared space and time. Here we can also draw on Faucault’s40 argument that it is every single one of us who has the power (which in this case I translate into practicing responsibility for the other) that as a united effort within society can result in change into something greater, a common good, that by our individual efforts we actually are striving for all the time. So what we

38 Arendt

(1970). (1993). 40 Foucault (1998). 39 Peperzak

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have here is a sum of endless numbers of subjective perspectives that are a part of our human condition together with its underlying note of everyone’s responsibility for everyone else. As in Hegel and Aristotle, this is a form of our self-realisation as human beings and as developed moral agents capable of having and capable of acting on moral responsibility for the other.

Conclusion The conclusion of my argument has two aspects. Even though the development of one’s moral capability is highly dependent on the societal processes we undergo throughout the early stages of our development, the same processes come only as secondary conditions for our development as morally responsible agents. The primary condition of our being morally responsible agents, is our pre-given form of being human. Everything starts with our possession of all the faculties necessary for the development of our moral capabilities, as human agents capable of moral acts, prior to the process of socialisation. In spite of all the socialisation processes that shape us as moral agents, our perspective on the world always remains as if in “two episodes”. The first is the episode in which we experience the world around us as if “for us only”, resulting in our subjective perspective, that always remains so, “my subjective perspective” of the world from which I always act. The second episode is the one in which each time that we perceive the Other what we de facto perceive is an unavoidable fact of our human condition, which is the condition of plurality as non-optional. This is the condition of having the responsibility for others due to our “being many” in our moral togetherness.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1965. Eichman in Jerusalem. New York: Viking Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1970a. On Violence, 63. London: A Harvest Book. Arendt, Hannah. 1970b. The Human Condition, 7. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle. 1996. The Nichomacean Ethics. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1989. Modernity and Holocaust, 173. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1993. Postmodern Ethics, 26–27. Oxford: Blackwell. Benjamin, Jessica.1988. The Bonds of Love. New York: Pantheon. Bowlby, John. 1971. Attachment. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bowlby, John. 1989. The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds. London: Routledge. Cohen, Richard A. 1994. Elevations, The Height of the Good in Rozenzweig and Levinas, 183. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michael. 1998. The Will to Knowledge, The History of Sexuality: Volume One, 96. London: Penguin Books. Franco, Paul. 1999. Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, 220–255. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Klein, Melanie.1988. Envy and Gratitude. London: Virago Press. Kohut, Heinz. 1977. The Restoration of the Self, 255 ff. New York: The International Universities Press.


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Levinas, Emmanuel. 1981. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, 115. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1985. Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, 79. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Peperzak, Adriaan. 1993. To the Other, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, 171. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Stern, Daniel. 2000. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A view from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. Basic Books. Stern, Daniel. 2002. The First Relationship: Infant and Mother. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tester, Keith. 2001. Conversations with Bauman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vetlesen, Arne Johan. 1993, January. Why does proximity make a moral difference, coming to terms with a lesson learned from the holocaust. Praxis International 12(4), 377–381. Vetlesen, Arne Johan. 1994. Perception, Empathy, and Judgment, 155–160. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. Vetlesen, Arne Johan. 2003. Nedskytingen av Levinaske spurver med Kantianske kanoner, (my translation) Norsk Filosofisk Tidsskrift, vol. 38, Nr. 1-2, Universitetsforlaget, ISSN 0029-1943: 163–164. Winnicot, Donald W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

Conclusion

What makes the discussion of the above listed topics very important is that we are in essence discussing the currently ongoing neo-liberal totalitarianism and some of its consequences. The underlying reference throughout the discussion is that we have never experienced such unanimous dominance of one ideological system, and therefore we cannot look into the past in order to discern what might happen next. Today, it seems as if we cannot make up our minds about whether history is repeating itself or we have arrived at The End of History even though the weather parameters apparently are showing that we seem to be heading towards the literary meaning of The End History. There are no historic examples in which there were so many people on Earth whose average consumption of resources was increasing so rapidly. The mismatch between the growth of population and consumption, on the one hand, and the Earth’s ecological capability on the other, has never been so critical. The question that remains is whether we can look for other evidence in history that would offer us a different perspective on the problems we are facing. The other evidence would be examples of what it previously cost us as a society when we let moralizing tendencies overwhelm our practical judgement. What we might find then is that the neo-liberal virtuality is just another point in evolution of the history of human-made abstractions for which we, as society, periodically pay the price. Therefore it remains to be seen whether history repeating itself is nothing more than what is happening to all of us on both the small and large scale, and the only problem remaining is how we can conceptualize all this for ourselves, our role, whatever we assume to be our part in the process.

G. Ognjenovic (ed.), Responsibility in Context, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3037-5, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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Index

A Abstract experience, 7, 10, 12, 17, 120 Action, 2, 5, 7, 12, 21, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 50, 51, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 80, 82, 83, 84, 87, 96, 99, 100, 108, 109, 110, 111–114, 115, 116, 117, 134 Active citizens, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 36, 38 Adiaphorization, 11, 82 Adorno, T. W., 110, 113, 120, 121, 123 Aesthetic experiences, 7 Affective action, 108 Agacinski, S., 107 Agent, 1, 3, 5, 8, 37, 39, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 84, 93, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 138 Anheier, H., 67 Animal pity, 130 Anti-sweatshop, 5, 54, 55, 56, 58, 64, 65, 68, 72, 73, 74 Anxiety, 6, 9, 10, 70, 95 Appelbaum, R. P., 55, 57, 73 Arato, A., 49 Arbitrary, 43, 109, 111, 113, 116, 121 Arendt, H., 19, 21, 51, 62, 63, 64, 68, 81, 82, 83, 98, 126, 130, 131, 137 Aristotelian, 103 Asymmetry, 59, 134, 135 Authority, 11, 13, 16, 29, 41, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 109, 117, 126 Autonomy, 2, 3, 4, 10, 22, 28, 29, 31, 35–51, 115, 116 Autotelic, 108

B Baudelaire, C., 114, 122 Bauman, Z., 6, 9–17, 82, 91, 95–101, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133 Beck, U., 3, 13, 14, 98, 106 Beginner, 131 Beiner, R., 3, 4, 19–33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 47, 50, 51 Beitz, C., 60 Benhabib, S., 37 Benjamin, J., 127 Benjamin, W., 120, 121, 122 Bergson, H., 122 Bernstein, J. M., 37, 115 Blame, 25, 55, 56, 57, 62, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 73, 75, 99 Bloch, E., 7, 120, 121, 122, 123 Blumenberg, H., 114 Bonacich, E., 55, 57, 73 Bourdieu, P., 97 Bowlby, J., 127 Bureaucratisation, 12, 13 Butterfly effect, 97 Bystanders, 6, 95–101 C Canovan, M., 28, 29 Capacity, 20, 28, 38, 50, 51, 57, 73, 100, 104, 107, 114, 119, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130 Capitalism, 107, 108, 109, 110, 117, 119, 122, 123 Carrier, J. G., 1 Casino culture, 99 Cassirer, E., 42, 43, 49 Causality, 37, 38, 40–43, 44, 48, 50, 53, 136 Change Agent Program, 15

143

144 Choice, 3, 11, 12, 16, 43, 44, 51, 56, 60, 70, 78, 101, 126, 127, 128, 130, 137 Circumstances, 8, 26, 27, 38, 41, 45, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 73, 115, 126 Citizens, 3, 4, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 68, 69, 70, 72, 98 Citizenship, 3, 4, 5, 19–33, 35, 36, 37–40, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51 Civic beings, 4, 26 Civic egalitarianism, 28 Civic equality, 3, 19, 27, 28, 31 Civic life, 3, 4, 19, 21, 30, 31, 41 Civil personality, 4, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 31, 33 Clark, T. J., 106 Cohen, J. L., 49 Cohen, R. A., 133, 134, 135, 136 Cohen, S., 12 Collective action, 62, 64, 67, 68, 69, 74 Colonialism, 15, 17, 90 Commodification, 107, 109, 111, 118 Communication, 6, 15, 59, 61, 81, 91, 97, 100 Community, 2, 3, 4, 11, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 29, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 43, 46, 63, 97, 109, 127, 129, 130, 136 Comte, A., 105 Concept, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 20, 22, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 56, 58, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 81, 82, 91, 103, 104, 105, 106, 110, 111, 114, 115, 118, 123, 125, 131, 133, 136, 137, 141 Condorcet, A., 105 Conolly, W., 68 Conrad, P., 120 Consumers, 11, 53, 55, 58, 60, 62, 64, 65, 69, 72, 74, 118, 123 Context, 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 27, 29, 31, 32, 40, 43, 45, 51, 58, 59, 64, 66, 68, 78, 81, 82, 84, 86, 112, 113, 115, 126, 129, 133 Continuous renewal, 115 Contradiction, 3, 4, 30, 32, 36, 88 Cost minimization, 55 Cultural reproduction, 110 Culture, 1, 6, 7, 15, 43, 49, 51, 60, 77, 79, 80, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 93, 99, 103–123, 126, 132, 133 Cycles, 105, 106, 110, 118 D Denial, 12, 21, 25, 59, 82, 97 Dependency, 2, 15, 27, 39, 44, 130, 136

Index Deregulation, 10 Descartes, R., 96 Despotism, 49 Disembedding, 10 Disenchantment, 106, 111 Doctrine of citizenship, 21, 28, 29 Dostoyevski, F. M., 137 E Ecological capability, 141 Egalitarian, 3, 19, 21, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32 Elshtain, J. B., 29, 30 Empathy, 127, 128, 130 Epistemological, 131 Equality, 3, 4, 19, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 38, 39, 40, 117 Ethical challenge, 6, 95, 96, 98, 99 Ethical religion, 131 Ethnicity, 6, 92 Evil, 6, 12, 51, 91, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 128 Exceptionalism, 50 Existential feelings, 6 Exploitation, 13, 15, 53, 54, 68 F Face, 10 Faceless, 14 Fate, 12, 13, 36, 37, 38, 40–43, 44, 48, 50, 51, 58, 82, 121 Faucault, M., 137 Feher, F., 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92 Feinberg, J., 56, 66 Fetherstone, L., 55 Fichte, J. G., 47, 48, 49, 134 Finitude, 7, 112, 113, 117 Finke, S., 4, 5, 35–51 Flathman, R. E., 19 Fletcher, G., 65 Franco, P., 127 Freedom, 4, 5, 7, 13, 15, 16, 22, 25, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35–51, 93, 136 Freedom of choice, 43 French, P., 56 Freud, S., 127 Fung, A., 67, 74 Fusion of horizons, 15 Futurity, 103, 105, 121 G Gadamer, H. G., 15 Galston, W., 20 Genocide, 91 Given end, 108, 111 Glasius, M., 67

Index Global actors, 6, 69 Globalization, 64, 100 Global warming, 2 Goodin, R., 59, 66, 67, 71 Government, 10, 53, 54, 57, 63, 64, 69, 71, 100 Grosz, E., 122 Gutman, A., 37 H Habermas, J., 36, 49, 50, 104, 114, 115 Hamann, J. G., 29 Hammer, E., 7, 103–123 Harvey, D., 107 Hayek, F., 26 Hegel, G. W. F., 2, 9, 14, 20, 36, 38, 45, 107, 110, 114, 122, 127, 133, 134, 138 Heidegger, M., 112, 113, 123 Heller, A., 82, 86 Hermeneutical culture, 6, 77, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93 Hermeneutical project, 6, 90, 92 High-liberal, 19, 20, 22, 31, 35, 40, 49 Historical evolution, 6 Historicity, 103, 119 History, 7, 9, 14, 17, 24, 30, 46, 48, 50, 56, 66, 89, 90, 92, 100, 101, 104, 105, 109, 120, 123, 133, 141 Hobbes, T., 19, 20, 21, 22, 35, 37 Holocaust, 13, 64, 91, 126 Hope, 6, 15, 17, 28, 32, 33, 36, 38, 93, 95, 100, 101, 103, 111, 121, 129 Horkheimer, M., 110 Human agent, 138 Human condition, 2, 77, 82, 83, 125, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138 Humanity, 2, 4, 14, 15, 30, 38, 39, 82, 84, 89, 91, 93, 97, 98, 100, 101, 114 Human misery, 6, 95, 96 Human rights, 5, 6, 50, 56, 57, 77, 79, 80, 83, 84, 86, 89, 91, 92, 93 Husserl, E., 9 Hypothetical citizens, 4, 23 I Ignorance, 6, 15, 82, 95, 96 Imperative, 22, 44, 45, 46, 53, 106, 113, 118 Inaction, 12, 96 Independency, 39 Indifference, 5, 6, 77–93 Individualization, 3 Infinite, 10, 43, 91, 111, 114, 130, 134, 135 Information technology, 6 Injustice, 5, 25, 32, 54, 55, 58, 59, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75 Innocence, 12, 93, 96

145 Integrity, 6, 81, 83, 84, 89, 95 International justice, 58–62 International Monetary Fund, 57, 69 Inter-subjectivity, 126, 132, 135 J Jameson, F., 7, 103, 117, 118, 119, 123 Jaspers, K., 11, 16 Jonas, H., 53, 66 Justice, 5, 15, 26, 41, 42, 43, 46, 53–75, 96, 117, 131, 136 K Kagan, R., 37 Kaldo, M., 67 Kant, I., 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 13, 14, 19–33, 35–51, 103, 104, 114, 115, 121, 123 Kersting, W., 39, 46 Klein, M., 127 Klein, N., 55 Kohl, H., 17 Kohut, H., 127 Koselleck, R., 104, 105, 106, 107, 113, 114 L Lam, L. L., 73 Lange, L., 28, 29 Laws, 3, 4, 5, 19, 22, 23, 25, 26, 30, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43–45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 64, 68, 70, 71, 73, 78, 79, 87, 88, 96, 109, 112, 115 Legitimacy, 4, 23, 36, 46, 48, 50, 89, 90 Levinas, E., 7, 9, 10, 11, 100, 120, 121, 125, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137 Liability model, 55, 56, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 69, 75 Liberty, 11, 16, 31, 40 Liquid modernity, 12, 16 Locke, J., 22 Lorenz, E., 97 Low-liberal, 19, 20, 21, 22, 31, 35, 38, 40 Luk´acs, G., 109, 110, 113 Lyotard, F., 118 M MacIntyre, A., 78, 79, 81, 88, 90, 91 Maritain, J., 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 88 Market logic, 107, 109 Marx, C., 87, 105, 109, 110, 113, 122 Masternarrative, 105 Maus, I., 35, 47 May, L., 66, 67 McCormick, J. P., 51 Meaningful praxis, 116 Media, 50, 81, 95–101, 123

146 Mendus, S., 26, 27, 30 Mestrovic, S., 81 Mini-discourses, 6, 7, 90, 91, 92 Modernity, 6, 7, 13, 14, 42, 77, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 92, 103–123 Moral act, 9, 11, 12, 99, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 138 Moral capacity, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130 Moral community3, 20, 21, 35 Moral consequentiality, 2, 36, 60, 80–81 Morality, 4, 5, 9, 12, 31, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 67, 68, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 100, 101, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136 Moral justice, 58–62, 131 Moral obligation, 15, 22, 38, 59, 133 Moral package, 4, 30, 36, 38, 47, 51 Moral recognition, 22, 38, 39, 51 Moral responsibility, 2, 11, 58, 60, 70, 125–138 Moral self-limitation, 4, 36, 51 Moral self-understanding, 4, 35–51 Moral togetherness, 138 Moral worth, 19, 38 Multidisciplinary, 1 Murphy, L. B., 70 Mutual dependency, 44 N Nation-state, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 99, 100 Natural state, 22, 45, 46 Neo-liberalism, 1 New Public Management, 10, 57–58 Nietzsche, F., 121, 122, 123 Non-optional, 129, 135, 136, 138 Normative perspective, 4, 36, 46 O Oakeshott, M., 19 Object relation, 2, 9, 127 Ognjenovic, G., 1–8, 9–17, 125–138 Okin, S. M., 26, 29 Oliviero, M. B., 67 O’Neill, O., 58, 59, 62 Openness, 136, 137 Orlie, M., 68 P Pangle, T. L., 43 Paradigm, 2, 37, 63, 70 Paradoxes, 4, 19–33, 36, 37–40, 46, 120 Passage, 15, 20, 21, 23, 29, 32, 35, 42, 82, 107, 120 Passive Citizens, 4, 22, 23, 24, 26, 30, 36, 38 Pateman, C., 28, 29

Index Peace, 20, 22, 35 Pepperzak, A., 135, 137 Perceptual conscience, 132 Personal Responsibility Act, 67 Phenomenological, 9 Pity, 130 Plato, 28, 37, 40, 42, 49, 51, 134 Plurality, 2, 6, 82, 83, 84, 86, 90, 92, 93, 118, 125, 131, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138 Pogge, T., 58, 60, 62, 68 Political autonomy, 35–51 Political package, 31, 40, 49, 51 Political responsibility, 5, 54, 56, 58, 62–74, 75, 103 Post-modern, 7, 103, 117–123 Poverty, 60, 68, 69 Power, 5, 12, 15, 16, 24, 32, 37, 38, 42, 46, 48, 49, 50, 61, 68, 71, 72, 73, 89, 90, 91, 99, 100, 105, 133, 134, 137 Practical reason, 39, 45, 46, 47 Precarious, 97 Pre-oediepal, 127 Pre-ontological, 9 Pre-social, 9, 126 Primal, 10, 12, 128 Private sector, 21, 24, 47, 48, 57 Privilege, 24, 60, 61, 72, 73 Project, 6, 15, 50, 56, 66, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 106, 112, 115, 118, 119, 120, 122 Prospectivity, 122 Proximity, 83, 125, 127, 128, 129, 132 Public sector, 57 Purposive-rational, 108, 109, 110, 111–114, 115, 116 R Rage, 131 Ranke, L., 96 Rawls, J., 20, 26, 31 Reason, 13, 17, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 39, 41, 45, 46, 47, 63, 70, 72, 73, 74, 78, 84, 85, 88, 96, 115, 122, 128, 129, 131 Receptivity, 122, 136, 137 Recht, 4, 32, 35, 36, 44, 46, 47 Reciprocity, 23, 129, 132 Recycling, 10 Redemption, 123, 136 Reflexive responsibility, 13 Refugee camps, 14 Reiss, H., 24 Resources, 44, 49, 69, 70, 73, 111, 112, 117, 141 Responsibility, 1–8, 9–17, 25, 40, 49, 53–75, 98, 103, 125–138

Index Revelation, 7, 85, 87, 88, 133, 136 Right, 2, 3, 9, 13, 17, 20, 22, 24, 26, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 41, 43, 44, 45–47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 57, 70, 79, 81, 91, 101, 117, 123, 126, 128 Rosa, H., 106, 119 Rosen, E. I., 55, 57, 73 Rousseau, J. J., 19, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30 S Scheffler, S., 61 Schengen agreement, 14 Schiller, F., 106 Schmitt, C., 51 Schwartz, J., 28 Scruton, R., 26 Self-apology, 12 Self-erosion, 88 Self-estrangement, 12 Self-love, 128 Self- perfection, 5, 51 Self-realization, 2 Sennet, R., 50 Shared responsibility, 5, 67, 69, 74 Shell, S. M., 32 Simmel, G., 83, 120 Simmons, A., 67 Simpson, L. C., 112, 116, 117 Smith, P., 115 Social animal, 2, 7, 9 Social contract, 21, 22, 28, 29 Society, 1, 3, 10, 13, 14, 17, 21, 26, 29, 31, 35, 37, 48, 49, 54, 64, 67, 70, 97, 106, 108, 110, 111, 113, 125, 126, 135, 137, 141 Socrates, 41, 42, 43 Sovereign, 23, 36, 37, 43–45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 100, 134 Spectators, 96, 98 Steiner, G., 99 Stern, D., 3, 14, 15, 16, 19, 28, 69, 88, 91, 105, 108, 117, 132 Structural injustice, 5, 58, 65, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75 Structural international injustice, 5 Subject, 1, 4, 5, 11, 12, 15, 16, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 89, 92, 100, 104, 106, 109, 114, 115, 116, 119, 120, 121, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138 Substantive freedom, 4, 5, 35–51 Sweatshop, 5, 16, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74 Systemic contradictions, 3, 4, 30, 36

147 T Taylor, C., 32, 77, 110, 113 Television, 81, 96, 99, 120 Temporality, 7, 103–123 Tester, K., 5, 7, 77–93, 126 Theunissen, M., 121, 122, 123 Thorpe, L., 26, 32 Time-consciousness, 7, 104, 105, 107, 113, 114, 115, 120 Tito, J. B., 17, 57 Traditional action, 108, 109 Transcend, 7, 39, 44, 103, 119, 120, 121, 123 Transience, 106, 107, 113, 115 Transnational, 54, 58, 60, 62, 73 Transparency, 74, 89 Tribe, K., 101 Trolley dilemma, 1 U Unconditional, 10, 97, 126, 131, 132, 134, 136 Unified will, 46 Unions, 54, 55, 74 Universal, 6, 13, 26, 37, 43, 44, 77, 78, 79, 80, 85, 86, 90, 91, 92, 115 Universal declaration, 77, 78, 79 V Value rational action, 108, 109 Vetlesen, A. J., 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 134 Virilio, P., 106, 119 Virtualism, 1, 2, 10 Virtue, 2, 7, 21, 25, 30, 32, 41, 42, 43, 45, 48, 59, 70, 73, 78, 122, 127 W Wages, 5, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57 Weber, A., 95 Weber, M., 12, 82, 84, 106, 108, 109, 110, 113 Welfare state, 3 Winnicot, D. W., 127 Women, 4, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 36, 37, 38, 54, 78, 82, 84, 90, 97, 100 Worker’s Rights Coalition, 55 Working conditions, 5, 53, 54–58, 62, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75 Y Young, I. M., 5, 53–75 Yugoslavia, 17

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