Ethics as Ideals in Practice
15. November 2013
Workshop with Prof. Michael Lambek (Toronto)
for programme and conference report, see below
Abstract
In anthropology, engagement with research on ethics has its historical roots in a Durkheimian approach to ethics, most prominently represented by British social anthropology. In this perspective, ethics appear as somewhat mechanistic rules and obligations which regulate society while social action, in turn, appears as response to these regulations (for a critique compare Lambek 2010: 12; Laidlaw 2002: 313). Another influential position is concerned with the human subject that finds itself confronted with the necessity to make ethical decisions, in doing so reflecting on the conundrum of how to conceptualize the liberal subject that is subjected to its own free will and to the rules, expectations and obligations of its society. Finally, the more recent Foucauldian inspired anthropology of ethics highlights the study of the subject and its ethical re-fashioning in the contexts of power; in this perspective, subjects can be individuals, but also institutions, governments and non-human actants – which led James Faubion to coin the term “cyborgic ethics” (2010: 119).
However, broadly speaking, there presently exist only very few ethnographic studies of the everyday realities of ethics, a paucity that astonishes in view of the fact that people throughout the world routinely entertain discourses on how one ought to act and on how to evaluate the actions of others according the ethical standards of the society in question. Instead, Michael Lambek notes, “social theory has focused almost exclusively on rules, power, interest, and desire” (2010: 40).
The workshop follows Lambek’s "Ordinary Ethics. Anthropology, Language, and Action" (2010) in contending that the study of ethics needs to become a subject of empirical investigation whereby ethics represent an often overlooked social dimension in the triangle of mind, action, and the social. Yet, the question how to distinguish an anthropological study of “morality” from an anthropological study of “ethics” is still unresolved. We posit that “morality” indicates a mundane level of (social) rewards, rules and sanctions in dictating everyday life whereas “ethics”—here understood as an imperative code of conduct—produce an imaginary of the social on a higher order of abstraction– that is, an abstract level of reflexivity about conduct in and of society. At the same time, this imaginary and abstracting nature of “ethics” does not mean that the everyday realities of ethics are beyond sociocultural practice (in the sense of “things set apart”). Instead, we argue that “ethics” can and should be understood as ideals in practice.
Against this conceptual backdrop, the workshop starts on the following four assumptions: First, the perspective on “ethics” allows for an exploration of social action and agents beyond single social domains such as the family, religion, education, economy, or politics. Whereas each of these domains may produce or maintain specific moralities that may or may not be congruent with one another, at a higher level of reflexivity ethical notions have the capacity of producing overarching sets of ideas. In other words, exploring ethics as ideals in practice by ethnographic methodologies allows us to deal with cross-cutting and mutually interfering translations of ethical expectations across social domains. The study of ethical dimension of any social action therefore opens a new and interesting analytical perspective on the intersectionality of different social domains.
Second, it can be noted by drawing on empirical data that ethical expectations are often conflicting with each other as well as with social actors’ material contexts such as people’s market activities (Laidlaw 2002: 318) or people´s stringent social obligations and responsibilities. It is therefore important to examine social actors’ reactions to conflicting ethical imperatives and their strategies in accommodating them as these are indicative of the sites of ethical dilemmas.
Third, ethical expectations are not necessarily mutually exclusive but can be shown to be nested into each other (Zigon 2007) which, in turn, give rise to complex constellations of interlocking ethical requirements while also allowing social actors to legitimately draw on different ethical registers according to circumstance and the matter at hand. We therefore need to ask how this nesting of ethical expectations finds expression in people’s everyday life and what kind of institutional arrangements encourages or inhibits such nesting. Fourth, given that “ethics” are most often directed towards consideration of ‘not doing harm to others’, these considerations reveal people’s ideas on ‘the social’, but indirectly also on what they consider to be ‘a-social’. As a consequence, exploring “ethics” necessarily implicates dealing with the “unethical”.
Taken together, participants to the workshop are invited
- to ethnographically examine the everyday realities of ethics and
- to critically reflect on the conceptual notion of ‘ethics as ideals in practice’.
More particularly, they are invited to take specific social institutions (such as churches, non-governmental organizations, the state bureaucracy) as empirical examples in order to explore the making and re-making of ethical registers, in doing so taking account of nestings within and translations across sociocultural domains as well as of attempts within social institutions to ‘blackbox’ ethical prescriptions (i.e. make them non-negotiable). By focusing on social institutions, the workshop strives to reach an integrative middle ground between, on the one hand, the tendency in anthropological theory and research on ethics to highlight the individual and his or her ethical decisions and, on the other hand, the tendency to interpret ethical dilemmas as nothing but a reflex to a crisis of society.
Participants
- Astrid Bochow (MPI Halle)
- Hansjörg Dilger (Freie Universität Berlin)
- Annette Hornbacher (Universität Heidelberg)
- Michael Lambek (University of Toronto and LSE)
- Marie Natalie LeBlanc (Université du Québec)
- Thomas G. Kirsch (Universität Konstanz)
- David Parkin (Oxford and SOAS, University of London)
- Rijk van Dijk (African Studies Centre, Leiden)
Fri, 15 November 2013, 9 am–6 pm
Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg Konstanz (Bischofsvilla), Otto-Adam-Str. 5, Konstanz
Organisation
Rijk van Dijk (guest professor in Ethnology)
Astrid Bochow (fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz)
Thomas G. Kirsch thomas.kirsch[at]uni-konstanz.de
