New Perspectives on Moral Change: Anthropologists and Philosophers Engage with Transformations of Life Worlds 9781800735989

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New Perspectives on Moral Change

WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Editors: James Laidlaw, William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge Joel Robbins, Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge Social Anthropology is a vibrant discipline of relevance to many areas – economics, politics, business, humanities, health and public policy. This series, published in association with the Cambridge William Wyse Chair in Social Anthropology, focuses on key interventions in Social Anthropology, based on innovative theory and research of relevance to contemporary social issues and debates. Former holders of the William Wyse Chair have included Meyer Fortes, Jack Goody, Ernest Gellner and Marilyn Strathern, all of whom have advanced the frontiers of the discipline. This series intends to develop and foster that tradition. Recent volumes: Volume 13 New Perspectives on Moral Change: Anthropologists and Philosophers Engage with Transformations of Life Worlds Edited by Cecilie Eriksen and Nora Hämäläinen Volume 12 Where Is the Good in the World? Ethical Life between Social Theory and Philosophy Edited by David Henig, Anna Strhan and Joel Robbins Volume 11 Making Better Lives: Hope, Freedom and Home-Making among People Sleeping Rough in Paris Johannes Lenhard Volume 10 Selfishness and Selflessness: New Approaches to Understanding Morality Edited by Linda L. Layne Volume 9 Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City John Fahy

Volume 8 It Happens among People: Resonances and Extensions of the Work of Fredrik Barth Edited by Keping Wu and Robert P. Weller Volume 7 Indeterminacy: Waste, Value and the Imagination Edited by Catherine Alexander and Andrew Sanchez Volume 6 After Difference: Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological Theory Paolo Heywood Volume 5 Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life Edited by Cheryl Mattingly, Rasmus Dyring, Maria Louw and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer Volume 4 The Patient Multiple: An Ethnography of Healthcare and Decision-Making in Bhutan Jonathan Taee

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/wyse

New Perspectives on Moral Change Anthropologists and Philosophers Engage with Transformations of Life Worlds

Edited by Cecilie Eriksen and Nora Hämäläinen

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2022 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2022 Cecilie Eriksen and Nora Hämäläinen All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2022025348 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-597-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-598-9 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800735972

Contents

Introduction. Moral Change in Philosophy and Anthropology Cecilie Eriksen and Nora Hämäläinen

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Chapter 1. Moral Change through the Lens of Marriage Susan MacDougall

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Chapter 2. Queering ‘Ayb in the Urban Landscapes of Amman Marie Rask Bjerre Odgaard

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Chapter 3. Ordinary Possibility, Transcendent Immanence and Responsive Ethics: A Philosophical Anthropology of the Small Event Cheryl Mattingly

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Chapter 4. Moral Revolutions, Value Change and the Question of Moral Progress Joel Robbins

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Chapter 5. Losing Selves: Moral Injury and the Changing Moral Economies of State-Sanctioned Violence Elizabeth M. Bounds and Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon

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Chapter 6. Dementia Care Ethics, Social Ontology and World-Open Care: Phenomenological Motifs Rasmus Dyring Chapter 7. On Moral Revolutions Robert Baker

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Chapter 8. Moral Borderlands: Moral Change and Ethical Normativity in Liminal Spaces 143 Cecilie Eriksen

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Chapter 9. Moral Change and Moral Truth Nora Hämäläinen

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Chapter 10. The Problem of Impiety Cora Diamond

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Chapter 11. Guiding Ethical Sentences, Moral Change and Form(s) of Life Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen

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Chapter 12. Two Historical Periods within One Human Breast Niklas Forsberg

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Conclusion. Morality in Action Nora Hämäläinen

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Index

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Introduction Moral Change in Philosophy and Anthropology Cecilie Eriksen and Nora Hämäläinen

In the winter of 2019, the appearance of the SARS CoV-2 virus, which led to the COVID-19 pandemic, changed a small part of the biological habitat for human life on Earth, resulting in numerous moral changes globally. Before COVID-19, coughing into the air or one’s hands in public places was considered gross, yet fairly harmless, at least in most European and US settings. After the outbreak of the virus, in those very same locations, these forms of coughing were morally condemned as reckless and socially irresponsible behaviour. Previously, it was considered a family’s moral obligation to visit sick and elderly family members during, for example, the Hindu Diwali festival, the Islamic Eid al-Adha and the Christian Christmas. During the pandemic, many families have been faced with a moral demand to refrain from doing so and find other ways of caring and connecting socially. These alterations in accepted and desirable behaviour are minor instances of moral change. Even if what in this case could be called the grounding values remain the same (e.g. care and not harming people in one’s vicinity), new patterns of attention, consideration and concern are internalized, creating new possibilities for moral condemnation, along with new ways of exhibiting and conceptualizing virtue and moral responsibility. People’s moral imaginaries have been set in motion in ways that may or may not have longterm implications for our acknowledged moral duties to others.1 When seeking to understand moral change, it is useful to note that it can unfold at various levels and with different scopes, for example, at the level of an individual’s life, in the behaviour of groups, in practices and in cultures at large. There are also varying degrees of moral changes, ranging from minor moral changes, such as parents internalizing a norm of listening parenthood (for example, by not interrupting their children unnecessarily, letting children have their say), to major and radical moral changes, whereby the moral ‘framework’ itself undergoes transformation, such as those undergone by the Crow tribe during and after the colonization of their land (Lear 2008) or the Urapmin

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people of Papua New Guinea after their conversion from their traditional religion to a form of Christianity in the 1970s (Robbins 2004). Furthermore, moral changes can advance at various paces. The minor moral changes resulting from COVID-19 happened fast, but the moral revolution in the social roles and understanding of women in Western societies has occurred slowly over hundreds of years. Finally, moral change can also happen due to a variety of different, at times interacting, dynamics, such as, for instance, a changed biological environment, legal interventions, grassroots activism, increases in scientific knowledge, religious and political pressures, technological inventions and cross-cultural interactions, to name just a few (see, e.g., Appiah 2010; Henrich 2020; Eriksen 2020). The trajectories of moral changes are often unpredictable and major moral alterations usually require several contributory and co-evolving factors that can only be traced in hindsight. At all times and in all places, moral change has been a feature of human life. We can cope with such change in ways that either further or diminish our own and others’ quality of life. Both Cheryl Mattingly (2014, 2019) and Jonathan Lear (2008) describe what struggling for a good life as individuals and as a group in unfamiliar moral territories can amount to. Successfully negotiated changes enhance the capacities of individuals and groups to create flourishing lives for themselves and future generations, while failures to ethically come to terms with new conditions and demands may destroy lives and tear communities apart. Further, humans not only ‘suffer’ moral change as something they encounter and must deal with. We also face ethical demands to actively initiate and create moral changes. Movements for women’s rights, civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights and animal rights have altered Western patterns of moral reasoning, action and justification over the past century. Climate activist Greta Thunberg and others of her generation have lobbied to initiate a revolution with many moral implications, such as radical changes in how politicians, business leaders, public officials and citizens all over the world think, act and live with regard to matters that affect the environment. In this case, the movement claims that if we do not change, we risk not only the flourishing of humans and most living beings, but also our very survival. Investigating and understanding the phenomenon of moral change, empirically as well as theoretically, is thus an important aspect of understanding human life and societies, and one with extensive practical implications. Yet, moral change as such has until very recently not been considered a central topic in either philosophy or anthropology.2 In anthropology, it has usually been subsumed under social change. In philosophy, from Plato and onwards, moral change has generally been neglected in favour of a search for and foregrounding of that which is considered universal and unchanging in ethics (Parsons 1974; Eriksen 2020). In this process, moral change tends to dissolve both as a genuine phenomenon and as a topic of research. As Robert Baker aptly points out: ‘Even philosophers who once acted as agents of moral change eschew the concept, preferring to view moral change as a process of reinterpreting the fundamental moral principles of our common morality’ (2019: 1).



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This situation is, however, beginning to change, with a growing number of authors in philosophy seeking to theoretically address the phenomena of changing morality (e.g. Lear 2008; Appiah 2010; Hämäläinen 2017; Pleasants 2018; Baker 2019; Eriksen 2020; Smyth 2020). Regardless of the minimal theoretical interest in moral change as such in contemporary anthropology (for exceptions, see Robbins 2007, 2014; Keane 2016), the field’s plentiful descriptions of life in many different areas of the world offer an abundance of insights into moral transformations, how best to do research on them and the ethical, existential and political issues associated with moral changes. This anthology addresses moral change by bringing together anthropologists and philosophers in a conversation about how to understand the moral transformations of, for example, norms, concepts, emotions, practices, world views, forms of personhood and life circumstances at individual and cultural levels. Most of the authors in this volume represent two strong currents in contemporary academia: on the one hand, the interest in thematizing morality and seeking inspiration from philosophy among anthropologists, and, on the other hand, the growing interest in contextuality, in thick descriptive and empirical approaches, and in local changes to moral conceptions among moral philosophers. By bringing these currents together, we hope to create an ideal environment for dialogue and thinking about moral change and thus potentially to open a space for future interdisciplinary collaborative work on the topic. In order to provide the context for this cross-disciplinary conversation – to cast light on why it is happening now and why it is experienced as vibrant and inspiring – central differences and similarities in the intellectual orientations and backgrounds of, respectively, moral philosophy and moral anthropology need to be addressed. Four core topics are therefore sketched in the following sections, namely, ‘the nature of the moral’, ‘freedom’, ‘normativity’ and ‘the ordinary’. Finally, we give a brief overview of the chapters.

The Nature of ‘the Moral’ What is ‘the moral’? This philosophical question is fundamental to investigations and discussions of moral changes. What kind of transformations are moral changes, as opposed to, say, economic, political or fashion changes? This is not a simple question to answer, first, because the nature of ‘the moral’, ‘morality’ or ‘the ethical’ is a hotly debated issue in both anthropology and philosophy (see, e.g., Heintz 2013: 3–5; Keane 2016: 16–27; Fink 2020) and, second, because moral issues in real life often are, for example, economic, social and political questions too. What we call an issue is significantly dependent on our reasons for and ways of engaging with it. Anthropologists have always investigated and described their subjects’ moralities (Laidlaw 2017) and anthropology used to be considered one of the so-called ‘moral sciences’, along with, for instance, economics and psychology. Yet, until fairly recently, anthropologists have focused on social change but have

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not had a disciplinary orientation of thinking about change in terms of ethics or morality ‘in its own right’ (Zigon 2008: 2; Heintz 2013: 1–3; Lambek 2010b: 1). Another way of framing this is to say that anthropology has been characterized by a theoretical tradition of investigating and understanding morality as reducible to and indistinguishable from social norms and values. This orientation is often attributed to the strong influence and popularity of Émile Durkheim’s thinking (see, e.g., Laidlaw 2002; Mattingly 2014; Fassin 2014: 3). In the first decade of the new millennium, however, a growing chorus of critical voices in the field of anthropology challenged this reductive view of ‘the moral’, picking up on critiques made earlier, for example, by May Edel and Abraham Edel in the late 1950s, but not broadly recognized in the field (Zigon 2008: 4–8; Laidlaw 2017). These anthropologists wanted to thematize morality ‘in its own right’ (Laidlaw 2014: 2–4, 15). One reason for doing so was that they identified, in their fieldwork, a distinction between moral norms and considerations and social norms and considerations operative in people’s understandings of themselves, their situations and possibilities. People would regularly experience conflicts between what social norms and morality demanded of them, conflicts that could not properly be made sense of in a Durkheimian theoretical framework. Anthropologists therefore increasingly began to thematize morality in itself; they have since done so in different, at times opposing, ways. Some anthropologists challenge the standard reductive view of morality by exploring the roles of the individual, freedom and ethical critique in moral life (see Laidlaw 2002: 315, 2016; Zigon 2007; Robbins 2004). One way of doing this is through the exploration of the intricacies of the phenomena of self-formation and self-cultivation (e.g. Faubion 2001, 2011). Others challenge the standard view by drawing a conceptual distinction between, on the one hand, ‘morality’, which is a society’s system of rules and obligations towards others that govern our decisions about right and wrong acts, and, on the other hand, the more encompassing category of ‘ethics’, which relates to virtues, values and a conception of the good life. Here ‘ethics’ has the resources to challenge a society’s morality system (e.g. Keane 2016: 16–21; for another version of this distnction, see Zigon 2008: 162–66). Still others have challenged the standard reductive view by conceptualizing ‘the moral’ as an immanent aspect of everyday lives, practices and societies that is, however, not fully reducible to these (Das 2007, 2015c, 2020; Lambek 2010a); it is not reducible to these because, among other things, ‘the ordinary’ is laced with ethical insecurities and indeterminacies, which can propel change (Das 2007: 1–18, 2015a: 1–3; Lambek 2010b: 1). These and other dissenting voices soon resulted in a multifaceted ‘ethical turn’, which swept through the field and consolidated ‘moral anthropology’ as an indispensable and popular part of contemporary anthropology (see Heintz 2009; Fassin and Lézé 2014; Fassin 2015b; Laidlaw and McKearney forthcoming). Philosophers, on the other hand, can claim a more than 2,000-year-long tradition of discussing morality ‘in its own right’. The Western academic tradition of reflecting on ethics originated in Ancient Greece and the nature of its subject matter was debated from the outset. No consensus has been reached on



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how to conceptualize morality, draw its boundaries or articulate its central issues. Originally, the words ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’ were synonymous, derived from Greek and Latin respectively, but they have also been used to designate different things by different philosophers and philosophical communities (see Fink 2020 for an illuminating overview). Bernard Williams (1985) is one example of an influential thinker who uses the word ‘ethics’ to refer to broad questions of the good life and ‘the morality system’ to refer to specific questions of moral obligation. Often the answer to what ‘the moral is’, at least in Anglophone moral philosophy, falls under one of the three major moral philosophical traditions: virtue ethics, consequentialism or deontology (see, e.g., Driver 2007; Timmons 2013; Rachels and Rachels 2015; Wolff 2018). However, these major traditions have also been criticized and challenged in recent moral philosophy and today ethics of care, phenomenological ethics, feminist ethics and contextual ethics, among others, have broadened the range of ways in which the moral is conceptualized. Because of its long and rich tradition of discussing morality in its own right, moral philosophy has attracted many contemporary anthropologist readers, who have found therein a wealth of ideas about how to formulate what ‘the moral’ is, if it is not fully reducible to a society’s norms, rules and values. Thinkers from Aristotle and Immanuel Kant through Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas to Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt, and many others, have provided conceptual and theoretical inspiration for moral anthropologists (see, e.g., Das 1998, 2020; Throop 2010; Das et al. 2014; Liisberg, Pedersen and Dalsgaard 2015; Laidlaw 2017; Mattingly et al. 2017). The contrasts and conflicts within current moral anthropology are therefore, to a certain extent, reflections of related conflicts and demarcation issues between the traditional philosophical orientations that anthropologists make use of. The tradition of moral philosophy has not, however, only served as a positive inspiration. It has also been found wanting in several important respects. To mention a few of its obvious shortcomings: although some parts of philosophy have undergone ‘a postcolonial reformation’, many have not. Thus, in modern moral philosophy, one still finds what for the anthropologist are, for example, overly naïve and often Eurocentric conceptions of who ‘we’ are and what ‘an ethical agent’, ‘the universally human’ and ‘the good life’ are (see, e.g., Widlok 2013; Keane 2016: 7–9, 14–15). Further, the complex cultural differences encountered in the field and the epistemic challenges of anthropological research place different demands on the conceptual apparatus to those encountered in the largely armchair activities of philosophers. For these and other reasons, moral anthropologists have rarely found it useful to simply copy the ideas, concepts and theories they have encountered in moral philosophy. Rather, they have had to use this inspiration to creatively forge new concepts and theoretical tools suitable for anthropological work. Thus, on the basis of the work of Aristotle, Charles Taylor and modern phenomenology, Cheryl Mattingly has developed her own version of virtue ethics, termed ‘first

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person virtue ethics’, in order to better highlight the moral issues her informants struggle with (2014: xvi, 33–58, 2018). The anthropologist, spurred on by the life she encounters in the field, refines moral philosophical concepts. In some cases, the ethical issues encountered in the field call for a focus on new topics, raise new questions or demand the development of new concepts and moral ideals that are different to those moral philosophy has so far offered (see, e.g., Zigon 2018b). In these and similar cases, moral anthropology can serve as positive ethical, theoretical and methodological inspiration for contemporary moral philosophy. That neither philosophy nor anthropology can settle on a universally agreed-upon definition of ‘the moral’ is neither, we believe, a theoretical nor moral problem. On the contrary, there are good reasons to treat any fixed concept of the moral with caution (Eriksen 2020: 145–59). Historically, narrow definitions have repeatedly distorted or neglected many phenomena that are morally important. Further, delineations are necessary for a range of moral, theoretical and practical purposes and they always express normative commitments. Saying that a phenomenon (norm, virtue, value, concern) is a moral one often means granting it a special importance. Anyone who is genuinely concerned about ethics is likely to want to step back now and then to think about whether the chosen delineation properly reflects the world we live in and our own or other people’s needs, commitments and orientations in it (see Murdoch 1997: 76–77).

Freedom: Navigating Issues of the Individual, the Intersubjective and the Social One of the challenges faced by researchers engaged in moral anthropology has been to convince anthropologists more generally that a substantial notion of freedom in the domain of the ethical is relevant in the study of societies. Against a broadly Durkheimian background of attention to the habitual reproduction of ideas, virtues and practices, anthropologists such as James Laidlaw, Joel Robbins and Jarrett Zigon have recently singled out the domain of ‘morality’ as a domain of freedom and choice, and argued for its heuristic importance (Laidlaw 2002, 2014; Robbins 2007; Zigon 2008). Looking at people as, in some senses, free agents will bring out important moral aspects of social life that are easily lost to sight if only the habitual and socially conditioned are emphasized. The anthropologist turning to philosophy may be searching for many things, but one of these things has been confidence and conceptual complexity in talking about freedom as a substantial and effective part of human lives stemming from a long tradition of doing so. Interestingly, many moral philosophers have travelled in what seems to be the opposite direction. In early and mid-twentieth-century Anglophone moral philosophy, the individual, freedom and choice were taken for granted as the primary loci of morality, while insights into the moral significance of habit,



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virtue, social mores and contextually specific ethical practices were hard won. This was perceptively criticized by Elizabeth Anscombe (1958) and Iris Murdoch (1997), among others. A moral philosophy focused solely on free action and choice fails to make sense of its own underpinnings: moral freedom is not acting and choosing in a void; rather, it is a complex interpretative endeavour of contextually embedded, linguistic, cultural, habitual and emotional creatures (Murdoch 1997). Today, thanks to the late twentieth-century expansion of virtue ethics, attention to character, habits and community is standard in moral philosophy. In addition, attention to the embodied aspects of moral experience has been increasingly theorized under the influence of phenomenology (see, e.g., Guenther 2013). One of the most important trajectories of late twentieth-century Anglophone moral philosophy has thus been the broadening of ethical attention from individual free, voluntary action to the complex impediments of character, community, context and culture. Thus, when the moral philosopher turns to anthropology today, she is most likely looking not, or not only, for alternative theories of freedom of action, but for theoretical and practical insights into what it might mean to investigate and pay respect to the complex lived and often local backgrounds of human action and personhood (Lear 2008; Laugier 2015; Hämäläinen 2016). Feminist and postcolonial anthropologists, among others, have made poignant critiques of individualist notions underlying liberal understandings of agency, freedom and the relationship between ethics and social norms, in ways that resonate with parallel critiques in philosophy. Saba Mahmood (2005) shows how female piety in Islamic moral reform movements challenges liberal feminist assumptions about the relationship between individualism and ethics. The pious bodily practices of her female informants – though embedded in religious and patriarchal structures – come forth as a kind of creative agency with transformative potential. Lila Abu-Lughod’s work on the Islamic veil insists on looking at what different people and communities do with different kinds of veils, as a requisite for any conclusions about veils as instruments of oppression or freedom (2005). Her early work on Bedouin communities in Egypt also explores how morality is expressed in poetic form by men and women, pointing to the maintenance of moral communities through sentiments and poetry (cf. 1986, 1993).3 Similarly, Veena Das’s work describes moral agency as immersed in and carried by everyday tasks of maintaining a liveable world in fraught circumstances (Das 2007, 2020). Such work highlights how embeddedness, rather than only being able to function as an obstacle to freedom and moral action, is also always the prerequisite of any lived liberties and agencies. As we see it, philosophy and anthropology have much to learn from each other as their different trajectories intersect, thus creating a unique opportunity for cross-disciplinary pollination and mutual collaboration in negotiating the roles of ‘the individual’, ‘the intersubjective’ and ‘the social’ when seeking to understand moral change.

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Normativity: Moral Relativism, Moral Critique and Moral Progress Another topic that is central to understanding moral change, where complicated patterns of differences and similarities between moral philosophy and moral anthropology show up, is ‘normativity’.4 Even though moral change has not been a core theoretical issue in moral philosophy, it has generally, from Plato onwards, been considered a threatening theoretical and moral challenge to the discipline’s investment in providing moral guidelines. Moral differences and fundamental changes in moral compasses have most often been found disquieting because they seem to pose a challenge to moral objectivity and the ethical reliability of any society’s current morality. They thus seem to undermine our moral judgement and ability to act in morally justified ways (Stokes 2017; Eriksen 2020: 81–160). If what we formerly considered to be morally acceptable turned out to be bad and unjust (e.g. slavery and torture), how can we trust what we believe in today (e.g. equality between the sexes, the prohibition of incest)? By the same token, moral change also seems to undermine the possibility of genuine cross-cultural and crosshistorical moral comparison, evaluation and critique. A lot of moral philosophical work has been put into showing how, across history and between cultures, there are universal moral issues, values and principles that do not change and can serve as the foundation for cross-cultural and cross-historical moral comparison, evaluation and critique (see, e.g., Raz 1994; Moody-Adams 2002; Nussbaum 1993, 2007). Although there is much to appreciate in this work, moral change here tends to evaporate as a substantive or even real phenomenon. When that happens, something of vital importance to human lives slides out of view, as humans experience and at times must deal with sometimes radical moral changes in their personal lives, as well as on a societal level (Lear 2008). It is therefore important that we also keep the legacy of ‘flux-thinkers’, such as Heraclitus, Friedrich Nietzsche and Foucault, alive in discussions of moral change. In anthropology, different forms of moral change are frequently discussed and described, but they have generally not been conceptualized as a challenging problem to be solved. This is, among other things, because modern anthropology was born of the ambition to inquire into other cultures in an objective, scientific, descriptive way in order to understand without passing moral and culturally biased judgement (Fassin 2015a). Moral relativism, that is, versions of the idea that different individuals’ or societies’ moralities are incommensurable and only valid for members of the particular society in question, was, for a long time, the dominant meta-ethical stance of anthropologists (Laidlaw 2017). Fieldwork descriptions of how radically differently ‘primitive tribes’ thought and lived around the world also had a powerful impact on the public imagination, as well as on the philosophical community, in the early twentieth century. Moral relativism shaped the sensibilities of Anglophone moral philosophers, who were struggling to consolidate moral philosophy on a secular basis (Appiah 2015: 561–63). The early decades



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of the twentieth century became the era of meta-ethics in philosophy; the study of ‘moral language’ gained increasing prominence and philosophers also saw themselves as representatives of a modern scientific approach to morality. It was argued that words like ‘good’ or ‘just’ did not denote facts of reality but only expressed, for example, subjective emotions. Moral relativism has to this day remained a widespread meta-ethical theoretical background for most anthropologists (Zigon 2008: 9–19; Laidlaw 2014: 23–32). Even though this understanding of anthropology has since been challenged and changed in several ways, not least as a result of the growing importance of socially engaged anthropology, the contemporary anthropologist’s ethos is still based on accurately describing and interpreting actual, contingent forms of living, valuing and knowing. The trajectory of Anglophone moral philosophy has again been quite different. Here we see a regained confidence in largely objectivist normative ethics from the mid-twentieth century and a relative marginalization of moral relativism in philosophical ethics (for exceptions, see Harman 1975; Wong 2009; Velleman 2015). Meta-ethical conversations, in which relativism features as a live option, have continued to the present day, but they are not broadly seen, by philosophers, as challenges to the possibility of offering objective ethical judgements. The latter half of the twentieth century saw an upsurge of new formulations of the classical normative ethical theories: utilitarian/consequentialist (e.g. Richard B. Brandt, Peter Singer, Peter Unger, John Broome), Kantian and contractualist theories (e.g. John Rawls, T.M. Scanlon, Christine Korsgaard, Onora O’Neill), and virtue-ethical theories (e.g. Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, Rosalind Hursthouse, Julia Annas). The search for objectivity in moral philosophy is today largely, though not unanimously, seen as the search for universally valid principles for good action or personhood. The regained confidence in largely objectivist normative ethics has also been evident from the 1980s onwards in the still ongoing revival of otherwise extinct discussions of moral progress (see Singer 1981; Moody-Adams 1999, 2017; Rorty 2007; Nussbaum 2007; Buchanan and Powell 2018; Kitcher 2011, 2021).5 In contrast to the anthropological research community, most of these moral philosophers have used the need to attend to moral change as an incentive to reinforce a normative agenda and a normative professional identity. Morality is often strongly linked to normative universality (see, e.g., Moody-Adams 1999). The making of a philosophical contribution, again, is construed as tapping into that normative universality by offering criteria for evaluating what is truly morally good and bad. Changing moralities are thus subsumed under a universalist narrative of ethical truth and progress (or regress). Although this normative angle on change is far from universally embraced by philosophers interested in the moral implications of societal change, it is currently shaping parts of the field in a way that risks increasing the distance between philosophers and researchers in other, more empirically or descriptively oriented fields, such as anthropology. For anthropologists, the philosophical discourses on progress can seem incomprehensible, parochial and

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ignorant of the more complex implications of the very changes that they set out to evaluate as progress (or regress). From the perspective of moral philosophers, anthropologists’ descriptions and analyses of changing worlds can be seen as merely dealing with changes of ‘mores’, with little deeper philosophical or indeed moral import, when the difficult normative issues associated with such changes are not dealt with. However, the distinction between ‘the descriptive anthropologists’ and ‘the normatively engaged philosophers’ is, if taken to apply widely to contemporary anthropology and philosophy, an overgeneralization and an oversimplification. Firstly, there can be no practice of ‘description’ without normativity in the form of, for example, ideals of good description. Secondly, there are currently strong trends of empirically informed and descriptively oriented moral philosophy, for instance, in experimental philosophy, so-called x-phi, and in moral psychology (see, e.g., Appiah 2008; Greene 2013; Buchanan and Powell 2018). Anthropology contains a plurality of methodologies, including ethnography, multi-sited ethnography, auto-ethnography, history and archaeology, producing in different combinations a plethora of ways of delimiting and engaging what is to be described. Reading anthropology could further expand moral philosophers’ descriptive toolkits in useful ways. The relativist spirit of anthropology has also been revisited and revised many times over the past century: the idea of cultures as ‘sealed spheres’ has been deemed untenable and insights into cultural complexity, change and intercultural exchange have made the methodological prohibition against the ethical critique of other cultures seem less obvious. As anthropologists have increasingly directed their attention towards locations closer to home, they have also become more used to working with cultural landscapes in which they are personally involved and evaluatively implicated. Zigon, for one, has been engaged in criticizing ‘the war on drugs’ in the United States (Zigon 2018a, 2018b). Bracketing moral evaluation and judgement has thus, for several reasons, become increasingly ethically complicated and theoretically problematic in anthropology (Fassin 2014: 6–8, 2015a: 2–10; Zigon 2008: 10–11; Ortner 2019).

A Joint Focus on ‘the Everyday’ One research trajectory relevant to the understanding of moral change that for some years now has engaged both moral anthropologists and moral philosophers is the focus on what is often loosely referred to as ‘the everyday’, ‘the immanent’ or ‘the ordinary’ (Laugier 2015).6 One of the strong trends in moral anthropology in recent years, as mentioned above, has been that of ‘ordinary ethics’. But even among those anthropologists who do not explicitly work under the label ‘ordinary ethics’ or who are even openly critical of it, we can identify a closely related underlining of everyday life as a crucial site of the moral (e.g. Zigon 2008: 3, 161; Keane 2016: 3, 10; Robbins 2007, 2016). In so far as anthropological work consists of fieldwork in various communities and descriptions of



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observations made in these sites, the anthropological literature is generally rich in narrations of the actual life and transformations of individuals, practices and societies. As Veena Das remarks, like poems, ‘[a]n anthropological text, we know, is marked by a certain kind of excess or a certain surplus. Call it thick ethnography, call it fascination with detail’ (Das 2020: 39). In the philosophical context, ‘ordinary’ signals a shift from abstractions, (over)generalizations and theoretical system-building towards a focus on and descriptions of the complex and unruly lived realities that the theories are supposed to be about. A significant attraction for moral philosophers in the work of moral anthropologists is that the latter often produce texts radiant with an ethical sensibility, beauty and attention to the paradoxes of human life only rarely seen in the long tradition of moral philosophy. Here we witness what it means to incarnate ‘the point of view from which we see and attend with warmth and sympathy to the complex reality of human life’ (Diamond 1997: 246). It seems to us that this complex reality, with its numerous moving and interacting parts, is precisely what we need to attend to in order to develop better theoretical, empirical and ethical understandings of the phenomenon of moral change.

Book Overview We have ordered the contents of the book into two sections. The first consists of chapters in which case studies of various forms of change with ethical implications take centre stage. The second section contains more theoretical and philosophical discussions of changing morality. This ordering is dictated by a ground-up approach: we believe that theoretical discussion is more helpful when we have relevant cases and contexts fresh in our minds, and that ‘the field’ can alert us to things we ought to take into consideration, but which we can tend to overlook when reflecting and theorizing. The chapters of the latter section are therefore not best understood as theoretical elaborations of case studies, with the cases serving the role of ‘illustrations’ and ‘examples’ of theoretical insights; rather, they introduce philosophical conversations that, for instance, seek to complicate, deepen and expand the range of tools and topics at work in moral philosophy based on insights from ‘the field’. They use case materials as moral laboratories, reminders, objects of comparison and starting points for readdressing or raising new moral philosophical questions about changing lives. Marriage has always figured prominently in the anthropological imagination due to its central role in most communities as a union, often a legal and religious one, with implications for kinship, daily life, gender roles and the transfer of wealth and power through generations. In a lower-income neighbourhood of East Amman, women today try to navigate the challenges of marriage in hay al-ayyam (these days), a period experienced as a collective descent into amorality. Using Raymond Williams’s notion of ‘a structure of feeling’ as a guide, Susan

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MacDougall’s chapter traces the transforming moralities of marriage in Jordan and shows how evolving economic and social circumstances create new ways for people to relate to themselves and new moral ideals for them to aspire to. In the urban landscapes of Amman, business-as-usual morality also meets the vibrant ethics of queer living, resulting in the emergence of a novel space for shame, irony and moral change. In her chapter, Marie Rask Bjerre Odgaard traces the meanings of ‘ayb as the word used to shame those who stand out from the ordinary in morally corrupt ways, but also as a tool used to playfully tease and challenge normative gendered expressions among queer friends and in the queer community. With reference to phenomenological thinkers such as Lisa Guenther and Sara Ahmed, she demonstrates how subjectivity is shaped in the experience of ‘ayb as both a powerful cultural ideal and an ironic experience, pointing also to the potentiality and temporality of queering shame in the context of urban Amman. Cheryl Mattingly’s chapter likewise centres on the realm of ethical potentiality and ponders its recognition in fieldwork. How might the existential-philosophical question of human possibility be posed when focusing on how it is addressed by particular people in situations shaped by structural conditions and cultural norms? She draws upon long-term fieldwork among African American families in Los Angeles and engagement with Bernhard Waldenfels’s phenomenological work to tune into experiences of ethical novelty. In the context of one family, she explores the indeterminate structures of ethical experience and the ways in which ordinary life serves as a crucial space where the possibility for moral change emerges. Joel Robbins’s chapter revisits the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, who, at the time of his fieldwork with them in the 1990s, were living in the aftermath of a moral revolution, which, instead of doing away with the old, had left the people to negotiate the demands of two incompatible moral frameworks. A rapid conversion to a charismatic and eschatological form of Christianity by the whole population in 1977 had resulted in their ethical life being recentred around the urgent goal of saving as many people as possible, in the face of the imminent return of Jesus. But the dictates of individual salvation in their type of Christianity was at odds with the relational ethics of their previous form of life, in ways that had far-reaching implications for their moral psychology. Robbins uses the case to reflect both on the nature of moral revolutions and on the application of the idea of moral progress to them, in ways that resonate with current moral philosophical work on these themes. The following two chapters deal with ongoing ethical renegotiation in institutional settings. Both chapters engage, in different ways, with the normative question of how changing ethical life within the discussed institutions should or could be contested or shaped. Drawing on recent literature on the notion of ‘moral injury’, Elizabeth M. Bounds and Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon explore the differences in social recognition associated with two domains of ethically fraught labour in the United States: the military and the prisons. In recent years, several activists and



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scholars have suggested that certain ills suffered by soldiers in their work should be understood in ethical rather than psychological terms: as injuries afflicting their moral personhood and character rather than merely their mental health. While correctional officers in prisons are often similarly forced to compromise ordinary ethical conduct in their use of state-sanctioned violence, the discussion of moral injury has not yet been applied to them, largely due to the different cultural valorization of the soldier, in contrast to the correctional officer. This difference opens a vista on an ongoing process of moral recognition and renegotiation. As the populations of the West grow ever older, and with the rise and subsequent modulations of welfare states, institutional care of the elderly is an area where practices and their moral underpinnings are, in many places, under renegotiation. Meanwhile, growing scientific knowledge of psychology and human relations has contributed to challenging previous ideals and methodologies of care. In his chapter, Rasmus Dyring investigates the transformations of moral agency and relationality that occur in people with dementia, and explores the significance of the social-ontological underpinnings of approaches to institutional care. He relies on the ‘non-substantive social ontology’ found in the work of phenomenological thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, as well as observations from a dementia care centre in Denmark, to critically supplement the currently prevailing paradigms in institutional dementia care, namely, person- and relationship-centred care and neuro-normative discourses. With the following six chapters, which form part two of the book, we move further into philosophical conversations about moral change. Women in workplaces, gay marriage and equal rights for people of colour are some of the moral and social revolutions that have transformed American life over the last century. Moral revolutions change the lives of communities and individuals, so that what was once morally outrageous is rendered morally acceptable and what was once morally acceptable is deemed morally outrageous. Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Robert Baker’s chapter explores the idea that revolutionary changes in forms of life share a structure analogous to that of scientific revolutions. When life changes in a major way, new moral territories open up that challenge our ordinary morality. In her chapter, Cecilie Eriksen investigates the ethical normativity of such liminal spaces by looking at the phenomenon of care in anthropological studies of homeless life, testimonies from the Second World War and the post-transformation life of Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s short story ‘The Metamorphosis’. She does so in dialogue with Jarrett Zigon’s concept of ‘a moral breakdown’, Lear’s work on ‘ironic experiences’ and Anne O’Byrne’s idea of ‘an end of ethics’. This dialogue sheds light on some of the resources that can help people to recreate a moral world after radical changes to their form of life and concludes that in human life there are no ethical voids. Picking up a thread of sensitivity to context and situatedness from philosophical discussions on ethics and narrative literature, as well as philosophers

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such as Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, Nora Hämäläinen explores why moral philosophers often render the phenomena of moral difference and change invisible or marginal to ethics. She does so by critically analysing Michele Moody-Adams’s Fieldwork in Familiar Places and by suggesting that rather than an idea of truth, the activity of ‘world-making’ should be made central in moral philosophy to gain a clear view of moral change – along with an increased dialogue and collaborative work between anthropology and moral philosophy. An important area of moral puzzlement, especially in secular contexts today, regards concerns that in a religious setting would be explicated in terms of impiety. New technologies for manipulating living organisms, for example, elicit the moral judgement that the suggested action would be impious or against nature, with the action therefore being ruled out. Yet, without a shared framework of religious belief, and in the realm of secular moral debate, such arguments lose a great deal of their explanatory and argumentative force and are easily relegated to the realm of personal sentiment. Cora Diamond’s chapter explores the question of how to do justice to piety as a constitutive aspect of moral life in a complex and changing world, in which we know that our sense of absolute moral prohibition rarely is the final word. Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen, taking her cue from a recent article by Cora Diamond, explores two different responses to moral disagreement: one whereby we experience difference and disagreement as potentially widening and enriching our understanding of moral possibility, and another whereby we consider the other’s moral thinking unhinged, off the rails or miscarried. The latter kind of judgement seems to rely on the idea that a certain trajectory of moral development has an unavoidable momentum, as well as relying on a form of moral universalism. The modern slave-owner, for example, knowing what ‘we’ know about human beings, cannot from this perspective both claim that slavery is right and still make sense. The intuitions pertaining to this latter form of judgement, while widely shared among philosophers, give rise to a range of difficult questions relating to the nature of moral reasoning, cultural difference and moral change, which Christensen seeks to address. The theme of trajectories of moral change is also picked up by Niklas Forsberg, who focuses on how conceptual change impinges on our first-person attempts to make ethical sense of our lives, duties and place in the world. Exploring modulations that the concept of a father has gone through in mainstream Western settings, he shows that some of our moral quandaries relate to a kind of pluri-temporality of our moral language and moral experience: how we, in Stanley Cavell’s words, sometimes carry ‘two historical periods in one human breast’.7 Cecilie Eriksen is a moral philosopher who works for the Danish National Center of Ethics. She is the author of Moral Change – Dynamics, Structure and Normativity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She has also published on basic trust, moral progress and Ludwig Wittgenstein and co-edited and contributed



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to volumes on topics such as law and legitimacy, modern work life and contextual ethics. The latest of these is Philosophical Perspectives on Moral Certainty (Routledge, forthcoming). Nora Hämäläinen is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic, and the author of Literature and Moral Theory (Bloomsbury, 2015), Descriptive Ethics: What Does Moral Philosophy Know about Morality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Är Trump Postmodern: En essä om sanning och populism (Förlaget M, 2019).

Notes  1. In this introduction, we use the words ‘morality’, ‘ethics’, ‘moral’, ‘ethical’, etc., interchangeably.   2. At least in Western philosophy, which is the tradition we are familiar with and the one we focus on in this introduction. All references to ‘philosophy’ are thus to the Western academic tradition of philosophy.   3. We thank Marie Rask Bjerre Odgaard for adding her insights into feminist and postcolonial thinking in anthropology to this section.   4. ‘The normative’ is often explained in contrast to ‘the descriptive’ and though this is somewhat misleading (as all description can be said to presuppose normativity), it can serve as a heuristic starting point: the normative is about prescription, about ought, about evaluation – for instance, what ought to be or ought to be done or whether something is good or bad, right or wrong. An ideal of justice is thus normative in that it prescribes how, for example, the benefits in a society ought to be distributed, and a traffic rule is normative in that it prescribes how we ought to act in traffic. Neither describes how humans in fact do distribute benefits or act in traffic. Another way of characterizing normativity is to say that the normative makes a claim on us: it commands, obliges, recommends or guides.   5. For overviews of contemporary discussions of moral progress, consult Musschenga and Meynen (2017) and Sauer, Blunden, Eriksen and Rehren (2021).   6. The use of the term ‘the immanent’ here does not imply that attention to ‘the ordinary’ excludes attention to the place of divinity or religion in people’s lives (for a fine example of how to make room for the role of ‘the transcendent’, see Orsi 2016). The stress on ‘the ordinary’ and ‘the everyday’ should also not be understood as excluding extraordinary events, unusual ethical challenges in people’s lives or the need and possibility for radical critique or moral revolutions (see, e.g., Das 2007; Eriksen 2020: 123–36).   7. We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as the participants in the research group Ethics After Individualism at Aarhus University for feedback and useful critique on earlier versions of this introduction. Cecilie Eriksen’s research was supported by Independent Research Fund Denmark – Humanities (grant n° 7013-00068B) and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 851043). Nora Hämäläinen’s research was supported as part of the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, registration no.  CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic. We would also like to warmly thank Joel Robbins and James Laidlaw for hosting us as visiting researchers at the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University in spring 2019. Our stay provided nurturing soil for this book. This open-access library edition has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 851043).

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References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1986. Veiled Sentiments. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 1993. Writing Women’s Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2002. ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’. American Anthropologist 104(3): 783–90. Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret. 1958. ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy 33(124): 1–19. Appiah, Kwame Appiah. 2008. Experiments in Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. . 2010. The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. . 2015. ‘Moral Philosophy’, in Didier Fassin (ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Backwell, pp. 561–77. Baker, Robert. 2019. The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Buchanan, Allen, and Russell Powell. 2018. The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Das, Veena. 1998. ‘Wittgenstein and Anthropology’, Annual Reviews of Anthropology 27: 171–95. . 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2015a. Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty. New York: Fordham University Press. . 2015b. ‘Adjacent Thinking: A Postscript’, in Roma Chatterji (ed.), Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 372–99. . 2015c. ‘Ordinary Ethics’, in Didier Fassin (ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Backwell, pp. 133–49. . 2020. Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology After Wittgenstein. New York: Fordham University Press. Das, Veena, et al. (eds). 2014. The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Diamond, Cora. 1997. ‘Henry James, Moral Philosophers, Moralism’, The Henry James Review 18(3): 243–55. Driver, Julia. 2007. Ethics: The Fundamentals. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Eriksen, Cecilie. 2019. ‘The Dynamics of Moral Revolutions: Prelude to Future Investigations and Interventions’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22(3): 779–92. . 2020. Moral Change: Dynamics, Structure and Normativity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fassin, Didier. 2014. ‘Introduction’, in Didier Fassin and Samuel Lézé (eds), Moral Anthropology: A Critical Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 13–16. . 2015a. ‘Introduction: Towards a Critical Moral Anthropology’, in Didier Fassin (ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Backwell, pp. 1–17. (ed.). 2015b. A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Hoboken, NJ: WileyBackwell. Fassin, Didier, and Samuel Lézé (eds). 2014. Moral Anthropology: A Critical Reader. New York: Routledge.



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Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’, Anthropological Theory 12(2): 161–84. . 2014. Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2018. ‘Ordinary Possibility, Transcendent Immanence, and Responsive Ethics: A Philosophical Anthropology of the Small Event’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8(1–2): 172–84. . 2019. ‘Waiting: Anticipation and Episodic Time’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 37(1): 17–31. Mattingly, Cheryl, et al. (eds). 2017. Moral Engines – Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Moody-Adams, Michelle M. 1999. ‘The Idea of Moral Progress’, Metaphilosophy 30(3): 168–83. . 2002. Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. . 2017. ‘Moral Progress and Human Agency’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20(1): 153–68. Murdoch, Iris. 1997. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. London: Chatto & Windus. Musschenga, Albert, and Gerben Meynen. 2017. ‘Moral Progress: An Introduction’, Ethical Theory & Moral Practice 20(1): 3–15. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1993. ‘Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach’, in Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (eds), The Quality of Life. Oxford: Oxford University, pp. 242–69. . 2007. ‘On Moral Progress: A Response to Richard Rorty’, The University of Chicago Law Review 74(3): 939–60. Orsi, Robert. 2016. History and Presence. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 2019. ‘Practicing Engaged Anthropology’, Anthropology of this Century 25 (May). Retrieved 20 May 2021 from http://aotcpress.com/articles/ practicing-engaged-anthropology/. Parsons, Kathryn Pyne. 1974. ‘Nietzsche and Moral Change’, Feminist Studies 2(1): 57–76. Rachels, James, and Stuart Rachels. 2015. The Elements of Moral Philosophy. New York: McGraw-Hill Education. Raz, Joseph. 1994. ‘Moral Change and Social Relativism’, Social Philosophy and Policy 11(1): 139–58. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2007. ‘Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change’, Ethnos 73(3): 293–314. . 2016. ‘What Is the Matter with Transcendence? On the Place of Religion in the New Anthropology of Ethics’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22: 767–808. Rorty, Richard. 2007. ‘Dewey and Posner and Moral Progress’, The University of Chicago Law Review 74(3): 915–27. Sauer, Hanno, Charlie Blunden, Cecilie Eriksen and Paul Rehren. 2021. ‘Moral Progress: Recent Developments’, Philosophy Compass 16(19). https://doi. org/10.1111/phc3.12769. Singer, Peter. 1981. The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.



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Smyth, Nicholas. 2020. ‘A Genealogy of Emancipatory Values’, Inquiry – An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.1080/00201 74X.2020.1758766. Stokes, Patrick. 2017. ‘Towards a New Epistemology of Moral Progress’, European Journal of Philosophy 25(4): 1824–43. Throop, Jason C. 2010. Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap. Berkeley: University of California Press. Timmons, Mark. 2013. Moral Theory: An Introduction. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield. Velleman, J. David. 2015. Foundations for Moral Relativism. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Widlok, Thomas. 2013. ‘Norm and Spontaneity: Elicitation with Moral Dilemma Scenarios’, in Monica Heintz (ed.), The Anthropology of Moralities. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 20–45. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana. Wolff, Jonathan. 2018. An Introduction to Moral Philosophy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Wong, David B. 2009. Natural Moralities: A Defence of Pluralistic Relativism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zigon, Jarrett. 2007. ‘Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand’, Anthropological Theory 7(2): 131–50. . 2008. Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berg. . 2014. ‘An Ethics of Dwelling and a Politics of World-Building: A Critical Response to Ordinary Ethics’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(4): 746–64. . 2018a. Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding. New York: Fordham University Press. . 2018b. A War on People: A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1 Moral Change through the Lens of Marriage Susan MacDougall

When I made my first research trip to Jordan in 2005, there was a Starbucks near my home in the well-heeled Abdoun neighbourhood of Amman, the capital. It was on a bit of a lonely stretch – the Blue Fig Café was next door, but if you continued any further past it, the surroundings looked a little sparse. There was a tent pitched on the empty plot of land behind the Starbucks and sometimes the sheep that usually grazed in front of the tent crossed in front of the iconic Starbucks façade in a tableau that seemed designed for a caption about social change in action. By 2013, the behemoth Taj Mall was constructed in that sparse expanse beyond the Starbucks and an overpass was built to accommodate the uptick in traffic. Within a year of the mall’s opening, the surrounding area was booming. Empty spaces were turned into parking lots for those who wanted to park close to the mall’s cinema rather than several stories underground; hipster burger joints and money changers and commercial banks all moved onto the strip of increasingly busy road between Taj Mall and the American Embassy. Abdoun in 2005 was a place where some drivers stepped on the gas at night, taking advantage of the wide empty streets. In 2013, it was a place where you sat in traffic between 4 and 8 pm, cursing at the way people pulled in and out of the restaurants and banks that lined the busy main drag without using turn signals. Jordanians did not need to get out of their cars (or buses, or taxis, or motorcycles) to feel the way this crowded patch of Amman had changed. Amman’s urban landscape physically shifted during the early noughties, when I was doing fieldwork. The city’s residents found that their routes were disrupted by construction and familiar sites were rendered unrecognizable. There was nothing abstract about this change. The city looked different and the way people moved through it was different. Behind these changes were national economic policies that prioritized attracting foreign investment, often at the expense of public services; these construction projects cannot be understood without paying attention to their political and economic

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dimensions (Parker 2009; Kadhim and Al-Akiely 2015; Abu-Hamdi 2016). But, as Kathleen Stewart (2007) has shown, the everyday experience of physically moving through the built environment and encountering other humans in it is a rich starting point for understanding social realities. The particular circumstances shaping Amman’s transformation have their attendant affects as well (Anderson 2015). The case of Abdoun, and the mushrooming of consumptionenabling architecture that took place there, shows how change is a felt and embodied category as much as it is an intellectual one. My intention here is to explore the implications of these felt and embodied dimensions of change for understanding moral change. My fieldwork was centred on the East Amman neighbourhood that I call Tal al-Zahra, where the environmental shifts that took place in Abdoun were equally present in the background of daily life. I was interested in learning about the everyday accommodations that people, in particular women, made in their inner lives to navigate this outer change. During the period that I spent time there, from 2009 to 2015, this accommodation was most evident in conversations about ordinary domestic affairs, such as housekeeping, child-rearing and marriage in all of its varied stages and facets. Marriage offers a particularly rich lens through which to consider the ways the changing city and changing morals reflect one another, hence my decision to take up that lens here. Within anthropology, marriage has been of interest since the discipline’s earliest days (McGee 1896). A union, often a legal one, with implications for kinship, daily life, gender roles and the transfer of wealth and power through generations, marriage features prominently in the anthropological imagination. In contemporary Jordan, it reflects the concerns of this moment while activating implied connections to the norms and morals of a timeless ‘Jordanian culture’. Fida Adely (2012) has shown the ambivalent place of the goal of marriage in young women’s conceptions of their aspirational futures, especially as they increasingly pursue and excel in educational environments. Geoff Hughes (2015) has argued that emergent concerns about a ‘marriage crisis’ in Jordan have put the spotlight on the state’s regulation of marriage as an institution and on the need for marriage to rein in young men’s natural inclination towards vice (Hughes 2017). For the women I worked with in the lower-income neighbourhood of Tal al-Zahra, marriage was where these numerous social and political issues intersected with their everyday lives in the most obvious way, inviting them to take stances on the way they wished to orient themselves in relation to ongoing moral change in their environments. As norms around gender, and particularly romance and dating, opened up (Jordanians used the Arabic infitah to describe the current state of affairs), their ability to predict how a relationship between two people would proceed seemed even murkier than it had before. As this was often a deeply emotional experience, I explore it as a structure of feeling (Williams 1977), an arc of emotions that people experienced as individuals but that, from an analytic distance, appears similarly across individuals and reflects evident social trends.



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The anthropology of ethics has generally been attentive to the ways in which changing social circumstances create new ways for people to relate to themselves and new ideals for them to aspire to. C. Jason Throop’s (2014) concept of ‘moral moods’ describes diffuse feeling-states that ‘inhabit existential intensities that are perhaps more diffuse than those that arise in more marked moments of “moral breakdown” (Zigon 2007, 2011)’1 (Throop 2014: 72). Jarrett Zigon’s (2007) notion of moral breakdown, which Throop invokes, also makes reference to the strong emotions accompanying moments of ethical reflection. I propose here to continue this interest in the connection between ethical experience and feelings, by proposing that the social contexts where ethical experiences arise also have their emotional dimensions. It is especially important for anthropologists to consider the ways that moral change takes shape through shared emotional experiences given the immediate resonance of explanations using a decontextualized version of this approach with broad audiences. Outside of the anthropology of ethics, in the unlikely pages of the Harvard Business Review, this sense of change as a mood appears vividly in the commonplace acronym VUCA, which stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Contributors to the Harvard Business Review have called it a ‘trendy business acronym’, a nod to just how jargon-y the term is. Coined at the US Army War College in 1987 to describe the post-Cold War global environment, VUCA was quickly appropriated by businesses to describe the new management challenges they faced as they attempted to globalize, to innovate, to disrupt. It is a fixture in business leadership literature, serving as a blanket contextual fact that explains why a specific set of leadership skills is important. For those who advise leaders, the VUCA environment is a call to action: leaders should carry themselves differently to thrive in this kind of complexity (Kegan and Lahey 2001; Petrie 2014; Anderson and Adams 2016). VUCA is not useful as a category of differentiation; its application to business environments is tautologically uniform. All contemporary business environments are VUCA because they exist in a VUCA world, which is what our world is and will continue to be until it reaches a stasis of predictable stability the likes of which we have never seen and cannot imagine. Despite its wide application and relatively limited descriptive capacity, VUCA still has important explanatory power for those using it and interacting with it. It identifies the experience that they are having. It is an experiential category, not a historical one. In the words of one Harvard Business Review contributor, in VUCA, ‘Problems no longer arise in the distance; they emerge for the first time in our personal space and require immediate attention’ (Kail 2010). As an ethnographic artefact of our time, VUCA hits many of the same affective notes as the anthropology of ethics does. Charles Hirschkind’s (2006) pious-listening Cairo, Zigon’s (2009) post-Soviet Moscow and Nadia Fadil’s (2009) Brussels all seemed to be landscapes of dramatic social change prompting moral upheaval. As Zigon puts it, ‘much like with the Urapmin described by Robbins, major social and cultural change … increased and made more public these expressions of moral uncertainty’ (Zigon 2009: 264). Amman in

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2013 was similar: against a backdrop of social change that took myriad forms, fleeting moments of tension, such as waiting in traffic or disagreeing with a shopkeeper, prompted angst about the moral state of Jordanian society as a whole. As one taxi driver put it to me as we idled at a particularly congested roundabout, ‘This isn’t a traffic jam, it’s a moral crisis.’2 Given the frequency with which we see these feelings of tension, stress and conflict arising in connection with the social and moral changes that interest anthropologists, management scholars and many Jordanians that I interacted with, I propose that an understanding of moral change will necessarily attend to these feelings. Change itself seems to be associated with a distinct set of affects, emotions, moods. In this chapter, I take up the topic of marriage and women’s conversations about marriage to explore how the recitation of what is new and surprising in a familiar and highly normative area of social life creates its own vibe. I draw on Raymond Williams’s (1977) notion of a structure of feeling to guide this exploration. Williams offers structures of feeling as an alternative to codified, official narratives of what it is like to live in a given epoch; structures of feeling are ‘the whole process of actually living [an epoch’s] consequences’ (1979: 159). This approach holds that emotional experience is inflected with culture and shared across groups (Harding and Pribram 2002). It does so in a way that attempts to give personal and embodied experience due consideration while also recognizing the many layers of structural influence that the notion of ‘culture’ contains. It acknowledges the contradiction that ‘the feelings that belong to us, that animate us as individuals, at the same time, exceed us, extend far beyond the individual’ (Best 2012: 194). Structures of feeling, in other words, allow us to acknowledge the reality of VUCA as lived experience while demanding a stronger historical and sociological context for theorizing those experiences. In what follows, I bring this framework to bear on the way a community of working-class women in Amman, Jordan, talked about marriage during my fieldwork there between 2009 and 2015. I begin with a brief exploration of the social and economic context that prevailed in Jordan during that period. I then delve into the ways women expressed their orientation towards the changes associated with this context through an analysis of their everyday engagements in the high-stakes question of what makes a good marriage. I argue that their feelings were structured in this moment in a way that was not necessarily supportive of strong moral commitments. Morality, in other words, was inflected with a deep sense of effort, of swimming against the amoral current of society.

Moral Change, Ethnographically During my fieldwork in Tal al-Zahra, which is a majority-Muslim area on Amman’s eastern side, the idea of moral change was a pervasive trope. The present, referred to as now (hela’) or these days (hay al-ayyam), was regarded as a problematic moment in which basic principles of social morality, such as



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trust, reciprocity and respect for others and oneself, could not be reliably attributed to other people. Sociologically, this can be linked to rapid economic growth and development in Jordan, as well as large-scale migration. Since King Abdullah II assumed the throne in 1999, he has embraced economic reforms that consolidate wealth in Jordan’s elite and encourage foreign spending and investment in the country, a policy agenda that simultaneously opened up the horizon of possibilities for middle-class identity (Tobin 2012) and made it more difficult for Jordanians to earn the wages that would sustain this middle-class identity. One indicator of the scale of this change is the fact that Jordan is now confronting an unprecedented protest movement about modifications to its tax code that revolve around these issues of rising costs of living, stagnating wages and a government that provides very little in the way of public support. Protest movements have been a part of Jordanian public life for the duration of Jordanian nationhood, which began in its current form in 1946; since then, however, infrastructural changes in the capital, Amman, have rendered these protests increasingly marginal (Schwedler 2012). Where it used to be possible to hold large visible protests that disrupted the flow of urban traffic in front of the Prime Ministry, changes to the city’s roadways have eliminated gathering places from traffic circles and shunted those gathering places to parts of the city where their visual impact is muted. Since 2011, when a movement began gathering to demand government reform and adequate treatment of dramatic economic inequalities, protests have drawn attention to the rights of ordinary people to lead an economically dignified existence (Ryan 2019). These movements unfolded in a nation that hosted a significant number of refugees, amplifying concerns about scarcity and fairness. Large numbers of people displaced from neighbouring countries relocated to Jordan following the American military campaign in Iraq that began in 2003 and the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011; the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2015 has also contributed to the notion of rapid change. Since 2006, Jordan’s population has grown by 87 per cent; a 2015 census concluded that three million of Jordan’s nine million residents were non-Jordanians (Ghazal 2016; Obeidat 2016). The statistical evidence for change in the country’s social make-up is strong. While powerful, the changes in this period mirror the changes of past periods in Jordan’s hundred-year history. Population growth on a similar scale took place after the first Gulf War in 1991. Major Israeli military campaigns in 1948 and 1967 displaced Palestinians in numbers greater than any recent refugee crisis. The arrival of the Ottoman Empire and its subsequent dissolution were likewise periods of change. Jordan, in short, is a nation that has experienced dramatic upheaval in its social fabric at several junctures in the past century. ‘Change’, during the period of my fieldwork, meant something specific to that time, but its realness in that period does not take away from its consistent presence throughout the history of modern Jordan. I am interested here in elaborating a structure of feeling associated with this set of changes. In the part of Amman where I worked, the working-class neighbourhood of Tal al-Zahra, that structure relied on a conviction about the

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present moment’s newness. My interlocutors held this as self-evident: they were living in a time of unprecedented social degradation, where people could no longer be bothered with morality and one needed to be tough and to defend oneself in order to survive in this ruthless world. This view was present in other Jordanian conversational fora as well (MacDougall 2019). Their conversational temporality included two time periods: hay al-ayyam, Arabic for ‘these days’, in which we were living, and ’abl, ‘before’, the time that preceded our collective descent into amorality. Understanding this temporality as part of a structure of feeling is helpful because it allows us to see the flexibility of this conviction: this sort of analysis was most often a way of reacting to, or understanding, something shocking. It did not preclude acknowledging other temporalities (for example, discussing historical events of the recent past or recalling different periods in one’s personal history) or appreciating, or even taking for granted, the genuine goodness of one’s friends or family. Again, politics and history are relevant for contextualizing this understanding of the past. Located between Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Israel and Saudi Arabia, Jordan is located in what we might euphemistically call a ‘geopolitically strategic’ spot, vulnerable to being destabilized by regional conflict. It is also a somewhat unlikely nation-state, run by a monarch whose claim to the throne is based on a tribal lineage connecting the Jordanian ruling family to the Prophet Mohammed. The Jordanian monarchs were originally from the Arabian Peninsula and assumed authority in Jordan with the authorization of the British Mandate. The Jordanian concept of historical past is itself flexible. The modern history of Jordan is much too problematic a narrative for the Jordanian state to adopt it, fraught as it is with competing tribal narratives (Shryock 1997), the integration and also the problematization of the Palestinian population, and civil wars that have been subtly erased from history books (Massad 2001). The Hashemite monarchy’s narrative of Jordan’s history skims over the details of becoming a nation in order to focus on the more important pan-Arab, panIslamic elements of the country’s history, minimizing internal divisions and presenting a story of unity (Al Oudat and Alshboul 2010; Corbett 2011). In Tal al-Zahra, the idea of ‘these days’ as opposed to ‘before’ was not well elaborated; similarly, Jordanian history, as taught in schools or in public spaces such as museums and monuments, is not very specific about the periodicity of the nation’s development. The vague constitution of past in this context is not only a feature of my interlocutors’ experience. The use of this discursive designation of the present as different from the past to interpret or metabolize shock or indignation was a common conversational groove. In the following section, I explore this tendency as it arose with reference to marriage.

Moralities of Marriage Changing ideas of marriage in Jordan represent a particularly fraught structure of feeling for women. Their experiences of first imagining, then considering,



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marriage, and later perhaps living the sequence of engagement–wedding– cohabitation–reproduction–married life, in that order or with disruptions, such as broken engagements, infertility or divorce, are inflected with misapprehension, anxiety and failure to balance the competing imperatives that marriage is meant to fulfil. For women even more than for men, the way they inhabited their marriages indicated either their allegiance to the ‘traditional’, in many ways Durkheimian, notion of marriage as a means of preserving the quintessentially moral institution of the family, or their acquiescence to the pressures and pleasures of ‘change’, a reconfiguration of that Durkheimian family unit into a vehicle for the realization of individual desires. In a modern marriage, both partners were economic contributors and they made choices collectively as a couple – a process known as co-operation (ta’awan). Because women were independent financially, they did not have to tolerate uncooperative behaviour from their male partners. They generally established this dynamic during the period of courtship, which evolved through dating relationships and into love, which, if true, led to marriage. The decision to marry in this way was called zawaj ’an hub, ‘marriage for love’. At every point, this pursuit of an individual, tailored path was imagined to be littered with anxiety. Women warned one another through stories and gossip of the potential pitfalls of this arrangement: if women were full economic contributors, they had priorities other than the house. If women did not tolerate uncooperative behaviour from their male partners, they were at risk of leaving out of pride and ruining their homes. If males did not have important roles caring for their families, they were at risk of feeling weak and insignificant and losing their masculinity. (Some jealousy, gheera, was regarded as an essential feature of love, especially men’s love for women, since it activated protective impulses; a woman who required no protection had no ability to draw a man to her.) And love, of all the possible risks, appeared to be the most dangerous, since it exposed a woman to two potential pitfalls. First, she could mistake something other than love for the real thing and be seduced, ruining her marriage prospects. Second, she could lose herself in love, forget the importance of pragmatism and end up marrying into an unhappy life or a doomed union. While this might have been the reality some women met some of the time, its force as an arc of normative emotional experience in relation to marriage was much more powerful than its real-life manifestation. Its normative power was equally forceful in creating anxiety about the pursuit of a traditional path. While all of the aspects of marriage for love came with warnings, the same was true of traditional marriage. If the man was the sole breadwinner, his wife was totally financially dependent on him. If men and women divided decisionmaking into issues of solely domestic concern – women’s domain – and issues of genuine family concern, which were for men to handle, they could minimize conflict and she would be free to act as she wished in her house, but she would have little say over his actions and decisions. If families contracted a marriage, there was a guarantee of deep social support for a union and an expectation that things would go smoothly, since the families had enough in common to get

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on with one another, but a problematic set of in-laws left women essentially without recourse. Evidence of similar backgrounds was seen to minimize areas of major disagreement. At every stage, women were aware of the risks they were facing, primarily because they were informed of these risks by their close friends and family. In short, women saw the highly normative life aspiration of marriage as both deeply desirable and terrifying. While this narrative unfolded in Tal al-Zahra through conversations held between friends and neighbours over coffee, it was mirrored in research-driven discourses about Jordan as well. Discourses of women’s empowerment viewed traditional expectations of marriage as constraining: marriages where women’s economic contributions were viewed as secondary tended to limit their educational and career prospects, and the official authorities in Jordan regard this as opposed to women’s empowerment. Education and employment are avenues to progress and forces opposing those developments are obstacles to progress. The persistent statistical finding that women are not entering the workforce at the same rate that they are completing their education, then, is a problematic, nonlinear development trajectory that presents what Fida Adely (2012) has described as a ‘gendered paradox’. Adely’s work, and my own, shows that women contest this narrow narrative, but that contesting it requires a dramatic amount of social and emotional labour. The force of this norm underlines the power that a collective structure of feeling can carry.

Change, No Progress: Following the Marriage Example Marriage speaks effectively to questions about moral change and to the need for a framework that takes the felt experience of this change into account. As laid out above, conceptions of marriage as a key moral institution lead to troubling consequences if marriage ideals ‘progress’ to represent a freely made contract between loving equals and if they ‘return’ to a nostalgic perfection of gender-based duty fulfilment in the expectations of intergenerational kin groups. It is freeing to dispense with both of these heuristics. For the Jordanian women that I worked with, moral change meant that marriage fully maintained its social significance as a major rite of passage into adulthood, but also that they individually had to grapple with what they wished that adulthood to look like and somehow reconcile the gaps between their actual lived realities and the wishes that they articulated for themselves. Social change in Jordan has translated into changes in the way marriage is viewed and experienced. As more women pursue higher education and paid employment outside the home, their roles within the home shift as well. The idea of insijam, or compatibility, has emerged as a key marriage criterion among young women, who now want a male partner who understands them (Adely 2016), a change from approaches orientated toward commensurate socioeconomic status and family friendships. Young men’s modes of inhabiting



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masculinity are similarly in a period of change. Upward mobility for ambitious young men in Jordan typically proceeds along two lines depending on one’s starting point in terms of social class: either through the adoption of a pious persona (Achilli 2015) or the adoption of an elite one, characterized by the leisure activities of well-to-do young people (Schwedler 2010). Experientially, these shifts settle into the body and the emotions as apprehension and even fear. Prioritizing insijam means seeing an individual for their personality first and viewing other attributes as complementary information; this opens one up a horizon of possibility that de-emphasizes important other attributes, such as financial stability or family reputation, and leads to momentary happiness and deferred regret. Individuals can certainly seek to balance their desire for compatibility with other things, and women who seek insijam do not abandon their desire for financial security, nor their discernment in relation to a potential partner’s family background. Insijam can be difficult to assess, though, given the relatively limited information that is available on it. In Jordan, those couples who do marry for love generally see one another in public places and in groups before they are married. In Tal al-Zahra, as well as in most communities within Jordan, it was not typical in the 2010s to have the sorts of dating relationships that are common in Euro-American contexts. Some people did date, but dating relationships were circumscribed and often both parties kept them secret until their families could announce their engagement, which rendered the relationship respectable. Before engagement, young men and women typically met in places that both parties were meant to be anyway (such as school or work) and exchanged surreptitious text messages. Couples who embodied a more ‘free’ (the loanword that Jordanian Arabic speakers in Tal al-Zahra used to describe more liberal mores) attitude towards dating would gather together with groups of friends and perhaps go out to restaurants together in the classic sense of ‘dating’; this was common in elite Jordanian circles but decidedly uncommon in Tal al-Zahra. The more common route to marriage in Tal al-Zahra was some version of an arranged marriage, zawaj taqlidi. In this process, the women of a groom’s family, primarily his mother, travelled ahead of him, making connections with eligible women through informal inquiries and formal visits to would-be brides in their family homes. Suitors visited the women their female relatives approved of, making a number of formal visits before making their proposals. The precise progression of these relationships could vary greatly, but this way of approaching marriage allowed for courtship within the boundaries of family supervision. Expectations of the marital relationship were in flux and norms relating to courtship moved uneasily between allowing for new desires (such as insijam) and circumscribing the ways that young couples could explore their compatibility in the name of family-held notions of propriety. These shifts in marriage norms have created a shared structure of feeling characterized by uncertainty and confusion, accompanied by languages of disapproval and judgement with regard to the ways that some people inhabit these emerging, new ways of doing things.

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Marriage, in short, led Jordanians to reflect on the meaning of moral change for them and for their lives. It also led to reflection on the meaning of moral change for their society (mujtama’na) and their culture (thaqafatna) as the effects of other people’s choices and changing ways of thinking rippled out to reach them. Women felt the vicissitudes of these changes deeply as they lived their own confusions and ambivalences about marriage; they also waxed philosophical about the overdetermined nature of these emotional vicissitudes from the vantage point of hindsight or advice-giving. Their discourses translated this intensely felt reality into a known commodity, which did little to ease individual experiences in the moment but suggested that wisdom could follow. Change, in this structure, was still too much of an unfinished affair to constitute progress.

The Challenge of Morality: Judgement as Practice The turmoil of change left many of my Tal al-Zahra interlocutors with the feeling that living morally can be lonely and unrewarding. While the wish to live morally was shared by the women I worked with, and their personal reflections on what that meant in their own lives were continuous, they often experienced the holding of moral stances as effortful. This was true in their own lives and in the lives of others as they observed them. The events of others’ lives also seemed to include a rather large amount of potentially immoral decisions that people made as a way of getting by in difficult circumstances. They devoted considerable time to puzzling out what was what: when were people behaving admirably and when were they behaving abominably? Everyday conversational judgement allowed them to practise sorting this out with friends and acquaintances by collectively debating different interpretations. This daily practice also equipped them to make these distinctions in their own lives and to develop a sense of what best matched their personal moral commitments and other mundane goals when they needed to make these decisions themselves. Women’s individual experiences of this kind of moral conflict can be ‘affordances’ (Keane 2016) to prompt reflection on their personal projects of moral becoming, but they also make sense of these moments in a larger social context where these affordances arise frequently. Their conversations with others, and about others, add dimensions to their felt experiences of conflict, rendering their personal emotional experiences intelligible and cultivating a shared sense that such emotional experiences also say something about the world they inhabit. When groups of women together bring their personal skills of discernment to bear on other people’s choices, they together assemble a shared interpretative framework. In Tal al-Zahra, conversations about marriage and the way people conducted themselves in working out their and their family’s unions reinforced the idea that immoral behaviour of different degrees was common and the idea that strong adherence both to one’s personal ethical commitments and to an imagined ‘traditional’ moral code involved some strength of character.



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To show how women leveraged their discernment in discussions of marriage, and to show how these discussions reinforced a felt tension between being swept up in the momentum of change and holding oneself steady on a moral course of some sort, I draw on the idea of a semiotic square, developed by Algirdas Julien Greimas and imported to anthropology by James Clifford (1988). The square describes how opposing terms generate systems of meaning in cooperation with one another. It can be used for any opposing terms, for example, masculine and feminine, and illustrates how many meanings and understandings arise from this opposition of two terms while preserving the stability of the original opposition. Masculine and feminine is a rather stable opposition that generates myriad meanings. Less stable, less obviously naturalized oppositions are equally effective at generating new kinds of relationships and meanings. In Tal al-Zahra, there was an animated audience of interested parties, namely women who spent time at home, discussing the everyday dramas of their own lives and the lives of others. These women practised judgement as part of their daily conversations together. Their ability to discern the appropriateness of a person’s choices, to assess the way in which these choices were executed and to deliver criticism of them – to an audience of their judging peers or to the mistaken decider herself – allowed them to navigate the fraught conditions of contemporary life in Jordan. Marriage was a rich subject for this kind of discussion as it encapsulated so many of the challenges of changing social mores in Jordan. It also combined the repetitive nature of the everyday with the high stakes of social scandals such as divorce, spinsterhood and adultery. The practice of judging itself was critical to generating the feelings of anxiety and risk that characterized the structure of feeling animating women’s experiences of marriage. Observing the constancy of judgement, its harshness and its inevitability led women to internalize judging voices and apply them to their own decisions, even without hearing real people pass judgement on their choices. The discomfort of feeling judged, and the effortful process of defending oneself, suggested that the risk of choosing wrongly was always imminent. To show how this judgement proceeded, I will lead you through a typical session in a Tal al-Zahra living room. I will follow this up with a rendering of the semiotic square arising from their activities and conclude with an analysis of how each of the instances they addressed fit into the square distribution that I propose. One night in Tal al-Zahra, I accompanied my friend Jafra to visit her friend Lamia’s house. This was a normal social visit that Jafra made periodically, often with me, because she was involved in a jamai’yya, a money-saving scheme, with Lamia and her mother and went monthly to pay her share. Lamia was an unmarried woman in her thirties who lived with her mother and another, older, unmarried sister, Muna. Her brother had died less than a year previous and his widow and her children also lived with them in the house. Her younger sister Zeina had recently returned to work after having her first baby and was on an evening visit to her parents. Their house, in short, was active. On this evening, Jafra and I were welcomed into their home, served tea and biscuits, and folded into the activity of the household. Greeting everyone took

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up some time and, after several rounds of kisses and introductions, we discussed one another’s news: how was it being back at work? How was everyone’s health? Zeina showed us her baby son and then described her transition back to work. It had been easy, thank god, she told us. After her seventy days of maternity leave had finished, she returned to her regular schedule and left the child with her mother-in-law during the day. As we attended to the children in the house and enjoyed the snacks that we were served, their neighbour, Im Mohammad, came over to say hello. The core topic of our conversation soon emerged: Lamia and her sisters were in search of a bride for their unmarried brother and they were asking around about potential matches. This process was revealing to them the norms that their contemporaries seemed to take for granted, which ranged from predictable to shocking. They shared some of their more outlandish observations with us. There were a new set of conditions for marriage that men, and their mothers and sisters, believed to be reasonable – a premise the group viewed with scepticism. Women should be blonde and have blue or green eyes (less common than brown or hazel in Jordan). They should know how to cook. In addition, they noted, they should work and contribute to the rent. In some cases, men even put it in the marriage contract that their wives would be responsible for paying for the rent on their apartment (ijar al-bayt ’alayki, the feminine second person, indicating that men said this to their brides as a decree). This sort of bald male refusal to assume a fairly standard household expense indexed the economic backdrop against which marriages took place in Jordan – higher costs of living, especially rising housing costs, were an impediment to marriage in many cases. The cultural expectation that men provide their wives with a home, and the increasing number of young women who refused to move in with their new husbands’ parents, forced the discussion of rent into marriage negotiations. It also highlighted the risks inherent in valuing one’s financial independence and the sacrificing of entitlements that prioritizing financial independence could entail. Lamia considered this outlandish. Who would agree to this? she asked, disdainful. Older women, her elder sister told her. People who are older and who just want to get married, finally. There are much more unbelievable things, though, Muna went on. She and her sisters knew a man who was planning to remarry after the death of his wife. He would bring the new bride home to his apartment, which was in the same building as that of his late wife’s sister. The collective seemed to share an embodied discomfort with this, falling silent as Muna finished the story. This, they all agreed, would be uncomfortable. Everyone would eventually get used to it; it would not be uncomfortable forever. But at first it would be uncomfortable. Anyway, Muna said, the sister doesn’t seem too upset. She had gone out to a wedding and worn make-up only two weeks after the death of her sister. They had lost their brother months ago and they still did not go out, still did not wear

Figure 1.1. Judging Marriage. The descriptions in parentheses apply to the un-bolded text immediately following them clockwise. (Moral and Expedient): Respectable; (Expedient and Not Moral): Condemnable; (Not-Moral and Not-Expedient): Baffling; (Moral and Not Expedient): Admirable. © Susan MacDougall

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make-up. And so conversation continued, progressing through increasing levels of scandal.

Dialogue, Squared: Activating Oppositions In this dialogue, women collectively field, and evaluate, the marriage choices and circumstances that other people find themselves in and the ways in which they choose to deal with those circumstances. What emerges is the tension between holding a moral stance and going along with the flow of change. This is depicted in the semiotic square in Figure 1.1. Each proposed example goes through the assessment. First, there is the panoply of financial conditions placed on would-be brides. For Lamia, they are baffling: why would someone agree to this? It is neither Islamically mandated nor personally expedient. However, her sisters and guests correct her: for some women, it is indeed expedient; marriage is sufficiently worthwhile that they would accept something like this as tolerable. Second, there is the assessment of the widower’s remarriage. It is inevitable: a man left alone is unlikely to remain alone. While uncomfortable, it is the kind of situation one adjusts to, both moral and expedient, if not desirable. Behaviour such as that of the sister, though, falls squarely into the category of immoral and not expedient: she failed to properly mourn her own sister by attending a wedding. No excuses could be made for this. It brought the wedding guest no discernible pragmatic gain and fulfils no readily apparent moral imperative. Finally, there was the initial statement of normalcy, which went entirely unremarked: Lamia’s sister had recently returned to work after her maternity leave and she was leaving her child with her mother-in-law during the day. This was unremarkable as a result of its clear adherence to standards of both the moral and the expedient and attracted not so much as a raised eyebrow. However, this extremely typical family configuration likely involved some emotional labour on Zeina’s part as she sought to maintain a strong and agreeable relationship with her mother-in-law. The experience of moral change for the women who sat together in this crowded living room talking about the different ways in which other women could handle the varied marital situations that they encountered was one of assessment, of weighing things up, of discerning what was acceptable and what simply was not. They used the full range of possibilities on the semiotic square in their discussion, which left an unease in the air; marriage was a rather risky adventure to wade into, but declining to marry (or failing to marry) was substantially riskier.

Conclusion The model of the semiotic square in this case shows how the practice of judgement serves to inscribe this opposition, which in turn offers guidance in the



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discernment of what is moral. The experience of change, for the women, is the experience of continually having to evaluate what is morally acceptable, what they can judge favourably and what they must condemn. Engaging in this practice underlines the riskiness of many of the quotidian life choices they encounter. Having established this troubling opposition and having made it a feature of the time they lived in, they experienced day-to-day life as the site of changes, the site of disruptions to morality that pushed them into an evaluative vigilance. During my fieldwork, Jordan was changing economically, politically and socially in myriad ways; any anthropological treatment of Jordan would necessarily take all of this complex context into account in formulating an analysis. Moral change happened alongside, and in a dynamic relationship with, these changes. Understanding the nature of this moral change requires attention to the granular details of conversations about things such as marriage – durable fixtures of everyday life, the stakes of which change as social contexts shift. I offer the lens of the semiotic square to illustrate how women use mundane conversation in ways that create and reinforce their ability to make meaning despite their impression that norms, in this case relating to gender and gender roles, were changing rapidly. I also offer the structure of feeling concept to highlight women’s experiences of changing norms, which they live both from a deeply personal first-person perspective and from the judgemental third-person perspective. Their example underlines the importance of attending to the affective dimensions of moral change as it unfolds in other contexts. The power of simple explanations that rely on references to a shared feeling of overwhelm in the face of change, including the VUCA example, point to the need for anthropological treatments of moral change to address the role that feelings play in our sense that things are changing. Susan MacDougall is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She has carried out fieldwork in Jordan, Lebanon and in the online world of post-Covid professional networks in leadership development. Her research has been funded by the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, where she did her DPhil, the Fulbright Program, the Sijal Institute and the WennerGren Foundation. 

Notes   1. Citations in original text.   2. In Jordanian colloquial Arabic, ‘traffic jam’ is expressed as azmat sayr. Azma is also the word for crisis, making his commentary a neat double entendre (Hada mish azmat sayr, hada azmat akhlaq).

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Massad, J. 2001. Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan. New York: Columbia University Press. McGee, W.J. 1896. ‘The Beginning of Marriage’, American Anthropologist 9: 371–83. Obeidat, O. 2016. ‘Population Grew by 87% Over a Decade – Census’, Jordan Times, 22 February. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from http://www.jordantimes.com/news/ local/population-grew-87-over-decade-—-census. Al Oudat, M.A., and A. Alshboul. 2010. ‘“Jordan First”: Tribalism, Nationalism and Legitimacy of Power in Jordan’, Intellectual Discourse 18(1): 65–96. Parker, C. 2009. ‘Tunnel-Bypasses and Minarets of Capitalism: Amman as Neoliberal Assemblage’, Political Geography 28: 110–20. Petrie, N. 2014. ‘Future Trends in Leadership Development’. White paper, Center for Creative Leadership. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://leanconstruction. org/media/learning_laboratory/Leadership/Future_Trends_in_Leadership_ Development.pdf. Ryan, C. 2019. ‘Resurgent Protests Confront New and Old Red Lines in Jordan’, Middle East Report and Information Project 292(3). Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https:// merip.org/2019/12/resurgent-protests-confront-new-and-old-red-lines-in-jordan/. Schwedler, J. 2010. ‘Amman Cosmopolitan: Spaces and Practices of Aspiration and Consumption’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 30(3): 547–62. . 2012. ‘The Political Geography of Protest in Neoliberal Jordan’, Middle East Critique 21(3): 259–70. DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2012.717804. Shryock, A. 1997. Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Jordan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stewart, K. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Throop, C.J. 2014. ‘Moral Moods’, Ethos 42(1): 65–83. Tobin, S. 2012. ‘Jordan’s Arab Spring: The Middle Class and Anti-Revolution’, Middle East Policy 19(1): 96–109. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4967.2012.00526.x. Williams, R. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zigon, J. 2007. ‘Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities’, Anthropological Theory 7(2): 131–50. . 2009. ‘Within a Range of Possibilities: Morality and Ethics in Social Life’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 74(2): 251–76. . 2011. ‘A Moral and Ethical Assemblage in Russian Orthodox Drug Rehabilitation’, Ethos 39(1): 30–50.

2 Queering ‘Ayb in the Urban Landscapes of Amman Marie Rask Bjerre Odgaard

Red Marks on the Pavement On a November evening in 2016, a procession of people dressed in white, with red strings attached to the tight bright fabric, walk down an otherwise busy street of Jabal al Weibdeh. Their faces are hidden behind masks and, unless one knows them by their body language, it is impossible to tell who they are. A box constructed out of metal and walled with white cloth is paraded down the street on wheels. Inside it is a moving body. The body is stretching, bending back and forth, then pushing against the inside of the fabric, making odd shadows on the outside of the construction – like a baby beneath the skin of its mother’s belly or a bird hatching through the soft membrane of an egg. The reactions of the spectators on the sidewalk range from puzzlement or amusement to repulsion and anger. ‘Zalame, zalame, zalame, zalame, anjad innak zalame!’ (Man, man, man, you are truly a man!) a loudspeaker booms. A small forest of mobile phones recording the scene light up the street. Inside the hammock-like container, which resembles a traditional woven Jordanian scarf stretched over a metal construction, is a substance. The substance starts to leak through the white fabric and onto the street. Red streams of liquid flow in pulsating waves on the dry pavement. One of the masked people applies pressure to something inside the container. More red liquid sieves out. White sneakers turn pinkish. In yet another rectangular box stands a woman dressed in a white gown. Her hair is long and wavy and she wears dark red lipstick and greyish brown eyeshadow beneath her plucked brows. She starts to smear the lipstick with her fingers. The lower parts of her cheeks turn dark red. With a monotonous expression, she records herself with the camera on the phone turned inward. At both ends of the procession, there is a police vehicle redirecting traffic until they reach Duwar Paris (Paris Circle).1 For a moment, business as



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usual seems suspended. The morning after, perhaps the only traces left of the procession are red marks on the pavement. Men behind municipal desks and in the uniforms of authority were most likely surprised by what they had allowed to happen, the irony being that the authorities had, unknowingly, protected what they otherwise disavowed. In the following pages, I examine the emotional intensity and immense care work involved in ‘battles’ over what can be understood as the (morally) good life in terms of gender and sexual orientations in Amman, Jordan. Shame plays a central role as that which makes one vulnerable in the face of others, but also in the potentiality that shared experiences of vulnerability hold (Ahmed 2006; Guenther 2011; Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay 2016). Where potentiality is concerned, I am particularly interested in those gaps between concepts and norms that provide us with a window into ethical experiences. I will relate this investigation of ‘ayb (literally: defect) to the concept of shame in recent critical, phenomenological investigations of shame in existentialist terms (Guenther 2011), as well as considering uses of irony. I understand irony broadly as a contradictory tension between the perceived and that which is supposed to ‘underlie’ that perception – thus questioning the idea of underlying essence or truth in the first place. One example is the queer performance that opened this chapter and exposed the gaps between the perceived and an idealized masculinity or femininity. My interest in combining the topics of queering, shame and irony emerges from my work with artists and activists in Amman. Therefore, the following chapter points to a more general discussion of how we might understand moral change, when ‘change’ is open-ended, ambiguous and fragile (Mattingly et al. 2018). Here, the idea of change is an imagined potentiality in the face of being shamed, or in the ironic absurdities of what is considered shameful, rather than a teleological approach to change as such. Methodologically, I use insights from regional ethnographies on the Middle East and material from my own fieldwork and time spent in Amman between 2015 and 2021, as well as continued online dialogues during the recent pandemic. I will address the way in which the concept ‘ayb is used in Jordan, especially in relation to gendered ways of behaving. The literal meaning of the noun ‘ayb is ‘defect’ (Esposito 2004: 31). The colloquial use of ‘ayb, however, pertains to behaviours that are considered disgraceful or inappropriate within what we might call a social-moral rubric (Deeb and Harb 2013). Much has been written on the topic of honour and shame in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern societies and cultures, but because of the empirical focus of this chapter, I will not detail the scope of this scholarship here. However, almost nothing has been written about ‘ayb in relation to social configurations of gendered (and queer) life in Amman (for exceptions touching upon similar topics, see Mahadeen 2015, 2021). A few clarifications are in order before I proceed. I make interchangeable use of ‘shame’ and ‘ayb not for the sake of etymological comparison but in order to conduct a phenomenological investigation into an empirical concept with

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the tools I have at hand for such an investigation. These tools are delimited by translation between colloquial Jordanian Arabic and academic English, as well as by translation between lived experience, my perception and secondary analysis of these experiences. I will argue that we should understand ‘ayb in queer existence in Amman in at least two ways: first, as related to social sanctioning and moral-cultural ideals of respect and embodied conformity; second, as related to uses of irony – and to the irony of there being something ‘shameful’ about one’s whole being in the first place – when ‘visibly’ queer both inside and outside the home in urban Amman, which attracts different forms of attention and moral scrutiny in different spaces in the city. In this sense, I draw a connection between what I will call the ‘village-like’ aspects of life in Amman: individual acts of care and curiosity, drawing on notions of what is respectful or graceful behaviour towards a community of known others, and the related social sanctioning, judgement and associated fears and feelings of shamefulness in front of those others. I will argue that ‘ayb is one of the ways in which queer subjectivities take shape precisely because shame is a feeling that both draws the person inward through the question ‘Who am I?’ and because it unveils an openness and a vulnerability in the face of other people’s opinions. Collective forms of activism play a role in reorienting feelings of shamefulness towards something that is shared among people, through the asking of questions such as ‘How can we be?’ in the ethical practice of activism. The anthropologist of queer ethics Naisargi Dave writes that this is a nurturing of ethical ideals about what the world could look like (2012: 4) and should not to be mistaken for an early indication of large-scale societal moral change or for what some want to view as outside the normative or solely theoretical project by default (Lewin 2016). Later in the chapter, I will elaborate on the discussion of how ‘ayb is used widely and frequently. Central to my argument for now, however, is the way the attitude towards, experience of and atmosphere related to what is ordinarily considered ‘ayb is explored, mocked, contested and struggled against when behaviours (and therefore the bodies and beings that come to embody these behaviours) are performed in an ironic manner. This is done both through the public procession described at the beginning of the chapter and in more informal settings, to which I shall return.

The Village of Four Million Amman is an urban context that lends a certain material fleshiness to the interactions of people in it. Therefore, none of the below can be understood without acknowledging the way in which Amman wraps its arms around its inhabitants and how it scatters its people with an idle hand over endless beige hills. The ways emotions are expressed in the streets, the loud and welcoming voices of men greeting each other, the melody of young schoolgirls in green uniforms and white headscarves chattering, wearing their backpacks. The constant buzz of the city’s many, many cars and the stubborn chirping of birds, heard by those



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lucky enough to find a tranquil nook in one of the city’s Roman or Umayyad ruins or on a private rooftop. In my experience, downtown Amman is always busy and hectic. However, for the Cairenes or Beirutis I have met, the city’s downtown is often talked about as relaxed – perhaps even sleepy. It is in this city, whose population has grown over a century from a few thousand to around four million, that we will now get to know Younes.

The Busy Friend Younes is short and slender. The contours of his face and the characteristics of his brown eyes are underlined by the way his black beard is cut. Hair takes up time for him in general because he has so much of it. He always uses the same barber right around the corner from his apartment in his particular neighborhood of Amman; other barbers never cut his hair quite right. Despite his shortness, you notice him. Younes dresses in everything from large woollen coats by a 1960s German designer to dresses, stockings, cargo pants, suit pants, turtlenecks, tops, necklaces and shiny shoes or sneakers. Some days, he dresses all in white, black or burgundy. His laughter can be heard from far away and when Younes is in the other room I always hear him before I see him. He is stern and fluttery at the same time. Next to him, I always feel out of fashion and relatively conservative, and Younes is not afraid of letting people – including me – know what he thinks of their attire, their hair or their posture. What always comes to mind first when I try to describe Younes, apart from his smile and attention to dress, is that he is always going somewhere – physically and mentally, with all of his being. Rarely does he sit for extended periods of time, that is, unless he is on his couch smoking, drinking Nescafé with sugar and talking to friends or family. But, even in those situations, he is always planning where to go next, with whom and how to do so. Younes and I first got to know each other in 2015 on one of my first visits to Jordan. His hair was longer then and he would curl the front part in ways that required skill and attention to detail. Sometimes he coloured parts of it because he liked that this made him look different. Our first couple of meetings took place in friendly2 cafés around the downtown part of the city and he showed his hospitality from the very beginning, introducing me to other people in the context of my master’s thesis research. He would ‘scan’ me and be welcoming, but he would also treat me as a sort of business contact in that he would refer me to people I could talk to or places I could go. At the age of twenty, he was already a known face in some artistic milieus. With time, Younes and I developed a friendship conditioned by intermittent distance and closeness, and we spent many hours together in his apartment and around the city and its peripheries. He was usually the first person I would see when I returned to the city and he was often the last person to whom I would say goodbye before I placed my luggage in the back of a car and drove to Queen Alia Airport.

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Upon entering the front door of his place, I always saw piles of clothes and shoes alongside things such as plastic, wire, thread, pieces of cloth and metal that he had collected and was considering using for his next piece. The contents of the piles of clothes were mostly bought on weekly trips to the thrift shops at Souq juma‘a (Friday market). In spite of the name, Souq juma‘a is best on Thursday evenings, before the crowd comes after Friday prayers. With prices ranging from 0,50 to 10 Jordanian dinars (70c to $14), there are plenty of bargains to be had for low-income households who go there from East Amman to shop for the entire family. For Younes, Souq Jum‘aa is a treasure chest, with anything from Indian saris and European evening dresses to counterfeit Nike shoes and red lingerie for his next photo shoot. Early on, I learnt through those trips a great deal about how interrelated the diverse urban cityscapes of Amman are with the kinds of imagining and acting that some artistic Ammanis engage in; the materiality of the urban fabric and acts of transgression are deeply entangled. Younes knows the streets of downtown Amman like his back pocket. He was born and raised in the city. Actually, for the most part, he raised himself from a young age. But even though he was born and raised as an Ammani, he sets himself apart from the majority in the streets of Wasat al Balad (the middle/ centre of the nation) on any given day – and not just on those weekly Thursdaynight trips to buy outfits. I know this because, in addition to Souq juma‘a adventures, he and I spent hours walking through different shops in the downtown souq that stretches through the narrow alleyways between the Grand al Husseini Mosque and the Roman Theatre in the north-east. The downtown souq is intense and, for the outsider, it is easy to get disoriented. People push past each other and young boys, who are children in terms of age but not in terms of life experiences, offer to take people’s groceries along in an old shopping cart for a small fee. Here, we navigate the alleyways at a fast pace, buying anything from plastic toys to wigs, make-up, vegetables, pomegranate juice and imported cloth, or visiting one of the proud tailors who have had their small shops in the souq for decades. Most of the local shop owners in downtown Amman are used to Younes. They know him and he knows them. There is friendly chit-chat about what he is looking for, where he might get it and who would know how to get it if it is not in stock – a kind of readiness to help the other that is apparent in so many situations between people in the souq in Amman. The stereotype of the hospitable Jordanian has been marketed to tourists visiting the souq and other places in and around Amman, but it has strong historical roots in Bedouin life in the deserts of the southern part of the country, where guests depend on the hospitality of others to escape the scorching daytime sun or the freezing evening cold with his life (see Shryock 1997). A guest should always be invited inside and it is shameful not to invite a guest in. I will argue that most of the people I know in Amman would agree with that statement, even if it is a generalization. Hospitality as a culturally indigenous concept has been marketed to foreigners,



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who then engage with these norms in clumsy and sometimes offensive ways, as I am sure I have at times, too. As Younes and I walk through downtown Amman, we sometimes enter shops where other customers look at him in a way that seems rather hostile. But the attitude rarely lasts long: once Younes starts to speak and the shop owner realizes that he is in fact a local Ammani, even if he has brought with him a young ajnabiya (female foreigner), the hostility often vanishes and is sometimes replaced by astonishment, entertainment and a curiosity of sorts. Especially early on in my time in Amman, I had the feeling that Younes would bring me along on his daily trips downtown not only to keep a weird anthropologist occupied but also so others would look at us and not just at him. I once asked him about this and he replied that, indeed, when he brought me along, people would look more at me and less at him. This provided Younes with a short break from one performance and an opening for another, as, in the beginning, he was very aware of the presence of this Danish anthropologist who found him so interesting and spent her time documenting his life.

The Contradiction One day in late 2019, after I had returned to Denmark from Amman, I received a message from Younes: ‘Last night was the shittiest night. Let me know when you are free, I would like to talk.’ I called him but there was no answer. Younes called me back a while later and told me that he had been verbally assaulted the night before by a café owner and his wife on a busy street close to his home. Younes had been walking along the pavement, as he did every day on his way home from a long day of work, most likely a photo shoot or an exhibition or something similar, when the wife loudly uttered ‘tanaaqud’ (contradiction) as he walked by. Younes had wanted to leave the place, but he took a deep breath and decided to try and reason with her. ‘What is it you see that is a contradiction?’ he asked. It turned into an argument in the middle of the street and Younes felt outnumbered by the group of people who wound up criticizing him and pitching in with their opinions because of how he looked and what this represented for them. He had tried to sit them down at a table. But the café owner and his wife asked him why he looked and dressed the way he did? Why would he contradict his own gender? After a discussion that only seemed to escalate and draw a bigger crowd, Younes got up and left the place. He hurried to his house and shut the door. He was supposed to go to an event that day; as soon as he arrived, he felt that everybody in the room was looking at him differently than they usually did – and he panicked. He went back home and lay in bed for the entire day, unable to leave the house. He told me that he felt completely drained and tired, too uncomfortable to go out the door and risk being confronted again on the road leading from his house to the downtown part of the city. Over the following hours, we spoke about what Younes should do about the situation. Should he return and speak to them again? Should he avoid walking

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down the street leading to his house? If so, for how long? Younes smoked to calm his nerves. He was used to hearing comments from men and women who did not know him, but this was very different. From our conversations, I gathered that what annoyed him most was the fact that these people had succeeded in making him feel that he was not in control of his own emotional response. Their scolding had made him stand out as vulnerable. They had succeeded in shaming him, even though he had worked for years not to let other people’s negative opinions of him determine his own perception of himself. In the midst of those hours following, he wondered why he confronted his surroundings with his different expressions of self and why he kept exposing himself by dressing in the ways that he did. ‘What was the purpose when nothing changed?’ he had thought. A couple of days went by. Younes and I spoke frequently on the phone. Younes licked his wounds, spent time in his apartment working on a dress made out of bubble wrap, which makes a crackling sound if you get too close but also protects the person wearing it. He sent me pictures of it hung around a mannequin in the living room. He cooked with his relatives and then he went out again. In the days that followed, one of Younes’ female family members insisted that they pay a visit to the café owner; she was upset at how they had treated him. But he convinced her that they should not. When Younes later read what I had written about his experiences that day on the street, he told me that the incident had been exceptional in the sense that he had felt outnumbered. But it had also left him wondering the experience was exceptional because he had stopped and asked the café owner’s wife what she meant when she called him a contradiction. He felt ‘guilty’, he told me, for having done so, because he should have known that it was better just to let it pass. It had startled him that the woman was shameless enough to continue her condemnation when confronted with him as an actual person – not just an ‘odd’ man walking down the street. I asked him if he had felt ashamed at the time. Younes said that he was unsure what to call the feelings he had, but he had wanted to throw all his clothes away – his clothes being a big part of his everyday life. Knowing that he could not, he felt stuck inside himself. ‘What do I look like? Am I that strange?’ It is not unusual to be commented on in the streets of Amman if you appear to blur the boundaries between what is perceived as male and female. The woman Miriam told me one day, when we were sitting together and talking about urban spaces, that she had passed two older men in the street the day before. As she walked by, they openly debated whether what they saw was a man or a woman. She walked up to one of the men and responded – much to their surprise. In a reverse sort of Greek tragedy, she showed the men that she was fully aware of the irony of her own appearance and that although they were confused, she was not. Miriam told me that she saw their loud discussion as an expression of the communal attitude that many (older) Ammanis have: a matter of blatant curiosity, but also people in Amman engage much more directly with each other, in both a positive and a negative way, than people in the capital cities of northern Europe. She made a comparison with a recent trip to Stockholm; a



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similar comparison has been presented to me by Jordanians visiting, for example, Berlin or Copenhagen. The lack of care between strangers in the street in these cities, several people told me, is remarkable and makes one feel at once lighter and non-existent. Care and curiosity, I argue, are part and parcel of the more pervasive inquiries that are made into other people’s lives in Amman. As Younes noted, ‘people are in each other’s butts’ – for better and for worse. We can say, using Younes’s example, that shaming is something that others do to you – and the consequences of it are not necessarily only limited to you feeling ashamed. Even if you do not feel ashamed of yourself for being queer, people who find your behaviour shameful might alter their behaviour towards you and your relatives, making life more difficult for everyone. These were some of the consequences Younes mentioned. Shame, then, becomes an atmosphere that draws more and more people ‘in view’ of norms and moral ideals. This atmosphere is not set in stone, yet the vibe of a place can feel exceptionally intense when someone crosses the line of the respectable.

‘Ayb For the purpose of this chapter, I will (re)locate the role of ‘ayb in relation to an anthropological tradition of investigating the discursive, embodied and cultural aspects of shame (Peristiany 1965; Levy 1983; Abu-Lughod 1986). Because of the limited scope of this chapter, I will not venture into a review of the literature. It nevertheless serves as a backdrop for how I have come to understand ‘ayb in relation to queer people and queerness in Amman, in the sense that much of this literature has advanced understandings of the moral dimensions of human life in Middle Eastern societies but, paradoxically, has also seemingly reconfirmed theories on gender segregation and sex relations in those same societies (AbuLughod 1986, 1991). It is within this empirical and theoretical tension, then, that I first developed an interest in the in-between investigation of ‘ayb. In colloquial use in Amman, the exclamation ‘aa-aeeyb’ is often heard when children misbehave, spill their juice after being told not to, run in front of elderly people in the street, drop their teddy on the ground on purpose or simply don’t do what their mother tells them. ‘Ayb can also often heard in conversations between adults about gendered norms; for example, two women will comment ‘‘ayb’ in reference to another woman wearing a short dress or a lot of make-up as she walks in front of them on the street. Likewise, when a group of boys in their early teens passes me in the souq and one of the boys brushes my thigh with his hand, I automatically snap at him, ‘‘Ayb alleyk!’ (Shame upon you), in a loud voice for other people around us to hear. He rushes away into the crowd – perhaps amused at having touched an ajnabiya, but fully aware of an urge to escape the moral attention that my utterance creates. Shame has multiple translations in Arabic, depending on context, subject and object, which means that speaking of ‘ayb and shame as ‘the same’ is problematic. Nevertheless, an important aspect of the concept ‘ayb is that it points to transgression of what is socially expected

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of an individual, of the person’s behaviour and attitude towards others, and it is very widely used in daily speech (al Jallad 2010: 41). In the alternative onlinemedia landscape – which is uncensored by the state – the Jordan-based Arabiclanguage podcasting platform Sowt (Voice) has produced a series of episodes on ‘ayb. The series has more than a hundred thousand subscribers and addresses subjects such as eloping for love, abortion, menstrual cycles, queer sexualities and the uses of erotic visual content.3 Different from topics or things that are ‘haram’, meaning forbidden in Islam, ‘ayb generally refers to what is deemed culturally, morally or socially shameful but not forbidden in the strict sense of the word, although, in practice, of course, what is forbidden or shameful in religious terms often overlaps with what is perceived as shameful in social terms. The reason I mention the ‘ayb podcast is to underline certain phenomena considered ‘ayb, as well as the difficulty of ‘defining’ something that is often surrounded by silence and considered taboo. As argued by Lara Deeb and Mona Harb, ‘the concept of ‘ayb also captures the way that social rules for moral behaviour are often implicit, unarticulated, assumed, and more difficult to unravel, as social norms or social taboos generally are’ (2013: 21). How might we address ‘ayb in a way that takes into account the critical potentiality of the uses of shame more generally?

Shame, Vulnerability and Openness The critical phenomenologist Lisa Guenther, in her article ‘Shame and the Temporality of Social Life’ (2011), introduces the reader to the intersubjective and relational qualities of feeling shame through a reading of selected texts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas and Simone de Beauvoir on the role of shame. Central to Guenther’s argument is these existentialist philosophers’ view that when we experience shame, we experience ourselves as deeply connected to – and shaped by – the other. She argues that the experience of shame allows a radical opening of the self, ‘calling him in question’ (see Levinas 1969: 88) and towards possibilities of co-existence, because, through the other, one is confronted with the limits of one’s own self-absorbed freedom (Guenther 2011: 31). In the Levinasian understanding of shame, shame does not ‘emerge from the inside, like intentionality, but rather from the outside-in, like sensibility’ (Guenther 2013: 292). This has implications, for example, for how we understand the political importance of the experience of shame. If we conceptualize shame as a feeling or an emotion that shows the individual to be tied to the collective through the experience of radical openness, shamed people also have the political opportunity to use that shame in a productive way, for instance, by feeling a sense of solidarity with others who are shamed in similar ways. This also applies to colonial shame – meaning a shame felt by those in positions of power in response to the actions of others ‘like’ oneself in colonialism. Guenther writes: ‘it is because others matter to us in ways that exceed individual choice or control that our relationality can be exploited in shame, but also invested as



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ethical responsibility and political solidarity’ (2011: 35). Such experiences of identity-based shaming can actually serve as a productive backdrop for activism and solidarity, it is argued, not unlike the way the concept ‘queer’ was utilized by activists and academics alike in their fight for less rigidity within gender and sexuality categorizations, and in support of a focus on the diversity of sexual practices in North America (Butler 1999). But here I wish to move beyond identity-based solidarity and point to an opening up to what Naisargi Dave has formulated as an indifference to difference (2014: 170) that I see in the irony of shameful experiences. That is to say that potentially, even – or especially – when shaming happens with reference to identity claims or when shaming is carried out by loved ones, this can give rise to the opportunity in the experience of the person who is shamed to ironically question identity claims, but also to reflect on loving relations, family and friendships, in a radical way. Solidarity, in this sense, is not based on a unified idea of sameness or on progress, but on being oddly present in the face of others, despite the fact that this presence is risky or uncomfortable. Like the odd procession in the streets of al Weibdeh, there is no clear identity being claimed – but rather an ironic, insisting presence of sorts. Further, the reason loved ones shame you might lie in the fact that they have so much care invested in you in the first place, because they at once feel that they are part of you and radically different to you (Georgis 2013). I will return to this point. When a person’s behaviour becomes a subject of (persistent) gossipy scrutiny in Amman, it is referred to as kalam al nas (word of the people). In relation to sexual behaviour and the difficulties of queer youth, I have often heard that what parents are the most worried about is not the son or daughter being queer or transgressing accepted gendered behaviour in itself, but rather kalam al nas (see also Georgis 2013: 243). People in the community will say that the son or daughter is morally corrupt. This will reflect on the rest of the family, stigmatizing them or making life difficult for all of them. The taken-for-granted, urban middle-class understanding of ‘morally good’ is caring for the community and the family through an obligation and desire to fulfil the role of a good man or woman: one who is (on the way to being) married, educated and religious but moderate (Adely 2012). It is not that the queer people I have come to know in Amman resist these ideals of the good person or condemn others for doing their best to embody them. If we are to speak of what the subjects of my research share, it is that at the time of fieldwork they did not neatly embody the ideal role of a married man or woman on the road to having children in the conventional sense.

Honourable Men and Proper Appearances I will now add a layer to the understanding of ‘ayb, as well as a critical perspective on the existential potentiality in shame, by addressing the urban visibility of gendered performances in Amman. This should highlight how queer people in Amman use shame in ironic ways, through their appearances. The appearance

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of ‘al rajul urdunii’ (the Jordanian man) differs according to socioeconomic background and geography, and my view on masculinity is influenced by what I have encountered living in Amman, as opposed to rural parts of the country. Many of the young men I encountered daily in the streets of downtown Amman stand or sit in groups outside their shops, often talking, laughing and conversing loudly. Their dark hair is combed or set and they sport light shirts or t-shirts with English logos, long trousers, well-polished shoes and accessories such as watches and silver signet rings. Almost by definition, they smoke cigarettes and occasionally a portable ‘shisha’ (waterpipe). Jordan has been ranked as the country with the highest proportion of smokers in the world – around 80 per cent of the adult male population used nicotine products in 2020.4 There are also men, both older and younger, who wear Islamic robes and sandals, and sometimes, but not always, sport a long beard and the red-and-white head garment known as the keffiyeh or shmagh. And there is the businessman in his suit and tie, smoking a Marlboro while speaking on the phone and checking his large wristwatch as he leaves the bank. The young Bedouin men who visit Amman from the southern part of the country embody still other ideals, which I will not detail here. In practice, there are, of course, as many variations as there are lived experiences and, to complicate matters even further, women have always played a key role in the domestic and community socialization of men (Adely 2016; Ghannam 2013; Kreil 2016). My intention here is not to offer an exhaustive account of how ‘Jordanian men’ look, as if they are a sea of sameness, but rather to highlight that a good deal of the people who concern me in this text, including Younes and Yara, whom I introduce in the next section, do not adhere to the ideal of how an honourable man (or woman) should look. At the same time, they can be seen in relation to a mostly younger crowd of Ammanis. Foreign (Englishlanguage) travel blogs note that, in fact, Amman is the ‘hipster paradise you never knew existed’.5 In cafés and galleries in Jabal al Weibdeh, you will find a crowd of freelancers, artists and fashionistas, and if you stick to that area alone – as many European and American visitors do – the café can function as a sort of spectacle of a liberal paradise. Walking past these cafés always meant walking past someone I knew from my fieldwork, as well as spotting a bunch of other ‘foreigners’. In reality, however, these young Ammanis are a diverse crowd from different social backgrounds (albeit with some level of income), on different educational trajectories and with diverse political views that they share, discuss and negotiate. Among Ammanis who visibly ‘stand out’ are people who playfully engage with ideas of ‘proper’ appearance. One of the ways in which I have encountered this is through the ironic uses of ‘ayb in informal contexts. An example could be a party to which Younes and others would show up with elaborate outfits, which they wore under jackets or brought in backpacks; others would playfully comment on the outfit’s splendour and the wearer would strut about in it with extra intensity. Laughter would follow, but only because of the atmosphere that has been created over time and through the strong relationships between friends. Another example was when a female interlocutor went with friends to



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an upscale bar but the manager refused her entry because she was wearing the hijab. This constituted an ironic experience of being categorized as someone who could not possibly want to be in a place where people drink alcohol, because of the ideas people in some of the wealthier residential areas of Amman have about the veil. The irony was that it was considered more ‘ayb for her to visit a bar than it would have been had she not worn the hijab. She felt less judged when spending time in the Jabal al Weibdeh, she argued. I will remind the reader of how, in the description of the procession of the masked participants that opened this chapter, the loudspeaker boomed ‘man, man, man, truly a man’. The immense importance of honourable masculinity in Jordanian society – and therefore the irony of such an utterance about ‘true manliness’ during a queer performance – was hard to miss for anyone who was even remotely initiated. As Younes later noted about conversations between friends, ‘You know we use this concept a lot with each other’, referring to how ‘ayb was used in many situations, but in a way that mocked the concept itself. I will now turn to the context of familial relationships, particularly between a daughter, her mother and extended female family members, to discuss the relationship between care, shame and moral change.

Yara Feeling Sick On a weekday evening in Amman, I picked up Yara from her workplace and we took an Uber to a Korean restaurant in a residential area in the western part of the city. Yara is a young woman in her early twenties, tall, with dark curls emerging from under her beanie. We talked in the taxi. I always got the sense that she was analysing me when I spoke, just as I was analysing her. Our conversation was interrupted by the young taxi driver, who was, as is so often the case with taxi drivers in Amman, unhappy about the heavy traffic and other people’s driving. When we arrived at the restaurant, we sat down with the menu and exchanged small talk about recent events and common friends and acquaintances. The waitress came with thinly sliced beef and a bowl of rice, vegetables and raw egg yolk. We both took sips of our soft drinks and talked about childhood comfort foods. Then she said: ‘I don’t know if you can use this story for anything, but the other day at home, I didn’t feel so good in the evening. My mom was worried. I came home early and went downstairs to the kitchen to make myself some dinner.’ It was warm inside the house, so Yara wore a pair of short pyjama pants. Upon seeing her, the mother said it was inappropriate to wear the shorts in the kitchen. ‘Inappropriate at home with my siblings and mother?’ she sighed, looking at me. It ended in an argument and Yara went upstairs to her bedroom. She went to bed, but then she heard a discussion between her younger brother, with whom she was very close, and her mother. She grew nervous and when the mother suddenly entered her bedroom, she went from nervous to petrified. Yara had just gotten out of her first queer romance, she told me, and was not at all ready for confrontation.

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But when her mother entered Yara’s room, she said that she thought Yara was feeling unwell for spiritual reasons, that she wasn’t grounded in her religion these days. ‘I just couldn’t have that conversation,’ she told me. Her mother had argued that Yara should revive her commitment to Islam. When I asked Yara why she thought her mother had made that analysis of the reasons for her failing health, she told me that the previous day, they had had a conversation about sex before marriage, a conversation they had never had before. Yara, her parents and siblings, who lived in Amman, and her extended family, who lived in Bahrain, had attended the wedding of her cousin. Reflecting back on that day, she said: ‘I told her that it wasn’t too late not to get married.’ She had said this because of something the husband-to-be had told the cousin about the wedding night that Yara considered disrespectful. When she told her mother about the incident, her mother defended the cousin’s husband and argued that what he had said was in keeping with the reasons why any man gets married. ‘It is so depressing,’ Yara exclaimed, with a stress on the ‘so’, in her otherwise soft voice, gesturing towards the restaurant’s big windows. When I later spoke to her about what she had said that day in the restaurant, she explained to me that she had wanted to remind her cousin of her rights in relation to a man, as well as her agency in relation to him in Islamic terms. But, as she said, this had ironically exposed Yara as ‘the dreadful spinster’ in the eyes of some of her family members.

Where Do We Go from Here? During the conversation between Yara and her mother that night, a gap seemed to form between the two women. The gap was still wide open the day after, when Yara’s mother noticed her short shorts in the kitchen and seemingly concluded that a way of re-addressing it would be for Yara to have her soul treated. But this gap was also conditioned by the fact that the two women were located together in Amman and not in Bahrain with the extended family. This allowed them to negotiate positions without the overriding influence of cousins, uncles, aunts or others who were invested in the reputation of the family. This illustrates the slippery quality of what is considered ‘ayb and the threat of it becoming more than just a matter of the situation itself and more about the morality of the person. When Yara told her cousin that she could choose not to get married, she did so because of her perception that she had a choice about how to live, but also about the rights and agency with which Islam discursively provides women. The flipside of this is that it was perceived as shameful to meddle in something as important as marriage. I wish to argue that such discussions cannot be reduced to individualist versus collectivist approaches to life, nor can they be reduced to reformist versus traditionalist views; rather, they are loaded with moral and normative ideals that women who love and care for each other put forward, fiercely disagree on and try to move forward from.



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Following a queer rendition of critical phenomenological understandings of shame, then, when we are ‘successfully’ shamed, our inhabiting of the body breaks down and we are torn out of the ease, relative comfort and habitual rhythm of everyday life that accompanies being oriented (Ahmed 2006: 129). A relatively seamless relationship with our bodies and emotions can come to a halt: dizziness, disorientation (see also Harbin 2016; Ahmed 2006: 159) and a kind of entrapment in one’s own self and in one’s physical body might follow. One can even feel estranged from one’s physical home. The day I spoke to Younes on the phone, he lay in bed unable to move, yet his mind seemed to travel to dark places: who am I? What am I to others? Why am I doing what I am doing? Why is my body and its desires and limitations such that I experience my surroundings as always being ready to confront me with it? This might have been the case for Yara, too, when she lay in bed hearing her mother’s argument with her brother. The bed in her room, to which she had retreated, was at least more private than the kitchen, which had become a site for discussions about whether wearing shorts is a shameful act. It is hard to tell whether what was most pressing for Younes was the feeling of being overwhelmingly in a (burdensome) relationship with the world around him or whether it was being all alone with a body from which he felt alienated. Perhaps he felt both. The same could be said of Yara that evening at her house, although their circumstances and the relationships in which they were being overwhelmingly questioned varied. And although their experiences were distinct from the queer performance in an otherwise busy street in Amman, the activist reworking of ‘ayb cannot be understood without individual narrations of scrambling up against the existential openness of feeling shame, because the performance was initiated and enacted by people whose bodies, in an ‘Ahmedian’ sense, had been disoriented time and time again.

Changing Qualities of Embodied Shame As mentioned earlier, Guenther argues that in moments when we feel shame, we find ourselves radically open to the other. Existential openness, some critical phenomenologists argue, also constitutes an openness in analytical terms (Salamon 2018), which entails an openness to asking questions pertaining to ontology (see also Al-Saji 2017). In her study of elderly Tibetans in exile, Harmandeep Gill noted the potential of using the critical phenomenological angle inspired by Hannah Arendt’s later ideas of the experience of thinking to ‘defrost’ heavily loaded and sometimes romanticized concepts of Tibetan subjectivities (2020: 49; see also Arendt 2003 in Mattingly 2019). In the same vein, in experiences of ‘ayb, I ask: what kind of understanding of queer subjectivity emerges? And when (what is considered) ‘ayb is being ironized, joked about or thrown around in conversation, how does disorientation become a part of that emergence? Care and curiosity, Younes argued, is about being invested in each

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other. In this investment lies the potential for care to turn into gossip and for gossip to turn into stigma. But, conversely, it also contains the potential for being open to, and then being able to critically investigate, what kinds of shared understandings of queer being are possible and how these might translate into individual ethics of subjectivity in the context of a Middle Eastern capital such as Amman. Moral change in Western liberal thinking is often understood in normative terms, as a kind of progress from that which is perceived as outdated or lagging behind. The necessary progress to allow citizens to experience individual freedom in gendered terms becomes the normative backdrop for much thinking about changes in perceptions of gender (Mahmood 2005: 10–13). The body, with its desires and orientations in the discursive sense, is set free only to exist in a highly regulative liberal-democratic state. The liberal idea of the autonomous body – however much one might empathize with bodily liberation and the consequences of a schism between free and unfree – can be an added a layer of pressure on non-Western queer experiences and ideas about the future. In her book Queer Phenomenology (2006), Sara Ahmed reminds the reader of the dangers of ‘expecting’ queer people to live in a disorientated way in practice. This can be too much to ask for, and some might live in seemingly conventional ways in order to remain connected to their families and thus to remain connected to the habits, resources and relations of a world structured in normative terms (176). In Ahmed’s analyses, nevertheless, there seems to be a claim that in so far as structural and personal resources are available, a deviation from the ‘straight path’ follows (177). As I read Ahmed, disorientation is normatively held above (straight) orientation because of its existential potentiality – the potentiality of radical openness in a worldly sense, because the world is made up of oriented peoples. But Ahmed also notes that we must be careful not to look for disorientation or deviation from the straight line only in terms of what is in direct opposition to those straight lines, particularly the ones drawn by the family. Having a ‘family’ one chooses (a chosen family of non-kin gay or lesbian persons, for example), or subtly queering aspects of the one that one has, also has the potential to open up possibilities of what family care and love can enable in terms of queer existence (see also Weston 1991; Dave 2014). Getting permission to do a performance instead of trying to do it illegally is another possibility. When queer friends in Amman jokingly tell each other that something is ‘ayb, I am reminded of this argument: using ‘ayb in an ironic way allows for the possibility of a different kind of ‘ayb. Yet there is still a sense of belonging and safety in knowing that there is a moral space that is shared because people are in on the irony, even if only for a moment (Dave 2012: 203). At the same time, I have witnessed discussions among the same group of people about whether the use of ‘ayb in conversation with others should be abandoned completely because of the burdensome emotional legacy that the concept represents for many.



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Conclusion In his own words, Younes loves no place in Amman more than the downtown area, the oldest neighbourhood in the city, where a mix of people from different social and class backgrounds would meet and where Younes knew the shop owners and they knew him, even if they knew him as ‘weird’. If ‘ayb is a phenomenon that, for queer people I have spent time with in Amman, has (at least) two different meanings, namely, the ideal-dogmatic and the ironic, my argument regarding the gaps that emerge in queering ‘ayb is not just an empirical argument on the role of shame in social life. It is, rather, an open-ended argument about how subjectivity is shaped in the experience of ‘ayb as both a powerful cultural ideal and an ironic experience. The irony lies in the absurdities of those ideals in relation to one’s own lifeworld and embodied experience of self. This was also evident with Yara, when she ironically noted how it was supposedly shameful for her to wear shorts in the kitchen – knowing that the shorts referred to several other things that were considered much more shameful than them. Therefore, when ‘ayb becomes ironic, it nurtures a queer presence, a provocation to envision something that is not manifested or fully verbalized. This happens in intimate encounters as well as in public performances, such as the procession that opened this chapter, a procession that at once distorts and confirms the heteronormativity of that space – bodies stretching in a kind of synchrony and an audience that is really unsure what to think or make of it all – only to be absorbed once again by the everydayness of the urban tapestry of Amman once the performance is over. This chapter has begun to unfold the question of how ‘moral change’ can be understood when it is investigated in relation to instances of a powerful concept being momentarily made ironic. When morality becomes unsettled in terms of normative red marks on the pavement – but often not for long.6 Marie Rask Bjerre Odgaard is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research concerns ethics, queer relationality, activism and artistic creativity, and feminist, critical phenomenological approaches to everyday life in urban spaces, including Amman, Jordan, where she has conducted her ethnographic fieldwork. Her most recent work, ‘Contagious Heartaches: Relational Selfhood and Queer Care in Amman, Jordan’, has been published in the journal Contemporary Islam (2020).

Notes   1. This is a rendition of the public performance ‘republic of body’ planned and choreographed by feminist architect and researcher Rosana Al-Khatib and others. The performance was held in Amman in 2016 while I was in Denmark. My description is based on conversations with people who were present, as well as from video footage of the evening

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that is still publicly available, plus a series of blog reflections written by Al-Khatib about the long and intensely bureaucratic process leading up to the (official permission to carry out the) performance; see https://www.architexx.org/subtexxt/republic-of-body. Some cafés in Amman are known among people I spent time with to be ‘friendlier’ to queer people and thus functioned as important meeting places for them. These topics, and more, are described by the producers of the podcast as topics rarely discussed in Arab society as they are ‘tainted by eib’; see https://www.sowt.com/en/Eib. According to The Guardian, Jordanian men have been found to smoke an average of twenty-three cigarettes a day. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/23/ jordan-smoking-rates-highest-in-world-amid-claims-of-big-tobacco-interference. The blogger writes, for example, ‘Watch out Seattle, Amman is close on your heels’, to describe how ‘surprisingly hip’ she found Amman’s café scene; see https://www.coffeewithasliceoflife.com/where-to-eat-and-drink-in-amman-jordan/. I am grateful for generous readers’ comments on earlier versions of this chapter. These include the comments of Younes and Yara (both pseudonyms), Maria Louw, Rasmus Dyring, Lone Grøn, Martijn van Beek, Cecilie Eriksen, Naisargi Dave, Jihan Zakariyya, Ola Al-Khalidi, BK, FZ and my writing group of Ph.D. colleagues at Aarhus University, Anne Sophie Grauslund, Kasper Helligsøe and Annemarie Jensen. The text has benefitted from questions and comments made in response to an earlier version of a part of this chapter, received during the Sensus Communis conference at Aarhus University in 2019.

References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1986. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Oakland: University of California Press. . 1991. ‘Writing Against Culture’, in Richard Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 137–62. Adely, Fida. 2012. Gendered Paradoxes: Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, Faith and Progress. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 2016. ‘A Different Kind of Love: Compatibility (Insijam) and Marriage in Jordan’, Arab Studies Journal 24(2): 102–27. Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Butler, Judith. 1999. ‘Revisiting Bodies and Pleasures’, Theory, Culture & Society 16(2): 11–20. Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay (eds). 2016. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dave, Naisargi. 2012. Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. . 2014. ‘Death and Family: Queer Archives of the Space Between’, in Leela Fernandes (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia. London: Routledge, pp 160–72. Deeb, Lara, and Mona Harb. 2013. Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Esposito, John L. 2004. The Oxford Dictionary of Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Georgis. Dina. 2013. ‘Thinking Past Pride: Queer Arab Shame in Bareed Mista3jil’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 45(2): 233–51.



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Ghannam, Farha. 2013. Live and Die Like a Man: Gender Dynamics in Urban Egypt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gill, Harmandeep K. 2020. ‘Things Fall Apart: Coming to Terms with Old Age, Solitude and Death among Elderly Tibetans in Exile’, Ph.D. dissertation. Aarhus: Aarhus University. Guenther, Lisa. 2011. ‘Shame and the Temporality of Social Life’, Continental Philosophy Review 44: 23–39. . 2013. Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Al Jallad, Nader. 2010. ‘The Concept of “Shame” in Arabic: Bilingual Dictionaries and the Challenge of Defining Culture-Based Emotions’, Language Design 12: 31–57. Al Khatib, Rosana. 2016. ‘Republic of Body 1 and 2’. Retrieved 2 May from https:// rosanakhatib.work/republic-of-body. Kreil, Aymon. 2016. ‘The Price of Love: Valentine’s Day in Egypt and its Enemies’, The Arab Studies Journal 24(2): 128–46. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levy, Robert I. 1983. ‘Introduction: Self and Emotion’, Ethos 11(3): 128–34. Lewin, Ellen. 2016. ‘Who’s Queer? What’s Queer? Queer Anthropology through the Lens of Ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology 21(4): 598–606. Mahadeen, Ebithal. 2015. ‘Media, State, and Patriarchy’, Feminist Media Studies 15(5): 763–78. . 2021. ‘Queer Counterpublics and LGBTQ Pop-Activism in Jordan’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 48(1): 79–93. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Mattingly, Cheryl. 2019. ‘Defrosting Concepts, Destabilizing Doxa: Critical Phenomenology and the Perplexing Particular’, Anthropological Theory 19(4): 415–39. Mattingly, Cheryl, et al. 2018. Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. New York: Berghahn Books. Peristiany, J.G. (ed.). 1965. Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Al Saji, Alia. 2017. ‘Feminist Phenomenology’, in Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader and Alison Stone (eds), The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy. New York: Routledge, pp. 143–54. Salamon, Gayle. 2018. ‘What’s Critical about Critical Phenomenology?’, Journal of Critical Phenomenology 1(1): 8–17. Shryock, Andrew. 1997. Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weston, Kath. 1991. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

3 Ordinary Possibility, Transcendent Immanence and Responsive Ethics A Philosophical Anthropology of the Small Event Cheryl Mattingly

The Drill Team Parade Delores’s five grandchildren, ranging in age from five to thirteen, are piled on her bed, a favourite cosy spot for family gatherings. Delores lives in a modest house in a predominantly Black neighbourhood on the eastern outskirts of Los Angeles. She is the matriarch of her household, which is comprised of these grandchildren and two of her adult daughters, the children’s mothers.1 The children are facing Delores’s television. Delores sits to one side, on the peripheries of the main scene of action, in which the children lean against one another, affectionate, teasing. They have gathered to watch a recording that we (on the research team) made of a local parade in which three of them performed as members of the Pasadena Rodeogirls Drill Team and one of them participated in the accompanying, all-male, Drum Squad. The parade features a performance competition between local Los Angeles area drill teams. These are judged informally by spectators lining the Pasadena streets and formally by a panel of judges who award prizes. Delores’s grandchildren watch the video footage intently, gauging the quality of the performance of rival teams. They joke as they comment and point out people they recognize, including their mother Marcy, who stands on the sidelines of the passing parade. She has her back to the camera but at some point she turns and sees that the camera is aimed towards her. She waves with a grin. The children on the bed laugh at this. As their team comes into view, the children’s attention stills. One of the girls (Latoya) exclaims, face lighting up, ‘Oh there we go!’ She points to the corner of the screen where she and two



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of her sisters can be seen executing their elaborate stepping routine. The other children lean in, following her gaze. With surprise and awe, she exclaims, ‘We look tight! We so tight!’ And so they are, their performance expertly choreographed, steps perfectly synced as they prance along the street in front of the judges. The bedroom is momentarily silent as the children stare at the television, mesmerized. Two of the girls on the bed sway along with the dance rhythms of the performers (which include themselves) without seeming to notice they are doing so, their moving arms a perfect muted mirror image of the movements displayed on the television screen. Once their team has passed out of view and been replaced by the drum squad, teasing resumes. One of the girls jokes with her brother Leroy, who is in the drum squad and not known for his physical prowess. ‘What is Leroy doin?’ She laughs. ‘What are you doing Leroy?’ she repeats, laughing harder. (Leroy ignores her jibes.) The children are disappointed that we have neglected to record the performance of their well-known competitors from South Central Los Angeles, the Compton Sounders. Jeanine, the videographer, tells them that their team, the Rodeogirls, have some routines that are similar to those of the Sounders. They are affronted by this comparison. ‘We don’t like them’, Latoya pronounces, annoyed. ‘They think they gangbangers.’ Leroy nods. ‘Sometimes we get into it with them’, he adds. ‘We battle against ’em.’ He recounts, with gleeful disapproval, an incident in which the Sounders did not act with appropriate decorum. ‘One time we were battling against them and they got in our faces.’ (Battles are more informal drill team competitions than the parade they are watching. They take place in neighbourhood streets when two or more teams ‘face off ’ in semi-improvised team exhibitions; no official judges are present but the applause of the crowd determines the winners.) Leroy is interrupted by others who offer evaluations of passing teams, noting costumes as well, an important ingredient of the performance. The ‘Blacks and Blues’ meets with special approval because their outfits are cleverly kitted out in varying shades of blue and ‘They have the hats and everything’, as Teisha explains enviously.

Border Talk: Philosophical Anthropology, Humanism and the Small Event This ethnographic moment serves as a springboard for investigating ethical experience from a phenomenological first-person perspective. I have three primary aims in this chapter. First, I make the case for responsive phenomenology as a powerful conceptual resource for exposing how ethical transcendence resides in the midst of ordinary life. In considering this, I draw upon Bernhard Waldenfels’s notion of ‘horizons of alienness’. Second, I try to show how an ethnographic approach to big (ontological) questions provides conceptual insights into ethical experience that philosophical phenomenology cannot, on

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its own, deliver. In other words, ethnographic particulars can challenge philosophical formalisms in analytically productive ways. My third and most ambitious goal is to illustrate how a border conversation between philosophy and anthropology provides one avenue for rethinking humanism itself. My aim to recast humanism is realized more by means of a suggestion than a fully developed argument. There is no doubt that humanism has a bad name. Why does it makes sense to try to revive this discarded and discredited tradition?2 We argue (Wentzer and Mattingly 2018) that there are significant costs to abandoning the theoretical question of the human, thereby relegating it to ascendant naturalist discourses. Anthropology and philosophy, especially through a border dialogue, ought to be central interlocutors. However, it is equally clear that the resounding critiques of traditional (Eurocentric) metaphysical humanism must be taken into account. My starting point for an alternative version of humanism comes from phenomenology’s own critical stance towards it, especially phenomenology’s insistence that what appears natural about the human cannot be positively identified with some unchanging essence. In their ambition to make claims about human existence as such, phenomenologists also resist reducing human existence to mere social fact, the arbitrary product of particular social or discursive histories. If there is something universal about human existence, phenomenologists argue, it is a condition that is at once excessive, uncertain and emergent. The human is the sort of being who exceeds any conceptual determination (Wentzer 2017). If the human is a being capable of transcending her condition, no social forms or facts can be presumed to thoroughly define human nature, even within specific local contexts or historical conditions. Nietzsche’s characterization of the human condition as a form of life that is not yet settled thus provides an apt entry point for inquiry (Dyring et al. 2017). In this chapter, I emphasize several phenomenological axioms that are particularly relevant to ethical experience. One is that a fundamental feature of human existence is our care about who we are, what we do and what happens to us. We are even the kind of beings for whom the question of our own being matters (Heidegger 1962). In other words, we have a first-person relationship with our own existence.3 The ‘at stakeness’ or significance of existence for us places demands upon us to respond to the social conditions we face. We cannot not respond (Waldenfels 1996, 2007, 2011). The demand to respond is not an ethically neutral matter and engenders uncertainty in multiple ways. While culturally shaped by local values and virtues, there is also an excess to the ethical demand that cannot be adequately captured with reference to pre-existing social norms (Waldenfels 1996). Response, too, has an uncertain fate and cannot be fully explained by societal moral codes. These axioms resonate strongly with contemporary anthropological work that stresses potentiality and the emergent qualities of social life. Perhaps nowhere has this focus on indeterminacy been so evident as in the still burgeoning ethical turn.4 Anthropologists inspired by phenomenology, in



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particular, have stressed the ethical implications of an indeterminate human condition characterized by potentiality (Jackson 2005, 2013; Zigon 2011; Throop 2010, 2014; Mattingly 2014, 2017a, 2017b).5

The Ordinary as Contested Site of Ethical Possibility Some prominent scholars in anthropology’s ethical turn insist that ethics are endemic to ordinary life (Lambek 2010, 2015 a, 2015b; Keane 2016; Das 2015). Several draw upon ordinary language philosophy, neo-Aristotelian ethics or Wittgensteinian approaches to offer an everyday that, as Veena Das eloquently puts it, is at once mundane and precarious, fraught with danger (2007, 2010, 2015). Despite the nuanced sophistication of this body of work, foregrounding the quotidian as a privileged space of ethical possibility has raised controversy, prompting a range of worries and critiques (Lempert 2013; Zigon 2007, 2014). If ethical moments are intertwined with the everyday, what is the use of the term ‘ethical’? What work does the concept do? Doesn’t it, once again, collapse the ethical into the merely social, becoming synonymous with a community’s socialization practices and the reproduction of dominant moral norms? One solution has been to distinguish morality (i.e. a society’s dominant norms) from ethics, preserving for the ethical a ‘stepping-back’ moment of conscious reflection and deliberation (Laidlaw 2014; Keane 2015). I propose a different tack, drawing upon phenomenology to consider how ethics pervades ordinary life and yet cannot be reduced to a reproduction of the moral order (see also Mattingly 2017a). Here, I draw upon Waldenfels’s responsive phenomenology to explore ethical possibility as related to structures of experience that disclose the unsettledness of the ethical, including the culturally inherited categories and practices that specify a certain range of norms and virtues.6 I consider how an experience of transcendence may arrive unexpectedly, even in small moments of everyday life. Phenomenology provides an especially powerful lens for revealing transcendent dimensions of the everyday. To highlight what responsive phenomenology can offer, I return to the opening ethnographic snippet, first considering this event from a cultural perspective as an ordinary social fact, and then contrasting this analysis with one that treats the scene as an experience haunted by an alterity that transgresses the moral order.

The Drill Team as Everyday Social Fact: Reproducing the Morally Normative From one familiar anthropological point of view, the drill team parade that the children watch is a cultural form that reflects dominant moral norms and codes and has its own social history. Following this analytic line, one could note that ‘drilling’, as it is sometimes called, is primarily identified with the African

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American community and has been associated with public dance and performance since the days of slavery. A drill team is an orchestrated dance group of performers who march in unison, as in military drills, but with movements infused with hip-hop, jazz, African dance and other types of choreography. Both drilling and its close corollary ‘steppin’ have been linked to tribal dances transported to America and reinvented by slave communities. Competitive dance performances emerged in post-slavery America with the rise of African American mutual aid and benevolence societies that grew up during slavery and continued for generations afterward. While their primary mission was caring for widows, orphans and other vulnerable community members, they also organized drill teams – in an earlier form – that put on shows in local parades. Drilling and stepping dance traditions gained popularity with the formation of Black fraternities and sororities in the 1920s and 1930s; learning secret ‘steps’ and ‘chants’ continues to be part of initiation rituals. In the post-Second World War era, these traditions were influenced by African American veterans who infused African American dance with military-style movements. Contemporary drilling, as a style of dance, exhibits cultural features that are well known within the context of African American history, combining synchronized movement with rhythm and chanting. Today, drill teams are primarily comprised of young girls from the age of seven or eight through high school. They are generally accompanied by drum squads primarily made up of boys. These are public and community-based art forms. Over the past several decades, they have been especially significant in poor and working-class African American communities, where they have been promoted as outreach programmes designed to engage youth after school and to offer an alternative to gang life. Drill teams also explicitly commemorate Black culture and history. The most important competitions are in February, Black History Month. The highlight of drill team performances is often a local community’s Black History Parade. These performances reflect a nationalist US militarism through creative incorporation of army marching band steps and the teams’ ceremonial recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance at parades. But they also mark a specific ethnic heritage that can be traced to slave times. This public art form exemplifies what W.E.B. Du Bois (1994 [1903]) called ‘double consciousness’ – the experience of being split into multiple identities (Black but also American and therefore not-Black). The very form of the dance routines simultaneously reflects a nationalist military zeal and a highly specific racial identity. This kind of cultural locating allows us to understand something about the children’s enthusiastic engagement, as well as Delores’s and Marcy’s personal commitment to their participation. We can also recognize that the children’s activities reflect dominant, deeply held moral norms. They are being socialized into values that are ethnically marked instantiations of American ideals. There is, for example, the cultivation of the self-discipline necessary for a performance that can win prizes (as the performances of the Pasadena Rodeogirls do): the tightly choreographed teamwork, the physical prowess, the aesthetic



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sensibility and the creative virtuousity required to master the rules of the game. Performative mastery also trains the moral self in such ideals as: learning to excel, cultivating collective as well as individual pride, loyalty to one’s teammates (which includes the enthusiastic denouncement of rivals), the ability to withstand the scrutiny and critique of one’s peers and superiors, and the willingness to be a follower and, for some, a leader. One could easily adopt a suspicious view of this moral order, noting, for example, the drill teams’ incorporation of military-style culture and practice, its training of docile bodies. One could ask whether the hopes invested in this voluntary community activity simply distract these mostly low-income participants from taking to the streets in a more self-consciously political way. Why is there no critique of the power structures that have relegated them to their disvalued economic and political position? Whether one is critical or not, my ethnographic moment appears to straightforwardly instantiate dominant moral codes, thus disqualifying it as a properly ethical moment if, by this, we want to include some manner of conscious deliberation upon what is of ethical value and ought to be promoted or discouraged.

The Drill Team as Site of Ethical Possibility: Responsive Phenomenology and the First-Person Perspective From the perspective of responsive phenomenology, it is possible to see this scene as both culturally ordinary and a singular moment of possibility. As noted earlier, phenomenologists claim that reality must be understood from a first-person perspective because we are not only embedded in social practices and positions; we also respond to them – they matter to us, speak to us, make demands of us. Waldenfels (2007, 2011) emphasizes the pathic and eventful features of this significance. He introduces the notion of the ‘alien’, which he thinks about not in a definitive categorical way but rather in terms of ‘horizons of alienness’. He sets out to illuminate an elusive alterity within even our most familiar surroundings: ‘how to face otherness or alienness without taking away its sting’, as he puts it (Waldenfels 2007: 1). While in some ways the alien accompanies our most ordinary experiences (‘the everyday has the non-everyday for a background’ (Waldenfels 2011: 55)), it shows up with particular clarity in anomalous or surprising events. As he puts it: ‘the alien surprises us. It goes beyond our expectations, it is not easy to grasp, it enters unsummoned. But precisely in this odd way it does belong to our everyday life, appearing as something unfamiliar within the familiar’ (2007: 2). And ‘radical alienness’, as one horizon of alterity, ‘reaches the core of Being and the heart of self ’ (2007: 4). Latoya’s cry of surprise can be understood as a response to an alien call that issues from elsewhere, the call of the children’s own beauty, a point I will elaborate on subsequently. I explore this event as a response that highlights improbability, ethical precarity and commitment to transformation rather than reproduction. I put these features into conversation with qualities of

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responsive experience characterized by the intrusion of the alien articulated by Waldenfels (1996, 2007, 2011). Four of Waldenfels’s points are particularly relevant for my purposes: 1. Experience has the basic structure of call (a call that comes from ‘elsewhere’) and a demand to respond. There is an authority to this call and an asymmetry as well. The call precedes the response and it demands that we respond. This is not a choice, though how we respond may be a choice. Waldenfels is not trying to exclude human effort or action as part of the event, but he wants to emphasize that which awakens our attention in the first place. 2. Experience has eventful and pathic qualities rooted in attention itself. In a moment of attention, something strikes us, becomes conspicuous. The phenomenology of perception has shown that selection is always part of attention – it organizes or orders it. Some things come into view and others do not. (Seeing everything would be the same as seeing nothing.) However, the eventfulness and ambiguity of attention is too easily disguised in phenomenological theory, he argues. (He critiques Edmund Husserl’s notion of intentionality on this point.) Waldenfels seeks to rectify this with his concept of the alien. His point is that the alien exists within all humanly created order. All ordering – or selecting – brings with it something ‘alien’ like a kind of shadow, namely that which is excluded by the order. The excluded is not merely a disorderly unruliness and still less is it ‘noise’. Rather, it is a kind of haunting that suggests another order and may even initiate a new order. The presence of the alien even within the quotidian helps alert us to this shadow possibility. 3. Some moments are more alien than others – surprise and the singularity of event. Sometimes, when something enters our awareness (when we are called to pay attention), we experience a moment of surprise and we take notice in a more conscious way. Such moments are of special importance for Waldenfels’s theory because they reveal the intrusion of the alien into the ordinary in a way that tends to be hidden in more taken-for-granted moments of experience. These striking moments reveal that while sense making (perceiving something as something) is always part of our human response, this does not mean that the ‘something’ that appears to us simply is something. Rather, something ‘becomes something by obtaining a sense’ and this occurs through ‘an accomplishment of sense’ through which something ‘comes into play which does not yet have sense’ (Waldenfels 2011: 24). Note that Waldenfels has introduced a crucial temporality to what can otherwise seem static or even culturally pre-given: ‘sense.’ He also introduces a separation between sense-making as our response process and that elusive ‘something’ that originally strikes us or calls to us and that ‘does not yet have sense’ (emphasis added). 4. There is a creative dimension to this pathic provocation. Response also exceeds the call that precedes it. Not only does a demand not predetermine



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a response, response also has an excess that cannot be captured by commonly held theories of action that stress either following rules, pursuing goals or making sense (where sense making is taken to be subsuming a particular within a prior whole, as in naming it as a member of a pre-given cultural category). These points are certainly abstract and the vocabulary may be unfamiliar. It is worth explicating them a bit more before returning to my own ethnographic example. To do so, I call upon a simpler illustration offered by Waldenfels, a description of a traffic accident taken from Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities (Waldenfels 2005: 37–38, 2011: 24–25). In Musil’s narration (as renarrated by Waldenfels), before a name can be given to this event, there are experiences of spectators for whom nothing is yet clear. Rather, they are confronted with a confusing jumble of sense impressions: a crowd of people blocking the road, the sounds of a vehicle ‘spinning sideways’ and ‘abrupt braking’, the sudden appearance of a heavy truck with one wheel on the sidewalk, a driver standing beside it ‘grey as the pavement’ and, finally, someone lying on the road ‘as if dead’. As the bystanders wait for an ambulance, a ‘know-it-all’ man offers some accident statistics to a listening woman. The woman is thankful for his explanations because they convert ‘“this horrible happening … into some kind of pattern, becoming a technical problem that would no longer concern her directly.” It becomes a case for the “social institutions” which are so admirably accurate in their services’ and for expert personnel who do not find this extraordinary at all, but simply part of their ordinary routine (Waldenfels 2011: 24).7 The first three features of Waldenfels’s responsive phenomenology are clearly revealed in Musil’s traffic accident. First, experience fits the logic of call and response. Response is required and is temporally preceded by a demand that comes from elsewhere. (Notably, the key protagonists in the incident are spectators.) Second, attention plays a crucial role in this experiential logic. Importantly, it is an eventful attention. Multiple senses (especially sight and sound) alert bystanders to what is initially a singular and confusing event – the road is blocked but it is not yet clear what is creating the obstruction. Sense, experiencing something as something, is not where experience begins. Instead, there is a jumble of sense impressions. But even this jumble does not include everything. Some selectivity is already involved. Only those sensory aspects of the unfolding scene that gradually reveal a sayable something are foregrounded: sounds of braking and spinning, the eventual sight of a truck parked askew. Third, the initial response of bystanders is characterized by surprise rather than categorization (seeing something as something). What is going on here? they wonder. My ethnographic scene is much more complicated than this. But I have taken some time with it because it not only grounds Waldenfels’s abstract claims; it also sheds useful light on how an elusive alienness can strike even in the midst of comparatively ordinary events. A traffic accident is both unusual

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and everyday, both startling and easily embedded within the relatively routine. In returning to the children watching the drill team parade, I will consider not only the basic experiential structure of call and response, the importance of attention, and the centrality of surprise that the Musil example illustrates, but also the incipient creativity and excessiveness of response. I will take Waldenfels’s claim that responses may also be excessive particularly seriously: although we have no choice but to respond (some response is inevitable), how we respond is not simply predetermined and responsiveness can be inventive.

The Call of Beauty: ‘We So Tight!’ There is one brief moment when the logic of call and response that characterizes the children’s experience of watching the parade closely aligns with Musil’s traffic accident as experienced by the befuddled spectators. This is when the children’s attention stills and Latoya calls out ‘We so tight!’ (In Black vernacular, this phrase refers especially to precisely executed movements, rhythmic synchrony, beauty in motion.) But there are differences too. The initial moments of the traffic accident are not yet labelled by the startled bystanders, whereas the children are watching something that they readily identify; they are well acquainted with the rules, roles and normative standards associated with this type of event. This is a parade, obviously. They have seen many like it and most have performed in such events. But it is precisely because of their extensive prior knowledge of what they are seeing that Latoya’s surprise alerts us to the entrance of alterity, the alien within the familiar. Her cry signals an attentional moment, following the logic of call and response, in which she and the other silenced children experience stunned recognition that is also misrecognition. The shock in her voice suggests that her directive (her pointing finger, her imperative tone) is also a responsive question. ‘Can this be us?’ she seems to ask. ‘Can this beauty, this grace, belong to us?’ The unanticipated appearance of this ‘tightness’ calls her to an alien beauty in herself and those closest to her. The call is excessive in the sense that it seems to surpass the many normative rules and goals that guide the ready opinions the children have been noisily offering up as they assess the strengths and weaknesses of various performers. They are, for the first time, silent. The small moment of surprise that I have focused upon in such detail may not seem capable of such alterity. After all, this temporary intrusion of beauty does not begin in the same manner as Musil’s, where an initiating call appears alien or excessive to bystanders – that is, it exceeds any immediate recognition of something as something. In my example, the call of beauty takes the form of an interruption. It quite literally halts the ongoing flow of conversation. The pause is also fleeting. As with Musil’s incident, the children’s moment of surprise is quickly absorbed into more familiar discourses, including sarcastic evaluative judgement (‘What is Leroy doin?’) and accusations made against a



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rival team. The scene returns to the familiar normativity of the quotidian. Like the traffic accident, it shifts participants’ attention through a series of normalizing processes that obviate or cover over the earlier moment of surprise. In Musil’s story, the form of experience is a movement from an initial startled first-person experience (an alien event calls in a way that cannot yet be named) to an increasingly third-person experience. The event is relocated in recognizable discourses and practices that satisfactorily place it in the hands of experts and beyond the concern of the spectators. But my example offers a more complex experiential movement that speaks to the presence of an alienness that seems to live alongside the familiar. Beauty haunts this family even during its most challenging times and breaks through, as on this occasion, as a fleeting joyful misrecognition that is also a recognition. In order to excavate the ethical potentiality of this ephemeral beauty and take up Waldenfels’s claims about the creativity of responsivity, I need to widen my ethnographic gaze, placing the moment I have described within another drama of call and response that has gripped this family. In this drama, the two mothers (Delores and Marcy) emerge as key protagonists and crack cocaine serves as a centrepiece. From this vantage point, the bed scene, and indeed the children’s participation in the drill team, can be understood as a response to a call that has issued from elsewhere, not primarily to the children but to the two women who together form a matriarchal team: Delores, the grandmother who sits on the corner of the bed, and Marcy, who only briefly appears on the television screen as she follows the drill team from the sidelines.8 The concepts of call and response shift to a different temporal register in family life when I widen my gaze. The moment of surprised response on the bed is situated in the context of a family history of drug addiction, drug dealing and imprisonment. At the time when Latoya calls out, her oldest brother (a high-ranking member of the Bloods, a prominent gang) and her aunt are in prison on drug-related charges.

Cocaine and the Call of Tiredness At fourteen, in the mid-1980s, Marcy became addicted to crack cocaine. When she had entered her teen years, crack, a cheap and highly addictive form of cocaine, was widely sold and even given free to young teens in neighbourhoods like hers. For the next eighteen years, she was an active user. During this time, she had four children. There came a point when Delores quit her job to take custody of her children so that they would not be put into foster care. Adopting Waldenfels’s language, crack calls not only to Marcy but also to Delores and the whole imperilled family. Its call is one to which not only Marcy but also Delores must respond. However, the presence of four children also makes a demand that cannot be ignored. Mothering calls, posing an excessive ethical demand on both these women. For many years, Marcy cannot meet it in a way that results in sufficient care being provided for her children.

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Until Delores stepped in by gaining legal custody, she was continually in danger of losing her family altogether. Crack cocaine, like other modern addictions, is surely a ‘cultural object’ (Leistle 2016). Its history, including the notorious role of the US military in helping introduce crack into low-income urban neighbourhoods where it gained such a foothold, has been well documented. Its popularity during the 1980s and 1990s was intimately tied to poverty and joblessness (Williams 1993; Bourgeois 2003) and dramatically increased rates of imprisonment. The Ronald Reagan-initiated ‘war on drugs’ incarcerated vast numbers of Blacks, especially young men (Alexander 2012; Reinarman and Levine 1997). If ever there were a thoroughly embedded social fact, crack qualifies as one. It is part of a cultural history of structural violence readily traceable to neoliberal policies, US military aggression and structures of class and race discrimination. And yet, even here, the crack cocaine ‘epidemic’ cannot be reduced to thirdperson analytics that do not explore its phenomenological face, the way that it calls to people and the variety of people’s responses to it. Delores described crack’s call to her daughter in strikingly pathic terms. She admitted that during the years when Marcy was using she could be ‘really mean’ to her children. ‘She used to be so hostile about things’, Delores said. But this meanness and hostility did not represent the real Marcy, she insisted. ‘It was the drugs doing it’, she sometimes remarked. ‘I think it was just the way that the drugs affect you.’ Crack is not part of Marcy, in Delores’s account, but an alien force that takes her over, that makes her alien. Although Delores found Marcy’s addiction mysterious, we might discount this bafflement as naïve. After all, the political economy of drug dispersal and the biology of addiction already suffice to explain the force it has exerted over Marcy’s life. I am reluctant to dismiss emic experiences of puzzlement, but even if one does, there is still the matter Marcy’s sobriety. This is less easy to explain, structurally. At the time of the children’s viewing of the drill team parade, Marcy has only been clean for three years. She disappears from home frequently and is often jittery and short-tempered with those around her. She can barely sit still. It is not clear to anyone why she has finally been able to stay clean or if this sobriety will last. This is a mystery to Marcy as much as anyone, as becomes clear in the following snippet from an interview Carolyn Rouse (a fellow researcher) and I conducted with her just one year into her sobriety.9 Carolyn: Do you remember the moment when you decided, ‘That’s it’? Marcy: Yup. I told my mom. I called to make me – put me on the waiting list [for drug treatment programmes]. But the first programme I called, I’m gone. [ready to leave.] I packed my bags, had them sitting by the front door. Carolyn: What made you change your mind? Marcy: As long as they was telling me to go to the programme, I wasn’t going. I ain’t going till I got ready to go. That’s why. I ain’t going till I’m ready to go. When I get ready that’s when I go. ’Cause if I go while y’all want me to go, it ain’t gonna work.



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Cheryl and Carolyn: Yeah. Marcy: It ain’t gonna work. Cheryl: Yeah. Marcy: So when I got ready I got [wait-listed] on three treatment programmes. Delores: We went to uh, Joe… [He] was doing an outpatient clinic for the city… He said, ‘Marcy, you want to see some hard-core drug addicts?’ He said, ‘Go down there.’ [to his downtown LA clinic on 5th Street] Marcy: Right down on 5th Street, and that’s where I went. I was standing around just watching them smoke right through it. I cried. Delores: She said, ‘I cry every day, Momma. I cry every day. Look at these peoples.’ Marcy: They sleep in cardboard boxes and all that stuff. You know, I ain’t never had to do all that. Cheryl: So, what do you think made you – what finally made you ready? Marcy: Well, either you get tired… Cheryl: Yeah. Marcy: Or – you just get tired.

When I analysed this in earlier work, I recognized the irony in Marcy’s final response to me as I continued to press her about why she decided to get sober ‘this time’. But, in my reanalysis here and in light of Waldenfels’s work, I can now see that she is suggesting something else entirely – the mystery of it all. She manages to get this across despite the whole interview conversation being saturated with a vocabulary of free will and individual autonomy, including the way we phrase our questions to her: ‘When did you decide?’, ‘What made you change?’ Marcy’s answers also take on a highly agentive ring. ‘I ain’t going [to a recovery programme] till I got ready to go … When I get ready that’s when I go.’ Although Marcy stresses her autonomy (‘as long as they tell me to go to the programme, I ain’t going’), she also hints at something else that I inadvertently pick up on in my continued questioning. Through her co-narrated story of a particular vivid moment when she sees homeless hardcore addicts in downtown LA and begins to cry, she is offering an explanation for her sudden decision – a clear cause in the form of a powerful event. But since I know that there have been many moments in her eighteen years of addiction that might have also compelled her – but evidently did not – I doggedly return to my questioning. Why was she was ready this time? ‘What made you ready?’ I ask, drawing on her language. Here, she introduces another causal formula, one in which she is not the agent but the recipient of transformation, a transformation that occurs within her body and yet seems to come from elsewhere, as an alien agent. ‘Well either you get tired’, she tells me, leaving that “either”

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dangling. When I press her, looking at her questioningly, she adds, ‘or you just get tired.’ Tiredness then, becomes the cause. But what kind of cause is that? As an experiential state, it is not an obvious inspiration for disciplined effort. As part of her addiction cycle, Marcy was, after all, often tired. Following a week or two of being high, she would come home and sleep for days before using again. But in this interview, Marcy is speaking of a different sort of tiredness, one that, in its inevitability, demands something else. Tiredness becomes a welcome visitor. It seems she has been waiting a long time for it to arrive. But its potency as a transformative agent only comes at that moment when it exerts an inevitable call. Marcy’s reply is rife with paradox. This mysterious caller has the power to initiate an enormous shift, a shift against all odds, from addiction to sobriety, not when it empowers or frees but when it is experienced as inescapable.

The Drill Team as a Creative Response The initiation that tiredness instigates is not sufficient to ensure sobriety in the long term. This is an everyday project. It is in this context that the children’s participation in a local drill team and Marcy’s role as a junior coach can be seen as a creative response to the call of addiction. The alien call of beauty that Latoya registers takes on an ethical weight because it challenges their stigmatized position as children of drug addicts and felons whose house has been raided, more than once, by the police. The children’s skilled performance is the result of a crafted, agentive response under the guidance of Delores and Marcy. Marcy’s participation simultaneously links her to and disconnects her from her own history. When she was a child, she, too, was a member of the Rodeogirls. She continues a proud family tradition when she marches through the streets of her community as a coach. But she also interrupts her history of inhabiting those same streets as an addict. The parade spectators who cheer her on from the sidelines are the same neighbours who have condemned her for abandoning her children. A moment in which children watch a video of themselves offers a small illustration of how projects of moral transformation may be deeply embedded within family routines (like enrolling children in a local drill team programme) but are also characterized by concerted attempts to transform family life. This video-watching moment belongs to an ongoing project of mothering that is also an experiment in the improbable. Delores and Marcy both act in morally transgressive ways. Delores refused to treat her daughter in the way she was advised to during the eighteen years when she was an active addict. She rejected the received wisdom of drug experts, twelve-step programmes and church friends and family members to ‘kick her out’ of the house and practise ‘tough love’. Instead, Delores took her in whenever she came home. Delores and Marcy also challenge the morally normative category of motherhood. Black feminists have contended that in the African American



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community this idealized category imposes impossibly rigorous and self-sacrificing virtues. But Delores and Marcy are not feminists. Their critique of this normative category emerges from something else; it excludes Marcy as a candidate. Delores epitomizes its virtues, but she resists a normative gaze that would preclude Marcy from taking up this position. Together, Delores and Marcy build a whole repertoire of experiences that provide evidence to support their challenge. They may not be reproducing the dominant moral order, but their actions do not position them dramatically outside ordinary life demands and routines. It is more accurate to say that their project of mothering demands a kind of transcendence that remains tethered to the immanent. Or, put differently, it reveals the transcendent face of immanence. Their moral striving does not leave behind but rather depends upon everyday cultural resources. Yet, their situation reveals how life’s demands may be experienced as alien as well as familiar, excessive as well as everyday. Responses may also introduce new forms of alienness. When an unexpected beauty intrudes, it registers an alien order that is of immense ethical import. This is not the familiar order of a precarious and stigmatized family shunned by neighbours but a synchronous moment of rhythm so perfectly executed that the children hardly recognize themselves. These two orders, the beautiful and the stigmatized, exist alongside one another and when they meet it is ‘like two glances that collide’ (Waldenfels 2007: 31).

Ethnographic Particulars: Excessiveness and the Ethnographic Demand I conclude by returning to the three aims I announced at the start of this chapter. The first was my ambition to demonstrate what responsive phenomenology offers in conceptualizing the transcendent immanence of ethical life, rescuing the moral ordinary from being reduced to the reproduction of social facts. I opened my chapter with an ethnographic particular for a reason. My phenomenological gaze has prompted an analytic inversion. Rather than embedding the small event of children watching a drill team performance within a larger sociocultural form, I have made the reverse move. The cultural history of drill teams is brought to bear in order to illuminate a moment of family life depicted in its singularity, its excessiveness. We discover why cultural practices take on the particular ethical weight that they do from the situated perspective of participants. In my ethnographic case, for example, participating in a local drill team is less ethically related to the moral worth of drill teams (as a cultural form) per se than it is to the ethically precarious task of handing over mothering to Marcy. Drill teams are certainly not an incidental cultural resource; they are a proud part of this family’s history. And yet the profoundly ethical dimensions of this scene point elsewhere, towards how Delores and Marcy are being called to respond as mothers and the excessiveness and uncertainty this engenders.

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A phenomenological approach can reveal the ethical dimensions of small and routine actions in a way that collectivist, sociocultural perspectives cannot. Moments that might look like the mere pre-reflective reproduction of moral codes can emerge, upon inspection through this analytic lens, as ethically fraught and precarious. My point, also argued elsewhere (Mattingly 2017a), is not that we should abandon the analysis of social histories, cultural forms and structural conditions. Rather, I am simply insisting that attention to large-scale collective forces and conditions are insufficient for understanding the ethical features of ordinary life, including ethical potentiality. This insufficiency really matters because without the kind of first-person gaze that responsive phenomenology, in particular, affords, the moral everyday is too easily reduced to either the reproduction of dominant norms or to highly visible modes of resistance, breakdown or transgression. My second aim was to draw upon an ethnographic particular as a (friendly) challenge to philosophy and as an illustration of how a border conversation between our two disciplines might proceed. In general, philosophical phenomenology sets out to articulate formal and abstract structures of experience that expose the indeterminacy of the human condition. The first person it references is equally abstract – a socially unspecified ‘I’ or ‘we’ or ‘us’.10 Philosophical phenomenologists have classically relied upon a variety of resources to try to get at ‘things as they are’, including by drawing upon aesthetic works as exemplars and, most famously, Husserl’s scholarly ‘bracketing’ methodology, intended to disrupt and problematize the ‘natural attitude’. Ethnographic explorations, precisely because they include ‘cultural conditions’, can offer a generative alternative to supplement these approaches and help us think through what is at stake in more formally stated claims. When I draw upon fieldwork to examine the indeterminate structures of ethical experience, it matters that the alienness I describe shows itself in a distinct social context governed by local and socially powerful moral norms and expectations. Alienness (of, say, beauty or tiredness) manifests itself socially; it calls to certain people under certain social conditions. Providing an empirical example not only substantiates abstract claims ethnographically, but also allows us to see how they actually work. In addition, it provides the impetus to elaborate and amend formal philosophical proposals in light of socially grounded material. For instance, Waldenfels insists that responsiveness can also be creative. However, at least in his works that have been translated into English, he does not develop what responsive creativity might look like. The examples he tends to call upon, including Musil’s traffic accident, highlight the pathic quality of responsiveness. The alien is that which calls and notably, in Musil’s example, those called are spectators. By contrast, in my example, the children on the bed are both actors and spectators of the drill team performance. Marcy and Delores are even more clearly agentive. There is something deliberative and conscious about the mothering project they are engaged in, including their choice to involve themselves and their children in the local Pasadena drill team. If the drill team – in this family – is a response to the call of crack



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cocaine, it is not an obvious response and it is not merely ‘pathic’. It is the result of deliberation and planning, most obviously exemplified in Delores’s efforts. But it also reveals pathic confrontations with alterity of the sort Waldenfels alerts us to. My ethnographically grounded analysis further suggests the need to amend the axiomatic tenet that the everyday is merely pre-reflective and that a reflection that de-familiarizes the ordinary demands a distancing or bracketing procedure. If phenomenology (of a certain kind) is useful in illuminating ordinary ethics, it is because it can highlight the way that people, in the midst of everyday action, may find themselves in an unfamiliar relationship with the quotidian. They may even draw upon cultural resources to problematize the moral ordinary, not because they have adopted a bracketing methodology or even because they have reflectively distanced themselves from action, but precisely as part of their engaged practical response to ethical demands. This brings me to my final aim: to suggest how a border conversation between anthropology and philosophy is poised to offer a revitalized and reinvented humanism. As already noted, from the perspective of philosophy, phenomenology addresses the question of the human by proposing existential universals as forms of experience – for example, the demand to respond. Such a universal is appealing for an anthropology committed to human plurality because it highlights the under-determined character of the human condition. However, if we are to unpack existential universals so that they show themselves to us as lived experience, then we need to move towards them by means of a detour that takes us into local cultural worlds in which particular people, beset by particular historical circumstances, respond to existential demands. In sum, by challenging and redressing philosophical formalisms through ethnographic particulars, anthropology can contribute to an ethnographically grounded humanism of indeterminacy and human possibility. But particulars do not speak for themselves. They emerge in dialogue with theory. Phenomenology can bring them to light by illuminating their alterity and challenging anthropological third-person tendencies to subsume unique events under social structures. Ethnographic particulars, illuminated in this way, elude or exceed the social categories in which they might be placed, allowing the existential question of human possibility to be asked differently than either a formalist philosophy or a third-person anthropology permits. This kind of humanism exemplifies our first-person relationship with our own existence as a matter that is existentially underdetermined, even while it is necessarily responded to concretely by particular people facing situations shaped by local cultural norms and concerns.11 Cheryl Mattingly is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California and Professor of Anthropology and Philosophy at Aarhus University. She is also an award-winning author whose works include Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1998), The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland

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(University of California Press, 2010) and Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life (University of California Press, 2014).

Notes This chapter was previously published in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8(1/2): 172–184.  1. Her family, along with almost fifty others, was part of a fifteen-year ethnographic project carried out between 1997 and 2011, during which my colleagues and I followed African American families in Los Angeles raising children with significant disabilities and chronic illnesses.  2. My periodic call for a renewed humanism in earlier work (Mattingly 2012, 2014, Mattingly and Jensen 2015) has unsurprisingly prompted unease among some anthropological colleagues (e.g. Laidlaw 2014).  3. Notably, this phenomenological ‘first person’ need not be a grammatical or biographical ‘I’, a named someone. In fact, philosophical phenomenology has often eschewed or been wary of this individual ‘I’ (Mattingly 2012).  4. The number of anthropologists in this camp has grown so large that a succinct list of contributors is impractical.  5. For my purposes, the terms ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ are interchangeable, as are the terms ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’. I recognize that these have distinct meanings in some theoretical schemes, but they can be treated synonymously in mine.  6. My arguments also build upon earlier work (Mattingly 2014) in which I drew on Jonathan Lear’s useful framing of philosophical anthropology as an inquiry into ‘the field of possibilities in which all human endeavors gain meaning’ (2006: 7). In Radical Hope, Lear explores this as part of an investigation of extraordinary conditions. By contrast, I have considered ethical possibility as embedded within what we might call everyday life.  7. Other anthropologists drawing on Waldenfels have also analysed this Musil example in useful ways in the context of their own ethnographic material (Gron 2017, Leistle 2016).  8. I have written about this family elsewhere (Mattingly 2014), although not this particular event. I utilize some of my earlier ethnographic material in developing it.  9. I have analysed this from a different theoretical perspective elsewhere (Mattingly 2014: 75). 10. Related challenges have been voiced in the tradition of feminist critical phenomenology, which has insisted on the social and political embeddedness of forms of experience (e.g. Guenther 2011, Ahmed 2014). 11. I thank my friends and colleagues at Aarhus University and Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, some stellar anonymous reviewers and support from a National Institutes of Health research grant.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2014. ‘Not in the Mood’, New Formations 82: 13–28. Alexander, Michelle. 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Bourgois, Philippe. 2003. In Search of Respect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press



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. 2010. ‘Engaging the Life of the Other: Love and Everyday Life’, in Michael Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 376–99. . 2015. ‘What Does Ordinary Ethics Look Like?’, in Michael Lambek et al. (eds), Four Lectures on Ethics. Chicago: HAU Books. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. 1994 [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. Mineola, NY: Dover Thrift Editions. Dyring, Rasmus, Cheryl Mattingly and Maria Louw. 2017. ‘“Moral Engines” as an Anthropological and Philosophical Inquiry: An Introduction’, in Cheryl Mattingly et al. (eds), Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. Oxford: Berghahn Press, pp. 9–36. Gron, Lone. 2017. ‘The Tipping Point of the Big Stone – and Life Itself: Obesity, Moral Work and Responsive Selves over Time’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 41(2): 267–83. Guenther, Lisa. 2011. ‘The Ethics and Politics of Otherness: Negotiating Alterity and Racial Difference’, philoSOPHIA 1(2): 195–214. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. London: SCM. Jackson, Michael. 2005. Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects: Methodology and History in Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn. . 2013. Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keane, Webb. 2015. ‘Varieties of Ethical Stance’, in Michael Lambek et al. (eds), Four Lectures on Ethics. Chicago: HAU Books, pp. 127-174. . 2016. Ethical Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Laidlaw, James. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’, Journal of the Ryoal Anthropological Institute 8(2): 311–32. . 2014. The Subject of Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael. 2010. Ordinary Ethics. New York: Fordham University Press. . 2015a. The Ethical Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. . 2015b. ‘Living as if It Mattered’, in Michael Lambek et al. (eds), Four Lectures on Ethics. Chicago: HAU Books, pp. 5-52. Lear, Jonathan. 2006. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leistle, Bernhard. 2016. ‘Responsivity and (Some) Other Approaches to Alterity’, Anthropological Theory 16(1): 48–74. Lempert, Michael. 2013. ‘No Ordinary Ethics’, Anthropological Theory 13(4): 370–93. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’, Anthropological Theory 12(2): 161–84. . 2014. Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2017a. ‘Autism and the Ethics of Care: A Phenomenological Investigation into the Contagion of Nothing’, Special Issue: Social Contagion and Cultural Epidemics, eds Lone Gron and Lotte Meinert, Ethos 45(2): 250–70. . 2017b ‘Ethics, Transcendent Immanence, and the Experimental Narrative Self ’, in Cheryl Mattingly et al. (eds), Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. Oxford: Berghahn Press, pp. 39–61. Mattingly, Cheryl, and Uffe Jensen. 2015. ‘What Can We Hope For? An Exploration in Cosmopolitan Philosophical Anthropology’, in Sune Liisberg, Esther Oluffa Pedersen and Anne-Line Dalsgård (eds), Anthropology & Philosophy: Dialogues on Trust and Hope. Oxford: Berghahn Press, pp. 24–55.

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Reinarman, Craig, and Harry Levine. 1997. Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Throop, Jason. 2014. ‘Moral Moods’, Ethos 42(1): 65–83. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 1996. Order in the Twilight. Athens: Ohio University Press. . 2007. The Question of the Other. New York: Sunny Press. . 2011. Phenomenology of the Alien. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Wentzer, Thomas. 2017. ‘Human, the Responding Being: Considerations towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Responsiveness’, in Cheryl Mattingly et al. (eds), Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. Oxford: Berghahn Press, pp. 211-229. Zigon, Jarrett. 2007. ‘Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities’, Anthropological Theory 7(2): 131–50. . 2011. HIV Is God’s Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2014. ‘An Ethics of Dwelling and Anti-War Activism: A Critical Response to Ordinary Ethics’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(4): 746–64.

4 Moral Revolutions, Value Change and the Question of Moral Progress Joel Robbins

There has been a recent surge of interest in studying radical moral change. A number of philosophers have turned to Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions as a framework for understanding this kind of transformation – one that, as Kwame Anthony Appiah puts it, registers ‘a large change in a short time’ and involves ‘a rapid transformation in moral behavior, not just in moral sentiments’ (2010: xi, emphasis in original). Unlike Appiah, who mentions Kuhn only in passing, Nigel Pleasants (2018) and Robert Baker (2019) draw on his model extensively. I am attracted to this use of Kuhn’s conceptualization of revolution for understanding moral transformation. Kuhn’s reckoning of change more as a matter of thoroughgoing gestalt shifts than piecemeal additions to existing paradigms, or tinkering around their edges, points to the kinds of processes I am most interested in when thinking about moral change in relation to my own ethnographic research. But even as I am drawn to the focus on moral revolution in these recent works, I am wary of taking the mostly Western examples Appiah, Pleasants and Baker use to illustrate their arguments as paradigmatic of this kind of change. Pleasants looks to the emancipation of slaves and the historical rise of broad moral condemnations of slavery, the loss of public legitimacy for racist positions, and changing attitudes towards gender and sexuality for his case studies. Baker, for his part, focuses on shifting moral evaluations of the use of cadavers in medical research, abortion and the ethics of medicine. Appiah recounts the end of Euro-American duelling, the cessation of Chinese foot-binding and the ending of the Atlantic slave trade as his primary examples of moral revolution. My worry is that these changes are the result not of radical moral paradigm shifts, but rather of the extension of prior paradigms in culturally logical rather than revolutionary terms. Here, I will just briefly back up this claim by suggesting that, in the Western locales Pleasants focuses on, what is being extended in

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the cases he examines is a traditional commitment to individual rights and ideas about the equality of persons and the sovereignty of personal choice that underlies that commitment. This is true, too, of the bioethics revolution and arguments about abortion on which Baker dwells (see also Baker 2002). It is, I want to suggest, a long-standing Western subscription to a specific kind of individualism, rather than a wholly new ethical perception, that lies at the centre of the ethical circle that is expanding in these cases, and this individualism retains its central place even as the circumference of the circle it occupies moves outward. Appiah is less focused on the expansion of the rights of individuals, though certainly this concern is present throughout his book. Rather, Appiah’s most ambitious argument is that a commitment to honour is a constant throughout all of his examples of moral revolution. What is key to moral revolution, according to him, is not that honour is displaced as a core commitment (which, he suggests, is unlikely to occur, given what he takes to be constants of human psychology), but is instead the occurrence of changes in the kinds of behaviour count as honourable (Appiah 2010: 169). I want to distinguish this kind of moral change, in which the centre – be it individualism or honour – holds, from the kind that involves a genuinely new central commitment, or, as I will put it in what follows, a commitment to a new central value or ranking of values. Although Baker and Pleasants, and Appiah as well, all examine cases of moral change in very productive ways, in this chapter I will reserve the designation ‘moral revolution’ for cases where such changes in core values are in play. This point about distinguishing changes that constitute paradigmatic expansions from those that are revolutionary is important for broader discussions of moral change because an elision of this distinction can allow for an excess of confidence when it comes to identifying cases of moral progress. In cases of change, such as the end of the slave trade, the emancipation of slaves, the legal enshrinement of the right to same-sex marriage in the West, the end of footbinding or the rise in concern for patients’ rights, the authors I have been considering judge the changes as clearly progressive. They can do so precisely because no matter how dramatic these transformations are, they remain grounded in moral values about the rights and freedoms of individuals that the authors already accept. Indeed, Pleasants (2018: 585) and Appiah (2010: 161–64) are quite open in their conviction that they are studying cases of moral progress, in which moral systems become more consistent in their conceptualizations and applications of already existing moral values. In the kinds of revolutionary cases I am most interested in, ones in which new moral gestalts come into play, the question of the vantage point from which one should judge whether the change involved counts as progress or not is much trickier: should the old moral standard provide this vantage point, or the new one? Or does the scholar bring some third standard to bear and use this to keep score of progress and regress across any given radical moral transformation, and if this is the case, in what moral paradigm is that standard grounded? As I will lay out in my conclusion, I do not mean for these kinds of questions to lead us into a



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discussion of cultural or moral relativism of the kind that has usually been conducted by anthropologists. But before I get there, I first want to briefly sketch an approach to morality that views it as grounded in values and that therefore finds it useful to define revolutionary change as occurring when cultural values themselves shift. I will then illustrate the usefulness of this approach by looking at a specific ethnographic case before returning to the problem of reckoning progress across chasms of moral change. I have already made a passing reference to the notion of values above, but I now want to define the term more clearly and spell out how I think it relates to issues of morality. In anthropology, theories of value tend to divide on the basis of whether they look at values as objective elements of cultural structure or as subjective phenomena that are part of people’s experiences of the world (Robbins and Sommerschuh 2016). The two types of theories can be linked, or at least I like to hope they can, but given space constraints here I am only going to focus on defining the objective aspects of values in a way that helps us understand their contribution to cultural structures, of which I consider moral traditions to be a subset. In this context, it makes most sense to define values as those parts of a culture that rank other parts of that culture on some basis or other. Moral values rank parts of a culture on the basis of how much or how little their realization contributes to the living of good lives, or lives that achieve various ethical goals. In all cultures, there is more than one value and indeed there is more than one moral value. Moreover, these various values are also ranked in relation to one another. Taking US culture, with which I am most intuitively familiar (but which I do not study ethnographically, so I accept that the accuracy of my seat-of-the-pants, illustrative analysis here is up for debate), we might say that being healthy, being law-abiding and being financially well off are all values – it is better to achieve all of these states than their opposites. But on the basis of a quick cultural analysis, we can also observe that these values are ranked in relation to each other, with health and law-abidingness being ranked above being well off, at least on the cultural level, such that it is commonly asserted (even if sometimes in the breach) that without one’s health, financial resources are meaningless and that wealth is not so important that one should break the law to attain it (again, a point sometimes asserted in the breach, but culturally salient nonetheless). Likewise, health at least potentially trumps law-abidingness, as evidenced by Carol Gilligan’s (1982) famous vignette of a husband stealing unaffordable medicine for a direly ill wife being a ubiquitous source of moral debate among students inside and outside the classroom when I was a university student. Now, if cultural values rank other items of culture along some scale or other, and values themselves are also ranked in relation to one another, what supplies the scales along which values are ranked? Sticking with the hierarchical imagery of rank that already suffuses my discussion, I want to suggest that it is very high-level cultural values that rank other values. That is to say, in most cultures, there are some very high-ranking values that are relevant across many domains of social life and that establish the scales along which other,

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lower values are ranked. In philosophical discussions of value relations, I sometimes see such values – for example, happiness or utility in various philosophical schemes – referred to as ‘supervalues’ (Chang 2001). They are also akin to what Charles Taylor, in more culturally oriented terms, calls ‘hypergoods’, which ‘not only are incomparably more important than others but provide the standpoint from which these must be weighed, judged, decided about’ (1989: 63). In anthropology, the most important theorist of values, Louis Dumont (1980, 1986), introduced the term ‘paramount values’ to refer to this same kind of value. In his work, one key example of a paramount value is one that I have already mentioned: individualism – a valuation of the worth and freedom of each individual person, which, Dumont argued, sets the terms by means of which all other values are ranked in the West, such that, for example, the value of equality is ranked lower than that of liberty because liberty more fully accords with the paramount value of individualism as it is understood in this tradition (Robbins 1994). Dumont’s formulation has deeply influenced my own approach to these issues, but since the term ‘paramount value’ is rarely used these days, I will call what I am discussing ‘high-level values’. At the heart of my argument is the suggestion that it is when a culture’s highest-level values change, either because they are replaced by wholly new values or because an existing but lower-ranked cultural value is elevated above them, that we can meaningfully speak of moral revolutions. In framing my argument thus, I am drawing on Max Scheler’s (1994 [1915]) discussion of value change. Scheler distinguishes between changes in what counts as a realization of a given value and ‘transformations of values’ themselves, which are ‘quite another thing’. The latter occur when ‘the rules of preference between the values have varied’ (59–60, emphasis in original). His own example of this kind of change is that point in Western history when bourgeois values became more highly ranked than Christian ones (61). To be sure, studies of changes in the kinds of behaviour that count as realizing a given value can be very productive in anthropological terms (see Sommerschuh 2020; and see again Appiah 2010; Baker 2019; Pleasants 2018), but here I am going to draw on Scheler and insist that only when hierarchies change, either because a new value is introduced into a moral system or the hierarchical arrangements of its existing values change, does it make sense to define a moral change as a moral revolution. I will illustrate my argument about the nature of moral revolution, and also move towards issues of moral progress, by briefly introducing the situation of the Urapmin people of Papua New Guinea as it stood when I carried out fieldwork with them in the early 1990s (for more details on this case than I provide here, see Robbins 2004). The Urapmin are a language group of roughly four hundred people living in a community in the far western Highlands of Papua New Guinea that is at least six hours’ walk in every direction from the other language communities in the region. Even in the early 1990s, when I carried out fieldwork among the Urapmin, their lives were markedly traditional in terms both of their subsistence practices, which consisted mostly of gardening



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and hunting, and of many of their fundamental social practices (including in the areas of kinship, marriage and politics). They had very little engagement with the market economy or the modern state of Papua New Guinea and lived without roads, electricity or an airstrip (a key point of entry for some other remote communities in Papua New Guinea to the wider regional world and beyond). But although at first glance they appear to lead largely ‘traditional’ lives, central to the Urapmin situation when I began to work with them was the fact that, despite never having been directly missionized by the Australian Baptists who proselytized among other groups in their area, in 1977 the entire community converted to a charismatic form of Christianity that was brought to them by a revival movement then spreading throughout much of Papua New Guinea. When I worked among them, their form of Christianity was intensely eschatological and once they converted, most people became constantly aware of the possibility that Jesus could return at any moment. When Jesus did come back, people regularly reminded each other, he would determine who was saved, and would therefore spend eternity in heaven, and who was not saved, and would therefore be assigned to hell. In the early 1990s, ensuring that as many people as possible would be saved when Jesus came back was the central Urapmin project. Given that salvation depended, in Urapmin reckoning, on moral purity, and that, as they understood matters, the human depravity that followed from original sin made such purity extremely hard to achieve, their Christian lives consisted of frequent ritual participation and moral exhortation aimed at helping people to ‘strengthen their belief ’ and live moral lives. From lengthy, two- and sometimes threehour church services focused on moral behaviour, both during the service and outside the church, to regular morning speeches in village plazas focused on moral rectitude and the difficulty of its realization, and on to many of the everyday conversations people held with one another and the elaborate confession rituals the Urapmin developed for themselves, the issue of moral difficulty and the rewards for moral success were a constant preoccupation that constituted the dominant theme of Urapmin life. Absurdly compressed accounts of the main issues that characterize the existence of a group of people, such as the one I have just given of the Urapmin situation, are always painful for anthropologists to write; so much of the richness and nuance of those lives is edited out that people can look almost cartoonish in their single-mindedness. But I hope I have said enough to give at least a sense of the profound extent to which the difficulties of living morally occupied the foreground of Urapmin people’s minds in the early 1990s, as well as a sense of why, at that time, they felt that the status of their moral lives was of such overwhelming import. I have tried to get this point across as economically as possible because, in this chapter, I am interested not so much in the fact of people’s intense focus on living moral lives, but rather in a key change in their moral values that I want to argue was driving the Urapmin experience of moral difficulty, an experience that was convincing them of the validity of the Christian account of the human condition as fundamentally shaped by original

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sin. What the Urapmin were experiencing, I want to suggest, was an as yet unsettled contest between an old highest value and a new potential one. They possessed, we might say, a strong awareness of a revolutionary moral paradigm shift that they would have liked to complete, but that they were having trouble completing. To explain their situation more fully, let me say a bit about the highest values in play in their lives. Before the advent of Christianity among the Urapmin, the highest value organizing their culture was one we can call ‘relationalism’. As a value, relationalism defines making and maintaining relationships as the most worthwhile things a person can do. Towards this end, Urapmin people were constantly giving food crops they had grown and harvested to one another so that no one had to eat their own food, which they considered ‘eating for nothing’, or, more straightforwardly, eating food that had not been put in the service of making or maintaining any relationships. Moreover, many of their traditional rituals involved relation-creating or reinforcing exchanges. And whenever relationships came under threat because of disputes between their constituent parties, these parties would arrange to exchange exactly the same things with each other at exactly the same time. As one younger man who had briefly attended a government school once told me, these later exchanges, like the constant exchanges of foodstuffs that everyone was already growing for themselves, make no ‘profit’ – but still, he went on to add, ‘we do them anyway’. Urapmin do these things because they are a key way of realizing the relationalist values they hold in such high esteem. According to Urapmin moral psychology, there are two parts of the ‘heart’ (the seat of all thought, feeling and intention) that people must mobilize correctly in order to succeed in creating and maintaining relationships. The first of these they call the ‘will’. This is the part of the heart that leads a person to ‘push’ others to enter into relations with him- or herself, such as by insisting that the two garden together or share food together or hunt together or build their houses close together or engage with each other in any other way. The other part of the heart they call ‘good thinking’, which leads people to act in ‘lawful’ ways. Behaviour is defined as lawful if it recognizes the demands of relations that people already have, so that it leads them, for example, to garden with people they have already gardened with, share food with people they have already shared food with, etc. Ideally, according to the traditional Urapmin view of things, wilfulness and lawfulness work together: people use their wills to create new relationships and follow the promptings of their good thinking to ensure that all their relationships remain in good order. In a more anthropologically detailed essay, I could link the appeal of relational values for the Urapmin to technical details of their social structure. Put simply, the point of such an argument would be that Urapmin social-structural norms allow for a great deal of choice about which potential relationships to participate in and therefore people do not imagine that relationships or broader social orders are timeless, or, as it were, come about automatically on the basis of the workings of their kinship and marriage systems. Instead, the Urapmin assert that people



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must make, maintain and remake such orders, and for these things to happen, they add, people have to place relational values at the top of their hierarchy. Having established this relatively technical anthropological point, for present purposes I do not have to go further into the niceties of Urapmin social organization. It is enough to have indicated that relational values held an extremely high place in traditional Urapmin life and that they gave shape to a moral system that viewed the correct balancing of wilful, expansive relational impulses and lawful ones aimed at maintaining existing relations as the key task of ethical life. One of effects of the coming of Christianity to Urapmin has been the introduction of a new high-level value that, at least for them, is fundamentally incompatible with relationalism. Given that that this value came to them from the very Christian tradition that many argue profoundly shaped Western individualism, and that in any case is a major global carrier of that value, we can call this value ‘individualism’ in something close to our own common-sense understanding of the term (Dumont 1986). At the heart of this individualism is the conviction that God will deal with each person as an individual and that one’s ultimate fate therefore depends upon the moral state of one’s own heart at the time of Jesus’s return, rather than the moral state of any relations one might have to others. As one Urapmin person very eloquently put this to me, in Christian terms ‘everyone has to have their own belief ’. ‘My wife’, he went on, ‘cannot break off part of her belief and give it to me, I have to have my own.’ If you remember how hard Urapmin work never to eat their own food and further consider that sometimes husbands and wives split their gardens into ‘his’ and ‘her’ halves so that even food shared between them constitutes a relationenhancing gift from one to the other, you can grasp the force of his point. This notion that in order to realize the highest Christian value one has to have something of one’s own – something one cultivates by oneself rather than receiving it from another – is a new one for Urapmin, one they have had to work hard to learn and to integrate into their lives (Robbins 2002). Urapmin efforts to realize this individualist value have led to a profound change in their moral psychology for the interior state the person now aims to achieve is not one based on a careful balancing of wilful and lawful impulses, but rather one that is marked by an ‘easy’ feeling that signals that one is free of wilful drives and able to avoid the sinful practices of pushing others, arguing, fighting, stealing, etc., to which such drives can lead. In Christian terms, having only lawful feelings is the sole route to having an easy heart and realizing the value of lawful living, and the will is now condemned as sinful by nature. This new emphasis on lawfulness alone plays out in many central areas of Urapmin lives. For example, in the name of the value of Christian individualism, some otherwise highly skilled and well-liked Urapmin people who were well-qualified to take up leadership roles have withdrawn fairly extensively from social life so as to avoid the kinds of wilful behaviour the occupation of such positions requires, or, as they put it, to avoid ‘ruining’ their ‘Christian lives’. Others have withdrawn from the will-driven, contentious exchanges that surround

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marriage (perhaps the ultimate wilful act of relation creation). More generally, the pursuit of an easy heart has attenuated for many the appeal of participation in public life. But even people like those I have just discussed, those who forego some of the key relation-making practices of traditional Urapmin life, do need, just like all other Urapmin, to work towards creating and maintaining at least some relationships in order to survive in the local social and economic conditions they still inhabit, and to do this they need to exercise their wills to some extent, despite the inevitability of this leading them into sin. No wonder, then, that the Christian model of humanity as fallen makes such good sense to the Urapmin: from the point of view of their highest Christian value, they are moral failures whenever they engage in the wilful relation-making work on which their social life depends, while, from the point of view of their highest traditional value, they are moral failures whenever they succeed as Christians in cultivating the consistently easy, lawful heart devoid of the wilful, relation-promoting impulses upon which their salvation depends. What I have tried to sketch here is a picture of the Urapmin as people who are living through an advanced but not yet complete moral revolution driven by changes in their highest values. At least in clearly voiced, public terms, they are sure of the direction in which they want to go; this is towards an ever-fuller realization of the value of Christian individualism. Yet the conditions of their lives, in particular the lack of fundamental change in the nature of their social organization, do not allow for the completion of this revolution. They thus inhabited both their traditional, relational moral gestalt and their new Christian individualist one at the time I carried out my field research with them. Analogous to the perception of the kinds of duck–rabbit multi-stable images that Pleasants (2018) and Baker (2019), drawing on Kuhn, deploy in their arguments, in the early 1990s Urapmin people routinely shifted from seeing moral life as laid out in the terms of one value configuration to seeing it as it as laid out in that of the other; they did so at the cost of failing to experience much in the way of moral comfort as they went about their daily lives. The question I want to raise in relation to this material is not that of how the Urapmin situation will resolve itself over time. Rather, having presented their situation as an example of what an at least partially complete moral revolution understood in value terms looks like, I want to ask how we might go about determining what counts as moral progress when moral revolution is defined as a matter of high-level value change. The Urapmin case is a useful one on the basis of which to raise this question, I would argue, because I think readers steeped in Western philosophy and Western social science are likely to see both of the values the Urapmin are caught between as good ones. Their individualism, I have already noted, has its origins in a tradition, religious but also philosophical and, more broadly, cultural, from which much of modern moral thought springs, so surely we can see some good in it. But, at the same time, their relational value seems to me to be equally hard to condemn from our own point of view, outside of the narrowest kinds of economic thinking. I have



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already invoked Gilligan, but there are many other strands in our own traditions of moral thought that, even if they are not the dominant strands, do promote a respect for relationships as an extremely high moral good. Furthermore, from an anthropological point of view that I have not had time to present in any detail here, it is evident that Urapmin social life as currently configured depends upon relationalism continuing to occupy a very high place in their culture’s hierarchy of values; consequently, for individualism to triumph completely would require the provision of resources for the Urapmin to live in a wholly different way, and most likely in a way that much more tightly integrated them into the global market economy. Given the points I have just made, we can ask the following question: if the Urapmin were to succeed in resolving their current moral difficulties by becoming wholeheartedly individualist, or by going in the other direction and returning to their predominantly relationalist moral system, would either outcome count as progress for us in the straightforward way that the end of slavery or the diminishment of sexual discrimination do? How do we settle hard cases like this, in which what is changing are highlevel moral values that both count as good in our own terms? And if we cannot settle issues of moral progress in hard cases of moral revolution of this kind, should we perhaps be wary of talking about revolutionary moral progress at all? I do not have answers to these questions, and I would be reasonably pleased if all I have managed to do in this chapter is raise them in a compelling form. But, by way of conclusion, I do want to point out at least one sense in which I have not meant to bring up this question in the familiar way anthropologists more routinely raise issues of cultural and moral relativism when faced with universalist philosophical arguments. I consider this familiar anthropological way of raising relativist concerns to consist in confronting our scholarly interlocutors with practices that are positively morally sanctioned in some culture or other but that we think they are likely to find abhorrent. Well-worn examples include infanticide, striking gender inequalities, ritual genital surgeries and the like. Our task then becomes seeing if we can lead our interlocutors to a position of what the philosopher John Cook (1999) calls ‘moral recusal’, in which they suspend their judgement of these practices because they have come to see how they are positively morally understood by those who carry them out. I have tried to do something different here. My goal has been to confront us with a moral revolution in progress in which a group is moving from one moral value – what I have called relationalism – which I think we are likely to consider good, towards another – individualism – which we are also likely to find attractive. In doing so, I am asking how we judge moral changes that move between different goods, as opposed to changes that we think self-evidently move from something worse to something better. I think there are resources to be found in value-pluralist positions in philosophy that might help us think about what this kind of position entails for thinking about cultural differences more generally. If we take the value-pluralist position of Isaiah Berlin (1998, 2013) as representative, he is clear that he is

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not supporting relativism. His point is not that any values a society might choose to elaborate can support a moral outlook that demands respect, if not support. Rather, he argues that however many values there are in the world that do not lead to flourishing human lives and should thus be condemned, there are at least a number of different values that can in fact achieve this goal. Further, some of these workable values conflict with each other, such that fully realizing one means having to forgo realizing another equally fully. In the liberal tradition with which he is most concerned, examples of conflicting values include those of equality and liberty, justice and mercy, etc. Between these values, he asserts, ‘tragic choices’ must be made – choices in which at least one value that is good in itself will fail to be realized as fully as it might be. John Rawls has glossed this position by noting that, from the value-pluralist perspective, ‘there is no social world without loss – that is, no social world that does not exclude some ways of life that realize in special ways certain fundamental values’ (1988: 265). What I have sought to argue is that it is between conflicting values such as these that moral revolutions, as opposed to paradigmatic extensions of existing moral values, occur. Precisely because both preand post-revolutionary values can support good human lives, in this scheme moral progress is hard to track. That does not mean, however, that recounting instances of such revolutions cannot inspire readers to think in new ways about their own moral lives. They can do so by expanding their understanding of worthy values that are not highly ranked in their own social worlds (Robbins 2018). I want to close by making a point about the scope of my claims here. I do not mean for what I have argued here to in any way cast doubt on the contributions of the works on moral change by Appiah, Baker and Pleasants with which I began. But I have suggested that we reserve the phrase ‘moral revolution’ for cases in which highest goods change, or at least cases in which the hierarchical arrangement of highest goods within a given cultural formation shifts. If we do this, we might define the kinds of paradigmatic extensions of highest goods with which these authors are concerned as a different species of moral change – one in which it is possible to track moral progress from within the terms of the cultural formation concerned, or at least within the terms of the philosophers writing about them. Both kinds of moral change are of great interest to those concerned with the social life of moralities; my claim is only that there is value in distinguishing them, and this is particularly true when the goal is to make claims about moral progress. Joel Robbins is the Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He works on the anthropology of religion, the anthropology of value and anthropological theory, and is the author of Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (University of California Press, 2004) and Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life (Oxford University Press, 2020).



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References Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2010. The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. New York: Norton. Baker, Robert. 2019. The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Berlin, Isaiah. 1998. The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. . 2013. The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chang, Ruth. 2001. ‘Value Pluralism’, in N.J. Smelser and P.B. Baltes (eds), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. New York: Elsevier, pp. 16139–45. Cook, John W. 1999. Morality and Cultural Differences. New York: Oxford University Press. Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, trans. M. Sainsbury, L. Dumont and B. Gulati. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1986. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pleasants, Nigel. 2018. ‘The Structure of Moral Revolutions’, Social Theory and Practice 44(4): 567–92. Rawls, John. 1988. ‘The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 17(4): 251–76. Robbins, Joel. 1994. ‘Equality as a Value: Ideology in Dumont, Melanesia and the West’, Social Analysis 36: 21–70. . 2002. ‘“My Wife Can’t Break Off Part of Her Belief and Give it to Me”: Apocalyptic Interrogations of Christian Individualism among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea’, Paideuma 48: 189–206. . 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2018. ‘Anthropology between Europe and the Pacific: Values and the Prospects for a Relationship beyond Relativism’, Pacific Studies 41(1/2): 97–116. Robbins, Joel, and Julian Sommerschuh. 2016. ‘Values’, in F. Stein et al. (eds), Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https:// www.anthroencyclopedia.com/. Sommerschuh, Julian. 2020. ‘From Feasting to Accumulations: Modes of Value Realisation and Radical Cultural Change in Southern Ethiopia’, Ethnos (online ahead of print, doi: 10.1080/00141844.2020.1828971). Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

5 Losing Selves Moral Injury and the Changing Moral Economies of State-Sanctioned Violence Elizabeth M. Bounds and Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon

In the last two decades, psychiatrists working with US military veterans have introduced the concept of moral injury to assess the impact of war. Reigning descriptions of psychological harm, such as trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, emphasized the emotional and psychological problems of individual soldiers. However, the category of moral injury suggests that participation in the state-sanctioned violence of military action profoundly alters aspects not only of a person’s emotional well-being but also of their character and understanding of the world. Such transformation is experienced as a negative change in one’s moral selfhood that makes one feel less able to function in society – particularly peacetime society – and unable to look to the future, hopeful about one’s ability to strive to be a good person, however that is defined. The introduction of this term, we argue, is connected to shifts in the way violence is framed and justified in US society at present. Since the emergence of modern national states, policing the threat of violence, whether inside or outside its boundaries, is one of the state’s key roles.1 Generally, this violent work is framed by a strong legitimizing discourse that helps those implementing the violence to negotiate the moral tensions and challenges that are inevitably present. If military personnel are seen as heroes, then any violence they inflict is either erased or valorized. However, the term ‘moral injury’ raises questions about these justifications. The concept of moral injury suggests that the vulnerabilities created by violence in such situations arise not just from experiencing violence but also from being a more intimate part of the violence (i.e. committing, stopping someone else from committing, and witnessing violence). This tension becomes even clearer when the term is used in relation to forms of violence carried out by the state that have not enjoyed the same



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glorifying legitimation, such as violence committed by police and correctional officers (Papazoglou 2020; Spinaris and Denhof 2015). To explore these shifts and this tension, we have chosen a comparative approach, concentrating on the differences between the moral locations of soldiers and correctional officers (COs), as two roles that present perhaps the sharpest contrast in the state legitimation of violence. Both are tasked with state-sanctioned violence towards and control of persons – enemies, criminals – deemed to be ‘other’ to the social order. However, their visibility and their public moral status differ in what we call the moral economy of state-sponsored violence. We draw here on Didier Fassin’s definition of moral economies as ‘representing the production, circulation, and appropriation of values and effects regarding a given social issue’ (Fassin 2015, see also Fassin 2009). This concept enables us to bring together the multiple levels of this moral work, connecting public ideologies that shape both the personal formation and the institutional roles of soldiers and correctional officers in the military and in the prison. For soldiers, the experience of moral injury is linked to societal glorification of their role, embodied in the common refrain – ‘Thank you for your service’ – that civilians often utter upon meeting or acknowledging a soldier or veteran, even without knowing their role in recent wars.2 This valorization of soldiers is often so tied to a valorization of American exceptionalism,that great pressure – symbolically, narratively and culturally – is placed on a soldier’s moral worth. For COs, however, their moral challenges are, for reasons discussed below, virtually invisible to the broader culture as they carry out ‘dirty work’. To the best of our knowledge, there are no images of noble correctional officers, nor are they usually thanked for their service. They play an almost subterranean role in state-sanctioned violence, which is in contrast to the movies, poems, books, holidays and memorials that engage the soldier and veteran as central to a shared virtue project in the United States. This chapter, then, compares the subjectivities of US soldiers with those of correctional officers in US prisons within the framework of moral injury. While this analysis helps deepen the definition of moral injury, our main purpose is to show how the emergence of the concept itself reveals changes in the moral economy of state-sponsored violence. US culture currently valorizes certain institutions and roles, such as the military and the soldier, while devaluing correctional institutions and their personnel, who can also claim to work on behalf of the security of the American people. This contrast suggests the ways in which changes in moral economies can operate differently in different institutional settings. Thus, we will first outline the current conversation on moral injury, with reference to the role and status of the military. We will then describe the contrasting location and challenges of correctional work. Finally, we will discuss what the similarities in the potential for moral injury and the contrast in social valorization suggest about tensions and shifts in the moral economy of state-sanctioned violence in the United States.

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The Development of Moral Injury The glory of the warrior who suffers in the service of their people has been honoured at least since Homer sang of the war between the Trojans and the Greeks, and since Arjuna was portrayed in the ‘song’ – the Gita – following his dharma in going to war against his own kin. Closer to our own time, George Washington instituted a ‘badge of merit’ for those soldiers of the emerging nation who showed ‘not only instances of unusual gallantry, but also of extraordinary fidelity and essential service’.3 This badge evolved into the Purple Heart, which, emblazoned with the image of the nation’s first commander-in-chief and president, valorizes the trauma of war at the heart of the nation’s founding. While the nation was eager to glorify the physical ‘sacrifices’ of soldiers as material evidence of valour, other ‘unseen’ wounds of war – those psychic marks borne long after the battle’s end – have been viewed ambivalently (Trimble 1985: 5–9). At least since the Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a tension between glorifying and acknowledging the harms of war. A virtue discourse marking ‘courage’ and ‘cowardice’ has been used to evaluate a soldier’s psychological attunement to the goals and dangers of combat. Naming adverse reactions as ‘cowardice’ supports a glorified, honourbased ethos and world view in the military. Further, since the assessment of psychological and emotional harms is based largely on testimony, and since doctors were unable to pinpoint an obvious, physical wound when assessing a patient, observers worried that those naming these unseen wounds were not being truthful. In the military, there was also suspicion that soldiers were trying to get out of their duty and masking cowardice, laziness and selfishness through a claim to injury, reserved for the virtuous and brave (Fassin and Rechtman 2009: 5). Not only could ‘shell shock’ or ‘battle fatigue’ be seen as a weakness of character; there was also the suspicion that soldiers might simply be cowardly, trying to get out of combat by faking a medical diagnosis.4 A major shift occurred in response to the US wars in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, when post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was codified in 1980 as a psychiatric diagnosis whereby, as a result of witnessing or experiencing violence, one relives the traumatic event with hyper-arousal and vigilance, avoiding people or places that may trigger these symptoms (American Psychiatric Association 2013: 194, 271–72). PTSD, with its diagnostic scales and measurements, tried to displace character as the primary frame for understanding ‘unseen’ wounds, since it provided sufferers with an official sanction for their experience that did not prompt moral condemnation, at least officially. This diagnosis offered epistemic justice to soldiers, whereby their experiences were finally recognized through a conceptual innovation affirmed through scientific practice and discourse. Further, with a PTSD diagnosis, soldiers and veterans could receive medical care, insurance coverage and time away from duties, all within an evaluative framework that did not impugn their character, courage, honesty or honour.



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Nevertheless, PTSD has not fully replaced notions of honour and virtue, either in the military or in the wider public. A PTSD diagnosis still carries a stigma, illustrating how its place in the moral economy of the US military, where notions of honour and virtue are critical, is still precarious. Labelling a soldier as having a ‘disorder’ necessarily stigmatizes, as it can be interpreted through a virtue-and-honour lens as a mark of deficiency (MacLeish 2013: 127–28). This is especially powerful when others who have gone through the same or worse experiences come through seemingly unscathed. Such language, then, can still frame the soldier as weak and unable to rise to the challenges that military life and combat can pose. Indeed, we have heard from veterans about how going to a military mental health professional is still seen by many soldiers as risky, as it can be interpreted by superiors as a sign that the soldier is no longer able to fulfil his/her duties, thus ending his/her career. The attempt to create a more neutral, clinical language that removed the stigma did not succeed in transforming a virtue-based framework of understanding. PTSD diagnoses also did not seem to capture the feeling that one had lost an important part of oneself while participating in wartime violence. An example is found in Bill Russell Edmonds’s memoir of war and moral injury, God Is Not Here. As a US Special Forces captain in 2005, working to quell insurgency during the US occupation of Iraq, Edmonds oversaw torture by Iraqi security forces. He describes his time as a balancing act, being present at the violent interrogations and torture taking place, on the one hand, while also trying to remain unaffected by what he saw, heard and smelled, on the other. One night, however, this distance becomes impossible to sustain. He writes: ‘As I feel my darkness intensely and taste this killer’s pleas, I can hear everything … I can see everything … I’m conscious of every scent, and the odors speak of the excitement, the anticipation, the fear, and the hatred we all feel. Then suddenly it vanishes. I feel a deep loss. I despair … I must escape or I will become lost’. Edmonds feels completely subsumed by the need, the desire ‘to hurt, to kill, this man who takes innocent life and then pleads for our mercy’. He becomes someone who desires violence. His identity is transformed, as is his moral compass. He concludes: ‘I become a man I no longer recognize. I’ve lost myself ’ (Edmonds 2015: 28–29). This experience of transformed identity exceeds the definition of PTSD as a threat-response disorder since the diagnosis did not address the feelings of guilt, shame and anger, including functional despair and anomie, that veterans were also experiencing (Litz et al. 2015: 3). Ten years after PTSD became an official diagnosis, another concept emerged to further delineate and nuance these other forms of harm. Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay used the term ‘moral injury’ to better describe the experiences of his patients who were US veterans of the war in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s. There are at least two main reasons why Shay made this conceptual intervention. The first is strategic. When he coined the term in 1991, Shay argued that the clinical language of disorder used to define PTSD continued to stigmatize those in the military, whose performance was often analysed through virtue language and notions of honour, which, at least formally, is so

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associated with the ethos of the US military. Moral injury, in contrast, evokes not mental disorder but a physical injury, a bodily trauma. By framing it this way, Shay hoped to associate such harms not with the often-stigmatized mental health categories but with bodily wounds sustained during combat. The new term resonated with the military’s moral economy of sacrifice and honour (Shay 2011: 179). Second, Shay distinguished moral injury from PTSD and trauma discourse for more substantive reasons. PTSD, defined as an enduring reaction to threat, which can diminish daily functionality, did not, in Shay’s estimation, capture the moral or even spiritual consequences of combat experience. He observed in these veterans a feeling of betrayal that haunted them and he argued that they suffered not just from trauma but also from injuries that took a toll on how they perceived themselves and their own character. Feelings of guilt, shame and anger can overwhelm soldiers and cause them to lose a sense of trust in themselves, others and even the world (Shay 2014: 185). This loss can happen when what a soldier thinks of as the right thing to do is violated ‘by holders of responsibility and trust’ (Shay 1994: 3). Shay provides various examples, including that of a US soldier in Vietnam whose unit was ordered to fire on people suspected of unloading weapons from boats. The firepower was ‘unreal’ in its power and intensity, and in the morning they realized they had killed many civilians and children. The officers’ response to this was that it was not a problem and that they had gotten a ‘body count’, a macabre assessment of success. As the soldier writes, reflecting on this, ‘So you know in your heart it’s wrong, but at the time, here’s your superiors telling you that it was okay’. The soldier was disgusted when all involved, including the officers, received medals for killing civilians (Shay 1994: 3–4). Such an experience can be experienced as an inversion of the moral order, being rewarded and honoured by one’s superiors for doing what one knows to be wrong, resulting in feelings of shame and even despair that do not respond to PTSD treatments. Shay formalized this experience as ‘moral injury’, which ‘is present when there has been (a) a betrayal of “what’s right”; (b) either by a person in legitimate authority (my definition), or by one’s self – “I did it” … ; (c) in a high-stakes situation’ (Shay 2014: 182). An important dimension of Shay’s definition is the emphasis on the institutional context as central, even critical, to understanding these harms. For Shay, moral injury takes place within a specific institutional context – the military chain of command – and within specific institutionally defined relationships – those of military superior and subordinate. It arises because of relationships, such as that between superior and subaltern, that rely on specific institutional structures for their intelligibility. There are moral norms and expectations of trust that include the expectation that one’s own life and the lives of one’s comrades will not be put in danger lightly, that one’s honour and military honour will be taken seriously, that there is care. These norms weave together the relationships and justify an essential power imbalance between the officer, who issues orders, and those under the officer’s command, who necessarily execute



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these orders. Such obedience only makes sense within such a high-stakes institution where the behaviour of those within the institution reflects, and even determines to a degree, the honour and virtue of the larger nation. Shay’s emphasis, then, on the institutional context, and the power relationships in such a context, in his conceptualization of moral injury provides a definition that is of use not only to clinicians. With its focus on the dynamics of power and violence within a specific political institution, moral injury also offers a conceptual framework with the potential for critical evaluation of military structures, relationships and even policy (Wiinikka-Lydon 2016). Nearly two decades after Shay’s initial writings were published, new definitions of moral injury have developed that are quite distinct from Shay’s institutionally grounded understanding. The core definition in this ‘second wave’ of moral injury work comes from a 2009 article framing moral injury as a research focus in psychology.5 Brett Litz, a psychiatrist at the Veterans Administration, and his co-authors defined moral injury as arising from ‘potentially morally injurious events, such as perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations [which] may be deleterious in the long-term, emotionally, psychologically, behaviorally, spiritually, and socially (what we label as moral injury)’ (Litz et al. 2009: 695). Although the military and its institutions are assumed in this definition, they are not highlighted; instead, the soldier is the focal point as both the one who is injured, the subject, and the one doing the injuring, the agent of violent acts (WiinikkaLydon 2019). While these later definitions have underscored the ways in which one can perceive others as having betrayed or injured one, they do not forcefully emphasize the institutional context and dynamics of moral injury. While Shay himself has suggested that there may be two different forms of moral injury (2014: 184), we do not want to separate the interpersonal and the institutional, as this could obscure Shay’s original insight that moral harms do not just occur to humans as such but are conditioned and shaped by institutional context (184). Such contexts are not mere background but the spaces of moral formation within which one’s relationships with others are defined, norms are given and contested, and one’s identity is formed and possibly even broken. The US military sees itself as a ‘school of virtue’ and many soldiers see the moral codes and ways of life of the military, in which they participate, as superior to those of civilians (MacLeish 2013: 18, 149, 188). The institutions, norms and practices of the military, then, are the context in which the members imagine the moral horizons of whom they want to be, providing both ethos and world view. Thus, when Litz and his co-authors focus on a soldier’s own moral code being broken, they tell only part of the story (Litz et al. 2009: 699). One’s moral expectations, one’s horizons, one’s assumptions of how the world is and how it should be, and about how one is and how one should be, are not just one’s own. For soldiers, character is informed by the current institutional moral economy of the US military, shaped not only by the idea of the sacrifice of the ‘Greatest Generation’ of the Second World War but also by the more complex legacy of Vietnam.

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This conceptual history of ‘unseen’ or non-bodily harms experienced during war illustrates the ongoing tension concerning the moral standing of soldiers and veterans, which is linked to the broader culture’s ability to regard itself as virtuous. Underlying debates about military mental health and character is a contestation in US culture of the complex symbol of the soldier. Central to the ideology of American exceptionalism is the moral standing of those who sacrifice in combat for their country, starting with those who fought to found the country (US Revolution) and continuing to those who fought to renew the country (US Civil War) and eventually save the world (two world wars). This history, which of course ignores the histories of African American slavery and indigenous genocide, is seen as explaining the moral character of the nation and its right to global pre-eminence. The soldier is central to the way US culture evaluates itself and others, a cultural dynamic that places significant pressure on those soldiers struggling with their sense of themselves as good, courageous and noble amid the realities of their country’s wars. The challenge, woven into the lived moral economy of the military and affecting military families and even the broader society, will become clearer when contrasted with the different moral economy of correctional officers in US prisons.

The Role of Correctional Officers in State Violence Since there has been far less reflection upon the work of correctional officers, as opposed to military personnel, we start this section with some descriptive discussion of similarities and differences between the two professions. Both the approximately four hundred thousand enlisted US soldiers and four hundred thousand US correctional personnel6 are more likely to be male, more likely to be white and more likely to have only a high-school diploma/some college (Council on Foreign Relations 2020; ‘Bailiffs, Correctional Officers, and Jailers’ 2020). And, perhaps surprisingly, there are not necessarily considerable differences in the duration of basic training. Initial military training varies by branch from seven and a half to twelve weeks, while correctional officer basic training varies from state to state – five weeks in Georgia, for example, and thirteen weeks in California.7 Yet there are differences in both imagined futures and immediate practical experiences in these institutional moral economies. The differences in imagined futures can be seen most clearly in terms of recruitment and advertising. There are recruitment offices, recruitment visits to schools and multiple forms of advertisements encouraging young citizens to join the military. There are far fewer of these for correctional employment, whether at the federal, state or local level. While both roles may become family occupations, military families usually point with pride to this heritage. Correctional work, particularly in rural counties, may well be a family occupation, but these connections are not named with particular pride and usually highlight the reality that the prison may be the best employer in the area. And although there are greater personal



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costs associated with relocation and longer-term commitment to enrolment in the military, the benefits are also much greater, from salary level to educational support (Joining the Military 2020). While joining the military may be a practical rather than an idealistic choice, people virtually never become a correctional officer on the basis of ideals; rather, they are likely to ‘drift’ into the job, coming from other types of blue-collar work.8 Both the military and prisons serve to protect society, but there are sharp differences in actual function. Prisons were originally established as more ‘civilized’ forms of punishment, with reformatory goals that contrasted with what had been traditional forms of physical punishment (Ignatieff 1978: 1). However, over time, these goals were overshadowed by concerns about the financial costs of imprisonment, although the goal of security never changed. The large, fortress-like state penitentiaries, increasingly built in more remote areas, symbolized the containment of a threat to civic order (Rothman 1995: 111). The specific demographics of those inside prisons has varied over the last two centuries. Nevertheless, prisoners have always primarily been those who were known to be ‘other’ – not only due to ‘depravity’ but also due to race, class, nationality, etc., depending upon the social fears of the time.9 When political theorist Jonathan Simon writes that prisons are spaces of ‘pure custody, a human warehouse or even a kind of social waste management facility’ (2007: 142), he is referring to the current system of mass incarceration. But the reality is that prisons have always been considered dangerous locations, containing bad (polluted) persons. Given this context, it is hardly surprising that correctional work has never been seen as a good calling, especially the work of those who guard. The old word for a prison guard was ‘turnkey’, highlighting their custodial purpose as ‘keeper’, that is, the person responsible for the security of the institution, which requires supervising prisoners, whether in their cells or at work or meals, as well as during the movements in between. Even when prisons were still understood as true ‘penitentiaries’, ‘both a place for punishment of crime and a school of reclamation’ through the penance of work and silence, the role of the officer was custodial policing and, when required, physical punishment.10 When there were periods of some reformatory zeal, these new programmes were likely to be run by newly hired staff rather than the turnkeys. As Kate O’Hare, observing guards during her imprisonment in 1920 for socialist activism, wrote, prison jobs have become ‘the dumping ground’ for ‘[those] too worthless for other employment’ (O’Hare 1923: 161). Correctional officers have always done what has been termed ‘dirty work’, that is, work marked by ‘moral, social, or physical taint such that society views the work as disgusting or degrading’ (Chenault and Collins 2019: 3). Anthropologist Everett Hughes first used this term in his study of the difficulty Germans had in acknowledging what the German military had done in the concentration camps. He named this ‘unwillingness to think about the dirty work done’ as one of the ‘complicated mechanisms by which the individual mind keeps unpleasant or intolerable knowledge from consciousness’ (Hughes

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1962: 8). And he concluded both that dirty work was work that society wanted done, but most citizens were unwilling to do, and that those doing this work were stigmatized. As Chenault puts it, correctional officers remind society of its failures (Chenault 2019: 4). Reflecting upon how this stigma works in relation to French correctional officers, Didier Fassin remarks: ‘The stigma marking those who exercise this profession relates not only to the acts they perform, such as strip searches, and the manner in which they execute them, often accompanied by a brutal imposition of discipline; it is also, and probably even more, due to the places where they carry out their work’ (2017: 147). Now turnkeys have become ‘correctional officers’ as part of ongoing professionalization in correctional work, starting with the formation of the first professional organization, the National Prison Association, in 1870. The admission of prison guards to this organization after the Second World War was part of a shift from ‘prison’ to ‘corrections’ and from ‘guard’ to ‘correctional officer’. Underlying all of these changes has been the consistency of the violent conditions of incarceration. A former inmate of Sing Sing, in an 1833 publication, wrote that, even though prison regulations forbade extreme corporal punishment, abusive violence was the norm and described a prisoner whipped over 133 times, which ‘tore his skin in pieces from his back’, and finished off by ‘a blow across the mouth with his cane’, as ordered by the warden (Graber 2011: 114). While there may be better regulation of extreme physical violence now, violent and dehumanizing conditions are still the norm. And the massive increase in incarceration in the United States since the 1970s, resulting in an increase of over 500 per cent in the populations of prison and jails, has been accompanied by overcrowded and understaffed facilities, intensifying stress and the potential for violence (The Sentencing Project 2018). Correctional officers have experienced increased professional formation, including formal training, paralleling military preparation. In Georgia, correctional officers receive five weeks’ basic training in criminal justice. At first glance, the topics seem broad and important: legal issues and ethics, inmate supervision, mental health, interpersonal communication and ‘human diversity’, emergency response and report writing. But consider the core required skills evident in the required exam topics: firearms, count procedures, contraband, vehicle search, pat search, cell search, perimeter security, fire safety, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and defensive tactics (Georgia Department of Corrections 2020). These exams address the most basic skills for maintaining the security and functioning of the institution. The vast majority of the work is routine – counting, searching, moving people from place to place. As a CO put it, ‘Most of [the] job, around 95% …, is pretty mundane. Every day … a cell count, keep[ing] an eye on inmate’s activities, fetch[ing] someone toilet paper. This goes on for eight or, often, 16 hours straight – sometimes without a lunch break, depending on the day’. But underlying this routine is a constant reality that it’s the other 5%, ‘when there are moments of extraordinary violence, when inmates fight or resist, or when they harm themselves’ (Lisitsina 2015: 3).



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The systematic infliction of violence and coercion that the prison as an institution embodies requires the construction of an ‘enemy’ and, in particular, the dehumanization of that enemy. David Grossman’s (1995) work documents ways in which the US military has, over time, used dehumanizing practices to emotionally distance soldiers from those they kill, helping them to see the enemy as inferior forms of life. Not surprisingly, one of the dominant features of correctional training is learning a ‘dehumanizing script’, which is reinforced when correctional officers start the job. While cursing at inmates is always officially prohibited, officers may commonly refer to inmates using terms such as ‘pieces of shit’ (male or female) or ‘hoes’ (female), not only among themselves but also to the inmates themselves.11 However, in contrast to military personnel, correctional officers are part of the ongoing lives of these ‘enemies’, working with them in all the most basic activities of human life, including feeding, bathing and toileting.12 And, depending on the facility and their career trajectory, COs might work with inmates for years. As one of the few studies of trauma among corrections personnel puts it, ‘there may be no other work environment where a significant percentage of all involved – both the corrections professionals and the justice involved individuals they manage – suffer from the consequences of exposure to psychologically traumatic material and other high-stress events’ (Spinaris, Denhof and Morton 2013: 8). Both official and unofficial CO culture requires constant work to maintain distance in these relationships, whether through strict policies on ‘fraternization’ or through the policing of certain scripts or discourses among themselves. And while soldiers struggle to adjust to civilian life after their tours of duty, there is at least acknowledgement (even if it is inadequate) by both society and the military institution that a transition exists. By contrast, COs must go back and forth, each day, between the moral economy of their domestic lives and that of the ‘total institution’ of the prison, changing worlds with ‘eight and the gate’ (Lisitsina 2015).

Comparing Moral Economies of State-Sanctioned Violence The anthropologist Didier Fassin uses the notion of moral economy, which he takes from E.P. Thompson and further develops, to describe the changes to normative social relationships that occur at various social levels. He discusses the moral economy within prisons, for example, but also the moral economy of an entire society, such as France (2009; 2017). Although one could critique Fassin for not being consistent, this seemingly deliberate conceptual flexibility is helpful in connecting broader cultural dynamics with the local, institutional and even individual.13 It is also helpful for our purposes in this chapter because it underscores that morality is not simply an individual matter but a contested field in shared human life that is highly dependent on institutional context.

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Fassin uses moral economy to bring out the normative, evaluative dimension of social life, what sociologist Andrew Sayer has called ‘that which matters most to people’ (Sayer 2011). Fassin, however, is not interested in a psychological or individual analysis. Instead, he wants to understand the changes that can occur in the common moral evaluation of actions, or even of whole populations. Fassin pushes back against the overuse of political economy as the primary lens of social analysis in order to demonstrate that transformations of collective imaginaries cannot simply be reduced to the economic or even the political. These are changes in moral imaginaries, that is, the mix of norms, bonds of trust, feelings, ways of seeing and what Raymond Williams called ‘structures of feeling’ (1977: 128–35). As an example, Fassin tracks how French society changed how French citizens and policymakers viewed immigrants and refugees over the course of half a century. After the Second World War, immigrants to France were largely looked on as a form of labour and any illness claimed by an immigrant was viewed with suspicion as a potential attempt to shirk the labour that had brought them to France. Fassin argues that in the 1990s, a new ‘humanitarian’ imaginary emerged whereby such immigrants were officially allowed into the country because of sympathy for illnesses that could not be treated in their home countries: ‘Thus the moral economy moved from a regime of suspicion to one of compassion’ (2009: 16). This was a transformation in sympathies, as well as a transformation of national regard to immigrants and their social status in France. And it was a change that could not be accounted for only in terms of political economy or other factors but had to be analysed through an irreducibly moral lens. Fassin’s analysis allows us to focus on the ways in which moral injury functions both as a marker of moral change (its emergence to describe the experience of veterans) and as a mark of difference (the lack of application to correctional officers) in the moral economies of state-sanctioned violence. As mentioned above, throughout most of the twentieth century, there was no clear clinical diagnosis for veterans’ claims to suffering that had no physical correlate. Instead, traumatized soldiers were considered to be lacking in virtue, displaying cowardice rather than courage. And the possibility that participation in war could cause such damage, a possibility that could challenge the standard account of noble national war, was excluded. However, the end of the military engagement in Southeast Asia, and especially the humiliating ‘fall’ of Vietnam to the communists, made it more difficult to glorify that war. The post-Vietnam cultural reckoning in film, for example, Born on the Fourth of July, Apocalypse Now, Hamburger Hill and even the Rambo franchise, showed the suffering of soldiers as possibly not justifiable and as worthy of compassion. This reframing created space for the emergence of clinical diagnostic categories, such as PTSD, that cemented psychological trauma in medicine and health care. Although suspicion certainly remains, the moral economy of war has changed so much that, nowadays, a lack of care for traumatized soldiers through official, federal programmes can be understood



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as a stain on a given society’s honour. Such sacrifices, as philosopher Nancy Sherman (2015: 3) has written – reflecting the opinion of many – create a ‘sacred’ duty for society to care for the wounded and traumatized soldier. Only a few decades ago, such care could be seen as coddling the vicious, as nurturing vice over virtue, and so endangering the moral fabric of society. Turning to the moral economy of the prison, no such transformation has occurred in relation to prisons and evaluations of CO suffering. Instead, there has been little to no regard for CO suffering at all. Although movements devoted to prison abolition have strengthened since the 1990s, they focus on opposing mass incarceration and addressing the suffering experienced by those inside. These are important struggles, in which correctional officers are considered part of the oppressive system. But even those who support the ongoing system of incarceration do not frame correctional officers as models of national virtue. Instead, any application of moral injury to prison work is used by correctional officers themselves to try to make sense of the suffering that can come from using and experiencing state-sanctioned violence within prisons. For example, Desert Waters Correctional Outreach, Inc., is a small non-profit in Colorado that was founded by a therapist in response to the therapeutic needs of clients who were workers or members of families of workers in the twelve prisons in that particular county.14 Its newsletters name moral injury as one way of understanding the trauma being treated. It is possible that these correctional officers are using the term not just to better understand their own experience but also as a way of contesting the lack of official, as well as broader public, attention to their suffering. For the moment, however, moral injury is not seen as something COs, as those who execute state-sanctioned violence, can or should experience. This contrast highlights the way in which the concept of moral injury has so far worked in the moral economies of state-sanctioned violence and how those economies participate in the broader national economy. Use of moral injury, for instance, privileges certain institutions, roles and experiences, reflecting the societal evaluation of these institutions. Both the military and correctional systems are institutions that revolve around state-sanctioned coercion, violence and even dehumanization. At the same time, these moral economies participate in the meaning-making of the larger culture in very different ways, leading to different experiences of moral harm. Both soldiers and COs see themselves as securing the safety of society through dangerous and hard work. Both military personnel and COs see themselves as connected by moral codes of solidarity with one another, which also require silence about their actual activities, which can be sources of both pride and shame. But society recognizes the pride of the military, while ignoring to an extent the possible sources of shame and moral conflict. The same is not true of work in corrections. And indeed COs themselves are aware of the ‘dirtiness’ of their work and use cynicism, depersonalization and emotional suppression to manage their experiences (Chenault 2010: 45–50). That the suffering of soldiers is culturally visible and seen as meaningful beyond the military further underscores the privileged

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position of the military as an institution, the integrity of which affects that of the nation and national identity much more than that of other institutions of state-sanctioned violence, such as prisons. The contrast can be viewed in various ways. On the federal level, there are congressional committees tasked with assuring the integrity of the military. While there is state oversight of prison systems, the concern is far less visible, unless there is a violent outbreak at a facility. And even though moral injury is still not fully accepted throughout all branches of the US military, the seminal papers on moral injury in the last twelve years have come from researchers in the Veterans Administration, the federal agency responsible for military health care. This asymmetry can also be seen in public attitudes towards these two institutions, as evidenced by a Gallup poll that asked people in the United States about their confidence in its public and governmental institutions. The military is by far the most trusted institution in the United States, according to polls. Indeed, its moral trustworthiness, at least since 1975, has only increased, while faith in central democratic institutions, such as Congress, has plummeted (Gallup 2016). This has occurred despite the atrocities and scandals in the military over the last fifty years and despite the current series of seemingly endless wars. Even though the military has changed significantly, becoming smaller, more diverse and dependent on voluntary enlistment, it continues exert an influence on the way in which many in the United States identify and understand themselves and others (Barroso 2019). The soldier in US society, and his/her experiences, are not just meaningful for the individual soldier but also for the self-understanding of the broader society. By contrast, the overall ‘criminal justice system’, a category combining the police, court systems, jails, prisons, etc., enjoys a third as much confidence among people in the United States as the military. It would, indeed, be considered odd in US culture to ask about one’s confidence in US prisons, as they are not institutions that are seen as contributing to the country’s moral project or identity. Further, correctional officers are poorly paid, with limited benefits. In spite of the vast numbers of persons currently incarcerated, prisons are ‘invisible’, a moral gap in terms of their moral significance for the wider public. Although there is certainly ‘dirty work’ in the military, one can also see such work as contributing to a greater mission or good. By contrast, as a former correctional officer puts it, ‘correctional officers are the least honored, least respected and least understood of all public service employees in the United States’ (Feld 2018). This reflects a view of the moral economy of the military as generative of morality, even as a school of virtue. This is one reason why Shay originally defined moral injury in terms of betrayal. It is reasonable for a soldier, as well as a civilian, to expect that the military will instil good character in its members through training and formation. No one in US society, however, could reasonably expect the same of prisons. Even at those times when the correctional system has had a more explicitly reformist mission, claiming to be a place for penance, transformation and even salvation (of inmates), it has always



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functioned predominantly as a place for confinement and control. As the prison population has exploded over the last fifty years in the United States, prisons have become places that warehouse and punish those deemed unworthy of or too vicious for public life. Prisons and COs are cultural signifiers not of virtue but of the vice concentrated inside the prisons. Consequently, COs are polluted through their central role in an institution that is associated in the public imagination with the worst members of society.15 Any such institution within a democratic republic that wields state-sanctioned violence against citizens is a morally ambivalent space at best. Thus, even though we can say that both soldiers and COs can experience what could be called moral injury, the social understanding of the institutional location and role of these experiences will determine whether these experiences will actually be labelled ‘moral injury’. The individual’s experience and the broader cultural meaning of that experience are connected and filtered through the overlapping moral economies in play. Indeed, it is difficult to see how COs could be morally injured in the same way as soldiers, as they do not internalize some ideal moral code from an institution deemed noble by the majority of the culture. Unlike soldiers, many of whom see the ethos and morality that the military embodies as superior to that of civilians, the prison’s place in the moral economy and imaginary of the culture does not afford COs such self-regard. And the moral pain does not come from failures of the institution to live up to its promise but from working in an institution that may have a toxic effect on positive forms of character or moral subjectivity. Because of the moral significance of the military, there has been a potential – that has only been partially realized – to understand the suffering and particular vulnerabilities of being a soldier in a way that could further change the culture’s understanding of war, the military and perhaps the culture itself. In contrast, the prison has continued to be a morally stigmatized place, which has been compounded by a new recognition of how it is a major engine of racial injustice (Alexander 2012). In our view, the injustice of prison institutions is embedded in the violence woven into its structures, which affects the moral vulnerability not only of those sentenced to be imprisoned but also of those whose role is to guard them. The vulnerabilities of the soldier, in contrast, can be used to show that they will sacrifice everything, even their souls and character. The profound depth of this sacrifice, when voluntarily made by a citizen, reflects positively on that citizen’s collective and country. Prisons play a far more ambiguous and hidden role, and the lack of recognition of the suffering of COs only underscores the differing roles these institutions play in the moral self-regard of the culture.

Conclusion Fassin’s concept of moral economy constitutes a way of tracking moral change in societies and connecting such large-scale change to the local and

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institutional. Using this concept has allowed us to investigate how moral injury – its use or lack thereof – can illuminate the ways in which different moral economies of state-sanctioned violence participate in the ongoing project of national identity, including its conservation and contestation. We have discussed how there has been a moral change in relation to how soldiers and their suffering are viewed by society at large over the course of more than a century in the United States. And it should not be surprising that language addressing this suffering, which was developed in the health sciences, should take on a larger social usage, as the struggles of the large veteran population in the United States affect millions through family, work and other social connections. The rapid extension of the concept of moral injury may also signal some changes in the way American exceptionalism has featured in the moral economy of state-sanctioned violence, since the recognition of the impact of war is no longer blocked as completely by a narrative of the global place of American democracy. We have also discussed the experiences of COs, as a comparison, which is a new direction in the work on moral injury. The juxtaposition of the strong expressions of moral harm by correctional officers and the relative absence of any claims of moral injury illustrates the importance of institutional location in moral economies. Little has changed in the general public moral evaluation of the work of correctional officers – or prisons – since the origins of prisons in the late eighteenth century. However, specific shifts and pressures in the role and size of prisons in recent decades have intensified pressures in correctional work. There is much work to be done to explore what the tracking of the development and deployment of categories can teach us about moral change. Although this essay is just a beginning, we conclude with some ideas for further research in these directions. First, our comparative institutional focus illustrates how important institutional context is to moral change. Applying moral injury to prison contexts may help shine a light on the sufferings of COs – sufferings that originate in the broader culture and that are outsourced to COs – but the term was developed for a very different context. There is potential, then, to conflate the moral harms of COs with those of soldiers, which, we suggest, would be an error. Instead, a wider vocabulary is required to speak about such moral harms and their role in broader moral change that is sensitive both to institutional context and to the ways in which the moral economy of such institutions interacts with larger cultural narratives, particularly through the bodies exposed to and carrying out violence within those institutions. Second, we point to the relation of moral change and the status of certain moral economies. As stated, there is a stark difference between the ways in which the sufferings of soldiers and those of COs are viewed. The military is already quite esteemed in the moral economy of the nation; this view of the military has developed since the Civil War, which gave rise to a culture of war and soldier memorialization in the country as part of national reunification.16 Although prisons are nearly as old as war-making in the United States, and although they, too, have changed in important ways, they have never been



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central to the self-regard of the country. Even now, with the growing scrutiny of prisons and increased concern about how race and white supremacy affect who ends up in prison and who does not, there is still very little reflection on the ways in which correctional officers are vulnerable to moral harms and sufferings that are perhaps unique to those carrying out state-sanctioned violence. Correctional officers do not have the same moral salience in the construction and contestation of national identity. They may be central, in the dirty work that they do, in creating boundaries within the country through the prison system, but they themselves are not important symbols. The comparative discussion in this chapter can help us understand in a deeper way how the institutions sanctioning and perpetrating violence participate in the broader moral economy of the United States. That such moral change has occurred in one institution of state-sanctioned violence and not another suggests that one possible condition for the occurrence of moral change is the pre-existing moral salience of the location of change. This should not be taken as a form of determinism, however. Instead, it may be that when moral change occurs, it does so along lines that offer certain possibilities, akin to the concept of ‘ethical affordances’ proposed by Webb Keane, that is, ‘the opportunities that any experiences might offer’ for connection and understanding, because they have certain properties that enable them to be engaged at particular cultural-social moments (Keane 2016: 27–32). Moral changes may not happen through revolution, but through social and moral conservation and transformation over time. Elizabeth M. Bounds is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, and the author of Coming Together/Coming Apart: Religion, Modernity, and Community (Routledge, 1997) and co-editor of Welfare Policy: Feminist Critiques and Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics (Pilgrim Press, 1999). Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon is Assistant Director of the Center for Principled Problem Solving at Guilford College, where he is also Lecturer of Religion and Ethics. He holds a Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics and Society from Emory University and is the author of Moral Injury and the Promise of Virtue (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019). His research examines the way in which violence affects moral selfhood, working at the intersection of moral philosophy, religious ethics and anthropology.

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Notes Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon’s contribution to this publication was supported within the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), ‘Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value’, registration no. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/000 0425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.  1. As David Garland puts it, ‘the state’s capacity to impose “law and order” came to be viewed … as a contractual obligation owed by a democratic government to its lawabiding citizens’ (2001: 30).  2. Such a greeting is not always well received. See Brock and Letini 2012: 48–49.  3. For Washington’s full order, see https://www.loc.gov/resource/mgw3g.006/?sp=207&st=text.  4. As evidenced by General George Patton’s slapping two battle-fatigued soldiers. See Lovelace 2019.  5. Shay initially framed his work through engagement with classical Greek writings (Shay 1991; 1994). For further discussion of first- and second-wave moral injury discourse, see Wiinikka-Lydon 2019.  6. In 2019, there were 401,366 enlisted US military non-officers and 423,050 correctional officers (Duffin 2020; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2020).  7. Initial military training varies from seven and a half to twelve weeks (Length of Basic Training 2020). Basic Correctional Officer Training can vary by state, ranging from as brief as five weeks to as long as thirteen weeks.  8. Concerning motivations for joining the military, see Keller 2018. For correctional officer patterns, see Chenault 2010: 4, 42.  9. Not surprisingly, African Americans have always been overrepresented, regardless of period or region. 10. Quotation from 1816 prison inspection report, cited in Graber 2011: 53. 11. We can personally testify to officers’ calling female inmates ‘bitches’ and ‘whores’. Chenault discusses a tension between formal rules of the prison and the actual scripts of officer interaction. For example, cursing at inmates is officially prohibited, making it an act of formal deviance. However, in his experience, a majority of officers believe cursing at inmates is an effective means of communication (Chenault 2010: 126, 130, 132). Officer training and volunteer training also emphasize that inmates are necessarily devious and cannot be trusted at all. 12. Jean Scandlyn and Sarah Hautzinger, for example, argue that the ‘primary witness’ of the soldier in combat is the military itself (2015: 562). 13. Fassin writes, ‘it conceptualizes moral economies at the level of entire societies and of specific social groups, always understood in their historical context’ (2009). 14. For more information, see https://desertwaters.com/. 15. No doubt soldiers can experience something like pollution, particularly the pollution that can come with feeling like one has been disgraced, but this is not necessarily so and indeed may come as a shock to a soldier. This was seemingly the experience of Shay’s soldier, mentioned previously, who scorned his superiors for celebrating the death of civilians. 16. For more on the way the suffering of the US Civil War transformed US society, see Faust 2008.

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References Alexander, Michelle. 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press. American Psychiatric Association. 2013. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition: DSM-5. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing. ‘Bailiffs, Correctional Officers, and Jailers’. 2020. Data USA website. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://datausa.io/profile/soc/bailiffs-correctional-officers-jailers. Barroso, Amanda. 2019. ‘The Changing Profile of the U.S. Military: Smaller in Size, More Diverse, More Women in Leadership’, Pew Research Center website. Retrieved January 2021 from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/10/ the-changing-profile-of-the-u-s-military/. Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Gabriella Lettini. 2012. Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Chenault, Scott. 2010. ‘An Ethnographic Examination of Correctional Officer Culture in a Midwestern State’, Ph.D. dissertation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska. Chenault, Scott, and Brooke Collins. 2019. ‘Someone Has to Do it: An Examination of Correctional Officer Taint Management Techniques’, Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology 8(1). Council on Foreign Relations. 2020. ‘Demographics of the U.S. Military’, Council on Foreign Relations website. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://www.cfr.org/ backgrounder/demographics-us-military. Duffin, Erin. 2021. ‘Total Military Personnel of the U.S. Army for Fiscal Years 2019 to 2021 by Rank’, Statista, 5 March. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://www.statista. com/statistics/239383/total-military-personnel-of-the-us-army-by-grade/. Edmonds, Bill Russell. 2015. God Is Not Here: A Soldier’s Struggle with Torture, Trauma, and the Moral Injuries of War. New York: Pegasus Books. Fassin, Didier. 2009. ‘Moral Economies Revisited’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 64(6): 1237–66. Version used translated from the French by JPD Systems. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://www.cairn-int.info/article.php?ID_ ARTICLE=E_ANNA_646_1237. . 2015. ‘Introduction: Governing Precarity’, in D. Fassin et al. (eds), At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions. London: Pluto Press. . 2017. Prison Worlds. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. 2009. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Faust, Drew Gilpin. 2008. This Republic of Suffering. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Feld, Gerry. 2018. ‘The Hardships of Correctional Officers Often Go Unseen by the Public’, South Carolina Times, 6 September. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https:// www.sctimes.com/story/opinion/2018/06/09/hardships-correctional-officersoften-go-unseen-public/670334002/. Gallup. 2016. ‘Confidence in Institutions’, Gallup website. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx?version=print. Garland, David. 2001. The Culture of Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Georgia Department of Corrections. 2020. ‘Basic Correctional Officer Training Overview’. Retrieved January 2021 from http://www.dcor.state.ga.us/sites/all/files/ pdf/Research/Fact_Sheets/Info_Sheets_Basic_Training.pdf. Graber, Jennifer. 2011. The Furnace of Affliction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Grossman, Dave. 1995. On Killing. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.

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‘History of the Medal’. 2020. Military Order of the Purple Heart website. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://www.purpleheart.org/HistoryoftheMedal. Hughes, Everett. 1962. ‘Good People and Dirty Work’, Social Problems 10(1): 3–11. Ignatieff, Michael. 1978. A Just Measure of Pain. New York: Penguin Books. ‘Joining the Military: Know What You Are Committing To’. 2020. Military.com website. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://www.military.com/join-armedforces/making-commitment.html. Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Keller, Jared. 2018. ‘The Top Five Reasons Soldiers Really Join the Army, According to Junior Enlisted’, Task and Purpose website. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https:// taskandpurpose.com/joining-the-military/5-reasons-soldiers-join-army/. ‘Length of Basic Training and When Will You Get Your First Paycheck’. 2020. Military. com website. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://www.military.com/join-armedforces/length-of-basic-training-and-your-first-paycheck.html. Lisitsina, Dasha. 2015. ‘“Prison Guards Can Never Be Weak”: The Hidden PTSD Crisis in America’s Jails’, The Guardian, 5 January. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https:// www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/20/corrections-officers-ptsd-americanprisons. Litz, Brett T., et al. 2009. ‘Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy’, Clinical Psychology Review 29(8): 695–706. . 2015. Adaptive Disclosure: A New Treatment for Military Trauma, Loss, and Moral Injury. New York: The Guilford Press. Lovelace, Alexander G. 2019. ‘“Slap Heard around the World”: George Patton and Shell Shock’, Parameters: Contemporary Strategy and Power 49(3): 79–92. MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. O’Hare, Kate Richards. 1923. In Prison. New York: Alfred Knopf. Papazoglou, Konstantinos. 2020. ‘Addressing Moral Suffering in Police Work’, Canadian Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy 54(1): 71–87. Rothman, David. 1995. ‘Perfecting the Prison’, in Norval.Morris and David J. Rothman (eds), The Oxford History of the Prison. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 100–16. Sawyer, Wendy, and Peter Wagner. 2020. ‘Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020’, Prison Policy Initiative website. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://www. prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html. Sayer, Andrew. 2011. Why Things Matter to People. New York: Cambridge University Press. Scandlyn, Jean, and Sarah Hautzinger. 2015. ‘“Victim/Volunteer”: Heroes Versus Perpetrators and the Weight of U.S. Service-Members’ Pasts in Iraq and Afghanistan’, The International Journal of Human Rights 19(5): 555–71. The Sentencing Project. 2018 (updated 2020). ‘Fact Sheet: Trends in U.S. Corrections’. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/ trends-in-u-s-corrections/. Shay, Jonathan. 1991. ‘Learning about Combat Stress from Homer’s Iliad’, Journal of Traumatic Stress 4(4): 561–79. . 1994. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York: Scribner. . 2011. ‘Casualties’, Daedalus 140(3): 179–88. . 2014. ‘Moral Injury’, Psychoanalytic Psychology 31(2): 182–91.



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Simon, Jonathan. 2007. Governing Through Crime. New York: Oxford University Press. Spinaris, Caterina, and Mike (Michael) Denhof. 2015. ‘Moral Injury in the Corrections Workforce’, Correctional Oasis 12(2): 1–4. Spinaris, Caterina, Michael Denhof and Gregory Morton. 2013. ‘Impact of Traumatic Exposure on Corrections Professionals’, White Paper, National Institute of Corrections. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from info.nicic.gov/virt/sites/info.nicic.gov. virt/files/06Impact_of_Traumatic_Exposure.pdf. Trimble, Michael R. 1985. ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: History of a Concept’, in Charles R. Figley (ed.), Trauma and Its Wake: The Study and Treatment of PostTraumatic Stress Disorder. Bristol: Brunner/Mazel, pp. 5–14. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2020. ‘Correctional Officers and Bailiffs’, Occupational Outlook Handbook. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/correctional-officers.htm#. Wiinikka-Lydon, Joseph. 2016. ‘Moral Injury as Inherent Political Critique: The Prophetic Possibilities of a New Term’, Political Theology 18(3): 219–32. . 2019. ‘Mapping Moral Injury: Comparing Discourses of Moral Harm’, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine 44(2): 175–91.

6 Dementia Care Ethics, Social Ontology and World-Open Care Phenomenological Motifs Rasmus Dyring

Into the Vortex Vagner is just standing there. Calm and silent, in the midst of the hustle and bustle in the kitchen area of the day centre at the dementia unit. The tables in the adjacent dining area are being cleared, cleaned and then set for lunch. Two other users of the day centre, Emma and Helen, walk busily back and forth between the kitchen area and dining area. There are so many things to do! Back and forth, and around Vagner they go. In a time-lapse-like scene, the two women rush about, while, as they swirl around him – round and around – the man serenely dwells. Swaying, as if swayed by their swift movements, he turns ever so slowly and takes it all in. Emma’s agile and directed posture, as she carries out these tasks, conveys a strong sense of the independent and somewhat firm-minded person she is. Only a minute ago, when clearing the tables, Helen dropped a napkin and Emma pointed it out in a strict manner that was almost reprimanding. Helen took no offence. She is seemingly happy just to be at work. On her own initiative, Emma begins setting the table with soup dishes. But the menu of the day, alas, does not include soup. So Katie, the caregiver, who is standing in the kitchen area preparing lunch, asks Emma to replace the soup dishes with regular plates. Back and forth, round and around, Emma and Helen go. It is a round dance through the imponderabilia of actual life. Then, out of the blue, the circle closes in on Vagner. Helen moves right up to him. She begins to sing: ‘Se, nu danser bedstefar …’ [Look, grandpa is dancing …]. She pauses, struggling with the words. They will not come out right. Katie tries to help out with the words, but she, too, is not quite certain



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of the lyrics. Together, the two manage to work their way through the chorus and into the song: Look, grandpa is dancing To the olden waltz Halfway through the dance, the girl puts her arms round his neck.

They sing the chorus over and over again. Vagner is weightless. He smiles and glows as he slowly begins to sway in time with the song. Helen, still facing him, smiles back. Their foreheads almost touch. She moves, also. Then Katie grabs hold of Vagner and brings his arms into a traditional waltz posture. And together they dance. Helen and Emma sing louder and louder, and they too dance; singly, each of the women swirls. Around and around it goes. The waltz flows, absorbing in its eddies all traces of the round dance of everyday practicalities. After a while, out of breath. The dancers bring the waltz to a halt. Laughing, they loaf. And lean against the kitchen table.1

Introduction Song, Lisa Stevenson writes, is about ‘seeking someone, calling someone, singing to someone … as company, as presence’ (2014: 163). Song, in this sense, is a mode of ‘seeing a human before you’; that is to say, a mode of seeing an infinitely singular being before you, rather than a token of the type ‘human’, and thus a mode of ‘recognizing their potential as company, recognizing them as lovable beings, capable of showing up regardless of any subject positions they may have been asked to occupy’ (2014: 163). Expanding on Stevenson’s description, Jarrett Zigon adds that song ‘could be understood as a possible intersubjective modality’ of what he, drawing on post-Heideggerian phenomenology, calls ‘the community of those without community’ (2019: 135). The phenomenological intuition expressed by Stevenson and Zigon is that excessive experiences of potentiality and singularity harbour a force that is capable of creating communities of people who do not otherwise share something that guarantees their attachment to a community (Durkheim 1973). If social relations, as Émile Durkheim would have it, are things that people have in common, such that ‘the social’ assumes the status of a substantive grounding of individual existence (1982: 60, passim), then the kind of non-substantive community glimpsed in the phenomenon of song is a community of singular beings who, in this sense, have no-thing in common (Agamben 1993: 64; Blanchot 1988: 1ff.; Derrida 1997: 37; Nancy 1991: 37, see Dyring 2015: 28).

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In the context of dementia research, this non-substantive social ontology has some promising potential for a critical examination of what it means to share a world of meaning and purpose when a neurological disease increasingly affects people’s ability to maintain relationships and enact the social roles that otherwise guarantee their social inclusion. While practices of person- and relationship-centred dementia care, as I will describe in more detail below, seek to counter the latent dangers of this kind of ‘social death’ by constructing care environments that sustain and support personhood and the relationships in which it is enacted, the phenomenological intuition above – with its emphasis on intense experiences of potentiality and singularity, rather than established social roles and a shared culture – directs the analytical gaze in another direction. The driving motivation in this chapter is to explore what dementia care could look like if, besides focusing on such things as personhood and interpersonal relationships, it were informed by a heightened sensitivity towards the ontological openness of the human condition and the persistent potentials for transformation and change both in persons with dementia and in the lifeworlds they inhabit. This brings into play the question of moral change and transformations in lifeworlds on two interconnected levels: on one level, these transformative potentials tie in with the basic ontological malleability of human subjectivity and being in the world, and what we could call the ontologization of ethical practice that follows from this. On this level, the task is phenomenological. It is to explore how life with dementia must still be recognized as a life of human creativity, life with the potential to become otherwise. On another level, these phenomenological insights harness a strong critical potential with respect, on the one hand, to prevailing neuro-normative discourses in which dementia is construed as a kind of living death and the person with dementia as an empty shell, and, on the other hand, to the ontological assumptions underpinning the prevalent paradigms of institutional dementia care. On the first level, the transformative potentials emerge as an inherent, practical function of the ontological malleability of human subjectivity and being in the world. On the second level, the exploration of the transformative potentials ties in with an ethico-political demand for a thorough philosophical critique of institutional practices. Following this line of thought, this chapter sketches the contours of a philosophical reconceptualization of the care ethics of institutional dementia care. In critical discussion with the widely adopted paradigm of person-centred care in institutionalized dementia care, I will propose some basic motifs of a theory of world-open care, which grows out of detailed phenomenological explorations of how transformative experiences of potentiality do not centre on persons, but rather emerge in the potentiated intervals between, for instance, people with dementia, caregivers and relatives, and also other people, creatures, artefacts, etc., that populate the spaces of a dementia care facility (cf. Dyring 2022; Dyring and Grøn 2022). In the first section, I start by briefly discussing the philosophy of person-centred care and other theories in which



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dementia care is conceived of as ‘centric’ practices, and I go on to propose an immanent critique of this centredness that takes dementia care in a markedly eccentric direction. In the second section, I will explore the minutiae of the social-ontological dynamics that unfold between people, such that their worlds are opened and maintained in their openness and new potentials are brought into a shared world. Drawing on the vignette above, which relates an ethnographic episode from a short period of fieldwork at a dementia unit in Denmark, I explore an event of everyday creativity in which potentials emerge and are followed and developed spontaneously in a meta-stable responsive community of care that forms between people with dementia and a caregiver. In the third and final section, I will conclude by briefly spelling out in more programmatic terms some fundamental elements of the kind of eccentric world-open care that emerges from these social-ontological explorations.

The Social Ontologies of Centred Dementia Care According to the idea of person-centred care – the philosophy of dementia care implemented on a national institutional level in, for instance, Norway, the United Kingdom and Denmark (HD 2020; NICE 2019; SST 2019a) – good dementia care is care that supports the personhood of people living with dementia by countering cultures of ‘malignant social psychology’ in their environing communities. As Tom Kitwood famously argues, a malignant social environment is just as serious a factor as the neurophysiological factor in the concrete development of the disease and the concrete development of a person’s ability to enact their personhood (2019: 55ff.). In phenomenological terms, Kitwood points to an ontologically generative force surging in the interplay between neurophysiological factors and factors in the socio-psychological lifeworld, which delimit the very structures of subjectivity of people living with dementia and which, in the case of cultures of malignant social psychology, corrode these structures. The task of breaking the downward, negative spiral in this dialectical progression of dementia is the project that Kitwood (1993, 2019) conceives of under the heading of person-centred care and that several other authors have either developed further under this same heading (e.g. Brooker and Latham 2016; McCormack 2003) or pursued under other headings, such as relationship-centred care, emotion-focused care and validation therapy (e.g. Nolan et al. 2004; Ryan et al. 2008; Feil 1993). The ‘centredness’ of care practices is a common trait in these various philosophies of care (Hughes, Bamford and May 2008). What changes across the board is what exactly is taken to be the central concern of care practices and the socialontological assumptions that underlie the understanding of the central concern in question.

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The Psychological, the Relational, the Embodied Person In Kitwood’s original conception, person-centred care is grounded in Martin Buber’s account of the I–Thou relationship (2019: 10). In terms of social ontology, Kitwood’s person-centred care is not individualistic at the outset. It is fundamentally relational. However, it conceives of the ‘manner of relating’ as being centred in the other (the Thou) as a unique person with a host of individual psychological needs for love, inclusion in and attachment to groups, comfort, identity and meaningful occupation (2019: 92; see Brooker and Latham 2016: 35). ‘Needs’ are, as Kitwood puts it, ‘that without the meeting of which a human being cannot function, even minimally, as a person’ (2019: 92). Hence, Kitwood attempts to translate a relational social ontology into a psychology of needs with an obvious individualistic bent. This individualism becomes pronounced in the institutional implementation of Kitwood’s ideas. The Danish Health Authority, for instance, describes person-centred care as ‘individualised considerations and interventions’ (SST 2019a: 17, my translation), which centre on an individual’s needs, where these needs are concretely interpreted as a function of the interplay between the individual’s neurological impairment, life history, personality, state of health and fitness, and the social environment (SST 2019b: 29, 35, 38; see Brooker and Latham 2016: 81ff.). Kitwood’s conception of person-centred care has been criticized by many scholars for its apparent individualism (e.g. Adams and Gardiner 2005; McCormack 2003; Nolan et al. 2004; Ryan et al. 2008). Mike Nolan and colleagues argue that rather than centring on the psychological needs of the other person, care practices should centre on the relationships of care practices, such that ‘all parties involved in caring (the older person, family carers, and paid or voluntary carers) should experience relationships that promote a sense of: [security, belonging, continuity, purpose, achievement]’ (Nolan et al. 2004: 49). Contrary to Kitwood’s dyadic focus on the individual other, the social-ontological foundation here ‘sees human beings as belonging to a network of social relationships within which they are deeply interconnected and interdependent’ (2004: 47), and the concrete practices of care change accordingly from being centred on the needs of another individual to centring on intersubjectively constituted experiences of belonging, continuity, purpose, etc. (see Ryan et al. 2008; Watson 2019). Finally, scholars have criticized person-centred care for lacking a focus on corporeality in care practices (e.g. Dewing 2008; Jenkins 2014; Millett 2011; Twigg 2000; Zeiler 2014). The idea here is that we remain blind to fundamental dimensions of personhood if we do not acknowledge the role of embodiment. This is not a matter of acknowledging bodily needs, but rather of understanding how the body holds a vast reservoir of practical knowledge allowing a person to enact dimensions of their personhood that would otherwise seem lost. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pia Kontos argues that ‘bodily schemas’, that is, the habitual, corporeal modes of being emplaced in the world that result



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from a life’s worth of sedimented lived experience, are ‘foundational to the coherence of embodied selfhood’ (2006: 211). The implication with respect to care practices of this kind of ontology of the flesh is that care now ought to be orientated towards ‘reactivating’ certain pre-reflective levels of existence; for instance, the embodied knowledge connected with certain ritual activities or the singing of particular songs that have accompanied a person throughout his or her life (cf. Kontos 2006: 210; Zeiler 2014).

From Personhood to Worldhood Two things follow from the fact that these various conceptions of dementia care are based on specific (social) ontological assumptions: first, if these assumptions are changed, the rest of the theoretical architecture will likely change, with the consequence that the design of concrete care practices would also change. Second, acknowledging this foundational role of social ontology, it is pivotal that basic conceptual development, social-scientific research into the efficacy of specific care practices, and cross-professional practice development are explicitly and programmatically tied in with basic research endeavours in social ontology. Approaching the question of social ontology, I will take a different route than the theories concerned – affirmatively or critically – with personhood. There is, as it were, a matter of fundamental importance that remains unnoticed, as long as the notion of the (psychological, relational, embodied) person is the pivot of critique and conceptual development, namely, the issue of how personhood is related to worldhood. Kitwood writes, in passing, that ‘[t]o be a person is to live in a world where meanings are shared’ (2019: 105), but he does not develop the notion of worldhood. If we take this statement seriously, the implication is that being in the world conditions the possibility of both personhood and the interpersonal (dyadic or more widely distributed) relationships that can occur between persons. Rather than exploring what is at stake in the worldhood of care relations, Kitwood conceives of the issue of shared meaning within a framework of symbolic interactionism that both fares poorly with respect to capturing the affective dimension of meaningmaking and leaves the deeper ontological dynamics pertaining to the constitution of the worldly setting within which meaning is generated and shared entirely in the dark. In Kitwood’s interactionist account, meaning is shared in a series of ‘triadic interactions, in which interpretation and reflection have a vital part’ (2019: 105). A single triadic unit consists of exchanges between two persons, where one person ‘with a unique personality’ and a ‘particular sentient state (mood, emotion, feeling, etc.)’ ‘defines the situation in a particular way’ and acts with ‘certain desires, expectations, intentions’ (Kitwood 2019: 105–6). A second person then interprets and responds to the act of the first person and the first

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person in turn interprets the response of the second person and reflects on it. ‘Any social act’, Kitwood contends, ‘can be analysed as a succession of these minute triadic units’ (2019: 106). However, ‘[s]ometimes the succession of interactions does not make up a social act of a recognizable kind; here it is as if the “definition of the situation” changed on the way, and perhaps changed several times’ (2019: 107). In other words, according to this view of social action, it is the coherence of a succession of acts within a uniformly shared situational definition that guarantees the integrity and meaningfulness of social action, and since personhood is premised on life being situated ‘in a world where meanings are shared’ (2019: 105), it follows that succession, coherence and uniformity are also what secure the integrity of persons. From this perspective, breaches in the situational definition are deemed destructive of meaningful social action. However, this view is blind to the way in which interruptions might also give birth to the new, the different, the otherwise. Hence, while a person-centred framework is concerned with interactions within coherently defined situations – as is also largely true of relationship-centred care, with the only modification being that the latter is aimed more directly at the promotion of intersubjective experiences of coherence rather than the satisfaction of individual needs – the social-ontological approach taken in this chapter seeks to explore: 1. the dynamics in which a basic definition of the situation is generatively transformed, such that new potentials for interaction are developed; 2. the dynamics that allow for the generative co-creation and sharing of a world of meaning and purpose even when, due to vast ontological differences in modes of being-in-the-world, there is no unitary shared definition of the situation. I suggest that an ontological exploration of both of these perspectives on the transformation of the lifeworlds of people with dementia is a necessary prerequisite for the development of any robust ethics of dementia care. In the remainder of this chapter, I will focus on the first of these perspectives. The second perspective I have explored with a colleague elsewhere (Dyring and Grøn 2022).

Transformative Openness and the Eccentricities of Care Focusing on transformative potentials, and notably exploring how life with dementia is potentiated and opened up to new realms of practical possibilities, means focusing on instances in which going beyond or transgressing the basic definition of the situation prove ontologically generative. With this centrifugal openness in mind, it would make sense to reconceptualize the basic care ethics that underlies dementia care in terms of an eccentricity, rather than a centredness of care practices. A first step towards such a reconceptualization might be taken by exploring the intercorporeality of potentiality. Rather than adhering to the picture of



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corporeality as a principle of individuated personhood, with personhood, as outlined above, being understood in terms of a past life sedimented in the ‘body schema’ of a person, the point here is to trace how subjectivity and a subject’s capabilities emerge in ongoing intercorporeal movements. Kristin Zeiler traces the emergence of what she calls intercorporeal capabilities by analysing a short video clip2 of an exchange between Gladys Wilson, an elderly woman with advanced dementia, and Naomi Feil, who created validation therapy (Feil 1993), an approach to dementia care that, much like Kitwood’s person-centred care, aims at identifying and validating the psychological needs that a person has but cannot easily express (see Brooker 2019: 78–79). In the video, at the beginning of the session, we see Ms Wilson sitting in an armchair by herself, with her eyes closed, seemingly secluded from the world around her. Feil approaches her very gently, moves her face close to Ms Wilson’s face and talks to her in a soothing voice. Feil then begins to sing the first phrases of a Christian hymn that she knows has meant a lot to Ms Wilson. There is an immediate response to these phrases, as Ms Wilson starts beating a pulse on the armrest of her chair. Throughout the session, the intensity builds as Feil’s singing and ways of touching Wilson’s face resonate with Ms Wilson, increasingly bringing her out of her seclusion. In Zeiler’s phenomenological account of this exchange, what is happening between Feil and Ms Wilson is a matter of responsive ‘social attunement’ (2014: 137), of movements back and forth between Feil, who begins singing, Ms Wilson, who responds by clapping her hand on the armrest, and back to Feil, who in turn aligns her singing with the beat that Ms Wilson is clapping and intensifies her singing as Wilson claps harder and harder. This continues up until the culmination point of the exchange – the ‘breakthrough’ in the terminology of validation therapy – when Feil sings the phrase ‘He’s got the whole world’ and Ms Wilson, who is otherwise almost entirely without language, responds, ‘in his hands’. The two of them, hence, engage in a process of ‘cocreation’ that neither of them could possibly undertake alone (2014: 138). As Zeiler puts it, ‘the intense face-to-face intercorporeality of these kinds of joint activities can make a set of intercorporeal capabilities spring forth’ (2014: 137). From a social-ontological perspective, there are two levels in this responsive process: (a) the joint activity of singing together, which results in the artistic co-creation and maintenance of specific ‘capabilities’, and (b) an intercorporeal process that originarily opens up a resonant space for the joint musical activity. As Zeiler puts it, their bodies ‘form and saturate the shared space between them. … [P]osture, touch, eye contact and movement … create a shared space of dynamic intercorporeal engagement’ (2014: 136). Hence, the space (b) between the persons opens, not as a neutral meeting ground, but as an intense potentiated interval that originarily and generatively affords the possibilities of the joint activity (a). This is a truly intercorporeal dynamic in the sense that it is a phenomenon of the interval, of the space between persons and not a straightforward function of either of the implicated individuals’ psychological

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make-up, biographical past or neurological state. And rather than Feil’s being the active party that intentionally brings Ms Wilson, the passive party, back in touch with a shared world, this is a matter – on an ontological level – of a generative delimitation of a space of corporeal intertwinement. That is not to say that Feil does not play the relatively dominant role here. ‘Their joint musical activity is deeply asymmetrical’, as Zeiler writes, but ‘[d]espite the asymmetry, they “co-inhabit the lived time of the musical piece” that they create together’ (2014: 138, reference removed). In other words, on the level of the joint musical activity (a), there is a marked asymmetry between Feil and Ms Wilson, but on the level of the potentiated interval (b) that opens up between them, the two are on the same footing. Neither of them owns or controls this space; all they can do when or if it opens is respond to the possibilities emerging in this transformative opening of the world. In her discussion of Zeiler’s analysis of the exchange between Naomi Feil and Ms Wilson, Lisa F. Käll takes the argument further into the intercorporeal depths of the potentiated interval, expanding the analytical scope from the ‘intense face-to-face intercorporeality’ to a more encompassing ‘primordial intercorporeal openness’ that underlies the face to face. On this level, Käll argues, intercorporeality is the name of the generative ontological dynamics whereby the constitutive bounds of the very subjectivity of those implicated are perpetually (re)constituted (on intercorporeal social depths, see also Guenther 2013: 178). Hence, since human subjectivity as such, including the subjectivity of people with dementia, is perpetually ‘in statu nascendi’, as Käll puts it, these potentiated intervals erupting in the interstices of intercorporeal being-in-the-world are spaces for ‘becoming otherwise’ (Käll 2017: 374). As I have argued elsewhere, the implication of this basic ontological malleability of human subjectivity and being in the world is that ethics – whatever else is at stake more concretely in transformative moral experience (Zigon and Throop 2014) in terms of the value conflicts that cause moral torment (Robbins 2004) and call for judgement (Lambek 2010) and reflective choice (Laidlaw 2002) – is, on an ontological level, charged by an existential impulse pertaining to the practical necessity of (re)settling the meta-stable bounds of being-in-theworld (Dyring 2020). The implications of this line of argument in the context of the care ethics that underpins the practices of dementia care is that care practices should no longer exclusively ‘centre’ on this or that person or these relationships as ‘objects’ of care. The practice of care must in some measure also become eccentric in the sense that caring for others now means tending to transformative possibilities that emerge in the potentiated intervals forming between oneself and those others, in such a way that these events of potentiation – that take place in between and that, properly speaking, belong to neither of the implicated persons – are perpetuated in their ontological openness (see Dyring and Grøn 2022). In what follows, I will move further into the potentiated intervals where care becomes eccentric.



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Vortextual Interruptions The vignette at the beginning of the chapter captures a series of marked transformations in the ways Vagner, Helen, Emma and Katie find themselves affectively emplaced in the world. Initially, Emma and Helen are busy clearing the tables after morning coffee and setting the tables for lunch, while Vagner is standing still in their midst, quietly observing what is going on. Katie, the caregiver, is busy working in the kitchen area. Then, suddenly, Helen breaks out of this pragmatic ‘definition of the situation’ (Kitwood 2019: 107), and a new configuration of coexistence and a new definition of the situation begin to emerge between them. In contrast to Naomi Feil’s interaction with Gladys Wilson, which has the pronounced aim of producing a momentary therapeutic ‘breakthrough’, the transfiguration in the definition of the situation that occurs in the vignette is not brought about by an intervention, planned or otherwise. Nor is it, properly speaking, a disruption of the pragmatic definition of the situation. Rather, as I will argue, the worldly transformation takes the form of an interruption, that is, an unanticipated eruption of a potentiated interval in the spacing of which alternative ways of co-inhabiting the dementia day centre are formed and perpetuated as concrete practical possibilities. To put it in more schematic terms: whereas (i) an inter-vention, such as Naomi Feil’s or those of art therapy, comes from the outside world and ‘ventures in between’ with the express intention of, and an externally defined blueprint for, changing the definition of the situation, and whereas (ii) the notion of dis-ruption, as the privative prefix suggests, conceives of the shift in the definition of the situation in terms of either a breakdown or deficiency in the order of things, on the one hand, or in terms of the power of a new operative order to negate or render obsolete a previously operative order, on the other hand, the phenomenological concept of (iii) inter-ruption foregrounds the generative dynamics of an emergent potentiated interval as it opens between the persons, creatures, artefacts, things, etc., that populate the world.3 In the vignette, the interruption in the definition of the situation apparently begins to take place when the first phrases of the song burst out of Helen as she, otherwise occupied in the pragmatic order of domestic work, approaches Vagner. Drawing once again on Stevenson’s phenomenology of song, referenced at the beginning of this chapter, we might say that the song, from the perspective of the prevailing definition of the situation, has a kind of ‘intrusive force’. It has the power to take us ‘outside’ what Stevenson calls our ‘everyday interpellative practices’, which reproduce a certain order and certain forms of subjectivity, to a dimension where ‘we recognize the uniqueness/specificity of the being in front of us’ (2014: 166). In Stevenson’s analysis, such intimate songs of recognition are calls from one singular human being to another singular human being. Conceiving of the call of song in terms of ‘intrusion’, she writes, ‘allows it to belong to a moment outside the solidification of positions and identities’ (2014: 166).

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I share Stevenson’s intuition regarding the interruptive potential channelled in the phenomenon of song. And her proposed call–response schema seems to fit nicely with the responsive pattern that Zeiler finds in her analysis of the interventionist exchange between Feil and Ms Wilson inasmuch as Feil indeed employs song as a validating and recognizing call extended to Ms Wilson, a singular human, before her. However, the song in the vignette – Helen’s sudden bursting into song – actually appears not only as a call that one person extends to another. Rather, judging by the suddenness of its bursting forth, Helen’s song seems to be a kind of impulsive response to something that unexpectedly befalls her, an experience that calls her and pulls her away from the prevailing pragmatic definition of the situation and towards Vagner. Now, this is not simply to suggest that we allocate the call to the other relatum, namely, Vagner. He just stands there silently, taking it all in, as he has being doing for a while. He does not say or do anything that invites Helen’s attention and response. He is simply there. If there is a call, then, it is a silent call not expressly and personally uttered by anyone. Nonetheless, this silent, impersonal call comes to resonate in the space between the two in a way that provokes a strong response. In his account of coexistence, Merleau-Ponty writes of being-with others not primarily in terms of the co-presence of persons, or in terms of a dyadic I–Thou relationship, but in terms of an affective being drawn into a vortex of possibilities that are not merely one’s own personal possibilities. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, ‘[a]round the perceived body a vortex forms, towards which my world is drawn and, so to speak, sucked in: to this extent, it is no longer merely mine’ (2002: 412). Unlike the other’s objectifying gaze, which, as Jean-Paul Sartre argues, is the ‘the solidification and alienation of my own possibilities’ (1956: 263), beingwith others, in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis, is a world-opening event, since this or that ‘alien life, like mine with which it is in communication, is an open life’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 412). Hence, being-with others – a vortextual intertwinement of open lives – amounts to undergoing manifold differential interruptions, large and small, to our personal perspectives, which shift, punctuate and pierce our shared world, opening it and potentiating it indefinitely. The point here is that there is, lodged in the heart of the lived experiences of beingwith others, an ontological unboundedness that, by virtue of its interruptive excesses, releases both a visceral sense of the new, the different, the otherwise and a visceral unsettlement circumscribing the experience of being emplaced in a domain that is ‘no longer merely mine’, a domain the basic definition of which ultimately recedes from my possessive grasp and control. Undergoing such experiences of excess, human corporeal existence, as Helmuth Plessner argues, has a capacity to respond impulsively. We burst into laughter or tears when ‘behaviour comes up against a barrier … before which word and deed, gesture and expressive movement, fail to be effective’. In such ‘impossible situations’, which throw ‘[man] back upon his own finitude in the irretrievability of lived existence’, there remains nothing for him ‘but correspondingly impossible



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answers: to laugh or cry’ and thus to let ‘his body answer in his place’ (Plessner 1970: 143–44). Following this line of thought, it would be the vortextual sense of an indefinite opening beyond the current definition of the situation, the sense of a potentiation of the space between herself and Vagner, that calls forth a bursting response in Helen. This bursting quality of her singing, and the fact that it receives its initiatory impulse – its call, its provocation – from this vortextual elsewhere, resembles that of laughter and crying in Plessner’s account. But, unlike laughter and crying, the responsive phenomenon of song amounts to much more than an overwhelmed individual’s somato-psychological coping mechanism. At a threshold that runs somewhere between language as rationalism’s tool for seizing and ordering the world and the wailing cries or manic laughter that arise from the utter unfathomability and chaos of life, lies ‘song’ – hymns, elegies, odes, poems. Song, in this sense, has a poetico-affective potency that allows it to create resonant spaces for expression and communication, where propositional language and the sharing of meaning by way of straightforward symbolic interactions becomes impeded, if not impotent.

Eccentric Movements of Potentiation This spatializing power at work in the responsive phenomenon of song is, as it were, traceable in the vignette through a series of eccentric movements of potentiation that (a) receive their initiatory impulse from a deferred elsewhere, that (b) open potentiated intervals within specific meta-stable bounds and build in intensity within these bounds according to the manner in which they are responded to, and that (c) eventually overflow these meta-stable bounds, thus transfiguring the potentiated interval. First Movement: If the above analyses of the bursting quality of Helen’s singing are correct, then Helen is neither the initiator, properly speaking, nor the centre of the phenomenon. Her bursting into song is a response to a vortextual sense of an indefinite potential that is reducible neither to her own person nor to that of Vagner. In this sense, the very power of initiation (archein) lies elsewhere than with any of the persons implicated in the situation. Rather than reflectively choosing to change the definition of the situation, as, for instance, when Naomi Feil sets things in motion by intervening in Ms Wilson’s life, Helen seems to be affectively drawn towards an emergent, yet-to-be-defined situation as she responds to the pull of the charged space that opens between herself and Vagner. In this sense, the transformative movements of potentiation are an-archic, that is, without an autarchic ruler or a transparent ruling principle (archē). As Helen and Vagner stand face to face with their foreheads almost touching, the intensity builds in the intercorporeally bounded space that emerges between their bodies, until it boils over and finds possible expression in Helen’s ecstatic chant: ‘Look, grandpa is dancing …’ Although Helen cannot get past

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this line at first, her chant has already overflown the meta-stable bounds of this first configuration of the potentiated interval. Second Movement: Katie, standing at the kitchen counter a couple of steps from Helen and Vagner, senses the potential building in the moment. When Helen is interrupted by the words escaping her, Katie responds: ‘To the olden waltz …’ Again, the singing stops short. Neither Helen nor Katie remember the words initially. However, through a common effort, the two of them work their way into the refrain and their joint singing intensifies and builds in volume. Over and over, they sing the chorus of the song. Vagner, who is silent, but clearly moved and engaged throughout the entire episode, seems almost to float, swaying in time with their singing. Also in this second movement, the initiatory impulse comes from a deferred elsewhere. Just like Helen’s singing in the first movement, Katie’s singing is responsive and not a spontaneous beginning in its own right. Furthermore, Katie’s singing is responsive to Helen’s singing not as a call from Helen addressed to Katie or Vagner, but as an experiential index of the potentiality building and intensifying in the moment. Hence, Katie’s singing is responsive – albeit in a deferred way – to the same vortextual potentiation as that to which Helen is responding. Both movements are thus driven by the anarchic impulses of the potentiated interval that first opened between Helen and Vagner, that ruptured the bounds of its first configuration and that now resonates in the spacing of the second movement of potentiation. When Katie responds and joins in, Helen and Vagner are still standing face to face, but the intensity of the space between them spills over the initial bounds of ‘the intense intercorporeal face to face’ and the potentiated interval expands into the space around them, encompassing also Katie and Emma, as it increasingly resonates in these swaying bodies, in this vibrating flesh. Finally, as the singing reaches its greatest intensity, Katie is drawn from her station, that is to say, from the pragmatic definition of the situation, which is dictated by the logic of the institutional procedures and the importance of serving lunch on time. She follows Helen and Vagner onto the anarchic plane of an emergent, yet-tobe-determined definition of the situation. Third Movement: Katie grabs Vagner and the waltz begins. Immediately, Helen and Emma begin dancing too. While the singing in the two first movements is responsive to the vortextual sense of potentiation, the dancing in the third movement seems almost to become the ecstatic incarnation of the vortices. Potentiation in the flesh! Swirling. Swirling, like eddies in a Heraclitean creek, the dancers now inhabit the space of the day centre in a wholly other configuration than before. The definition of the situation has been entirely transformed – for the time being, at least. Contrary to what happens in those experiences of a loss of an existential foothold that prompts the bodily responses of laughter and crying to answer in one’s place, as Plessner argues, singing in the vignette provides a way of breathing the atmosphere of this unsettled interval together and dancing provides a way of assuming a communal posture, when it is otherwise becoming increasingly difficult to secure a



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firm foothold in the world. In other words, what we witness in the vignette is a way of collectively composing a response that affirms and resonates with the vortextual potentiation surging in the intervals between persons. But then the singing and dancing end. Katie returns to her station in the kitchen and Helen, Emma and Vagner lean against the kitchen counters, laughing as they try to regain their breath. Soon they are back in the previous pragmatic order of things.

World-Open Care and the Transformation of Lifeworlds The emphasis on the ontological characteristic of anarchy in these analyses of relations of care becoming eccentric might be seen as somewhat alarming, since it seems to imply that the power to ‘define situations’, and thus to frame and sustain the sharing of meaning, is entirely removed from the persons involved in the situation, from the persons living with dementia, from their relatives and from the caregivers, whose function it is to secure an institutional framework that furthers well-being and a ‘world where meanings are shared’ (Kitwood 2019: 105). However, to acknowledge the anarchic impulses of creativity and worldly transformation is by no means the same as surrendering to the forces of chaos. Whereas the latter would be highly disruptive to social life in general, particularly in the context of dementia care, the former – while not centring on any one individual (psychological, relational, embodied) person – in fact harbours an empowering potential with respect to persons living with dementia as regards their basic inclusion in the social constitution of a shared, meaningful world. The above analyses allow for some preliminary conclusions that substantiate and expand on this claim and point towards some basic motifs of what I call world-open care. First, to acknowledge the anarchic impulses of creativity and worldly transformation is to acknowledge that the power to begin something new is not the exclusive privilege of those whose higher cognitive capacities remain intact, for example, those who can plan an intervention, stage an art therapy project, make autonomous decisions, organize life according to an institutional blueprint, etc. Rather, the transformation of situations in which meanings are shared, and thus the development of new dimensions of meaning and purpose, relies more primordially on wider distributed responsive capacities, that is, on the capacity to be moved beyond the bounds of a given situational definition and to be moved towards, alongside and with others in a way that functions as a perpetuating factor in the anarchic flows of potentiation. It is in their capacity to be thus moved and affectively emplaced at the thresholds of a yet-to-bedefined situation that Helen, Vagner, Katie and Emma responsively perpetuate the three eccentric movements of transformation in the vignette. A formative factor is also implied in this responsive perpetuation. The analysis above foregrounds exactly this kind of responsive co-creation of a new meaningful moment within highly malleable situational bounds that are formed

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immanently, affectively and intercorporeally by all parties involved. What comes to light here, then, is that the issue of worldhood in care ethics should be explored in terms of an affective, responsive openness to things becoming otherwise, to ontologically generative interruptions of situational definitions, as opposed to in terms of shared situational definitions that ideally allow persons to seamlessly interact, as Kitwood suggests. Hence, care, in its eccentric modality, means tending to the openness of the spaces between persons. Second, once we acknowledge that these generative anarchic impulses are ‘impersonal’ in the sense that they arise in a kind of ever-deferred, eccentric elsewhere that surges between persons, the supposed asymmetry between a caregiver, who provides and secures a nourishing institutional setting, and a passive receiver of care dissolves, and the task of defining the situation in which meanings are shared becomes a truly distributed task. Hence, the asymmetry, which Zeiler identifies, for instance, between Naomi Feil and Ms Wilson, gives way to an odd kind of symmetry in the sense that both Helen and Katie – i.e. both the supposed passive receiver and the supposed active giver of care – find themselves in a position, where they first and foremost are respondents, called forth by intercorporeally shared experiences of a transgressive event of potentiation that arises anarchically in the moment. Furthermore, this odd symmetry in their modes of being emplaced in the yetto-be-defined situation is emphasized by their common struggle to remember the words; their common struggle, that is, to perpetuate and give form – through the spatializing power of song – to the emergent potentiated interval. As all four of the participants sing and dance, they are all summoned onto this anarchic plane, ‘working’ alongside each other in perpetuating and forming the situation, tracing its meta-stable bounds. Katie, being the professional in this setting, might very well participate in the event with intentions that are different from those of the other participants, but, from an ontological perspective, this does not amount to asymmetry, since she – just as much as the other participants – is lagging behind and thus following, rather than mastering, the potentials erupting on this anarchic plane. What this difference points to, then, is a differentiation in modes of being in the world, which, in this case, to some extent, correlates with the cognitive differences of the participants (on cognitive difference as ontological difference, see McKearney and Zoanni 2018). In other words, once we see past the prima facie asymmetries between caregivers and those who receive care, what comes into view is an ontologically generative differential sharing of a meaningful moment across thresholds of cognitive difference. This calls for a reconceptualization of care relationships and practices in terms of a differential social ontology (see Dyring and Grøn 2022) that allows even for radical differences in modes of being-in-theworld without pathologizing them according to the measures of a static and unitary transcendental or fundamental ontology modelled on ‘normality’ or ‘average everydayness’ (Heidegger 2010: 43; Husserl 1973: 154), whereby the unique potentials they represent for the shared world are devalued, if not eclipsed.



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Some Basic Motifs and Paths for Further Research In this chapter, I started out by pointing to a blind spot in the theories of care that variously centre on psychological, relational and embodied personhood, namely, the question of how personhood is somehow conditioned by worldhood, a condition of possibility that Kitwood himself, in passing, notes, when he writes that ‘to be a person is to live in a world where meanings are shared’ (2019: 105). Through a critique of Kitwood’s tacit equation of worldhood with the interactionist idea of sharing meaningful actions within the order of a common ‘definition of the situation’, I argued that worldhood should, rather, be explored in terms of an ontological openness that surfaces notably when situational definitions are interrupted and transfigured. This led to detailed phenomenological investigations of the eccentric registers of care practices. I will conclude by drawing up some basic motifs of world-open care that build on the work presented here and elsewhere (Dyring 2022; Dyring and Grøn 2022). This preliminary sketch of basic motifs has the character of working hypotheses that call for meticulous ethnographic, social-ontological research: 1. World-open care supplements rather than supplants person-centred care. Neither the centred nor the eccentric registers of care can stand alone. Where person-centred care tends to construe the practical situation of care in terms of a hermeneutics of need that seeks to decode the ‘dementia presentation’ of an individual in terms of that person’s biographical past and current psychological make-up and neurological impairment, world-open care facilitates potentials in the situation that point beyond any given person and their individual needs and holds open yet-to-be-defined shared futures (see Myers 2013: 88ff.). 2. World-open care follows the potentials that erupt between persons. Given the anarchic quality of potentiation, care in the eccentric register becomes a matter of following the flows of potentials rather than constructing a situation with a specific design in mind. World-open care thus requires improvisational skills, such as those showcased by Katie in the vignette. For this reason, it is a care philosophy that is demanding in terms of both personal and institutional resources. The ethics of following also entails a cultivation of phronetic virtues that allow caregivers to know when to stop following potentials and close down potentiated spaces that are becoming disruptive to social life (see Dyring and Grøn 2022). 3. World-open care is an ethics of everyday creativity. The transformative events that practices of world-open care seek to perpetuate and give form to are events of everyday life. They may be so mundane that their calls and invitations would go unnoticed were it not for the empathy and trained responsiveness of caregivers and relatives. Their triviality notwithstanding, these events of everyday creativity (Bellass et al. 2019; Richards 2010) are indexical of an ontological openness that philosophers have described as a defining character of the human condition as such (Gehlen 1988; Plessner

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2019; Scheler 2009). Facilitating this openness in life with dementia by following the anarchic flows of everyday creativity amounts to facilitating the enactment of deep-seated aspects of the humanness of human beings. Thus, it amounts to locating the sources of human dignity on a much deeper affective level of existence that remains foreclosed in bioethics frameworks that somehow link human dignity with autonomy or interdependency. 4. World-open care is explicitly based in social-ontological research. As discussed above, all the prominent theories of dementia care, and notably person-centred care, use as their point of departure social-ontological assumptions that are understood to remain ‘beyond the possibility of testing’ (Kitwood 2019: 10). Taking phenomenology seriously as a meticulous, scientific study of social ontology, world-open care not only redirects the orientation of care practices vis-à-vis person-centred care. The philosophy of world-open care in fact seeks a scientific grounding of its fundamental axioms by connecting practice development and research into the efficacy of care practices with social-ontological research conducted in the same or similar practical settings.

Coda: Charleston at Morning Coffee It has been a couple of days since the impromptu dance in the kitchen. Several times during morning coffee, Helen has brought up the theme of dancing and she has sung the first line of the waltz a couple of times: ‘Look, grandpa is dancing …’ Today, however, no one follows her. There are other things to attend to. The conversations around the table flow. Someone tells a joke. The mood is elevated. But Helen is not quite there. She is somewhat beside herself. ‘They are dancing Charleston!’ she suddenly exclaims loudly. She stares straight out into the empty air in front of her. Judging from her diction, she seems to be tasting the words, as if they were exotic and unknown artefacts from a strange world. ‘They are dancing Charleston!’4 Rasmus Dyring is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Aarhus University, Denmark. He authored ‘The Futures of “Us”: A Critical Phenomenology of the Aporias of Ethical Community in the Anthropocene’ (Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2021) and co-authored (with Lone Grøn) ‘Ellen and the Little One: A Critical Phenomenology of Potentiality in Life with Dementia’ (Anthropological Theory, 2022).



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Notes   1. This vignette, as well as the short vignette that concludes the chapter, are drawn from a short period of fieldwork carried out in the winter of 2018 at a day center for people with dementia located at a dementia unit in a midsized Danish town.   2. See ‘Gladys Wilson and Naomi Feil’, memorybridge, 26 May 2009. Retrieved 24 May 2021 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrZXz10FcVM.   3. I have developed this notion of interruption at length in various recent works. For an account of interruption and ontological differentiation, see Dyring 2020, 2021; Dyring and Wentzer 2021. For an account of interruption and potentiation in life with dementia, see Dyring 2022; Dyring and Grøn 2022.   4. See note 1 above.

References Adams, Trevor, and Paula Gardiner. 2005. ‘Communication and Interaction within Dementia Care Triads: Developing a Theory for Relationship-Centred Care’, Dementia 4(2): 185–205. Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bellass, Sue, et al. 2019. ‘Broadening the Debate on Creativity and Dementia: A Critical Approach’, Dementia 18(7–8): 2799–820. Blanchot, Maurice. 1988. The Unavowable Community, trans. P. Joris. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill. Brooker, Dawn. 2019. ‘Personhood Maintained’, in Tom Kitwood, Dementia Reconsidered, Revisited: The Person Still Comes First, 2nd edn. London: Open University Press, pp. 78–82. Brooker, Dawn, and Isabelle Latham. 2016. Person-Centred Dementia Care. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. The Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins. New York: Verso. Dewing, Jan. 2008. ‘Personhood and Dementia: Revisiting Tom Kitwood’s Ideas’, International Journal of Older People Nursing 3: 3–13. Durkheim, Émile. 1973. Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education, trans. E.K. Wilson and H. Schnurer. New York: The Free Press. . 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method, trans. W.D. Halls. New York: The Free Press. Dyring, Rasmus. 2015. ‘A Spectacle of Disappearance: On the Aesthetics and Anthropology of Emancipation’, Trópos 8(1): 11–33. . 2020. ‘Emplaced at the Thresholds of Life: Toward a Phenomenological An-Archaeology of Borders and Human Bounding’, in Anthony Cooper and Søren Tinning (eds), Debating and Defining Borders: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 97–111. . 2021. ‘The Futures of “Us”: A Critical Phenomenology of the Aporias of Ethical Community in the Anthropocene’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 47(3): 304–21. . 2022. ‘On the Silent Anarchy of Intimacy: Images of Alterity, Openness and Sociality in Life with Dementia’, in Cheryl Mattingly and Lone Grøn (eds), Imagistic Care: Growing Old in a Precarious World. New York: Fordham University Press , pp. 109–38.

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Dyring, Rasmus, and Lone Grøn. 2022. ‘Ellen and the Little One: A Critical Phenomenology of Potentiality in Life with Dementia’, Anthropological Theory 22(1): 3–25. Dyring, Rasmus, and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer. 2021. ‘How Life Makes a Conversation of Us: Ontology, Ethics and Responsive Anthropology’, in Andrew Brandel and Marco Motta (eds), In the Grip of Reality: Anthropology and Our Life with Concepts. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 50–72. Feil, Naomi. 1993. The Validation Breakthrough. Cleveland, OH: Health Professions Press. Gehlen, Arnold. 1988. Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. C. McMillan and K. Pillemer. New York: Columbia University Press. Guenther, Lisa. 2013. Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press. Helsedirektoratet (HD). 2020. ‘Demens – Nasjonal faglig retningslinje’, Oslo. Retrieved 20 January 2021 from http://www.helsedirektoratet.no/retningslinjer/demens/ personsentrert-omsorg-og-behandling-ved-demens. Hughes, Julian, Claire Bamford and Carl May. 2008. ‘Types of Centredness in Health Care: Themes and Concepts’, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 11: 455–63. Husserl, Edmund. 1973. Cartesianische Meditationen: Eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie. Hua 1. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Jenkins, Nicholas. 2014. ‘Dementia and the Inter-Embodied Self ’, Social Theory & Health 12(2): 125–37. Käll, Lisa F. 2017. ‘Intercorporeal Expression and the Subjectivity of Dementia’, in Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge (eds), Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 359–86. Kitwood, Tom. 1993. ‘Towards a Theory of Dementia Care: The Interpersonal Process’, Aging and Society 13(1): 51–67. . 2019. Dementia Reconsidered, Revisited: The Person Still Comes First, 2nd edn, ed. Dawn Brooker. London: Open University Press. Kontos, Pia. 2006. ‘Embodied Selfhood: An Ethnographic Exploration of Alzheimer’s Disease’, in Annette Leibing and Lawrence Cohen (eds), Thinking about Dementia: Culture, Loss, and the Anthropology of Senility. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 157–79. Laidlaw, James. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(2): 311–32. Lambek, Michael. 2010. ‘Introduction’, in Michael Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 1–38. McCormack, Brendan. 2003. ‘A Conceptual Framework for Person-Centred Practice with Older People’, International Journal of Nursing Practice 9: 202–9. McKearney, Patrick, and Tyler Zoanni. 2018. ‘Introduction: For an Anthropology of Cognitive Disability’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 36(1): 1–22. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2003. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge. Millett, Stephan. 2011. ‘Self and Embodiment: A Bio-Phenomenological Approach to Dementia’, Dementia 10(4): 509–22. Myers, Ella. 2013. Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.



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Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community, trans. P. Connor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. NICE National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. 2019. ‘Dementia: Assessment, Management and Support for People Living with Dementia and Their Carers (NG97)’, London. Nolan, Mike, et al. 2004. ‘Beyond “Person-Centred” Care: A New Vision for Gerontological Nursing’, International Journal of Older People Nursing 13(3a): 45–53. Plessner, Helmuth. 1970. Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior, trans. J.S. Churchill and M. Grene. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. . 2019. Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology, trans. M. Hyatt. New York: Fordham University Press. Richards, Ruth. 2010. ‘Everyday Creativity: Process and Way of Life – Four Key Issues’, in J.C. Kaufman and R.J. Sternberg (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 189–215. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ryan, Tony, et al. 2008. ‘Using the Senses Framework to Achieve Relationship-Centred Dementia Care Services’, Dementia 7(1): 71–93. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. H.E. Barnes. London: Washington Square Press. Scheler, Max. 2009. The Human Place in the Cosmos, trans. M.S. Frings. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Oakland: University of California Press. Sundhedsstyrelsen (SST). 2019a. ‘National klinisk retningslinje: Forebyggelse og behandling af adfærdsmæssige og psykiske symptomer hos personer med demens’, Copenhagen. . 2019b. ‘Demenshåndbøger: Personcentreret omsorg i praksis’, Copenhagen. Twigg, Julia. 2000. ‘Carework as a Form of Bodywork’, Ageing and Society 20: 389–411. Watson, Julie. 2019. ‘Developing the Senses Framework to Support RelationshipCentred Care for People with Advanced Dementia until the End of Life in Care Homes’, Dementia 18(2): 545–66. Zeiler, Kristin. 2014. ‘A Philosophical Defense of the Idea that We Can Hold Each Other in Personhood: Intercorporeal Personhood in Dementia Care’, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 17: 131–41. Zigon, Jarrett. 2019. A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community. Oakland: University of California Press. Zigon, Jarrett, and C. Jason Throop. 2014. ‘Moral Experience: Introduction’, Ethos 42(1): 1–15.

7 On Moral Revolutions Robert Baker

What all scientific revolutions are about … [is] the community’s rejection of one time-honored scientific theory in favor of another incompatible with it. … each transformed … the world within which scientific work was done. Such changes, with the controversies that … surround them, are the defining characteristics of scientific revolutions. —Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

On Moral and Scientific Revolutions This prefatory quotation from Thomas Kuhn’s landmark intellectual history, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (hereafter Structure), might seem out of place in a chapter on moral revolutions. Yet Kuhn’s description of a scientific revolution should seem familiar to those of us who saw the dawn of the twentyfirst century. Time and again, we have witnessed our community’s rejection of one time-honoured moral view in favour of another moral view incompatible with it. We watched as women, once thought to be anatomically destined to child-rearing and domesticity, moved from the kitchen to the corporation and then from the receptionist desk to the boardroom, eventually turning to the media to cry ‘Me too!’ to protest against verbal and sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace; and as people of colour, having fought for the right to vote and then having moved on up from the servants’ quarters to the White House, marched in protest against police abuse in the name of George Floyd and others; and as someone with the ‘love that dare not speak its name’ came out of the closet to exchange marriage vows in public, ran for president and now serves as United States Secretary for Transportation.



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These transformations in our moral life rendered morally acceptable that which was once morally outrageous and resulted in that which was once morally acceptable being deemed morally outrageous – or, as Kuhn might have put it, our communities replaced traditional paradigms of morality with others that were incompatible with them. In this chapter, I draw on my detailed study, The Structure of Moral Revolutions, to argue that the revolutionary changes in forms of our moral life listed above share a conceptual structure analogous to that Kuhn discovered in scientific revolutions. I am not the first Anglophone philosopher to analogize changes in forms of moral life to political revolutions: John Stuart Mill noted the phenomenon of moral revolutions in 1833; more recently, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cecilie Eriksen and Kathryn Pine Parsons have also analysed the phenomenon (Mill 1833; Appiah 2010; Eriksen 2019; Parsons 1974).1 Still, for the most part, few philosophers writing in English treat morality as subject to revolutionary change. One reason for their blindness is that, as Kuhn observed of a similar phenomenon in Anglophone philosophy of science, ‘Textbooks … aim to communicate the vocabulary and syntax of a contemporary scientific language … And philosophy of science, particularly that of the English-speaking world, analyzes the logical structure of the same completed body of scientific knowledge’ (2012: 136).2 Kuhn continues, observing that Textbooks … begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. Characteristically textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter or, more often, in scattered references to the great heroes of an earlier age. From such references students and professionals come to feel like participants in a longstanding historical tradition. Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed. For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional science textbooks … refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solutions to paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as working on the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons the most recent theory and method has made seem scientific. (2012: 137)

Most moral philosophy in the Anglophone cultural sphere is presented in this manner; not surprisingly, therefore, few philosophers writing in this tradition take note of moral change. In so far as they discuss moral change at all, they either outsource their analyses to social scientists or engage in armchair social science themselves. By contrast, in the book on which this chapter is based, The Structure of Moral Revolutions, I argue that the intelligentsia are essential to moral revolutions and that philosophers, in particular, have played an important role in catalysing the critiques and conceptual innovations essential to moral revolutions in the past and could do so again in the future. I came to this conclusion, in part, because my initial ambition was to become a historian – a field that

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focuses on change – but, having exasperated my history professors with questions they deemed ‘too philosophical’, I ended up writing a doctoral dissertation on metaethics at a centre for philosophy of science directed by the eminent logical empiricist/positivist Herbert Feigl (Creath 2020). Unlike most logical empiricists/positivists, Feigl believed that moralities have analysable cognitive content and that there are sound reasons for choosing one morality over some alternatives (Feigl 1981: 386, 388; see also Neuber 2018). As Feigl’s student, I was also familiar with Kuhn’s critique of logical empiricist theories of scientific progress in Structure. Yet I did not connect Feigl’s views on morality with Kuhn’s analysis of scientific revolutions until I co-edited The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics, a collaborative effort to create the first global history of medical ethics (Baker and McCullough 2009a: 65–70). As I edited manuscripts, I was struck by Kuhnian passages, such as this one by Spanish physician-bioethicist Diego Gracia: ‘During the second half of the eighteenth century, there was a radical confrontation between two ways of thinking and doing, one “pre-revolutionary” and the other “counter-revolutionary”’ (Baker and McCullough 2009b: 427). Gracia’s remark reminded me of Kuhn’s observation that ‘What all scientific revolutions are about is the … community’s rejection of one time-honored scientific theory in favor of another incompatible with it’ (2012: 6). It struck me that Kuhn’s depiction of scientific revolutions might also apply to transformations in medical morality. Working on my next book, Before Bioethics, I again came across events that could easily be analysed using Kuhn’s model in Structure. Yet, since resemblance is not probative, I decided to explore these similarities in a project that led to my book on moral revolutions.

A Brief Review of Kuhn’s Analysis of Scientific Revolutions Before commencing my moral revolutions project, however, I reviewed Kuhn’s 1957 book, The Copernican Revolution. In analysing what most historians deemed the origin of the scientific revolution, Kuhn discovered that Nicolaus Copernicus’s revolution did not conform to standard textbook descriptions of how science progresses, that is, Copernicus was not responding to some failed prediction or some new empirical discovery. Copernicus developed his theory because he was vexed by astronomers’ traditional explanations of celestial movements. As Copernicus explains in a note to Pope Paul III prefacing his 1543 treatise, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres: What impelled me, to consider a different system of deducting the motions of the universe’s spheres [was] the realization that astronomers do not agree among themselves in their investigation of this subject … [T]hey are so uncertain about the motion of the sun and moon that they cannot establish and observe a constant length … for … the … year. [T]hey do not use the same principles, assumptions and explanation of the apparent … motions. … [Some] were unable to obtain any …



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result in … agreement with the phenomena. [Others appear] to have solved [this] problem [using] many ideas which apparently contradict the first principles of [physics] … Their experience was just like someone taking from various places hands, feet, a head, and other pieces, very well depicted, it may well be, but not for the representation of a single person; since these fragments would not belong to one another at all, a monster rather than a man would be put together from them. (Copernicus 2008)

As this statement makes evident, Copernicus’s revolutionary abandonment of earth-centred (geocentric) astronomy was not inspired by new empirical data. It was inspired by anomalies in astronomers’ explanations of their theory: they ‘do not agree among themselves’; ‘They cannot establish and observe a constant length … for … the … year’; ‘[T]hey do not use the same principles, assumptions and explanation of the apparent … motions’; some ‘were unable to obtain any … result in … agreement with the phenomena.’ Other geocentrists resorted to ‘ideas which apparently contradict the first principles’ of physics. The astrophysics they created is monstrous! Thus, Kuhn realized, Copernicus’s shift to a sun-centred (heliocentric) astronomy was inspired by the incoherence of geocentrists’ explanations of how to calculate the movements of heavenly bodies and the length of a year. In search of a more coherent astronomy, Copernicus experienced what Kuhn calls a ‘paradigm shift’, that is, a different way of conceiving or envisioning something, in this case, a sun-centred view of the motions of heavenly bodies. The word ‘paradigm’ derives from a Greek term designating anything that serves as an example to which other things are compared. Thus, since the paradigm for ‘mosaic’ is a picture composed of many different pieces, something as different as a virus came to be called a ‘mosaic virus’ because, as in the paradigm case of a mosaic picture, the virus transforms the colouring of the leaves of plants into a motley pattern of greens and whites. A paradigm, to reiterate, is simply something to which other things are, in some way, comparable. As Kuhn points out, paradigms can be motifs, patterns or perspectives and they can function ‘like a judicial decision in the common law, [as] an object for further articulation and specification’ (2012: 23). Copernicus’s paradigm shift involved abandoning the all-too-natural geocentric perspective whereby the movements of heavenly bodies were viewed from the vantage point of Earth and, instead, treating the sun as the locus of planetary movement. Later astronomers would retain Copernicus’s heliocentric paradigm, that is, his view of the sun as the locus of a solar system, even as they developed different theories predicated on it. Thus, Johannes Kepler retained Copernicus’s heliocentric model but rejected Copernicus’s theory of invisible ‘celestial spheres’ supporting planets because meteors crossing planetary orbits did not collide with the hypothesized crystal spheres.3 Treating the Copernican revolution as a paradigm case of a scientific revolution, Kuhn concluded that although normally sciences progress within a common paradigm – in just the manner described in science textbooks – during

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periods of revolutionary challenge, dissidents, such as Copernicus, reject a traditional, communally accepted paradigm, in this instance geocentrism, and attempt to supplant it with an incompatible new paradigm, in this example heliocentrism. Typically, the new paradigm will supplant the traditional paradigm, Kuhn claims, only if dissidents are more ‘successful … in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners have come to recognize as acute’ (2012: 24), in this case, calculating accurate calendars.

Applying Kuhn’s Model of Scientific Revolutions to Morality What struck me about Kuhn’s analysis was that, in so far as it focused on cognitive displacement and community acceptance, rather than empirical data and experiments, it could be applicable to cognitive displacement and community acceptance in morality as well. Thus, it could serve as a model for analysing moral revolutions such as the one Gracia described. To test this hypothesis, I developed working definitions of such terms as ‘morality’, which I defined as standards (or norms) of conduct and character that community members internalize and use to appraise fellow members’ actions and dispositions as praiseworthy, or to censure those that contravene these standards as blameworthy. Following Feigl, I also assumed that moral norms, even those implicit in the shared concepts and practices of communal life, have analysable cognitive content. I assumed further that communities create moralities for functional purposes: that is, just as communities create scientific paradigms, concepts and practices to explain, predict and manipulate their world, so too do communities create moral paradigms, concepts and practices to facilitate co-operation and to mediate and prevent conflict. Moreover, just as it is reasonable for communities to revise or reject scientific paradigms or practices that fail to explain, predict or permit them to manipulate nature, so too is it reasonable for communities to reinterpret or replace moral paradigms that fail to mediate or prevent conflict, or to facilitate co-operation, that is, it is reasonable to initiate a moral reform or a moral revolution. Thus, there will be periods of normal moral progress, during which communally accepted moral paradigms are articulated in increasingly fine-grained and specialized ways, but there will also be periods of moral reform in which change agents reinterpret these paradigms and periods of revolutionary challenge in which communally accepted paradigms may be displaced by incompatible alternatives, that is, there will be moral revolutions. With this conceptual apparatus in place, I selected four moral revolutions as test cases: two in the nineteenth century and two in the twentieth. If I found that these cases followed a Kuhnian model, I would then test the model on two ongoing moral revolutions: the feminist and LGBTQ+ revolutions. A word about Kuhn’s term ‘structure’. Kuhn was not the first scholar to analogize scientific revolutions to political revolutions; that honour goes to the



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nineteenth-century Cambridge don William Whewell. Nor was Kuhn the first scholar to write a history of scientific revolutions (Whewell 1847; see also Baker 2019: 5, 6). Kuhn’s contribution was his development of an analysis of the elements required to successfully displace a communally accepted paradigm with an incompatible alternative; he characterized these elements as the structure of a scientific revolution. Thus, my objective was to analyse the half-dozen examples of successful moral revolutions that I had chosen in order to assess whether the process of cognitive transformation and paradigm displacement described by Kuhn was present in them. More specifically, I sought to determine whether the thirteen elements that Kuhn describes as the structure of a scientific revolution were present in these six test-case moral revolutions. These elements are: (i) the displacement of a communally accepted paradigm by an incompatible alternative paradigm, occuring (ii) after dissident intelligentsia notice (iii) some anomaly, that is, something that doesn’t fit, doesn’t add up, doesn’t make sense, or is inconsistent or incoherent. Prompted by the anomaly, the dissident intelligentsia (iv) develop arguments critiquing the traditional paradigm and propose (v) one or more incompatible alternative paradigms that (vi) introduce new concepts and terminology. They then (vii) attempt to vindicate their alternative paradigm by citing new forms of evidence, drawing on (viii) incommensurable criteria for validating new principles, theories, practices or laws. Upon (ix) disseminating the new paradigm and its principles, theories, practices and laws, the dissidents (x) gain new adherents, because the new paradigm (xi) is vindicated by its superior ability at resolving problems that appear unresolvable under the tradition paradigm. This, in turn, leads to general, but not necessarily universal, (xii) acceptance within the community. It thereby (xiii) makes the older paradigm, its concepts, associated discourse and practices obsolete, often leading to a phenomenon known as ‘Kuhn loss’, that is, the loss of explanations and practices that made sense under the traditional paradigm but became incomprehensible or obsolete under the new paradigm.

On Revolutions and Reforms Since we do not usually think of ‘reforms’ in the sciences, I also explored whether this was a possible point of divergence between moral and scientific change. I characterize a ‘reform’ as an attempt to preserve a traditional paradigm by modifying or reinterpreting it to resolve some vexing problem or inconsistency. With one exception, Kuhn pays little attention to reforms in the sciences. The exceptional case is Tycho Brahe’s proposed geocentric astronomy, in which the Sun, like the Moon, rotates around a stable, solid, unmoving Earth but – to accommodate Copernicus’s more efficient mathematics and more accurate predictions – the ‘stars’ Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter circle the Sun. Ingeniously, Brahe’s proposed reform would preserve the geocentrist’s account of the stability of the Earth under our feet and the heavens

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‘above’ us – a phenomenon initially inexplicable in heliocentric theory – while still capturing the efficiency and accuracy of Copernican mathematical calculations (Kuhn 2012: 155–56). Brahe’s assistant, Johannes Kepler, however, rejected Brahe’s proposed reform. Using Brahe’s empirical data, Kepler demonstrated the superior predictive accuracy of a totally heliocentric theory in which all ‘planets’, including Earth, follow elliptical paths in orbiting around the sun. For over half a century, neither side prevailed; in 1610, however, Galileo’s announcement of his telescopic discovery of Jupiter’s moons tilted the balance of opinion towards heliocentrism (Galileo 1989). With the Brahe–Kepler example in mind, I sought similar cases in which reforms yielded to revolutions in the history of medical morality (my own area of expertise). I found one in Dr Joseph Taussig’s attempt to reform nineteenthcentury anti-abortion laws during the worldwide depression of the 1930s, while still preserving the traditional abortion-is-infanticide paradigm. ‘SO POWERFUL and universal is the instinct for motherhood’, Taussig wrote, ‘that, when a woman is impelled to do away with the child within her body, we may be sure that the fault lies with the special circumstances under which she is living’ (1936: 389; see also Baker 2019: 131–33). Hence, Taussig argued, it is reasonable to recognize such special circumstances by empowering a committee of physicians to excuse aborting a pre-viable fetus if the abortion was necessary to preserve a pregnant woman’s mental or physical health, or if the fetus is unlikely to become ‘an individual of value to the community’. Since excuses are appropriate only if someone is blameworthy, Taussig’s reform preserves the traditional abortion-is-infanticide-in utero paradigm – just as Brahe’s astronomy preserved geocentrism – but it accommodates social pressure to excuse women seeking abortions by placing blame for the infanticide on the ‘special circumstances in which she is living’, such as the worldwide depression of the 1930s. The American Law Institute (ALI) urged state governments to implement Taussig’s reform and many states enacted legislation on the ALI model in the 1960s, when a rubella (German measles) pandemic caused many infants to be born blind, deaf and/or with mental disabilities (Baker 2019: 133–39). Taussig’s reform, however, created an anomalous situation in which physicians, who had no right to excuse the killing of a newborn infant, could nonetheless excuse the killing of an unborn ‘child’. This anomaly was preserved in the US Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision, which was based on the ALI model and effectively decriminalized abortion in the US. In Roe, however, the court, responding to feminists’ arguments about a woman’s privacy right to control her own body, eliminated the face-saving expedient that women must apply to a medical committee for a medical excuse for an abortion. In effect, this made abortion available ‘on demand’, thereby visibly vitiating the abortionis-infanticide paradigm. By inadvertently transforming a moral reform movement into a moral revolution, the court galvanized a counterrevolution led by a conservative intelligentsia seeking to re-immoralize and recriminalize abortion (Baker 2019: 148–49).



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Dissidents and Insurrections As a minor dissident and participant-observer in moral change movements, I can attest to Kuhn’s observation that dissidents who champion paradigm change at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by problem solving. He [or she] must, that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few … Something must make at least a few … feel that the new proposal is on the right track and sometimes it is only personal and inarticulate … considerations that can do that … At the start a new candidate for paradigm may have supporters … [and], if they are competent, they will improve it, explore its possibilities, and show what it would be like to belong to the community guided by it. And as that goes on, if the paradigm is one destined to win its fight, the number and strength of the persuasive arguments in its favor will increase. More … will be converted, and the exploration of the new paradigm will go on. Gradually the number of articles and books based on the paradigm will multiply. Still more [adherents], convinced of the new view’s fruitfulness, will adopt the new mode of practicing normal [ethics or] science, until only a few elderly holdouts remain. (2012: 156–58)

My personal experience matches Kuhn’s description (Baker 2002: 369–79). By the 1970s, the US civil rights, Medicare and Medicaid reform laws of the previous decade had effectively lowered gender, racial and financial barriers to medical care for the elderly, poor people, minorities and women throughout the United States. They now had the financial means to enter hospitals and clinics through the front door, so to speak. However, as they moved from charity, Coloured/Negro and women’s health care facilities into integrated facilities, they confronted a structurally reinforced ethos of ageism, classism, racism and sexism, perpetuated under the mantle of scientistic paternalism. Perhaps the best description of this ethos was penned by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons. American medical practitioners of that period, Parsons observed, believed that ‘Non- and irrational mechanisms were … prominent in the reactions of sick people to their situation’. Accordingly, since ‘the physician is trying his best to help the patient … [the physician–patient relationship] has to be one involving an element of authority … of “doctor’s orders” … [which it is] the patient’s obligation faithfully to accept’. Thus, the physician as ‘a technically competent person whose competence and specific judgments and measures cannot be competently judged by the layman. The latter must therefore take these judgments and measures “on authority”’ (Parsons 1951: 450, 464– 65). So conceived, the medical ethics of benign scientistic paternalism presupposed that patients and their families were so irrational – so ignorant of their own self-interests – that they were incompetent when it came to making medical decisions. Doctors, in contrast, as benign scientific agents, could make rational medical decisions on patients’ behalf and the patients’ role was to obediently follow their doctors’ orders.

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In a society emerging from centuries in which ageism, classism, racism and sexism were accepted norms, physicians’ scientistic decisions were naturally filtered through these lenses. Not surprisingly, therefore, in the 1970s, an African American civil rights movement, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), joined with a feminist organization, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (BWHBC), to lobby the American Hospital Association (AHA) ‘to do something about doctors who were: condescending, paternalistic, judgmental and non-informative’ (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective 1973). At issue were such practices as health care facilities’ refusal to offer advance appointments to lower-class people on welfare, elderly people covered by Medicare and poor people receiving treatment through Medicaid. Lacking advance appointments, these patients were forced to fritter away their time standing in overcrowded clinic and hospital waiting areas, as if their time – or they themselves – were of little value. Such architecturally abetted structures of discrimination served to reinforce pre-existing biases that permitted clinicians to misinform, or fail to inform, these patients when they were being used as experimental subjects – ‘human guinea pigs’, so to speak (Jonsen 1998: 368–71; Baker 2019: 175–80). Those of us who became pioneering bioethicists were shocked to find so many structurally reinforced ageist, classicist, racist and sexist barriers facing the patients newly entitled by the civil rights, Medicaid and Medicare laws to equal treatment. As founding bioethicist Robert Veatch points out, these practices were the tip of the iceberg: When laypeople learned what decisions physicians were making about laypeople’s health, they were often appalled … they discovered that physicians … were making controversial moral moves, choices that … some laypeople considered morally indefensible. Physicians intentionally withheld grave diagnoses from patients; they did research on them without informing them; they sterilized some patients who they thought were not worthy of being parents; they routinely held critically and terminally ill patients alive against the wishes of those patients or their families; they refused to perform sterilizations, abortions, and provide contraceptives if they thought that patients shouldn’t have them … The more laypeople learned about the ethic that had become embedded in the medical profession, the more they protested. (Veatch 2005: 208)

One clear implication of Kuhn’s analysis is that critiques like Veatch’s – however fervently expressed – will be ineffective in changing entrenched traditional paradigms unless dissidents can advance some alternative paradigm that resolves issues deemed relevant by the power brokers or opinion makers themselves. Consequently, although the AHA placated the NWRO and the BWHBC by adopting a patient’s bill of rights, it provided no enforcement mechanism. Thus, although health care institutions and practitioners paid lip service to notions of equal treatment and patients’ rights, in practice they ignored the proposed reforms. During the same period, however, clinicians sought the advice of pioneering bioethicists, not about dealing with patients – they



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deemed themselves experts on ‘handling’ patients – but about how to resolve issues arising from morally disruptive technologies, such as ventilators. However, when my colleagues and I turned from discussing morally disruptive technologies to such issues as overcrowded waiting areas, we found ourselves in the position of biblical prophets, talking to ‘people … without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not’ (Jeremiah 5:21).4 As Parsons’s apt characterization of the paradigm dominant in American medicine during that era makes evident, clinicians understood ‘beneficence’ from a technocratic and scientistic perspective: their focus was on relieving symptoms and curing. Our complaints about the absence of advance appointments and long waiting times or the absence of informed consent were deemed irrelevant and fell on deaf ears. In the end, as Kuhn observed of scientific revolutions, ‘the single most prevalent claim advanced by proponents of a new paradigm … [is] that they can solve the problems that have led the old one into crisis’ (2012: 152–53). Thus, bioethicists did not catalyse a moral revolution by speaking about patients’ rights. Instead, bioethicists were able to show clinicians that if they recognized patients’ autonomy-based rights to informed voluntary consent, they could resolve vexatious moral and legal problems arising from emerging morally disruptive medical technologies, such as ventilators. For example, if physicians insisted on retaining their paternalistic prerogative of writing donot-resuscitate (DNR) orders without informing patients or their families, or if they persisted in disconnecting ventilators (thereby allowing a patient to die) without a patient’s or surrogate’s informed voluntary consent, they would be held morally responsible and legally liable for the consequences. If, on the other hand, they recognized the rights of patients or their surrogates to consent to, or to reject, such procedures, they would transfer much of the moral and legal liability to patients or their surrogates (Baker 2013: 171–94). And, with the urging of the courts, as Kuhn predicted, a mostly younger generation of clinicians and researchers recognized the problem-solving virtues of the bioethics model and embraced the new paradigm – making the older ethos of medical paternalism obsolete. The word ‘autonomy’ in the preceding paragraph was foreign to the medical literature prior to the 1970s. It became prevalent as a consequence of an alternative conceptual paradigm that pioneering bioethicists developed to vindicate the demands made by the NWRO, the BWHBC and patients generally. During this period, the clash of paradigms was mirrored linguistically. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed, ‘The limits of our language means the limits of our world’ (1922: §5.6). Viewing clinical practices from a patient’s perspective, I was startled by clinicians’ apparent blindness to such patently non-benign conduct as making patients stand for hours in overcrowded waiting areas. But when I talked to clinicians about ‘patients’ rights’, I found myself accused of ‘political correctness’. What was at stake, however, was more than verbiage. In so far as the limits of our language mean the limits of our world as we conceive it, linguistic dissonance mirrors conceptual

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dissonance. This is true in both moralities and sciences. Geocentrists, for example, called the Sun and the Moon ‘planets’ (Greek for ‘wanderer’) because, like the wandering ‘stars’ (Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter), the Sun and the Moon traversed the sky ‘above’ the Earth. Yet from a geocentrist’s perspective, and hence in their language, the Earth, as a stable observation point, did not wander and was not a ‘planet’. The heliocentric paradigm turned this paradigm, and hence this terminology, upside down: Earth became a wanderer, a planet; whereas the Sun, as the focal centre of the ‘solar system’, was no longer a ‘planet’. Thus, anyone who called the Sun or the Moon ‘a planet’ revealed adherence to the traditional geocentric paradigm; similarly, anyone who described Medicare and Medicaid patients as ‘charity cases’ who were typically ‘non-compliant’ with ‘doctor’s orders’ was still thinking in terms of the older paternalistic paradigm – as reflected in medical chart notes with sections titled ‘doctor’s orders’ rather than ‘treatment plans’. The limits of their language did mean the limits of their view of the clinical world and the physician–patient relationship. Our challenge, as pioneering bioethicists, was to change their conception of their role, their relationship to their patients, and, in the process, the language that reflected this conception. As Kuhn observes of scientific revolutions, before proponents of different perspectives ‘can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift. Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all’ (2012: 149). It took two decades for clinicians to master the new conception of the patient–clinician partnership. And yet, as Kuhn remarks, ‘the entire process … occurred without … a permanent scientific truth’, or, I would argue, without a permanent moral truth (2012: 171–72). In morality, as in the sciences, as what was once revolutionary becomes normal, older forms of moral life come to be seen as odd or quaint, leading us to ask, as Appiah remarks, ‘What were we thinking?’ ‘How did we do that for all these years?’ (2010: xii). Which brings me back to my observation that Anglophone moral philosophers, and now American bioethicists, typically address themselves to normal morality, to communally accepted standards of moral character and conduct and to a body of problems often pre-specified in textbooks and recognized in journals, for example, deontology vs consequentialism, moral relativism, informed consent and so forth. Thus, ‘They need not provide authentic information about the way in which these were … recognized and embraced … [and they] inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them. Unless he has personally experienced a revolution in his own lifetime, the historical sense of the working scientist extends only to the outcome of the most recent revolutions in the field’ (Kuhn 2012: 137). I just happen to have experienced several moral revolutions in my lifetime and I am still astonished that I somehow migrated from picket

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lines to government commissions and that my writings migrated from the underground press to academic journals and publishers. During the process, I discovered that Americans have little regard for philosophy, which they treat like some arcane antiquated art in which bloviated verbiage is deployed in a quest to find in a dark room the proverbial black cat that isn’t there. Consequently, at public events, I am usually introduced as a ‘bioethicist’, ‘an ethicist’ or a ‘historian’ and seldom as a ‘philosopher’. Americans’ disdain for philosophy is likely a function of the pragmatic bent of the culture. Thus, to paraphrase Kuhn, American health care professionals only turned to philosophers out of practical concerns ‘in periods of acknowledged crisis … as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers. Indeed, normal science usually holds creative philosophy at arm’s length, and probably for reason … But that is not to say that [philosophical analysis] cannot be an effective way of weakening the grip of a tradition upon the mind and to suggest the basis for a new one’ (Kuhn 2012: 88). In point of fact, an interdisciplinary group of intelligentsia from the health care professions, law, philosophy and theology offered medical professionals an alternative paradigm that enabled them to cope effectively with disruptive medical technologies and to engage more successfully with a generation of newly empowered patients demanding to have their rights respected.

Criticisms and Responses Since the publication of The Structure of Moral Revolutions in 2019, several philosophers and historians, such as Claire Clark, John Danaher, Cecilie Eriksen and Michael Klenk, have voiced concerns about parts of my analysis. Danaher, Eriksen and Klenk raise questions about the distinction I draw between moral revolutions and moral drifts. ‘Moral drift’, as I use this expression, refers to changes in forms of moral life resulting from exogenous factors; in contrast, moral revolutions, like their counterparts in politics and the sciences, are changes fomented by dissidents. My usage parallels Kuhn’s description of scientific revolutions and can be traced back to the earliest use of the expression ‘moral revolution’ in the Anglophone philosophical tradition: John Stuart Mill’s comment in ‘A Few Observations on the French Revolution’ that ‘All political revolutions not effected by foreign conquest originate in moral revolutions’ (1833). Mill here analogizes moral revolutions to political revolutions, which suggests that he believes that they are led by dissidents, like his wife and her daughter, and himself. Moral drifts, in contrast, are non-purposive changes that are the unintended results of exogamous causes. I borrowed the expression ‘moral drift’ from evolutionary theory, where ‘genetic drift’ indicates arbitrary hereditary changes that are not causally relevant to reproductive success. The example of moral drift cited in The Structure of Moral Revolutions is the destigmatization of bastardy and unwed motherhood in post-Second World War America. In contrast

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to Britain, there was never a national campaign to effect this change in America; rather, it was the result of a convergence of diverse exogamous factors – a generation of post-war widows, the liberalization of divorce laws, more generous welfare systems, the decriminalization of birth control and so forth. The cumulative effect of these factors was to render out-of-wedlock pregnancy and unmarried motherhood more commonplace among ‘respectable’ people, eventually lifting the social opprobrium that once surrounded unmarried mothers and their children (Baker 2019: 27–35). American English tracked these changes as terminological innovations, like ‘one-parent families’, gained currency, making expressions such as ‘unwed mothers’ obsolete and eroding the literal meaning of ‘bastard’. No intelligentsia championed this transformation or offered critiques of the once dominant paradigm, nor did some alternative paradigm of the family emerge: on the contrary, the change in the status of former ‘unwed mothers’ to ‘single-parent families’ reflected a demographic shift that was deplored since married parenthood remained the ideal. The point to appreciate is that even though the impact of this change may be deemed ‘revolutionary’, the process of transformation differed from that in moral revolutions and requires a different analysis and thus a different name.5 Another commentator, Danaher, suggests that a ‘lack of precision regarding the concept of a paradigm vis-à-vis a moral rule, [creates] a danger that one person’s paradigm ends up being another person’s rule and vice versa and this creates problems about how to distinguish moral revolutions’ (2020). From my perspective, there is no problem distinguishing a dissident-led moral paradigm shift from a paradigm-preserving modification of laws or rules intended to preserve a traditional paradigm. In so far as there is no paradigm change, there is no revolution. For example, the Brahe/Taussig attempts to reinterpret or specify applications of a paradigm (geocentrism/abortion-is-infanticide) are reforms. Paradigms are inherently broad and somewhat vague, whereas changes in rulelike specifications – of planetary motion or excusing procedures for abortions – tend to be narrowly specific. Kepler’s first law of orbital motion, for example, states that ‘The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci’; but, since this law retains the idea of planets orbiting the Sun rather than the Earth, it does not change the underlying heliocentric paradigm that Kepler shares with Copernicus. Similarly, the Taussig/ALS reforms retain the abortionis-infanticide paradigm. However, they reform its application by introducing conditions for granting excuses for women seeking to violate it, if they can prove to a panel of physicians that they are violating it to preserve their mental or physical health or to prevent the birth of infants with disabilities. Moral reforms may change laws, rules and practices in order to ameliorate a paradigm’s deleterious effects, but they are ultimately paradigm-preserving and thus cannot be confused with paradigm-displacing moral revolutions. Danaher also raises questions about how to differentiate between revolutions: as both Kuhn and I.B. Cohen acknowledge, this is complicated because large maxi-revolutions typically catalyse a series of smaller mini-revolutions nested within them (Cohen 1985 xvii–xix; Kuhn 2012: 49). Thus, one could, as



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Danaher suggests, idenitify the ideal of egalitarianism as a basis for rejecting monarchy (the rule of one) and aristocracy (the rule of betters) in favour of democracy (the rule of many people, the public). This egalitarian maxi-paradigm shift was, as Danaher correctly observes, justified in the writings of dissident intelligentsia, such as Puritan philosopher John Locke. Locke’s writings that, in turn, were weaponized in 1776 by Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in their prologue to their egalitarian manifesto, the American Declaration of Independence. Adams, Franklin and Jefferson believed the egalitarian paradigm applied to African Americans and urged the abolition of slavery. Yet neither Adams, nor Franklin, nor Jefferson – nor Locke, for that matter – envisioned the egalitarian paradigm as justifying equal rights for women. About seven decades later, however, in 1848, firstwave feminists signed a Declaration of Sentiments in Seneca Falls, New York, that extended Adams, Franklin and Jefferson’s Declaration – and thus Locke’s paradigm – to demand equal rights for women. The point to appreciate is that the vagueness of maxi-paradigms makes them fecund, supporting multiple interpretations, many of which could be counted as mini-revolutions in their own right. As Kuhn and I understand revolutions, the difference between an insurrection, a reform and a successful revolution, scientific or moral, turns on whether dissidents can convince a community, or at least its power brokers and opinion makers, to abandon a traditional paradigm (geocentrism, authoritarianism, paternalism) and accept in its place an incompatible alternative (heliocentrism, egalitarianism, therapeutic partnership). In their initial stages, dissidents’ debating points will lack salience – hence my remarks about my experience of physicians’ dismissal of complaints about patient waiting times – and will continue to be deemed irrelevant unless and until some power brokers or opinion makers come to view them from the perspective of the alternative paradigm – typically because the alternative offers a solution to problems vexing them (e.g. disconnecting ventilators). As the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant put an analogous point, ‘Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’ (1781: A52; 1787: B76). To see the relevance and validity of contra-paradigm argumentation, one must somehow undergo, or at least glimpse, a paradigm shift (Baker 2019: 34–49). As Clark points out, another worry that could be raised about my conception of moral revolutions is that it seems to lead to moral relativism, the idea that all moralities are, in some sense, equally valid (e.g. Clark 2021). What leads to this concern is that, just as Kuhn rejects scientific realism, that is, the belief ‘that there is some one full, objective account of nature and the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal’ (2012: 170), I reject the view that there is some one full, objective, true account of morality and the correlative view that any conception of morality that falls short of this account is in some way inferior or false. Nonetheless, I also accept Feigl’s position that, just as we have sound reasons for treating heliocentrism as superior to geocentrism, we also have sound

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reasons to believe in a conception of patients as autonomous agents whose dignity and rights ought to be respected in a therapeutic partnership rather than dismissed, as they were in the now-supplanted paternalistic ‘doctorknows-best’ paradigm. In moralities, as in the sciences, there are sound reasons for accepting some paradigms, and some interpretations of them, as better than others. But to do this we need not treat morality as objectively true, set in stone and valid for all time. As I once wrote, to ‘Fetter a society to a single set of paradigms, concepts, norms, and laws would undermine the natural processes of moral reform and moral revolution that enable societies to adapt … to morally disruptive challenges’ (Baker 2019: 213). I believe that Jeremy Bentham got it right when he wrote ‘that a system that is never to be censured, will never be improved: that if nothing is ever to be found fault with, nothing will ever be mended: and that a resolution to justify everything at any rate, and to disapprove of nothing, is a resolution which, pursued in future, must stand as an effectual bar to all the additional happiness we can ever hope for; pursued hitherto [it] would have robbed us of that share of happiness which we enjoy already … whatever now is established, once was innovation’ (1776: xiv). If I have discovered any truth about moralities, it is that they need to be frequently questioned, sometimes reformed and occasionally revolted against to better serve our communities as we recognize inequities and face emerging morally disruptive challenges. Robert Baker is William D. Williams Professor of Philosophy at Union College (Emeritus) and Professor of Bioethics and Founding Director (Emeritus) of the Clarkson University-Icahn-Mount Sinai Bioethics programme. His publications include The American Medical Ethics Revolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), Before Bioethics: A History of American Medical Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2013) and The Structure of Moral Revolutions; Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution (The MIT Press, 2019).

Notes   1. Several other philosophically trained bioethicists with a philosophy of science background, most notably Arthur Caplan and Baruch Brody, have suggested that the establishment of bioethics was a moral revolution; see also Klugman 2015.   2. All references to Structure in this chapter are to the fourth edition, published in 2012.   3. For an excellent discussion of the physical nature of the celestial spheres, see Cohen 1985: 107–15.   4. Biblical quotations from the 1611 King James translation of the Holy Bible.   5. For example, the famous Moynihan report of 1965, ‘The Negro Family: The Case for National Action’, deplored the drift to one-parent families, urging the government to support two-parent African American families and their children, rather than just increasing welfare for one-parent mothers.

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References Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2010. Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. New York: W.W. Norton. Baker, Robert. 2002. ‘From Metaethicist to Bioethicist’, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 11(4): 369–79. . 2013. Before Bioethics: A History of American Medical Ethics from the Colonial Period to the Bioethics Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press. . 2019. The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolutions. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Baker, Robert, and Laurence McCullough (eds). 2009a. The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press. . 2009b. ‘The Travails and Triumphs of Publishing the First Global History of Medical Ethics’, Health Progress (March–April): 65–70. Bentham, Jeremy. 1776. A Fragment on Government: Being an Examination of What Is Delivered, On the Subject of Government in General, In the Introduction to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries: With a Preface in Which is Given a Critique on the Work at Large. London: T. Payne. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. 1973. Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York: Simon & Schuster. Brook, Andrew. 2008. ‘Kant’s View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self ’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008 Edition). Retrieved 3 December 2020 from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/ entries/kant-mind/. Clark, Claire. 2021. ‘Robert Baker: The Structure of Moral Revolutions’ [podcast], New Books Network, January. Retrieved 8 January 2021 from https:// newbooksnetwork.com/the-structure-of-moral-revolutions. Cohen, I. Bernard. 1985. Revolution in Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Copernicus, Nicolaus. 2008 (1543). The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, ‘Preface to His Holiness Pope Paul III’, trans. Edward Rosen. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved 1 January 2020 from http://www.geo.utexas. edu/courses/302d/Fall_2011/Full%20text%20-%20Nicholas%20Copernicus,%20_ De%20Revolutionibus%20(On%20the%20Revolutions),_%201.pdf. Creath, Richard. 2020. ‘Logical Empiricism’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition). Retrieved 19 December 2020 from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/logical-empiricism/. Danaher, John. 2020. ‘Moral Revolution, Moral Reform, Moral Drift’ [blog post], Philosophical Disquisitions, 10 January. Retrieved 2 January 2021 from https:// philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2020/01/. Eriksen, Cecilie. 2019. ‘The Dynamics of Moral Revolutions – Prelude to Future Investigations and Interventions’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22(3): 779–92. Feigl, Herbert. 1981. Inquiries and Provocations: Selected Writings, 1927–1974, ed. Robert S. Cohen. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Galilei, Galileo. 1989 (1610). Siderius Nuncius or The Sidereal Messenger, trans. Alexander van Helden. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gracia, Diego. 2009. ‘The Discourses of Practitioners in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury Spain’, in Robert Baker and Laurence McCullough (eds), Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 399–402. In re Quinlan 70 N.J. 10, 355 A.2d 647 (NJ 1976).

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Jonsen, Albert R. 1998. The Birth of Bioethics. New York: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1781. The Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, A52; 1787, B76, as cited in Andrew Brook, ‘Kant’s View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self ’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008 Edition). Retrieved 23 December 2020 from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/ entries/kant-mind/. Klenk, Michael. 2020. Q&A Zoom session with the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies Research Reading Group, 14 December. Klugman, Craig. 2015. ‘Bioethics: The Revolution is Over’, bioethics.net, 10 November. Retrieved 1 January 2021 from http://www.bioethics.net/2015/11/bioethics-therevolution-is-over/. Kuhn, Thomas. 1957. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. . 2012 (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mill, John S. 1833. ‘A Few Observations on the French Revolution: Review of Alison’s History of Europe’, Monthly Repository, August. Retrieved 1 January 2021 from http://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/jsmill/diss-disc/french-rev.html. Neuber, Matthias. 2018. ‘Herbert Feigl’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition). Retrieved 22 November 2020 from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/feigl/. Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor. 1965. ‘The Negro Family: The Case for National Action’. Washington, DC: United States Department of Labor. Retrieved 1 February 2021 from https://www.dol.gov/ general/aboutdol/history/webid-moynihan. Parsons, Kathryn Pyne. 1974. ‘Nietzsche and Moral Change’, Feminist Studies 2(1): 57–76. Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. London: Collier Macmillan; Glencoe: Free Press of Glencoe. Taussig, Frederick. 1936. Abortion, Spontaneous and Induced: Medical and Social Aspects. St Louis: C.V. Mosby. Veatch, Robert M. 2005. Disrupted Dialogue: Medical Ethics and the Collapse of Physician-Humanist Communication (1770–1980). New York: Oxford University Press. Whewell, William. 1847. Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded on Their History. London: John W. Parker. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Charles K. Ogden. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Retrieved 5 December 2020 from https:// en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus/5.

8 Moral Borderlands Moral Change and Ethical Normativity in Liminal Spaces Cecilie Eriksen

When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug … ‘What’s happened to me?’ he thought. It was no dream. —Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Can Liminal Spaces Be Ethical Voids? When life changes in major ways, unknown moral territories open up. This can happen during periods of war, if we become severely mentally ill or when our loved ones enter the terminal phase of life. In such liminal situations, humans often experience ethical disorientation and a lack of clarity in figuring out how to go on, as their ordinary moral compass and practical judgement seem to be of little use. If ordinary ethics does not suffice, how shall we then understand the ethics of liminal spaces? Are liminal spaces ethical vacuums, where there are no moral obligations or ethical guidance as to how to go on? Or do we find forms of ethical normativity even in the most radically liminal situations imaginable? These are the questions this chapter addresses. In the following, I philosophically investigate the nature of ethical normativity in liminal spaces by introducing Jarrett Zigon’s concept of ‘a moral breakdown’, Jonathan Lear’s work on ‘irony’ and Anne O’Byrne’s idea of ‘the end of ethics’. Using these concepts, I consider examples of care in three cases of life in the borderlands of human communities, namely, the life of homeless people, the life of the Muselmänner in the concentration camps of the Second World War and the post-transformation life of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s short story ‘The Metamorphosis’. Against this background, I conclude that no matter

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how radical the liminal spaces of human lives are, they are never ethical vacuums. There will thus always be ethical guidance to find during and after any moral change.1

Moral Breakdowns, Irony and the End of Ethics And for a little while he lay there calmly, breathing very gently, as if perhaps expecting the total silence to restore him to his real, understandable condition. … it occurred to him how simple everything would be if someone came to help him. … Now, completely apart from the fact that the doors were locked [from the inside and he no longer had hands able to unlock them], should he really have called for help? Despite all his tribulations, he was unable to suppress a smile at that thought. —Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

The concept of ‘liminality’ originated in anthropology around 1900 in Arnold van Gennep’s work on ritual theory and was further developed by Victor Turner in the 1960s. Liminality here designates the middle period in a ritual of passage, where the participant has left their old status but has not yet completed the ritual and therefore not entered a new role in society, for example, as ‘adult’ or ‘married’ (Van Gennep 2004: 21; Turner 1967: 93–111). The person’s status in this ‘in-between space’ is thus undetermined and ambiguous, even though the ritual itself entails a strict adherence to rules and a clear hierarchical distinction between, for example, the priest and the participant. Since Van Gennep coined the term, it has travelled beyond anthropology and into other academic fields, such as sociology, philosophy, and psychology (Thomassen 2014: 1–109; Rothem and Fischer 2018). On its journey, the meaning of the term has broadened; it can now designate the dissolution of order in many kinds of change and ‘in-between spaces’, as well as the resulting normative uncertainty and ambiguity (O’Reilly 2018; Thomassen 2014: 113–229). In this chapter, the term has the broad modern sense and is used to designate traits of the lives of people living on the border of or outside the ‘normal life’ of the society they live in, in ways that, to a greater degree than ordinarily, make it an open question what is ethically at stake in their lives. In the following sections, I give an account of three concepts that can serve as analytical prisms to highlight nuances in our thinking on the ethical normativity of liminal spaces, namely, Zigon’s notion of ‘a moral breakdown’, Lear’s concept of ‘irony’ and O’Byrne’s idea of ‘the end of ethics’.

Moral Breakdowns: When Ordinary Morality Comes into View ‘God forbid,’ called his mother, who was weeping by this time, ‘he may be seriously ill, and we’re torturing him. Grete! … fetch the doctor fast! Did you hear Gregor speaking just now?’ ‘That was an animal’s voice,’ said the chief clerk. —Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories



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In many situations in ordinary life in stable cultural contexts, adults unreflectively act in ways that are considered morally acceptable. In current Danish society, this could amount to taking care of our children, helping our neighbours if needed, not misleading a stranger who asks for directions, keeping our word, etc. But occasionally, even in highly stable cultural contexts, people experience a ‘moral breakdown’, that is, ‘a moment that shakes one out of the unreflective everydayness of being moral’ (Zigon 2007: 133). A moral breakdown occurs, and Zigon is here using Heidegger’s terms, ‘when something that is usually ready-to-hand becomes present-to-hand’ – such as when the hammer we are using suddenly breaks and we are forced to reflect on how to proceed (Zigon 2007: 136). A moral breakdown can be viewed as opening a mild form of liminal space, as we are uncertain of how to proceed. Reflection can lead us to find a way forward that is well within the ordinary ethics of our society, but sometimes it reveals a need to transform our own or our culture’s moral ideas, values or practices. The examples of moral breakdowns that Zigon offers are ethical dilemmas, such as being asked a troubling question that one does not want to answer, having an opportunity to steal or responding when a disagreement arises (Zigon 2007: 137). All are situations that most of us encounter at some point in our lives. Moral breakdowns, and the mild form of liminality they entail, are more prone to occur in connection with changes in life. For instance, when our offspring transition from childhood into young adulthood, parents must bring an end to what has, for some years, been their ordinary treatment of their child and reflect on how to balance, for example, ‘taking care’ and ‘making room for independence’ in moving forward. Becoming an apprentice, taking up a new job, moving to another area and death all constitute typical changes in a normal lifetime that can initiate halts in our ordinary moral ways of going about. A moral breakdown is thus not – as the term could suggest to those of us who are a wee bit dramatically inclined – a radical break with ordinary everyday life. Zigon’s concept of a moral breakdown is, rather, ‘a phenomenological description of the experience of coming to a moral halt and having to reflect before being able to go on’ (Zigon 2007: 144; see also 2018a: 122, 2018b: 146– 49). It is a normal part of our practices and everyday lives with each other, not a rupture (Robbins 2015: 770–71).2

Irony: What Has Any of This, Past and Present, to Do with Teaching? But Gregor had become much calmer. To be sure, he now realized that his speech was no longer intelligible … But anyway they were now believing that there was something wrong with him and they were ready to help him … He felt that he was once more drawn into the circle of humanity. —Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

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Sometimes, it goes without saying what we morally ought to do and we do it without giving it any thought. At other times, we come to a halt and have to reflect on what is morally required, or the right thing to do in this particular situation, before we can go on. Through the concept of ‘irony’, Lear seeks to capture experiences that are different from the kinds of moral reflection that are part of the normal everyday practices and life of a particular community (Lear 2011: 5, 119).3 For instance, as a Christian believer or as a primary-school teacher, we can – and are also encouraged to – step back from our ordinary life and practice and ask, ‘What does a proper Christian life consist in?’ or ‘What does good teaching consist in?’ These are not cases of ironic reflection and experience because such forms of stepping back and reflecting are part of what being a good Christian and a good teacher involves. Both are part of living up to the ideal of being a teacher or a Christian. We are thus still inside, not outside, Christendom or the practice of teaching (Lear 2011: 7–8), because we are still perfectly sure that there is such a thing as ‘being a proper Christian’ or ‘being a good teacher’. Irony, on the other hand, is the experience of ‘a breakdown in the perspective one has hereto taken oneself to have’ and to find oneself asking: among all the teachers, has there ever been a teacher (Lear 2011: 5, 22–23, 183)? ‘With irony’, Lear explains, ‘my experience is not that all my acts fall miserably short of my principle, rather, my experience is of my principle falling weirdly short of itself ’ (2011: 101). The ironic experience is not an experience of distance, disengagement or nihilistic meaninglessness. It is an experience of commitment to one’s practices. One has come to a disorienting halt, because one cares – cares about being a Christian or about teaching, etc. But, according to Lear, the experience of irony does not in itself lead us in any particular direction. It is an ‘immanent form of longing for transcendence’ (Lear 2011: 117): I may have only the barest inkling of the transformations I would have to undergo to be someone capable of such [Christian] love; but at the same time, I vividly recognize that the range of possibilities that Christendom has put forward as the field of loving one’s neighbor is wildly inadequate to the task. (Lear 2011: 14–15)

Irony does express a longing to go in a certain direction, but one does not yet know what that direction could be and one’s understanding of the past does not provide any basis for what to do next (Lear 2011: 18, 19). The ironic experience is thus, as I interpret Lear, the experience of a radical liminal space opening up; one is now in between everything one formerly took to be, for example, Christianity or teaching and an unknown future form of Christendom or teaching.4 Thus, either what Lear describes is a more radical form of liminality than what we see in Zigon’s moral breakdowns, or ironic experiences are a radical form of moral breakdowns. Even more radical still, however, is O’Byrne’s idea of ‘the end of ethics’.



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The End of Ethics: ‘It Was Impossible to Do Right by Them’ The sharp sound of the [door] lock, as it finally snapped back, woke Gregor up completely. … he heard the chief clerk utter a loud ‘Oh!’ – it sounded like the wind howling – … [the clerk] stepped slowly backward as if driven away by some invisible force … Gregor’s mother … took two steps toward Gregor and collapsed in the midst of her petticoats … His father clenched his fist with a hostile expression …; then he looked around the parlor in uncertainty, shaded his eyes with his hands and wept so hard that it shook his powerful chest. … Next, the door was slammed shut with the stick … —Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Human life can involve situations in which we not only come to particular forms of moral halts but also lose our moral bearings in life. Such encompassing losses of moral orientation happen, for instance, during prolonged periods of starvation, rapid colonization and civil war (Turnbull 1976; Lear 2008; Meinert forthcoming). In these situations, we, according to O’Byrne, come to ‘the end of ethics’. The end of ethics is contexts in which ‘ethics no longer applies’ and ‘familiar ethical categories are quickly exhausted’ (O’Byrne 2018: 5, 2). At the end of ethics, not only do humans experience a total loss of moral orientation, but the context is also such that ethical concepts have no meaningful application. O’Byrne points to genocides as settings in which everything becomes possible and therefore places where ‘neither political nor historical nor simply moral standards’ (2018: 7) can be meaningfully used: ‘Survivors of genocide sometimes describe the moment when they realize that ethics no longer applies. … For all concerned [both Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994], in their different ways, ethics is finished’ (2018: 5). Such was also the situation for the Second World War concentration camp prisoners on the verge of death from hunger and overwork, the so-called Muselmänner:5 ‘It was impossible to do right by the Muselmann’ (O’Byrne 2018: 6). The Muselmann was considered someone who could not be ‘done right by’ or helped because the Muselmann had been transformed into ‘a non-human’ (Agamben 1999: 47, 52) and because the Muselmänner were believed to be doomed to die (Ryn and Klodzinaki 1987: 150).6 With these examples, O’Byrne argues that human life can contain situations in which it is not possible to come up with an ethical response and our ethical concepts cannot get a hold. Here, we are at the end of ethics. I understand the concept of ‘the end of ethics’ in a radical manner. That is, I interpret it as designating an ethical vacuum – a context in which there is no ethical normativity. It is thus not only a ‘name signaling that ethics as we know it has been foreclosed’ (O’Byrne 2018: 8, my emphasis), which is also what happens in an ironic experience. But, as the ironic experience opens for a rebirth of an ethics that is able to deal with the issue that brought ‘ethics as we know it’ to a halt, this does not seem to capture O’Byrne’s idea. At ‘the end of ethics’, we are beyond any possible ethics.7

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Life in the Borderlands of Human Community It was only when he had reached the door that he noticed what had really lured him there; … a basin stood there, filled with milk in which little slices of white bread were floating. He could almost have laughed for joy, because he was even hungrier than in the morning, and immediately he plunged his head into the milk. —Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Before I bring the concepts of moral breakdown, irony and the end of ethics to bear on a discussion of normativity, I will supplement the ongoing story of Gregor Samsa’s post-transformation life with real-life cases of existence at the edges of the normal human community, namely, the life of the homeless in the United States, London and Paris today and the life of prisoners in the concentration camps during the Second World War.8 These cases have been chosen because they all involve life transformations that give rise to liminality with ethical implications. They can therefore function as moral laboratories, allowing us to witness, investigate or be reminded of the ethical normativity of such spaces (Mattingly 2014). I have chosen mainly to focus on examples of care in the stories. This is not because I consider care to be ethically the most salient trait of these cases or the essential core of ethics.9 Rather, I have done so because care in various forms showed up in all three cases and because ‘care’ is a term that has a normative use and it is often, though not exclusively, used to refer to something we consider important and morally positive (Frankfurt 1995: 80–94; Lenhard 2017).10

Homeless Life But soon he pulled it out again in disappointment … he didn’t at all like the milk, which was formerly his favorite beverage and which had therefore surely been placed there by his sister for that very reason. —Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Homeless people in Western societies today are often seen by others and by themselves as ‘estranged from society’ (Desjarlais 1994: 886) and homeless life can, in some respects, be said to unfold in a liminal space at the fringes of, or outside, the ordinary life of these societies. Homeless people have often lost contact with their families and former circle of friends; they have lost their jobs, most of their possessions and a permanent place to claim as home. Dave explains his situation as follows: I am twenty-eight years young now. I have had it all – job, home, so-called normal life, and time after time … well, not so hard to guess. I have lost it all, job, home, family, friends, anyone I cared for or cared for me. … My family is from up in North London and I haven’t seen them for ages now. That’s where I grew up, where my childhood was and stuff. And my friends. I would really love to see them. … But, yeah, they live in a different world. (Lenhard 2017: 316)



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Like all people, the homeless spend a good portion of their days taking care of basic needs, such as the need for food, drink, sleep, shelter and a toilet, but the conditions under which they do so are very different to those of the majority of people in their society. They often include being at odds with ordinary morality through breaking the law by begging, stealing, trespassing, littering, sleeping rough and being involved in ‘disturbances of the peace’. For many, they also involve taking care of a drug habit (Lenhard 2017). When Robert Desjarlais’s homeless informants from Boston describe the character of their lives, they use terms like ‘struggling along’, enduring ‘a singular forced sensorium of cold weather, fear, anonymity, transience’, and getting ‘beat up, cheated, robbed, disrespected’, so one has to be alert at all times. As a result, the homeless end up being hypersensitive, unable to deal with distractions, unable to gather their thoughts and unable to remember when things happened, what happened and who they were with (Desjarlais 1994: 886, 891–97). The liminality of homeless life is thus not only characteristic of the social, material and legal conditions, but also of one’s inner life, in the form of, for example, scattered memories, thoughts and feelings. As Julie explains: ‘You lose everything but a sense of survival’ (Desjarlais 1994: 890). Yet, despite being a life of struggling along, in which it is hard to hold on to anything other than a sense of survival, there are still forms of care. Desjarlais describes several instances of ‘self-care’, in which the homeless have found ways to calm and comfort themselves in the midst of a life that is anything but calm and comfortable: Jimmy says he used to pick up a newspaper and hold onto a word and that would calm him down. Chuck works on puzzles for the same reason. … Some try to stay calm by holding onto a thought, a word, a gesture, or a cigarette … People pace, play dead or hold onto … the Bible to get though the day. … ‘If I can just read the Bible for 15, 16 hours a day’, Alice says ‘and just block out all the rest, then I’m okay’. (Desjarlais 1994: 891, 892, 886)

Homeless life is described as an isolated and lonely existence, but Desjarlais also recounts examples of relational care given and received among the homeless (see also Lenhard 2017). One example is what seems to be Matthew’s first surprised and then respectful response to Barbara’s need for solitude: One day Matthew, a middle-aged man from Mississippi, sat down at a table where Barbara was seated. ‘I want to be alone,’ she said. ‘Alone?’ he asked. ‘How can you be alone here [in the shelter]? Everybody’s together. You could be off somewhere by yourself.’ A minute later, Matthew walked off. (Desjarlais 1994: 891)

Another example is Bruce’s advice-giving: ‘Bruce tells Larry not to be too stern in lending out money. You have to “work in international waters”, give “some room in between”, and tend to “the give and take”’ (Desjarlais 1994: 893). As Desjarlais notes, ‘The advice captures well the ethics of a place where money can be tight and debts are not soon forgotten’ (1994: 893). Even though adults

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can experience the unasked-for advice given by other adults not as caring, but as annoying paternalism, in this case, passing on what practical judgement amounts to with respect to a certain aspect of homeless life can be a form of care-taking, as homelessness is not a form of life most Americans are raised to navigate. And then there is the care provided by passers-by in the form of money and positive attention when the homeless are begging: ‘Many people think, that if they give, that keeps me on the street – but it really makes life bearable. It’s not all about money … What I appreciate is respect. Respect and understanding make me feel like a human being’ (Lenhard 2019a: 1). What I would like to conclude at this point is that ethically positive forms of care can unfold in life at the margin of ordinary life, even though what counts as care here can take not just familiar but also somewhat unfamiliar forms. The next case is what many, such as Giorgio Agamben (2002: 41–86), consider one of the most extreme forms of liminal life that history has witnessed, namely, the life of the Muselmänner in the concentration camps during the Second World War.

Muselmänner: ‘The Men in Decay’ But his sister immediately noticed with surprise that the basin was still full. … In order to test his likings, she brought him a big selection all spread out on an old newspaper. There were old, half-rotten vegetables; bones from their supper, coated with a white gravy that had solidified; a few raisins and almonds; a cheese that two days earlier Gregor would have considered inedible; a dry slice of bread … And from a feeling of delicacy, since she knew Gregor wouldn’t eat in her presence, she withdrew hastily. —Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Life in the concentration camps of the Nazi regime during the Second World War can be seen as a liminal form of life because of the exceptionally cruel and degrading ways in which the prisoners were treated and the extreme conditions in which they were forced to live (Levi 2008: 21–22, 100–1; Nyiszli 2012: 51, 61). This way of life was not only on the border of or outside the life of the normal society in which the camps were placed (as ‘homelessness’ is). It was, furthermore, a life at the border of any possible human life. It was a form of life leading to the corruption and annihilation of human life, and it was designed thus (Ryn and Klodzinaki 1987: 150; Nyiszli 2012). In the camps, the millions of prisoners were either murdered immediately upon arrival (by being gassed, shot or burned alive) or – if considered suitable for slave work or medical experiments – separated from their families, stripped of their possessions, clothes, hair and names, and sent into the concentration camps. Camp life meant that they had to, among other things, live in bug- and disease-ridden, overcrowded wooden barracks with poor sanitation; sleep in tiny bunks with several other people; freeze during winter in



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extremely insufficient clothing; endure standing for hour-long prisoner counts every morning and evening; do many hours of hard physical work every day; suffer all kinds of physical and mental abuse by the guards; and live on a diet consisting of a slice of bread, a bit of jam and thin cabbage and potato soup each day. There were regular ‘selections’ during which prisoners were picked out to be killed in the gas chambers. The average life span in the camp was only a few months (Iversen, Kjerkegaard and Nielsen 2008; Frankl 2004). The end stage of camp life was, as mentioned earlier, ‘Muselmann-hood’. The Muselmann was the prisoner who, due to abuse, starvation and exhaustion, was a walking skeleton, ‘neither dead nor quite alive’ (Ryn and Klodzinaki 1987: 89; Levi 2008: 103): A real Muselmann didn’t care for his own personal cleanliness nor his food’s. With hands covered in faeces he could eat garbage from the bin, he could drink coffee from a pot others had peed into; under no circumstances did he want to take off the rags and blankets he had wrapped himself into to wash himself or cleanse himself from insects, as if he did not at all feel that the lice was biting him. He did not respond normally, e.g., to frost; he could freeze completely, until his toes, hands, or ears fell off, as long as he did not have to endure any additional effort, such as to stand up from the place where he lay, to stamp his feet, to rub his ears, to ‘beat himself warm’ with his arms etc. … The Muselmann ate whatever he could lay his hands on, even cold turnip soup, leftovers from raw turnip, cabbage, peels, rotting vegetable waste, moldy bread – he even ate while relieving himself at the same time. (Maria Elzbieta Jezierska, in Ryn and Klodzinaki 1987: 113–14; author’s translation)

The Muselmänner died every day and everywhere in the camp. Their bodies gave up during meals, at the latrine, in bed, during work, as they rested in the sun against a wall, during the prisoner counts, in the gas chambers and during beatings by the guards. However, some prisoners returned from ‘Muselmannhood’ and survived the camps (Ryn and Klodzinaki 1987: 121–24). Here are some of their stories: I got a pain in the right lung, in the right side, and a high fever. I came back to the sick bay and was placed next to a young man from Copenhagen, Børge. … He could see that this could be the end. I was becoming what the Germans called a Muselmann. … Then Børge decided that I was going home. He started to scold me and said, now you have to go and wash yourself, now you have to go to the toilet, now you have to eat. And he picked me up, so that I overcame the crisis. (Nielsen 2012: 131; author’s translation) That I was able to escape from this state is something I owe to my companions who summoned all means to get me out of this paralysis and stupor … They organised some water from the camp kitchen, undressed me, and rubbed me off. At that point, something happened inside me, it was like an electric current that made me turn into a normal inmate who wanted to survive no matter the cost. (Feliksa Piekarska in Ryn and Klodzinaki 1987: 122–23; author’s translation)

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I understood this state better when I gradually became a Muselmann myself. Hunger, cold, excessive labour, fear of death, pain, and this terrible filth that to this day accompanies me and the sight of which I still cannot bear. Also the fever – from incipient epidemic typhus – all that had as a consequence that I lost my spirit and no longer believed in any point of continued survival … After I had survived the typhus, I weighed 39 kg, but during my convalescence, my companions did everything so that I regained my strength. … The change of work and the packages that I would later receive from home, gave me strength again. (Zygmunt Podhalanski in Ryn and Klodzinaki 1987: 108; author’s translation) I happened to meet Lorenzo. … an Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy and brought me a reply. For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward. … I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving. (Levi 2008: 139, 142)11

All these stories exhibit examples of care: the care of sharing limited food and clothing, of washing a sick and soiled fellow prisoner, of pulling strings to get a weak prisoner less arduous work, of putting an effort into returning hope to one who had lost all hope, of sending a letter and food to family members in need. All these stories make it clear that it was this kind of care – as well as lucky coincidences – that saved the lives of those who had entered ‘Muselmannhood’. And just as life as a homeless person gives rise to forms of care that would not necessarily be care outside that context, so also in the context of camp life the character of care mutates: Once one of the inmates from the same hall in block 3a received a package with a whole kilogram of smoked bacon. When the news got around, we all cast envious glances at the lucky devil. At night I woke up. An inmate moaned quietly at the other end of the hall, but soon stopped making a sound. The next morning, we found out that the inmate was dead. It was the one who had received the bacon package. Not a bit of bacon was found next to him. Overnight … he had eaten the whole kilo of bacon. This ‘feeding orgy’ had been too much for his starved organism. (Adam Jurkiewicz in Ryn and Klodzinaki 1987: 120; author’s translation)

The above is one of several tragic examples of how what amounts to caretaking under normal circumstances – providing plenty of fatty food for a hungry and undernourished person – is not care-taking in the context of the extreme starvation conditions experienced by the camp inmates (see also Ryn and Klodzinaki 1987: 123). Even though the packages of food sent from home often saved the lives of prisoners, they were also occasionally what triggered their death.



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In the concluding section, I will discuss the issue of ethical normativity in liminal spaces by bringing the concepts of ‘moral breakdowns’, ‘irony’ and ‘the end of ethics’ into dialogue with the cases of homelessness, camp life and Gregor Samsa’s post-transformation life.

The End, the Beginning, the Fleeting In-Between Quickly, one after the other, tears of contentment coming to his eyes, he devoured the cheese, the vegetables and the gravy. —Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Moral change can entail liminality, and the concepts of ‘a moral breakdown’, ‘ironic experience’ and ‘an end of ethics’ are all helpful in shedding light on the ethical normativity of liminal spaces, as the concepts capture increasing degrees of liminality, both in the sense of increasing personal or collective experiences of moral disorientation and in the sense of increasing changes in the context in which a person’s or a community’s ‘ordinary ethics’ can make sense. If a moral breakdown halts one’s going about and moral reflection is necessary before one can go on, then we can recognize this form of ethical liminality, for example, in Matthew’s response to Barbara’s request to be left alone. At first, the request seems to make no sense to him, because the homeless shelter is a crowed place where no one can be physically alone, so why is she here if this is what she wants? He is surprised and this brings him to a reflective halt. On reflection, he decides to go on by respecting her wish and leaving the table (many know the feeling of being alone in a crowd and perhaps this is not always bad). Similarly, Gregor Samsa’s sister is surprised and brought to a halt by the fact that Gregor has not drunk his favourite beverage. She faces yet another moral aspect of the liminal space created by a family member’s transformation into a giant bug: if she wants to care for her brother by attending to his need for food, she must reflect and revise the ordinary ways of doing so. For the homeless, the prisoners arriving at the camp and the beetle-human Gregor, the feeling arises that ‘none of this’ (e.g. the values, principles, ideals, practices and future hopes of their former lives) is of any help in figuring out how to live a life worth living in these radically changed circumstances. Primo Levi thus challenges us to contemplate ‘the possible meaning in the Lager of the words “good” and “evil”, “just” and “unjust”; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture we have outlined and of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire’ (2008: 98). The feeling and reality of being despairingly lost, not only with regard to a particular practice in one’s life, such as ‘teaching’ or ‘homemaking’, but with regard to one’s whole existence, captures a fundamental struggle in all of these lives, which can be characterized as a pervasive form of ironic experience brought about by changed life circumstances.

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Coming to ‘the end of ethics’ in the above sense is thus something humans do. We despair. We feel that ethics as we know it no longer applies, we can be right about that and we can have no idea of how new values, concepts and a sense of life purpose could be developed. Humans can also be in states in which they do not have any ‘moral agency’, such as when newly born, in a coma or in severe states of starvation, dementia or insanity. Here, the conditions are lacking for these individuals to be, for instance, morally creative, obligated, responsible or blameworthy. Philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Agamben and O’Byrne understand the concentration camps as institutions that are highly successful at eliminating the moral personhood of their prisoners, in part because they make it impossible for prisoners to act in morally good ways most of the time. This points to the structural and relational conditions for morality and for a life worth living to be able to unfold, as well as to the need for politics. However, even though we can say that we come to ‘an end of ethics’ in ways such as those described above, none of these situations, I would argue, amount to ethical vacuums. All three narratives show that there is something, which amounts to care for the homeless, care for the Muselmann and even care for the beetle-human Gregor Samsa. In homeless life, care could be having one’s personal space respected, having something to hold on to, being given good advice or the recognition that one is a fellow human being. Considering the extraordinary circumstances of life in the concentration camp, many of the examples of care found there are strikingly ordinary. Every day, all over the world, care workers and family members also wash sick adults; over the course of a lifetime, many people give or receive encouragement when life gives rise to despair; and when a co-worker falls ill, colleagues often try to share the workload. It seems, to address Levi’s question, that the ordinary moral world, to a large extent, did survive on the other side of the barbed wire, even though ‘Thou shall not steal’ was replaced by ‘Thou shall generally, though not in any case, steal’ as a moral commandment (see, e.g., Levi 2008: 101, 190), and even though almost everyone who entered the camp lost their moral bearings for a while or permanently. It was thus not impossible to do right by the Muselmann, and he was not beyond help: he could be shown respect and helped, and he could be mistreated and let down. Finally, the care that Gregor’s sister shows for her brother, manifested in how she manages to provide him with nourishment, is an exemplary display of clear-eyed acceptance of a radically changed reality, combined with a creative, experimental empathy. What these narratives highlight is, I believe, that in any type of liminal space in human life, there are forms of ethical normativity at stake. We are, in this sense, never at the end of ethics. If life contains no ethical voids, a consequence of this is that no matter how radical the change in our life, society or environment is, there is the possibility of finding ethical guidance in how to navigate the change well. Gregor’s sister illustrates one way of doing so, namely, through empathetic experimentation. She enters a moral lab, tests Gregor’s likes and learns that nourishing food for him is now very different to what it was before. But the stories also show that

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different things are ethically required of us during change. Gregor’s change calls for the investigation and development of a new way of living and a new way of being a family (a calling his family neglects, with the result that the story ends badly). But the development of a new way of life and new moral values did not seem to be the ethical calling in camp life. Rather, that seemed to be a calling for a holding on to and a return to ordinary care, decency and respect – as well as a calling for new political and legal institutions. In our attempts to deal with moral change, whether it is the struggle to reassemble a life out of the scraps left by a war or a new generation’s rebellious experimentation with sexuality and gender concepts, we find ourselves in a field where we are neither the masters nor the slaves of moral creation. The success of our endeavours is determined by a mutually interdependent interplay between us and the world, and in this work, we are always and never at the end of ethics.12 Cecilie Eriksen is a moral philosopher who works for the Danish National Center of Ethics. She is the author of Moral Change – Dynamics, Structure and Normativity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She has also published on basic trust, moral progress and Ludwig Wittgenstein and co-edited and contributed to volumes on topics such as law and legitimacy, modern work life and contextual ethics. The latest of these is Philosophical Perspectives on Moral Certainty (Routledge, forthcoming).

Notes   1. In this chapter, the terms ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’ are used interchangeably. The term ‘we’ generally refers to something along the lines of either ‘me, the writer, and you, the reader’ or ‘people in current Western societies with a background similar to this author and perhaps the reader’, and occasionally it means ‘human beings in general’. Hopefully, the context of use in each case makes it fairly clear what is meant. I am perfectly happy to accept all instances of ‘we’ as ‘grammatical fictions’ (Sandis 2020).   2. Zigon has, however, criticized the so-called ‘ordinary ethics’ approach in moral anthropology (see Lambek 2010; 2015; Das 2007, 2015, 2020; Mattingly 2014, 2018). His critiques are, for example, that the approach puts too much stress on what is ordinary, so that the approach turns into endorsing moralism and conservatism, and thus overlooks the unordinary folded into the ordinary, as well as the needs for radical ethical critique and a change of ordinary ethics (Zigon 2014, 2018a: 18–19, 2018b: 15–16).   3. Lear works with three degrees of irony: ‘the experience of irony’, ‘the capacity for irony’ and ‘ironic existence’ (Lear 2011: 4, 119). I only focus on ironic experience and reflection.   4. Lear underlines that we can have this longing without anything coming of it, that is, it does not necessarily lead to any moral changes in our practices or life, but ironic experiences can be the initiating spark of such changes.  5. ‘Muselmann’ was a term used in several concentration camps and a phenomenon observed in all camps. Its literal meaning is Muslim and it has been suggested that it was used because the Muselmänner were often curled up on the ground in exhaustion, resembling a Muslim in prayer (Ryn and Klodzinaki 1987; Agamben 1999: 41).

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  6. See also Shoah Resource Center and Levi (2008: 101–3). Oster (2014) has an illuminating discussion of why these are both false and morally highly problematic conceptions.   7. I would like to leave open the question of whether O’Byrne’s idea of ‘an end of ethics’ does imply what I term an ethical vacuum, even though several of her formulations suggest this and even though she did not protest at this interpretation upon reading it. I still suspect, however, that due to different ways of conceptualizing ‘the ethical’ (see Eriksen 2020a: 145–61, 2020b; O’Byrne 2019: 2–3), there might be more overlap in what we aim to say than what is displayed here.  8. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis was first published in 1915. It has been interpreted as a critical commentary on how some types of ‘modern’ work life lead to a dehumanizing of the worker, as well as an unflattering portrait of a certain culture’s inability to deal well with encountering what is non-ordinary and alien. Other descriptions of life in liminal spaces can be found in, for example, Turnbull (1976), O’Reilly (2018) and Zigon (2014, 2018). In all of their fieldwork, familiar and more unfamiliar examples of care, given and received, can be found (see, e.g., O’Reilly 2018: 837–8; Zigon 2018: 84–89, 97–99). The cases used here are thus not unique in this respect.   9. For an illuminating overview of the concept of ‘care’ and ‘care ethics’, see Mattingly and McKearney (forthcoming). My view on the nature of ethics can be found in Eriksen (2020a, 2020b). 10. It is, for example, doubtful that caring for a drug, in the way that Johannes Lenhard documents some of his homeless informants as doing, is a good thing (Lenhard 2017) and we do not mean it as moral praise if we say of someone that she cares more about money than her children. 11. Levi did not (as far as I recall) identify himself as a Muselmann. He did, however, come across as one to others (see, e.g., Levi 2008: 121). Consult Oster (2014) for why we should not consider Muselmänner a distinct group of prisoners. 12. I would like to thank Anne O’Byrne, Robert Orsi, Jarrett Zigon and the members of the research groups EAI and PROGRESS for valuable critique and comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. I would like to thank Hanno Sauer for help with translation of the German quotations. The research was supported by Independent Research Fund Denmark – Humanities (grant no. 7013-00068B) and the European Research Council (grant no. #851043).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books. Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Decent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2015. ‘What Does Ordinary Ethics Look Like?’, in Michael Lambek et al. (eds), Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives. Chicago: HAU Books, pp. 53–126. . 2020. Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein. New York: Fordham University Press. Desjarlais, Robert. 1994. ‘Struggling Along: The Possibilities for Experience Among the Homeless Mentally Ill’, American Anthropologist 96(4): 886–901. Eriksen, Cecilie. 2020a. Moral Change: Dynamics, Structure and Normativity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. . 2020b. ‘Contextual Ethics: Taking the Lead from Wittgenstein and Løgstrup on Ethical Meaning and Normativity’, SATS – Northern European Journal of Philosophy 21(2): 141–58.



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Frankfurt, Harry Gordon. 1995. The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frankl, Viktor Emil. 2004. Man’s Search for Meaning. London: Rider. Gennep, Arnold van. 2004. The Rites of Passage. Oxford: Routledge. Iversen, Stefan, Stefan Kjerkegaard and Henrik Skov Nielsen (eds). 2008. Vidnesbyrd: Danske fortællinger fra Tyske Koncentrationslejre. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Kafka, Franz. 1996. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. New York: Dover Publications. Lambek, Michael (ed.). 2010. Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Pres. . 2015. The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person and Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lear, Jonathan. 2008. Radical Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. . 2011. A Case for Irony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lenhard, Johannes. 2017. ‘You Care More for the Gear than the Geezer? Care Relationships for Homeless Substance Users in London’, City & Society 29(2): 305–28. . 2019a. ‘Homeless People Aren’t Just Sitting Around: They Actively Strive to Improve Their Lives’, The Conversation. Retrieved 21 August 2019 from https:// theconversation.com/homeless-people-arent-just-sitting-around-they-activelystrive-to-improve-their-lives-112715. . 2019b. ‘Better Lives on the Street: Homeless People in Paris Between Longterm Home-Making and Short-Term Survival’, paper, Aarhus University, 28 October 2019. Levi, Primo. 2008. Survival in Auschwitz – If This Is a Man. New York: The Orion Press. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2014. Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Oakland: University of California Press. . 2018. ‘Ordinary Possibility, Transcendent Immanence, and Responsive Ethics: A Philosophical Anthropology of the Small Event’, HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8(1–2): 172–84. Mattingly, Cheryl, and Patrick McKearney. Forthcoming. ‘Care’, in James Laidlaw (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meinert, Lotte. Forthcoming. ‘Arendt in the Lord’s Resistance Army and the ICC’, in Nils Bubandt and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (eds), Philosophy on Fieldwork: Case Studies in Anthropological Analysis. London: Routledge. Nielsen, Mogens Henrik. 2008. ‘Mogens Henrik Nielsen’, in Stefan Iversen, Stefan Kjerkegaard and Henrik Skov Nielsen (eds), Vidnesbyrd: Danske Fortællinger fra Tyske Koncentrationslejre. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, pp. 116–37. Nyiszli, Miklós. 2011. Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. London: Penguin Books. O’Byrne, Anne. 2018. ‘The Genocide Paradox’, paper given as public lecture, Aarhus University, 7 December (forthcoming as ‘Chapter 3. What’s Wrong with Genocide?’, in Anne O’Byrne, The Genocide Paradox: on Democracy and Generational Time. New York: Fordham University Press). O’Reilly, Zoë. 2018. ‘“Living Liminality”: Everyday Experiences of Asylum Seekers in the “Direct Provision” System in Ireland’, Gender, Place & Culture 25(6): 821–42. Oster, Sharon B. 2014. ‘Impossible Holocaust Metaphors: The Muselmann’, Prooftexts 34(3): 302–48.

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Robbins, Joel. 2007. ‘Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change’, Ethnos 72(3): 293–314. . 2016. ‘What Is the Matter With Transcendence? On the Place of Religion in the New Anthropology of Ethics’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22(4): 767–808. Rothem, Nitzan, and Shlomo Fischer. 2018. ‘Reclaiming Arnold van Gennep’s Les rites de passage (1909): The Structure of Openness and the Openness of Structure’, Journal of Classical Sociology 18(4): 255–65. Ryn, Zdzisław, and Stanisław Klodzinski. 1987. ‘An der Grenze zwischen Leben und Tod: Eine Studie über die Erscheinung des “Muselmanns” in Konzentrationslager’, Die Auschwitz-Hefte, Band 1. Weinheim: Beltz Verlag. Sandis, Constantine. 2020. ‘Who Are “We” for Wittgenstein?’, in Hanne Appelqvist (ed.), Wittgenstein and the Limits of Language. New York: Routledge. Shoah Resource Center. No date. ‘Muselmann’. Retrieved 8 October 2020 from https:// www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206474.pdf. Thomassen, Bjørn. 2014. Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between. Farnham: Ashgate. Turnbull, Collin Macmillan. 1978. The Mountain People. New York: Simon & Schuster. Turner, Victor 1967. ‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de passage’, in Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 93–111. Wandall-Holm, Iboja. 2008. ‘Iboja Wandall-Holm’, in Stefan Iversen, Stefan Kjerkegaard and Henrik Skov Nielsen (eds), Vidnesbyrd: Danske Fortællinger fra Tyske Koncentrationslejre. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, pp. 139–56. Zigon, Jarrett. 2007. ‘Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities’, Anthropological Theory 7(2): 131–50. . 2014. ‘An Ethics of Dwelling and a Politics of World-Building: A Critical Response to Ordinary Ethics’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(4): 746–64. . 2018a. A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2018b. Disappointment. New York: Fordham University Press.

9 Moral Change and Moral Truth Nora Hämäläinen

Let us think about the following scene from Doris Lessing’s novel A Proper Marriage (2001: 328): On the veranda of one of their houses was set a circle of grass chairs, a table with cakes and biscuits. The babies crawled around their feet, or played on the lawn outside. The women looked sharply at each other’s dresses and at the food provided, while they discussed economy. Money chimed through their talk like a regulator of a machine. For all the heavy insurances, the mortgages, the hire-purchase, the servants, were made possible because of their ingenuity with money. They could all make attractive and expensive looking clothes for themselves, their children and even their husbands for a few shillings’ worth of stuff bought at the sales; they continually discussed recipes which might cut the grocers bills by a fraction; they would haggle at their back doors with the native vendors over a penny like old women in a market place; they all knitted and sewed and patched and contrived like poor men’s wives. … They were all perpetually short of ready money because of their god, a secure and comfortable middle age.

The book is the second part of Lessing’s semi-autographical series of novels called The Children of Violence, which follows a young woman born right after the First World War, through a rural childhood and searching adolescence in an African colonial setting, through marriage and political activism during the Second World War, to life in London in the 1960s. The protagonist, Martha, has been thrust into a petit-bourgeois life as a civil servant’s wife. This much was expected of her and she has complied for reasons not entirely clear to herself. It is now expected that she meet up for morning tea with other young wives, to make the kinds of bonds that keep society together. What do we see here? We see the reproduction of a social order and an important segment of the material work that goes into it – all the making and mending. We see the hard though largely implicit negotiation of the terms of good personhood that is perhaps distinctive to groups of young mothers or

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wives. We see individual agency within the order, for that order, but also against that order, represented by Martha’s own developing discontent and distance. We see a moral teleology that provides an organizing principle for good personhood and action: the secure middle age that is sought not only for convenience but also as a crown of good character. We see the centrality of money, which marks both the middle-class position of these women and their rough historical placement as ‘modern’: saving money is their ticket, not just to a comfortable life but also to secure social status. It is the means by which they can reproduce the class of which they are a part. It is easy to mistake what is going on here for petit bourgeois inertia: a life in which nothing really happens. Yet, I see this scene as a painting that is bursting with movement while appearing perfectly still on its canvas. The women’s form of life bears similarities to much that we may be familiar with, but in fact it has not been like this for very long and it is very soon going to be no more. There are relatively trivial details to be noted: the strictly gendered division of labour that will soon become antiquated; their expressions of thrift that mark them as our grandmothers rather than our contemporaries. Some more important details about their world are not overt in the quotation but are significant for readers of the novel. They live in an unnamed town that is modelled after the Southern Rhodesian capital, Salisbury (later Harare). They are children or grandchildren of Englishmen and -women who have moved to the colony in the hope of making a good profit and, in some cases, to live in a style that was no longer possible for them back home. Their version of modern middle-class life includes black servants living at the bottom of their gardens. Many of them will face a reorganization of their moral and social world: what counted will count no more or will need to be exchanged for a different social currency. The everyday duties of these women are focused on the upholding of a form of life that contemporary Europeans or Americans are likely to find deeply morally problematic. However, the scene, though readily conveying Martha’s critical eye, is not designed to elicit the moral condemnation of readers. This would be too easy. It rather, and more interestingly, affords readers a glimpse into the practical and discursive space in which they form and develop themselves as responsible adult members of the community: the virtues they cultivate to uphold its values, for better or worse. Although this is a piece of literature and not a piece of ethnographic writing, I assume that the aspects of the situation that I have enumerated are easy to discern and look potentially significant to anthropologists (if this were a scene from fieldwork rather than fiction). They are not, however, the kinds of things that moral philosophers have traditionally paid attention to. Yet it would be unfair to say that moral philosophers have not attempted to pay attention to these kinds of things. A large number of moral philosophers have in the past half-decade emphasized the importance of context and situatedness in moral thought: we see this among virtue ethicists, in ethics after Ludwig Wittgenstein, in postcolonial



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thought, in discussions of ethics and literature, and in bioethics.1 For many of these philosophers, the important lesson to be learnt from attention to context has been that even the most felicitous and capacious universalist normative framework is an intellectual and practical failure unless it is sensitive to differences between people’s lives and situations. This is where I come from, philosophically and intellectually, but there are ways in which I find myself increasingly at odds with what I have come to call a context-sensitive universalism, especially, though not exclusively, in the Wittgensteinian tradition and in work on ethics and literature (Hämäläinen 2019, 2020). For me, what seems significant in scenes such as the one in Lessing’s novel is not situational data for a universalist normative ethical view, but something else. What I see is an intense activity of world-making: these women are producing, reproducing and upholding a world through their knitting, sewing and baking, as well as by exchanging critical and appreciative glances, by saving money and by keeping the natives in their place. Through these activities, they uphold a world of concrete everyday necessities and comforts, but, more than this, they uphold a place for themselves in the world, an evaluative orientation, a lived normality that enables them to act and to judge in ways that are legible to their peers, as well as to their husbands, parents and the rest of their communities. The scene readily lends itself to anyone who may want to show how this reproductive activity leads these women to invest massive moral energy in insignificant things and renders them insensitive to the real moral issues of their world. The positive contribution of the philosopher, social thinker or critical novelist, working from this point of view, is to argue for the criteria in light of which the women’s form of life (real or fictive) is (was) morally defunct, and what and how they should value instead. But such a ‘critical’ perspective takes for granted a fully produced human world, where cakes are there to be cut and money and recognition are there to be distributed according to need or merit. My question is: what if we philosophers take the reproduction of the human world, with its practical norms and imperatives, very seriously? What if we look at the universal morality proposed by moral philosophers as resting on complex, continuous productive activity, which upholds, shapes and also changes the orientation and imaginations of the people engaged in it? What if also the things we consider to be of the utmost moral importance always rest on this making and are shaped by it? From this perspective, it should come as no surprise that human worlds reproduced by different means exhibit differences in prevalent forms of moral personhood, conceptions of virtuous practice, different conceptions of the good and the good enough, of normal, natural and comprehensible. As Joel Robbins has noted, ‘one important thing anthropology can teach us is that there are profound differences between human lives lived out in different cultural surroundings’ (2013).2 It seems fair to say that this is one of the things that literature and history can also sometimes make us aware of. This is because

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writers and historians, like anthropologists, are able and willing to look at the busy and complex upholding of a human world with sustained interest. And it is there that we find the keys to understanding moral differences, as well as moral change. The passage from Lessing’s novel brings out a tension in our view of the past that is well captured by Iris Murdoch on the very first page of her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: ‘the “everyday outlook” or “natural standpoint” undergoes historical change. How much it changes many voices tell us now. How little it changes can be learnt from reading Homer’ (1992: 2). It is unlikely that one could read the veranda scene and suggest that the ‘natural standpoint’ has changed only very little: most of us could not live there, just as we couldn’t live in the early nineteenth-century American South, although we certainly live lives that could be found wanting by similar criteria. But there is also much that we can recognize and even identify with, especially if we are women: heated moral negotiation of young motherhood; the mixture of social ambition and social confinement; the simple pleasure of doing things well mixed with the complex pleasure of doing some things better than others. This tension between the foreign and the familiar would perhaps be unproblematic and uninteresting if it were not for the way in which the ‘how much’ and the ‘how little’ invite different metaphysical, meta-ethical, and normative intuitions. If we think that the everyday outlook changes a lot (or if we think that different cultural locations are radically different from each other), we may be inclined to find universalizing moral philosophy futile or at least problematic. If we think that it changes little (or think that different cultural locations are essentially similar when it comes to morality), we are more inclined to invest our hope in the possibility of a unifying normative account. The perspective of continuity, of little fundamental change, opens up the possibility of universal moral truths, not just regarding good and evil but also regarding something like what William Faulkner in his Nobel Prize address called ‘the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice’ (Faulkner 1950).

Arguments from Historical Continuity and Cultural Invariance Trying to navigate between these perspectives of ‘much’ and ‘little’, I have generally found that the extent of cultural plurality, contextuality and change are underestimated by philosophers. Prominent moral philosophers of the past century, most notably Bernard Williams (1985), early Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) and Charles Taylor (1989), have taken change very seriously and written vividly about it. Yet I find the reception of these philosophers in contemporary moral philosophy disappointing. Rather than moving closer to the action of change in moral life, by looking at history and anthropology, among other things, my philosophical contemporaries seem to have moved away from it.



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They have also tended to view the above philosophers as contributors to normative debates, in which their insistence on attention to historicity is downplayed.3 This has left philosophers with an impoverished understanding of what is required for bringing change properly into view. Michele Moody-Adams, whose work has lately been picked up in philosophical discussions about moral progress and moral critique (e.g. Pleasants 2010; Hermann 2019; Eriksen 2020), seems to me to exemplify this tendency, in a way that I think can help us to better understand the movements of thought that often seem to render genuine and deep moral change invisible in moral philosophy. Her book Fieldwork in Familiar Places (1997) is, I think, in many ways a good book, exhibiting a genuine and keen engagement with the issues discussed. Yet I find myself at odds with how she engages with anthropology, the role she grants to cultural variation and how she construes ethics as a universal and objective quest for truth. A closer look at her views on these issues will, I think, show why anthropologists and philosophers find it hard to learn from each other in ethics. It will also help me to formulate a conception of ethics that I think is more hospitable to anthropological insight, while retaining a place for transcultural strivings for truth and objectivity in the realm of ethics. This latter should be seen as a longterm goal, towards which I will here merely be able to point out some directions. It seems to me, however, that in order to make change visible, we need to pay attention to the philosophical tendencies that render it invisible or marginal to ethics. Unlike most philosophers, Moody-Adams is well read in twentieth-century anthropology. There is also a pragmatist undercurrent in her thought that surfaces, for example, in references to William James. Questions of cultural variation and change are central to her image of moral life. She observes that cultures ‘develop intricate patterns of normative expectations about emotion, thought and action’, and that these experiences structure experience and shape desires and goals. Economic, social and political institutions provide the frame for forms of sanctioned behaviour, but any society bent on survival also requires cultural processes that ‘allow the transmission of cultural patterns to agents in terms that leave agents capable of modifying, revising and occasionally rejecting elements of the cultural patterns by which they are initially shaped’ (1997: 83). She emphasizes that the task of moral philosophy is not to establish once and for all what is right by some theoretical trick, but to participate in the complex critical process of moral thought in which human communities are unavoidably involved. ‘Historically the most illuminating moral theory has been enlightening and compelling less for the systematic character of its constructions than for its capacity to stimulate self-scrutiny by enriching the moral imagination’ (Moody-Adams 1997: 185). Here, she considers the critical selfunderstanding resulting from ethnographic research a valuable resource (158). Moral philosophy, she notes, is ‘doubly hermeneutic’, in consisting of interpretations of moral understandings that are themselves products of interpretive

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activity (152). Thus, her view has many of the elements and taps resources that should make her well-equipped to attend to change, difference and plurality, and to help others to get these kinds of inquiries off the ground. Yet, her thinking goes in the opposite direction. She argues, insistently, that morality is everywhere the same, that there are no deep differences, no indissoluble moral disagreements, that there are no reasons to judge people of past or distant cultures differently than we would judge ourselves or our neighbours. Cultural plurality and the changing of accepted moral norms over time are facts of life but do not support relativist conclusions, be they descriptive or normative: ‘Novelty in morality and moral inquiry, as I have argued, never occurs in basic concepts but only in the reordering and reinterpretation of significant details’ (Moody-Adams 1997: 191). Commenting upon the tension between cultural diversity and universalism, she notes that ‘it is impossible to get at the truth in ethics without the appreciation for what people from diverse cultures have to “say” – even though what they in fact have to say often turns out to have a far more familiar ring than relativists are wont to admit’ (1997: 158). This is because, for her, difference and change are on the surface while sameness is deep, fundamental. The latter is supposedly revealed when we, unlike busybody relativists, listen to what people really have to say. (This contrasts interestingly with the sensibility expressed by Murdoch, cited above, whereby both change and sameness are fundamental.) Moody-Adams’s defence of cultural and historical sameness in morality seems to be at least partly a consequence of how she reads her own academic present and what she finds therein to worry about. Whereas I have mostly concerned myself with the relative lack of historical attention and anthropological curiosity in mainstream moral philosophy of recent decades, she focuses on what could be construed as the opposite danger, posed, in her view, by early twentieth-century anthropological relativism, meta-ethical prescriptivism and emotivism, and the value pluralism of prominent late twentiethcentury thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams. She thinks that these directions of thought have distorted our understanding of morality by making too much of cultural difference, historical change and plurality, thus undermining our faith in rational moral conversations between people of different cultures and convictions. The principal object of her critique is an idea of cultures that she believes is prevalent in anthropology, as well as in defences of relativism in twentiethcentury philosophy: one whereby cultures are (explicitly or covertly) construed as monadic, monolithic and unchanging. She emphasizes that it is hard to find a ‘culture’ that is not complexly mixed with others: in most cases of intercultural exchange, there is no sharp boundary between us and them. Cultures, furthermore, are not homogeneous, but contain conflicting perspectives in their own right. Often the voice of the powerless is systematically different from that of the powerful, and people’s behaviour might contradict overtly expressed beliefs (1997: 42–43): ‘[T]here is often cross-cultural overlap in the experiences of internal outsiders, which creates unexpected possibilities for



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cross-cultural understanding and cross-cultural moral argument’ (69). Cultures also change over time, not least through forms of reasoned social criticism, as we saw above. All of these features make rational critique possible and indeed perfectly ordinary, both within and between groups that may casually be construed as ‘different cultures’. Given these characteristics of culture, she emphasizes that intercultural moral criticism and reasoned moral discussion are both possible and desirable. We are not locked into our different cultures, but share a common humanity and the search for the good. She quotes Clifford Geertz, who writes that ‘The social world does not divide at its joints into perspicuous we’s with whom we can empathize, however much we differ with them, and enigmatical they’s with whom we cannot, however much we defend to the death their right to differ from us’ (Geertz in Moody-Adams 1997: 13, 53). Thus, she argues, the relativists’ constitutive belief in fundamental, insoluble moral conflicts between ‘cultures’ is unwarranted. Moral disagreements between groups and communities can be difficult, but we have no reason to state that such conflicts are, in principle, irresoluble. And so, relativism fails. This is a curious argument because these points (though not the conclusion) seem so obvious to anyone who has followed, with any level of interest, a contemporary ethical conflict involving cultural groups. Even the most humdrum media coverage of minority/majority cultural conflict is likely to highlight disagreement within the ‘groups’ involved (for example, liberal members of religious groups known for conservative views). Contemporary anthropologists emphasize, if anything, the diversity of understandings within a community and the complex interpretative work carried out by their informants when applying learnt norms and self-understandings to novel circumstances (e.g. Das 2020; Mattingly 2014; Robbins 2004; Mahmood 2005).4 Thus, while philosophers such as Gilbert Harman (2000) and anthropologists such as Margaret Mead (1928), Ruth Benedict (1934), etc., can be rounded up as representatives of monadic relativism, this kind of take on cultural difference and morality could hardly be called dominant today. J. David Velleman (2013) also presents cultures more or less in monolithic and monadic terms. But David B. Wong’s (2006) philosophical defence of relativism has, I think, earned a reputation as ‘sophisticated’ precisely by construing moral ‘cultures’ as less monadic and monolithic. And, by and large, defences of relativism overall are much less prominent than a fairly solid faith in ethics as a universalist realm of knowledge and understanding, at least if we look at philosophy today.5 The debates have moved on in ways that may seem to make Moody-Adams’s vigorous argument against monadic relativism somewhat obsolete. The examples from anthropology that she relies on represent concerns that speaks more of early than late twentieth-century anthropological sensibilities. Also, the relativisms of philosophers such as Velleman or Harman are today too obviously vulnerable to the kinds of objections she presents; they can hardly be construed as representing a dominant sensibility. But the argument is more interesting than this, in ways that make it highly relevant for present-day moral philosophy. It seems to me that her refusal to

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grant moral depth to cultural variation and to preserve morality itself as an eternal object, untainted by the shifting ways of human communities, is representative of widely shared sensibilities in contemporary moral philosophy. Those sensibilities again effectively stand in the way of making philosophical use of cultural variety and conversing helpfully with thinkers in empirical fields of study, who mostly do not share the objectivist preconceptions. Moody-Adams seems convinced that all forms of relativism, even those sensitive to the problems of early twentieth-century anthropological relativism, are tainted by the misconceptions that dominate the monadic forms: ‘Even Clifford Geertz, who is reluctant to defend relativism, nonetheless insists that proponents of anti-relativism wrongly attempt to place morality beyond culture’ (1997: 13). Yet she does not invest her energy in arguing with such intermediaries or dialectic third positions but rather concentrates on demonstrating what is wrong with the monadic forms. It seems as if she thinks that weighty arguments against these forms could settle the issues of radical cultural relativity and radical moral change. If relativism is wrong, if rational transcultural and transhistorical critiques are possible, then morality is always the same for all. Either relativism or universalism. She seems to be driven by the idea that if we cannot ‘place morality beyond culture’ by providing it with a universal rational grounding, then we are vulnerable to the crudest forms of relativism that preclude rational moral criticism between cultures. But her own provision of rational grounding is quite humble. It amounts to little more than showing that transhistorical critique is meaningful and transcultural conversations on ethics are possible and indeed rather ordinary. Yet, the intellectual cost of her procedure is high. What gets thrown out, like the baby with the proverbial bathwater, is nothing less than morally significant cultural variation. That is, anything that is subject to alteration is not part of the moral and not a worthy subject for ethics. Thus, for example, the whole busy world of young Martha and her routine of morning tea parties is ethically interesting only in so far as it involves things that we are conditioned to recognize as moral wrongs proper (the underpaid black servants, colonial oppression, oppressive gender roles). The moral philosophical gaze is thus conditioned to pick out only the big ‘moral issues’, rather than familiarizing us with – and taking seriously – the complex weave of valuations, habits, virtues, commitments and responsibilities of the young women. Morality is, in spite of Moody-Adams’s intentions, represented as a matter of passing judgements on a range of largely predetermined questions that qualify as properly moral, that is, as deep. The gaze is critical but also incurious, knowing and strongly normative. This seems too high a price to pay for a theoretical commitment that seems to add little to our ability to argue philosophically, for example, about the wrongs of social inequality or the need to remedy some preventable form of suffering. In fact, the narrowing, normative philosophical gaze may deprive us of the kinds of complex cultural understanding that are often necessary for recognizing social wrongs and their potential remedies. What I find compelling



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when looking at very different sites of moral life are precisely the kinds of differences that are well compatible with internal plurality within ‘cultures’, overlap between them, and intercultural or transhistorical critique. We are able to participate in a complex moral interpretation and critique of the practices of a cultural setting that is not ours, not because morality is always the same, but because different elements of human moral life are, or can become, legible to us. Yet, even when we see surface similarities between different human environments, we should not assume that what lies beneath is the same, or that sameness is more fundamental than difference. Or if we do, we need to be aware that this assumption comes at a cost: it takes a toll on our ability to learn about moral life in different times and locations. It confines philosophers to the narrowness and parochialism for which they are often known among more empirically minded social researchers.

The Historical Availability of Moral Ideas A particularly interesting part of Moody-Adams’s argument, for my present purposes, is her critique of ‘the relativism of historical distance, which denies that moral judgments made by contemporary critics can legitimately apply to the past’ (1997: 61), a view she finds represented by Bernard Williams and Richard Rorty, among others. Having argued that past cultures, just like present ones, cannot be construed as self-enclosed unitary wholes, she contends that any culture has the conceptual or logical space required for (universally valid) critique if 1) some group within the community suffers as a result of its current standards and practices, and 2) the people who enjoy the benefits of those practices would ‘not have chosen to be members of the groups that suffer most of the burdens’ (85). In this vein, she argues that insight into the wrongness of slavery was available to people in the early nineteenth-century American South, as well as to people in Ancient Greece. To support this, she reminds us of the nineteenthcentury abolitionist movement and the emerging slave narratives, as well as the fact that critiques of slavery were known to Aristotle when he formulated his now infamous defence of it. She suggests that anyone faced with such ideas must recognize that slavery is unacceptable and certainly not compatible with Christian or Enlightenment ideas of human value, which were available to people in the New World. That people did not recognize this can, according to her, only be attributed to morally reprehensible willed ignorance. I have no quarrel with her normative judgement that slave-owners, ancient and modern, were involved in something that was morally reprehensible. What concerns me here is her readiness to erase historical difference and distance, and argue that we should (indeed must) judge people who lived two hundred years ago in the same way we would judge our contemporaries. This readiness reveals, I think, the thinness of her thinking in relation to what it

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might mean to live in a world where slavery was common practice (see also Pleasants 2010). Moody-Adams construes the availability of moral options as a wholly cognitive affair. People who, two hundred or two thousand years ago, failed to reason their way to the absolute impermissibility of slavery were equally culpable, and culpable in the same way that people who have household or agricultural slaves today would be. It is as if moral options were served to us like cakes on a tray; the respective quantities of different kinds of cakes may vary, but we are equally free to choose the best ones even in times when there are few of these on offer. But what if we shift the implicit metaphors here and think of people as immersed in social ecosystems in which valuations are tied to daily tasks, practical engagements, situated duties, experiences of belonging, sharing, making sense, internalized virtues and responsibilities (Lessing’s tea party!). Abolitionist arguments were indeed rife in the early nineteenth-century US. Literary narratives with ethical intent sought to convince the public of the wrongness of the practice. The growing literacy among the working population, including slaves or freed slaves, gave a voice to first-person accounts. Slavery was a topic of political polarization. Yet it had been and continued to be economically important for developing the United States into the wealthy and powerful part of the world that it was about to become. Or so it was argued. Many people beyond the slave-owners and their families were implicated. In Europe, too, people depended on slave-produced sugar, cotton and coffee, just as we depend today on commodities produced in mostly Asian factories with substandard working conditions and insufficient salaries. This is the crude economic side of the deal, but not the whole story. There was also (as there still is) a large number of people whose livelihoods and quotidian responsibilities were bound up with, and dependent on, extremely cheap labour. In a thoroughly hierarchical world, slavery could be presented as just one variety of cheap labour, keeping in mind that for those at the bottom of the economic pyramid, the freedom of free labour is mostly nominal. The call for equality was not plain and obvious for every Christian, for most Christian denominations also preached hierarchy and obedience as the order willed by God. Quakers were among the radicals, calling for fundamental equality, but they too were divided on this issue (Carey and Plank 2014). For many Americans, slavery was a practice that made sense, even moral sense, at least for the time being, just as the inequalities created by capitalism and the treatment of animals in meat production make sense for a significant amount of our contemporaries (Pleasants 2018). For many of us, it makes perfect sense to insist on stricter regulations for farmers and abattoirs, rather than demanding that meat production be abolished. It also makes good sense for many of us to demand humane conditions for workers in the global textile industry, but few people would actually go to the trouble of making sure they do not buy anything produced under substandard conditions. We certainly have the conceptual space to question these practices and this is frequently done today: that is why they crop up when I look for contemporary parallels.



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But this is a space of renegotiation – of fundamental goods, norms, concepts (what is labour? What is an animal?) and ontological commitments – rather than a space of discovery and application of predetermined and freely available universal principles. It is easy to denounce a practice, along with the people benefiting from it, when history has already made it obsolete and seemingly inevitable moral development has occurred. But while a practice is in place, it forms part of the background against which people negotiate their day-to-day necessities and values, and it opens up towards different possible moral futures. Moral ideas are born, tried and consolidated in communal life: in people’s practical orientations, everyday duties, social relations and complex, layered experiences. Most of the people insisting on a relativism of historical distance would emphasize that questions of conceptual space and the availability of alternative moral views must be understood in the context of this embeddedness. We are both sustained and committed by our relations, interests, needs, preconceptions and ambitions. For us, there may be only one thing to say about slavery: that it is wrong (see Diamond 2019). For people embedded in a slave-owning context, there were many things to say about it: different judgements to be made concerning the acceptable treatment of slaves or the acceptability of slave labour and different trade-offs. The people Moody-Adams wants us to denounce can also be seen as the people who lived through an era when our current sensibilities regarding this issue were born, when meaning and shape were given to the idea that each person is the sole rightful owner of his or her labour force, and that all individuals are equal before the law. For Moody-Adams, it seems important, in the context of current social criticism, that we do not relax our standards when looking at past events. For someone who insists on the relativism of historical distance, the idea of considering people of the past answerable to our standards is misguided. But the core issue here is not whether we are ready to judge people of the past in the same way we judge our contemporaries. It is, rather, that if we do judge them thus, we miss out on the bustle of life that even our highest moral principles rest upon. We fail to know the people of the past, on whom we pass judgement, and at the same time we fail to know ourselves: our complex, entangled lives, in which certain moral ideas arise and appear to be non-negotiable, (seemingly) atemporal truths.

Ethics as Rational Inquiry For Moody-Adams, ethics as a truth-seeking endeavour is intimately bound up with a universalist, fundamentally egalitarian respect and concern for the good of each and every individual. For her, this is what morality fundamentally is, although it may be clouded by cultural forms when other values are given precedence. Thus, where I see a pidgin of human rights or a creole of universal equality, shared and spoken by people with potentially very different

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vernaculars, Moody-Adams sees the deep grammar of morality. This should not be understood as a difference in our moral commitments to egalitarianism or respect for persons; rather, it should be viewed as a difference in understandings of what such commitments amount to and how they relate to morality as an area of human life that exhibits variety and undergoes renegotiation and change. Relegating variety and change to the realm of the ephemeral implies that nothing truly important can be learnt from different ways of living and inhabiting different sets of norms, virtues and values. According to this view, we already know in our hearts what there is to know. But in order to get moral life and its alterations properly into view, we need to learn more about different moral vernaculars and their variations. We need to be able to think about past moral cultures, frameworks and societies as assemblages of values, virtues and norms as well as distinctive tensions and conflicts, resting on ways of life, with their particular range of needs and tasks and interpretive possibilities. We need to consider the nodes and tipping points where shifts occur, to determine why they occur and how these shifts may be related to other shifts. Without undertaking such work, we are not entitled to very strong claims about deep grammar. We need to be able to think that differences can be deep and yet at the same time genuinely moral. For all her reading of anthropology, Moody-Adams does not go there. One could say that she programmatically does not go there. For her anthropological evidence, in spite of cultural variation, is evidence of a fundamental unity in human moral orientation. Ethics for her is a rational inquiry into the human good. Given that human beings are fundamentally alike, with distinctly human needs and human capacities, this is, in her view, a joint venture of all humans. Yet, the only real change this rational inquiry can bring about is the application of given fundamental moral insights to a new range of situations: ‘Morally speaking, there is never anything fundamentally “new” in a new historical epoch’ (Moody-Adams 1997: 8). But how does she know this without looking more closely at cases of cultural or moral change? It seems quite clear that she knows it not on any empirical evidence but as one of the old truths of the heart. It is a moral creed bolstered by argument. This is not unusual and not necessarily a bad thing in moral philosophy. A good part of the greatest moral philosophy has been of this kind. What sets Moody-Adams’s account apart from many other such accounts is that she has all the evidence of plurality and difference under her nose, but she deems it unimportant. The very concept of morality is, for her, bound up with a distinctive normative orientation, which precludes considering things of a different normative order as belonging to morality proper. The moral vernaculars are for her deficient varieties of the correct universal language. The door to insights into the complexities of moral change and plurality is wide open, but she closes it, stating that what is important is the same for all anyway. But it is the same only in a semi-Platonic idea world of her philosophical imagination, not in the lived worlds of people. In her transition from descriptive facts about the human to a normative conclusion, she has unwittingly



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exchanged real-life morality for an ideal object that, incidentally, looks very much like the core tenets of modern liberal egalitarianism. I agree with this as an ethico-political ideal, but as an answer to how we should think about the changing of moral life over time, or differences in moral outlook between communities, it seems like an evasion of the question rather than an attempt to engage with it. Instead of a description of moral or ethical life in its variety of past and present forms, we are offered an articulation of a moral perspective. Such articulations certainly play important and powerful roles in normative moral thought and shape our societies in profound ways. The problem here is that Moody-Adams’s articulation presents itself as a precise description, sensitive to available facts. This conceptualization of morality is clearly too imbued with the moral preconceptions of a given time and place to be of much use for those approaching morality or ethics from an anthropological perspective. But it is equally problematic when bringing moral lives and the changes going on in those lives into view from a philosophical perspective. As mentioned before, it seems to me that similar moves are quite common in contemporary moral philosophy and are related to what philosophers consider their primary task, in contrast to empirical fields of research. In this view, social scientists deal with social mores and the cultural paraphernalia of morality. Philosophers, in contrast, work with true morality, which is deep, universal and in some sense the same for all. I am not concerned here with those philosophers who quite openly disregard real-life moralities and go straight for their chosen ideal. Rather, I am concerned with those who are sincerely interested in empirical reality, plurality, difference and change, and who fail to bring them into view because they slip prematurely into a normative perspective. By ‘prematurely’, I do not here mean that there is a predetermined ‘right time’ for normativity, merely that normativity comes in at a point and in a way that eclipses curiosity about lived moralities. This movement is prominent in the work of philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum (2000), Nancy Frazer (1985) and Rahel Jaeggi (2018), who display interest in complexity and plurality but see the principal task of moral philosophy as the provision of a theoretical articulation of the criteria by which we recognize a legitimate moral (or political) order. For all their differences, these thinkers find themselves at a standpoint from which genuine moral change and genuine, deep moral difference are obscured from view.6 The question is how to get these things back into focus.

Paths for an Anthropologically and Historically Curious Moral Philosophy I can see two different, distinctively philosophical paths here, both of which open up to anthropology. One is the systematic work of analysing actual

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processes of moral change, comparing them and seeking out the metaphorical and heuristic tools for talking about them. We see this strategy represented, for example, in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Honor Code (2010), Robert Baker’s The Structure of Moral Revolutions (2019) and Cecilie Eriksen’s Moral Change (2020), and it finds a natural companion also in legal scholarship. Another complementary kind of work involves looking for philosophically feasible ways of talking about the practical making of human moral worlds: the ways in which they are premised on changing material conditions, which generate practical necessities, which generate norms and forms of practical orientation, which again invite human interpretation and the modifications involved in it, which again feed into the change of conditions (see, e.g., Lear 2008; Pleasants 2018; Eriksen 2020). This kind of work finds its natural aids in the work of John Dewey and William James, among others, and my initial meditation on Lessing’s tea party can be read as a brief exercise along these lines. These are just two possibilities. Neither requires that we leave behind the traditional philosophical tasks of normative orientation or conceptual exploration, in order to pursue some kind of social science or social history. Moral philosophy is not replaced by accurate descriptions of moral life. As Jonathan Lear puts it, ‘“observing” the context in which rule-following activity is embedded will not yield the full meaning of that activity, nor is the anthropologist the philosopher’s final role’ (1999: 273). We need, however, a somewhat different relation to philosophy’s normative and explorative tasks than that which most contemporary moral philosophy has offered. An idea and an example of what such a different relation could be (since there are surely numerous possibilities) is captured by Lear in his book Radical Hope. He writes about the Native American leader Plenty Coups, of the Crow Nation, and how he dealt with the complete destruction of the form of life that had given his own and his people’s existence meaning, coherence, purpose and moral orientation: A philosophical inquiry may rely on historical and anthropological accounts … but ultimately it wants to know, not about actuality but about possibility: … The difference between a philosophical inquiry and a regular empirical inquiry: ultimately, it is concerned with ought rather than is. If this is a human possibility, philosophy – in its ethical dimension – wants to know: How ought we to live with it? (Lear 2008)

The call here is for an imaginative engagement with difference and change, and the question is: if something like this were to happen to us, what would carry us over?7 This is rational, world-oriented inquiry, the serious use of our reflective capacities in the pursuit of something we can recognize as an ethically sustainable and defensible life. But it places us in a very different register of normative and conceptual inquiry than that characterizing the work of Moody-Adams, one that will never need to short-circuit plurality and change, or sidestep the complexity of context, in order to cater to the intuition that morality is a domain of rationality and truth.8

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Nora Hämäläinen is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic, and the author of Literature and Moral Theory (Bloomsbury, 2015), Descriptive Ethics: What does Moral Philosophy Know about Morality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Är Trump Postmodern: En essä om sanning och populism (Förlaget M, 2019).

Notes   1. For discussion of attention to context in ethics, see Christensen 2020 and Hämäläinen 2016.   2. See also the growing field of moral anthropology, or the anthropology of ethics, e.g. Fassin 2011, Faubion 2011, Laidlaw 2011, Robbins 2004, Zigon 2008, Das 2006, 2020, Mattingly et al. 2017.   3. My attention to these issues should be seen as part of a countercurrent, in which moral change is foregrounded and its different dynamics investigated: Appiah 2010, Lear 2008, Baker 2019, Eriksen 2020, Pleasants 2010, 2018, and, in legal scholarship, Green 2013.   4. See also chapters 1–4 of this book.   5. We can observe a fairly robust and unquestioning affirmation of moral objectivism and realism in much of contemporary normative ethics, discussions on moral progress, and discussions on ethics and literature. Also, the moral particularism of Jonathan Dancy (2004), which is considered paradigmatic of contemporary particularism, represents a strong affirmation of moral objectivity. The particularity and situation-dependence of moral judgements does not here threaten the idea of moral objectivity but is premised on it.   6. For a discussion of different but not unrelated obstacles to focalizing difference and change in the tradition of ethics after Wittgenstein, see Hämäläinen 2020 and 2021.   7. I want to acknowledge, though I cannot explore this theme further here, that I often find anthropology more philosophical in this respect than philosophers are wont to do – that many anthropologists too are concerned with possibility, in this sense, although their paths are different to those of philosophers.   8. My work on this chapter was supported as part of the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), ‘Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value’, registration no. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic. My thanks to participants at the Research Seminar in Philosophy at Åbo Akademi University and the Higher Seminar for the Philosophy of Language and Culture, Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University, for invaluable feedback.

References Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2010. The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Baker, Robert. 2019. The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Benedict, Ruth. 1934. ‘Anthropology and the Abnormal’, The Journal of General Psychology 10(1): 59–82.

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Carey, Brycchan, and Geoffrey Plank. 2014. Quakers and Abolition. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Christensen, Anne-Marie Søndergard. 2020. ‘How to Work with Context in Moral Philosophy?’, SATS – Northern European Journal of Philosophy 21(2): 159–78. Dancy, Jonathan. 2004. Ethics Without Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Das, Veena. 2006. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Oakland: University of California Press. . 2020. Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein. New York: Fordham University Press. Diamond, Cora. 2019. ‘Truth in Ethics: Williams and Wiggins’, in Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going on to Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 271–308. Eriksen, Cecilie. 2019. ‘The Dynamics of Moral Revolutions: Prelude to Future Inventions and Investigations’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22(3): 779–92. . 2020. Moral Change: Dynamics, Structure, and Normativity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fassin, Didier. 2011. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Oakland: University of California Press. Faubion, James. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Faulkner, William. 1950. ‘Banquet Speech’, NobelPrize.org., Nobel Media AB 2021. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1949/ faulkner/speech/. Fraser, Nancy. 1985. ‘Michel Foucault: A “Young Conservative”?’, Ethics 96(1): 165–84. Green, Leslie. 2013. ‘Should Law Improve Morality?’, Criminal Law and Philosophy 7 (3):473–94. Hämäläinen, Nora. 2016. Descriptive Ethics: What Does Moral Philosophy Know About Morality?. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. . 2017. ‘Three Metaphors Toward a Conception of Moral Change’, Nordic Wittgenstein Review 6(2): 47–69. . 2019. ‘Literature and Moral Change: Rupture, Universality and SelfUnderstanding’, in Garry Hagberg (ed.), Narrative and Self-Understanding. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 29–51. . 2020. ‘A Case for Moral History: Universality and Change in Ethics after Wittgenstein’, Philosophical Investigations 43(4): 363–81. . 2021. ‘Wittgenstein, Ethics and Fieldwork in Philosophy’, in Richard Amesbury and Hartmut von Sass (eds), Ethics After Wittgenstein. New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 28–49. Harman, Gilbert. 2000. Explaining Value: And Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herman, Julia. 2019. ‘The Dynamics of Moral Progress’, Ratio 34(4): 300–11. Jaeggi, Rahel. 2018. Critique of Forms of Life, trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kitcher, Philip. 2011. The Ethical Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kronqvist, Camilla. 2019. ‘“Var och en har mor och far”: Om föräldraskap och begreppslig förändring’, Finsk Tidskrift 60(2): 63–80. Laidlaw, James. 2011. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lear, Jonathan. 2008. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lessing, Doris. 2001 (1954). A Proper Marriage. London: HarperCollins.



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MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1966. A Short History of Ethics. Basingstoke: Macmillan. . 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2014. Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mattingly, Cheryl, et al. (eds). 2017. Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. New York: Berghahn Books. Mead, Margaret. 1928. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. New York: William Morrow & Company. Moody-Adams, Michele. 1997. Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. . 2017. ‘Moral Progress and Human Agency’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20: 153–68. Nussbaum, Martha. 2000. ‘Why Practice Needs Ethical Theory: Particularism, Principle and Bad Behavior’, in Brad Hooker and Margaret Olivia Little (eds), Moral Particularism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 227–55. Pleasants, Nigel. 2010. ‘Moral Argument is Not Enough: The Persistence of Slavery and the Emergence of Abolition’, Philosophical Topics 38(1): 159–80. . 2018. ‘The Structure of Moral Revolutions’, Social Theory and Practice 44(4): 567–92. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Oakland: University of California Press. . 2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(3): 447–62. Segerdahl, Pär. 2014. Thinking About Ethics: A Collection of Reflections from the Ethics Blog. Uppsala: Centre for Research Ethics and Bioethics, Uppsala University. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Welleman, J. David. 2013. Foundations for Moral Relativism. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana. Wong, David B. 2006. Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zigon, Jarrett. 2008. Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

10 The Problem of Impiety Cora Diamond

In the first half of this chapter, I explain what I call the Problem of Impiety, and in the second half I explore some responses to the Problem.

The Problem The best way to explain the Problem is by looking at David Hume’s essay ‘Of Suicide’ (Hume 1903a). Hume was arguing that suicide would not in all cases be a violation of duty. Suicide was then generally taken to be a moral abomination and a violation of duty to God. It was usually prohibited legally as well. The general condemnation of suicide in Western thought, which forms the background to Hume’s essay, went back to Augustine. Hume was probably an agnostic, but his essay on suicide was addressed to people who might be assumed to believe in God. What he was willing to describe as ‘true’ religion played, he thought, a useful role in human life, but he took there to be also superstitious and fanatical forms of religion. He wanted to show that only if you accepted a superstitious conception of God could you defend an absolute prohibition on suicide, or hold that it was a violation of duty to God or an interference with divine providence. More exactly, then, what was Hume arguing against? The prohibition on suicide was often defended by saying that killing oneself was an interference in a sphere that God had reserved for himself, that of deciding when a person’s life should come to an end; and that God would be angered by anyone’s committing suicide, precisely because it was an interference in the sphere he had thus reserved for himself – it was in a deep sense a rejection of God’s sovereignty over life. But, Hume asked, how could we come to think that suicide was an interference in a sphere God had reserved for himself? Here we can see the significance of what Hume would take to be a conception of religion that



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is responsive to reason. For Hume takes it that, if you have a reasoned attitude to religion, you would think that God had given us our various powers, including our power to work out the consequences of our actions and to do all sorts of things to change what would otherwise be the course of nature. If anything is a God-given power, that is. So he thinks that reasonable people should take the God they believe in to have given us the power to alter what the course of nature would otherwise be, with the intention that we use that power as best we can, working out what are good or bad consequences of possible interferences. Hume asks us to think about the following sort of case: if I see that a boulder is going to fall on my head if I don’t interfere in the course of nature and that it will extinguish my life, I can interfere with the course of nature to ensure that I am not in the place where the boulder is going, or I can try to change the path of the boulder. No one, Hume thought, would take that to be an interference with God’s will. And yet making sure the boulder does not hit me causes me not to die at the time I would have died if the course of nature hadn’t been altered. So the unaltered course of nature cannot in general be taken as a guide to when God wants a person to die. There is an important general point here, namely, that no rational criterion is available to us for singling out some interferences in the course of nature and saying that they are absolutely ruled out for us, because they belong to a special sphere that God has set aside for himself. Only a superstitious conception of God, Hume thinks, can include the idea of some special sphere in which we are not allowed to interfere. The particular view of this sort that is his target takes the setting of the time of our deaths to lie within such a special reserved sphere and treats as prohibited any interferences in the course of nature to make one’s own death come earlier than it otherwise would. That, though, is just one specific kind of case and the general point is wider. To bring that general point home to his audience, Hume invites them to think about some people whom they will be quite willing to recognize as superstitious: the ancient Romans and the present-day French. The Romans held that diverting a river would ‘invade the prerogatives of nature’.1 This is, for Hume, a perfect example of a superstitious belief. And so is the contemporary French belief that inoculation against smallpox is an interference with God’s providence, because inoculation with a disease gives people a form of the disease and the French idea was that it is strictly God’s affair to give a person a disease; we can’t do so for our purposes. Hume hopes that his readers will also recognize that French idea as superstitious. In Hume’s day, nobody had argued, as people did later, that we should not have public health projects because they interfered with the divine will to give some people cholera; nobody had argued that we should not interfere with the pain of childbirth because God had linked childbirth and pain, and it wasn’t for us to unlink them. But, if those cases had occurred in Hume’s time and had been known to him, he would have treated them in the same way, as involving a superstitious notion of God. Any idea of God that takes there to be some realm that he has set aside, where we are not supposed to interfere, involves a superstitious

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conception of God; and the basic idea is that there is no rational criterion for recognizing such a sphere. It is superstitious to take some of the ways things happen in the course of nature and to say: that’s the way things are in the course of nature because God wants them so and we therefore must not interfere, or we will arouse God’s special anger. Whether a particular interference is a good idea must be looked at in terms of what is approved by the ‘sentiment of humanity’; it must be looked at without the idea of a set-aside realm of untouchable natural connections. Now, impiety. The notions of piety and impiety are complex and I focus here on only some of the elements in this complexity. One part of the notion of piety is the idea that we should treat the natural order of things with respect and awe. Another element is the idea of respect and gratitude as due to the sources of our life, which may be conceived to be God or the gods, our parents and ancestors, and our country. Another part of the notion of piety is the idea that actions that violate piety are properly regarded as outrageous or shocking. This outrage may manifest a sense that a wholly wrongful posture has been exhibited, a kind of will to dominate the natural order, a refusal to accept limitation, a challenge to God’s sovereignty or to honoured and honourable traditions that should be taken as sacred. Hume’s basic argument in the essay on suicide constitutes a challenge to the whole way of thinking that accepts the notions of piety and impiety toward which I have just gestured. I’d emphasize again what he’s doing when he notes that we properly recognize as superstitious the French idea that there is a kind of impiety in inoculating people against smallpox. He is trying to get his audience to alter their idea that suicide is outrageous in that it challenges God’s sovereignty, that it is shocking in its impiety. He is, I think, attempting to get his audience to see that conventional ways of thinking about what is pious and what is impious are mere covers for our own superstitions. All ideas of a realm where we should not interfere, where it is impious to interfere, are challenged by his basic argument. The question whether some interference with the natural order is justified can be answered in all cases by considering how it will affect oneself and others; nothing is simply and automatically ruled out. Hume’s argument goes further than just undermining ideas of piety tied to particular religious beliefs; it undermines as well, or is at any rate intended to, forms of natural piety, which need not be tied to specific religious systems, but which recognize comparable limitations in what we should take ourselves to be able to do. To bring out some of the issues here, it will be useful to have a list of things that people have already done, or that have been talked about as possible things we might do in the future, with advances in technology: 1. The manufacture by Soviet scientists of two-headed dogs by transplantation of dog heads. 2. Artificially supported maintenance of the separated head of a fetus, for research on chemical activity in the brain.



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3. The construction of embryos that are part human and part cow; part human and part goat, etc., as a source of tissues. 4. Mass production of animal life to exact genetic specification, treating animals as machines produced for research purposes. 5. Control over human reproduction, including in vitro techniques, surrogate motherhood, maintenance of the life of a pregnant but brain-dead woman (condemned by some Catholic authorities), pregnancies of post-menopausal women; and possibly for the future, cloning people, or possibly cloning embryos for use in research or as a source of tissues; transplantation of uteruses to men, making it possible for men to have babies. 6. Feeding of meat and bone meal to cows, which has given rise to bovine spongiform encephalopathy. This can be described as interference with the kind of creature the cow is, turning a gramnivorous animal into a partly carnivorous one. 7. The combination of reproductive technology with the technology of slaughter, when the technique of artificial insemination is practised on cows about to be slaughtered, using dye instead of semen, so that success or failure is visible when the animal is butchered. 8. Funding by the US Department of Transportation of research in Germany and elsewhere using corpses of infants in crash-simulation studies. When the story came out in Germany, it had the headline, ‘Professor Horror: He Did Car Tests Using Dead Children’, and gave the example of a corpse in a collision that resulted in injuries to liver and lungs, and twenty-seven breaks in the ribs. I have wanted to bring out something of the variety of cases that might be thought to involve some or other form of impiety, some kind of interference with the right ordering of things, a failure to recognize what ought to be treated with respect and not interfered with. Hume’s argument is meant to get us to give up the conceptual tools for such a criticism of any of these cases. So, in thinking about his sort of argument, we need to have before us such cases as these. The argument Hume provides to show that suicide cannot be taken as contrary to God’s will and an interference in divine providence can be regarded as an argument that there is no rational criterion for setting apart any area as beyond our interference. The Problem of Impiety confronts us, then, when we have taken in that argument of Hume’s. I can now state the Problem of Impiety: a range of actions have, in the past, been taken to be morally ruled out, have been taken to be outrageous, where both the moral impossibility and the outrageousness were thought of as tied to divine ordinances or commands of some sort. If we do not make any appeals to divine ordinances of any sort, are we then left only the alternative of allowing all of these actions, in every case in which they would appear to be conducive to human welfare? If not, what alternative to divine prohibition is available as a basis for objection? In the next part of this chapter, I explain how the Problem is connected with questions about objectivity in ethics.

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Hume’s rhetorical strategy in the essay on suicide can help us to see the connection. I mentioned earlier Hume’s reference to the Roman superstition that a river should not be diverted from its natural course. Hume’s own picture is that we are frequently stopped from doing what we want by the way nature works, including the placement of rivers, but that we also alter nature, including the course of rivers, for our own ends. We may, perfectly appropriately, move a water course to irrigate a field or prevent flooding. And just as it is not in general a crime to move a water channel from its natural course, so it is not necessarily a crime for me to turn a few ounces of blood that have been coursing around inside my body from their channel and to end my life that way. Hume is inviting us to view the person who cuts her wrists to end her life from a perspective in which what she does is divert a fluid from its natural channel. Hume’s language is intended to put the event of suicide into a world viewed as this happening and that: water running here and a millwheel turning; blood running there, followed by collapse of such-and-such body there. When we see this or that happening as having some moral character, we are as it were gilding it mentally, seeing it in the light of our own moral sensibilities. We are providing the moral colour. But the world to which we thus respond is simply the world of this happening and that; the moral colours are superadded by us. The world to which we morally respond is the same for all of us: events and psychological states without any moral colour of their own. What I want to emphasize here is not the obvious point that Hume takes the moral colour to be superadded, to be something we contribute, but that it is part of Hume’s picture that the world of happenings and states to which we add the moral colour is supposed to be available to all of us. There is the change in the channel in which some blood is flowing. That’s objective, that’s there; then, supposedly, we can raise the question what is a morally appropriate or what is a superstitious response to the action of disturbing the channel of the blood. Familiar as the Humean conception may be, we should recognize it as a particular conception, not one that is the only possible understanding of our situation as moral agents. Here I want to mention the ideas of Iris Murdoch and Akeel Bilgrami. Murdoch wrote that there are people, she meant including Hume, ‘whose fundamental moral belief is that we all live in the same empirical and comprehensible world’ (Murdoch 1956: 47); we then may have different moral responses to what are the same facts. So that is one conception of the world. But other people, Murdoch says, see the world of the moral agent in very different terms. For example, they may have as their fundamental belief ‘that we live in a world whose mystery transcends us’; and that what is central in moral life is responsiveness to that mystery. There is a sense in which different people may be said, as moral beings, to see different worlds – that’s another Murdoch point; and she notes also that the concepts with which one person makes sense of the world may be incomprehensible to someone else. You can’t, on her view, simply pick out the given facts and take people to differ merely in their judgments about how to act, given those facts. Moral concepts, she suggests, should be

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‘regarded as deep moral configurations of the world, rather than as lines drawn round separable factual areas’ (Murdoch 1956: 55). Bilgrami has argued, like Murdoch, that we need to recognize a view of the world different from Hume’s. As Hume sees it, the world does not genuinely make normative demands; facts are simply brute and there. But it is alternatively possible to take the world as suffused with value, and ourselves as tasked with respecting it (Bilgrami 2006). I’ll return to these issues at the end of this chapter. Here I have wanted to suggest that the background of the Humean conception of superstition is a particular understanding of what is genuinely objective, genuinely there.

Some Responses I come now to the second part of my chapter, in which I look at some possible ways of responding to the Problem of Impiety. Many of the views I consider are quite complex and my survey won’t be able to go into details. Further, in the case of each of the philosophers whom I consider (with the exception of the last), I focus on a single work and not on the development of their views in other works or their changes of mind. I want here simply to lay out something of what the ground looks like. One way of responding to the Problem is suggested by Hume’s essay: the Problem, from that point of view, isn’t really a problem. Hume’s argument suggests that only superstition would lead us to treat some type of interference in how the world works as off limits to us. This Humean sort of response can be seen in much public discussion of cases like that of cloning, or that of genetically engineered organisms. Cloning can be seen simply as a way of expanding the options for the creation of families, with nothing more uncanny or problematic about it than there is about expanding the options for making electricity by moving a river. And there are people who write about it in the same spirit in which Hume wrote about suicide. There are also people who write about creating transgenic animals in the same Humean spirit: there isn’t in the species of animals anything that it even makes sense to ask that we should respect. Whether it’s the case of transgenic animals or cloning people, this kind of approach looks to the foreseeable benefits and foreseeable risks, and if the benefits outweigh the risks, that’s all that counts. So this is a kind of utilitarian approach.2 (Hume himself takes a somewhat different approach in other works. See especially his treatment of respect for dead bodies in ‘Of Moral Prejudices’ and his discussion of designer babies in the same essay (Hume 1903b). Hume’s treatment of respect for dead bodies has some features in common with the second, third and fourth approaches discussed here.) The second approach I want to mention is that of Mary Warnock. In an essay on in vitro fertilization, she explicitly rejects the idea that what counts in considering such possibilities as cloning embryos as a source of organs for transplantation is simply the balance between the likely benefits and the risks

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(Warnock 1983). Warnock would want to object to such things as allowing embryos to be farmed for transplantable organs. Her objection, though, isn’t that such a system would be outrageous, but that feelings of outrage would be felt and that law and morality need to take such outrage seriously. Such feelings are a deep and significant part of our nature as moral beings. She puts forward a basic principle, meant to be an alternative to strict utilitarianism: that feelings of outrage and similar feelings need to be respected, even when there is no likely harm of the sort that utilitarians take seriously. So respect for such feelings can provide a basis for regarding certain actions as impermissible. Cloning embryos for transplants might then be ruled out without appeal to any religious views. So Warnock has a solution to the Problem of Impiety – the problem whether there is any basis for objection, other than appeal to a religious system, to any of the kinds of actions that many people may take as simply ruled out. Warnock’s response is: the feelings of outrage felt by people and the need for morality to respect such feelings provide a basis for objection to many such actions. It’s important here that she doesn’t take the feelings of outrage as indicating that there is anything wrong with what the feelings are directed against. The trouble with Warnock’s approach is that it takes equally seriously outrage that is merely part of conventional thinking and outrage at what (it might be argued) genuinely deserves to be met with outrage. If the principle is that feelings of moral outrage should be treated with respect, this would include the feelings of outrage at sexual relations between people of different races. Warnock might indeed allow that feelings of outrage could be outweighed when they clashed with other human interests, but her approach (in ‘In Vitro Fertilization’) doesn’t necessitate questioning whether the outrage is justified. And there is another problem: someone supporting a utilitarian approach might say: ‘Human feelings are malleable, and people should be educated out of some outrage. If creating cloned embryos for use in organ banks can be justified on utilitarian grounds when we ignore feelings of outrage, reeducation to change such feelings would be justified on utilitarian grounds, and we have no grounds for thinking this couldn’t be done’. A third approach is that of Stuart Hampshire (1978). He held that any morality must contain some set of prohibitions touching on the basic areas of human life, defining our attitudes toward human life and death, the treatment of the dead, sexual relations and relations within families, and so on. We have to believe in some firm and insurmountable barriers to some sorts of action; we have to believe that certain sorts of actions are utterly ruled out. In a religious society, these prohibitions will be tied in with the religion; the prohibitions will be taken to rest on divine commands. But even in a secular society, morality needs to respect fundamental prohibitions in these central areas of human life. There is here expressed a picture of human nature as containing deeply dangerous elements that would be let loose once such restraints are no longer recognized. But we should note that this conception of morality does not involve any idea that there is some way of evaluating any such set of prohibitions. The



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moral theorist can recognize that we must have some ideas about what would be horrific and outrageous, but, on this sort of approach, the theorist provides no guidance concerning what should be regarded as outrageous. And so again there is nothing in this approach against, for example, a prohibition on interracial sexual relations as being horrific and against the nature of things. The third approach, as I have described it, does not make a case for a virtue of piety, but the fourth approach does. Here my example is Roger Scruton, who has argued for taking piety seriously as a virtue within a secular society like ours (Scruton 1996). Piety, as he sees it, does not depend on a religious system or any kind of theological dogma. He has put his ideas about piety in various ways, and I focus on an essay in which he treats as the essence of piety respect for the dead, respect for our ancestors, for what we inherit from them and what we owe to them. We have inherited life itself from them and owe to them the passing on of life. We need to respect the attitudes toward life and death, and toward sexuality, that are essential to the passing on of human life. These attitudes are defined by prohibitions, by the ruling out of certain sorts of action and even ideas as unthinkable, and these prohibitions are themselves part of our inheritance from the past. Piety, respect for the dead and for the prohibitions we inherit from them, is a social necessity. For we cannot simply invent for ourselves the attitudes and moral meanings we need. The prejudices of ordinary people, and their habitual respect for these inherited prohibitions are in no way inferior to the prejudices of liberal enlightenment. This approach has some similarities to what I’ve laid out as the third approach. For both Scruton and Hampshire, there is a social need for a set of prohibitions that shape our attitudes in fundamental areas of human life. And, for both of them, you can’t judge the content of the prohibitions in question by thinking about what it would be good to have as the content of such prohibitions. Scruton claims explicitly that all we have to oppose the prejudices of tradition is the prejudices of liberalism. The only difference is that the prejudices of liberals never seem like prejudice to them. I don’t know whether Scruton would take this to imply that even liberal criticism of the banning of miscegenation was a prejudice and that respect for the dead would properly have involved respect for the inherited view that had treated racial mixing as an abomination. I cannot see what resources he has with which to distinguish between that inherited prohibition and the inherited prohibitions he thinks we ought to respect because they are inherited and we owe such respect to the dead. But this may be something of an oversimplification. I am not sure whether he is fully consistent on the issue of prejudice and reason. He wants to make the issue independent of rethinking on our part; but he does also want to take such things as a prohibition on pornography as justified because of what pornography expresses. Respect for the dead means, for Scruton, respecting the views we inherit from them and respecting their interest in our passing on life; but these two things may be quite distinct. The second, third and fourth approaches all accept a fundamental part of the Humean argument. He argued that only if we have a superstitious conception

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of God will we believe in some special sphere of actions that are out of bounds for us. There is no rational criterion for picking out some things that we might be able to do and then saying: ‘We are never to do those things, they lie in a sphere on which we must not encroach.’ If you accept that sort of argument, you can go on in two different ways. You can say there is no sphere in which we cannot interfere, so there is no absolute prohibition on suicide or on cloning babies or whatever else it may be. Alternatively, you can accept the argument that there is no rational criterion for delimiting the area on which we must not encroach and you can nevertheless say that we ought to recognize that there are things lying outside what we are entitled to do, although there is no rational way to establish what lies in that area. The second, third and fourth approaches have that in common, and something else besides. According to each of these approaches, we should treat with respect the prohibitions that people do recognize; but the philosophers themselves, in each case, distance themselves to a greater or lesser degree from the prohibitions. Warnock, for example, thinks that we oughtn’t to go in for cloning embryos and allowing them to develop for use as a bank of organs for transplantation, because people would find this outrageous and we should respect that. But she doesn’t say whether she finds anything outrageous in this. The respect she thinks we should have for people’s attitude toward such a system is not based on her going along with the attitude. The moral theorist, Warnock herself, doesn’t need to have any attitude in this area in order to respect the attitudes she finds there. Similarly with Hampshire: we need to have some prohibitions that set up impermeable barriers around doing certain sorts of things. But it is no part of his argument that anything in particular ought to be prohibited. So, whatever the actual prohibitions are, his position is not one of identifying with people who accept the prohibitions. And, in the case of Scruton, if you say that it’s good to accept the prejudices that have come down to us, you may yourself indeed accept the prejudices, but you are to a degree standing apart from them if you say that there is no reasoning about this, and that you just accept these prejudices because they are the ones you have inherited. If you say, ‘I believe that incest is absolutely ruled out, but I don’t believe the prohibition rests on some rational justification; it’s simply what was passed down to me’, you are, or so it would seem, undercutting your own claim genuinely to believe that incest is ruled out. Maybe there is some way of getting around this, but here I want simply to note the problem. The other approaches I shall describe do not accept the idea that there is no rational way of establishing any of the boundaries that people may think it is impious to overstep. I am not sure how to categorize the next kind of approach. Many thinkers would warn us of the dangers of overestimating our own capacities and of underestimating the dangers when we interfere in some fundamental way in the natural world. They remind us of the story of Prometheus: we should take as a warning the idea of the anger of the gods at anyone stealing what belongs to them and we should beware of overreaching ourselves. We can see Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein as expressing this sort of concern. A good



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contemporary example of this sort of thought can be found in John McPhee’s work. He writes about our attempt to control the course of the Mississippi, an attempt he takes as doomed to fail and likely to create huge economic and human damage when it does fail. Again, many people would think that, if scientists attempt to create a virus from scratch, we have no idea what horrendous consequences this might have; it is sheer arrogance, they say, to go ahead with such activities in the face of the possible fearsome consequences. Bernard Williams has written about such Promethean fear – the fear that we may take far too lightly the character of our relation to nature. Promethean fear, he says, is ‘based on a sense of an opposition between ourselves and nature, [nature] as an old, unbounded and potentially dangerous enemy’ (Williams 1995: 239), an enemy we are liable to terribly underestimate. Williams isn’t arguing that the feelings ought to be respected simply because people have them. He thinks that such fears can remind us of what is genuinely fearful. And the fears are also connected with things in nature that are deeply valuable to us, to our sense of what is important in human life. Now Promethean fear warns us of interfering in certain areas, as does the sense that such interference would be impious. But I think that these are distinguishable modes of response. They may be combined and they have in common that they see in human nature the tendency to interfere where we ought to hold back, a tendency tied to forms of arrogance. I am leaving unsettled here the question of what the relation is between Promethean fear and ideas about impiety. I turn now to what we can see in the thought of Immanuel Kant. I begin with his discussion of a case mentioned by Hume: inoculation against smallpox. Although Hume speaks of the idea that inoculation is impious as a French superstition, controversy about inoculation was widespread in Western Europe and America. The argument against the practice was that, however fine the end of preventing people from getting a serious case of smallpox might be, the means – deliberately giving people a disease – was a usurpation of what was reserved to providence. Kant (1996) discusses this case alongside his discussion of suicide, which he takes to be prohibited as a violation of duty to self. Suicide, the destruction of your own animal life, is, as such, also an attack on the subject of morality in your own person. Suicide is doing what it lies in your power to do to obliterate morality itself. Kant goes on to consider getting yourself inoculated against smallpox. He grants that you are entitled to run risks – for example, a sailor may set out to sea, even in a storm. But the sailor hasn’t created the storm, while the person who chooses inoculation has the disease put into himself; and so being inoculated isn’t merely running a risk for the sake of a benefit. Putting something into your body, something known to be capable of killing you, isn’t the same as going to sea when a storm may threaten. If you die in the storm, you did not kill yourself; but if you die of smallpox, having chosen to be inoculated, is this a case in which you are the agent of your death? Does respect for yourself as a rational being require that you abstain from doing anything to your own body that would risk making you the agent of your own destruction? Kant thinks this is not an easy question.

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My point, though, is that we see him, in his discussion of suicide and inoculation, as taking two questions that are familiar in European thought as questions about impiety and interpreting both questions in a new way: as issues of respect for what is genuinely deserving of awe and respect, the moral capacities within us. Questions that everyone in his audience will recognize as questions about impiety are being reinterpreted and transformed by Kant: they become questions about duty to self. (The same transformation can be seen in Kant’s treatment of sex.) I’m not suggesting that the questions cease to be questions about impiety, but rather that Kant is providing a new understanding of impiety itself, given his understanding of moral capacity as that which is genuinely deserving of respect informed by awe, that which is genuinely worthy of reverence. While Kant’s application of these ideas reflects his upbringing, there is nevertheless a great distance from the sort of ideas we had in Warnock, Hampshire and Scruton. If I am right in seeing Kant as giving us a transformed understanding of what is genuine impiety, he is providing a method for thinking about what is and what isn’t impious. Suicide and what he takes as unnatural sexual practices are ways of treating our animal nature that implicitly derogate from our character as rational beings. They can be understood as primary examples of impiety, within the context of Kant’s ethics; and the approach could be extended. So we can see Kant as providing a quite different kind of solution to the problem of impiety. He rejects the Humean argument that if we do not have a superstitious idea of God or the gods, we have no way to tell what sphere of actions is off limits to us, what interferences with nature go too far. We do not need any religious system in order to identify the limits. If there is a weakness in a Kantian solution to the Problem of Impiety, it is the difficulties in applying the ideas once we move away from the primary range of cases, for example to something like respect for the bodies of the dead. Not that you can’t apply the sort of ideas I’ve sketched, but the application becomes less direct and less convincing. I have not gone into detail of how a Kantian moral philosophy provides a reinterpretation of impiety. Both divine law morality and Kantian morality can treat ‘impiety’ as having both a narrow and a wider meaning. In a wide sense, any violation of a law that is worthy of reverence, that comes from a source worthy of reverence, is impious. But it is the narrow sense of ‘impiety’ that is directly relevant to Hume’s problem. What would be impious in this narrow sense within the context of Kantian ethics is a subcategory of perfect duties to oneself. The subcategory would include duties to oneself in regard to one’s own animal nature, the animal nature of other human beings and nonhuman nature; but again not all such perfect duties would correspond to impieties. This can be seen if we consider sexuality, and the contrast between what would from a Kantian point of view count as lack of moderation in marital sex and what would count as unnatural sex. Lack of moderation is a violation of duty to self, but it is the wilful misuse of one’s animal nature in unnatural sex that would constitute an abandonment of respect for oneself as a rational being. That is not a matter of degree. So what corresponds to impiety, within Kantian ethics, is



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violation of duties to self in regard to nature (one’s own animal nature, that of other human beings, that of nonhuman animals or inanimate nature), where the treatment of nature involves a denial or abandonment of respect for oneself as a rational being. I turn now to Elizabeth Anscombe. She said very little explicitly about impiety, but some interesting ideas emerge in four of her works. First, she holds that there are various practices of reason that are dependent on training in the particular practice. Recognizing that certain things aren’t to be done because they are impious involves learning one such practice of reasoning (Anscombe 1981b). This goes with a second idea: that conventional moral thought can be pernicious (Anscombe 1981a); so she would reject the Warnock, Hampshire and Scruton approaches because they do not take seriously enough that conventional pieties may be stupid or evil. Third, although she believes in a moral law given to us by God, she also believes that what is required by the moral law is something we can work out using our capacities to think through what sorts of actions are good and what are bad (Anscombe 1981b; 2008). And fourth, she thinks that a kind of recognition of mystery, or a kind of mystical perception, is involved in some virtues. She doesn’t mean by this something out of the ordinary. She thinks that the feeling for the respect due to a person’s dead body is a perfectly ordinary feeling. Take ‘the knowledge that a dead body isn’t something to be put out for the collectors of refuse to pick up’: ‘This … is mystical’, she says, ‘though it’s as common as humanity’ (Anscombe 2008: 187). So too the sense of respect for life that is reflected in the prohibition on murder: this is a kind of mystical perception. So too is a sense of something wrong in treating sex as mere casual satisfaction, like picking up an edible mushroom you happen to see and eating it. The sense that sex isn’t like that involves a mystical perception. There are, she thinks, some virtues that don’t depend on any such mystical perception. You don’t need any such perception to see the point of honesty about property, for example. Such honesty has obvious social utility. But, in the case of respect for life, what is involved is a sense of ‘respect before the mystery of human life’ (Anscombe 2005: 269) – the kind of respect that might come out in refusing to treat some lives as more valuable than others. What she has in mind you can call a religious feeling, but it isn’t connected with any particular religious system and can be found in an incipient form in people who might not have much time for religion as any kind of organized system of beliefs and practices. Anscombe’s idea is that some virtues, like honesty about property, don’t depend on a mystical perception and others, like respect for life and respect for the dead, cannot be given a utilitarian explanation and depend on a mystical perception. This distinction has in it the germ of a way of thinking about impiety. Interferences in the course of nature that go against the second sort of virtue could be thought of as impious. Take the case of the use of corpses in crash research. Many people have a sense of outrage and repugnance when they hear of this. A possible Anscombean approach here would not take those feelings as decisive (any more than they should be taken as decisive in the case of dissection

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in medical education): the question would be whether this treatment of corpses was a violation of the virtue of respect for the dead and outrageous on that account. If it went against that virtue, it would thus count as impious, since that is a virtue of the non-utilitarian sort, the sort that depends on a mystical perception. So that is an example of how Anscombe’s ideas could suggest a kind of response to Hume on impiety, a way of examining whether certain sorts of action were ruled out as impious. Her ideas provide, not an account of impiety, but a possible line to be explored. There is an important contrast between her ideas and Kant’s. In the Kantian reinterpretation of impiety, what plays a central role is the idea of reverence for our moral capacities, for ourselves as rational beings. In the Anscombean approach, what plays a central role is a kind of reverence or awe, and sense of mystery, before the life and death of human beings and before the capacity to transmit life through sexual reproduction. So an Anscombean approach would be more directly applicable than Kant’s to many of the cases listed earlier in this chapter. And it treats human beings essentially equally, whereas Kant’s approach has a more limited kind of applicability to the treatment of people who have no rational capacity. I have not tried to consider every thinker whose ideas suggest some approach to the Problem of Impiety. Here I will mention a few others. Simone Weil is one such thinker: she makes injustice into a kind of impiety, in that, in acting unjustly, we fail to be stopped by what is sacred about a human being (Weil 1957). I think also of Raimond Gaita (2002), writing on respect for the dead and how there is room for honouring a person, or indeed an animal, or dishonouring the person or animal, in how we treat the dead body of that person or that animal; also of Stephen Clark (1997), writing on why we are right to be horrified by such things as the transformation of mammals into milk machines; of David Braine, writing on ‘respecting man’s character as an animal in order to respect humanity itself ’ (Braine 1997: 21). There is Michael Sandel’s (2007) discussion of the taking up of a stance toward the world of ‘mastery and dominion’, and Mathew Lu’s (2013) wide-ranging investigation of the wrongness of cannibalism. These approaches have in common a recognition of certain forms of respect as justified by what it is we are treating with respect, although many naturalistic approaches to ethics would not see in the things in question anything that could be taken to be worthy of such respect. One further sort of possibility is exemplified by some Stoic thinkers, who take piety seriously as involving respect for what requires to be treated with respect, but who don’t tie such piety to a realm of prohibited actions.3

Conclusions First, the Humean sort of approach to the Problem of Impiety is not obviously correct, although it may appear to be the only reasonable approach if one assumes that only harms and benefits give us reasons for allowing or disallowing some interference in the course of nature.



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A second conclusion is that there is a range of responses to the Problem that go halfway with Hume. That is, they assign importance to impiety-feelings and argue that such feelings should be taken seriously. But they don’t depart from Hume on the question whether such feelings have any basis that a moral thinker might investigate. They don’t treat feelings of outrage at something as suggesting that the thing in question is outrageous, or might be outrageous, so that one could press the issue and examine whether it was outrageous. There is a contrast between those views and the approaches of Kant and Anscombe. Kant and Anscombe differ deeply from each other, but they both take respect or reverence or honour for what should properly be honoured to set limits to what we can legitimately do. If we look at their two approaches, we can see that piety goes with concepts of things that are worthy of our respect, and that how we treat nature (our own animal nature or that of animals or inanimate nature) can express disrespect for what is worthy of respect. It is therefore possible for us to recognize certain things as not to be done, as off limits, because they are expressive of such disrespect. Piety goes with an understanding of the world within which there are things requiring respect. For both Kant and Anscombe, in different ways, the world is such that this makes sense. The world can also be understood differently, as bare of such proper objects of respect.4 William Wordsworth (1969: 637) calls such a conception of the world impious; and the point is that, with a conception of the world as just a bunch of stuff or a bunch of unmysterious facts, nothing requires treatment as having a dignity or integrity that needs to be respected, and so, in our reasoning about action, there’s no room for asking what we need to honour or respect. There’s no room to examine whether something expresses disrespect or contempt for what must not be treated so. Thus, for example, there is no room for the issue of respect for the dead in thinking about whether we can bash their bodies for research. I’m suggesting that there are conceptions of the world within which the idea of impiety makes sense and conceptions of the world within which it doesn’t. Here I have come again to the ideas of Iris Murdoch and Akeel Bilgrami, about the very different moral visions people have of what the world is. And that is where I stop. Cora Diamond is the Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Virginia. She has published on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of language and philosophy and literature, and is the author of The Realistic Spirit: Witgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (MIT Press, 1991) and Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going on to Ethics (Harvard University Press, 2019).

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Notes This chapter originally appeared in David McPherson (ed.), Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).   1. Hume is referring to the debate in the Senate, described by Tacitus, about diverting some of the waters flowing into the Tiber to prevent flooding.   2. A similar sort of approach could be justified from the point of view of Stoic ethics, which does not take any type of action as absolutely ruled out. There are, for example, Stoic arguments that challenge the prohibitions on incest and that allow such things as the eating of amputated human limbs.   3. See, for example, Vogt 2008.   4. My summary leaves out the interesting case of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ethical views, as expressed in the ‘Lecture on Ethics’ (1965). The world (on his view) is bare of what I am calling proper objects of respect; it is nonsense to speak as if some feature of things could make it essential for us to act in a certain way, or be worthy of reproach if we didn’t. But exactly that nonsense is ethics. That sort of view could be said to leave room for piety (and indeed it is no accident that the primary example for Wittgenstein, in his earlier writings, of what is morally prohibited is suicide), but does not treat it as intelligible, in the way in which both Anscombe and Kant (on my account of their views) treat it as intelligible.

References Anscombe, G.E.M. 1981a. ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, in Ethics, Religion and Politics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 26–42. . 1981b, ‘Rules, Rights and Promises’, in Ethics, Religion and Politics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 97–103. . 2005. ‘Murder and the Morality of Euthanasia’, in Mary Geach and Luke Gormally (eds), Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe. Exeter: Imprint Academic, pp. 261–77. . 2008. ‘Contraception and Chastity’, in Mary Geach and Luke Gormally (eds), Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics by G.E.M. Anscombe. Exeter: Imprint Academic, pp. 170–91. Bilgrami, Akeel. 2006. ‘Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and Enchantment’, Critical Inquiry 32: 381–411. Braine, David. 1994. ‘The Human and the Inhuman in Medicine: Review of Issues Concerning Reproductive Technology’, in Luke Gormally (ed.), Moral Truth and Moral Tradition. Blackrock: Four Courts Press, pp. 226–39. Clark, Stephen R.L. 1997. ‘Natural Integrity and Biotechnology’, in David S. Oderberg and Jacqueline Laing (eds), Human Lives: Critical Essays on Consequentialist Bioethics. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 58–76. Gaita, Raimond. 2002. The Philosopher’s Dog. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Hampshire, Stuart. 1978. ‘Morality and Pessimism’, in Stuart Hampshire (ed.), Public and Private Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–22. Hume, David. 1903a. ‘On Suicide’, in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary. London: Grant Richards, pp. 585–96. . 1903b. ‘Of Moral Prejudices’, in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary. London: Grant Richards, pp. 573–78.



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Kant, Immanuel. 1964. ‘The Metaphysical Principle of Virtue’, Part II of The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James Ellington. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill. Lu, M.T. 2013. ‘Explaining the Wrongness of Cannibalism’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 87: 433–58. Murdoch, Iris. 1956. ‘Vision and Choice in Morality,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 30: 32–58. Sandel, Michael. 2007. The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Scruton, Roger. 1996. ‘Decencies for Skeptics’, City Journal, Spring 1996: 43–49. Vogt, Katja Maria. 2008. Law, Reason, and the Cosmic City: Political Philosophy in the Early Stoa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Warnock, Mary. 1983. ‘In Vitro Fertilization: The Ethical Issues (II)’, The Philosophical Quarterly 33: 238–49. Weil, Simone. 1957. ‘La personne et le sacré’, in Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 11–44. Williams, Bernard. 1995. ‘Must a Concern for the Environment be Centred on Human Beings?’, in Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers 1982-1993. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 233–40. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1965. ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, The Philosophical Review 74(1), 3–12. Wordsworth, William. 1969. ‘The Excursion’, in Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, new edition revised by Ernest de Selincourt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 591–698.

11 Guiding Ethical Sentences, Moral Change and Form(s) of Life Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen

Introduction Here is a thought: if there is such a thing as ethics, it must be universal.1 If we are to unfold this thought in more detail, it might sound something like this: if there is something, ethics, that binds us beyond the ties established by conventions, social norms and laws, it must surely bind us all and it must surely bind us independently of time and place. In short, ethics must be universal.2 I think that something like this thought is accepted not just by many moral philosophers but also by many ordinary moral thinkers.3 It is, however, hard to point to such a fully universal ethics and, for this reason, the first thought often gives rise to a second thought, a counter-thought, both in moral philosophy and moral life. The second thought is: there is really nothing universal in ethics. And if we unfold this thought in more detail: nothing is ever ethically binding as such; it is only ever binding in relation to a particular time and place, to particular communities or circumstances. In short, ethics must be relative. Of course, these two thoughts oppose each other, but they also lead to very different views of moral change. The first thought implies that, really, there are no genuine examples of moral change. At times, it may seem to us as if our moral views develop, but this is only because our moral understanding changes as we slowly approach (or remove ourselves from) an unchanging and universal ethics. In contrast, the second thought implies that ethics is constantly changing in relation to the cultures or communities in which it is embedded. At times, it may seem to us as if morality is invariable and constant, but this is accidental; in truth, morality is always potentially open to change. I think the reason why these two thoughts are so common, in moral philosophy and in moral life, is that they both capture something that is common to human experiences of ethics, something that is true in the sense that it is



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reflected in common experiences. This challenges us to find a way to combine what is true in the first thought with what is true in the second; to find a way to understand universality in ethics that is compatible with the insight that ethics is always, substantially and irreducibly, shaped by context. This challenge is one that I have tried to address on other occasions.4 What I want to do here is to focus on moral change and argue that change must be understood in a way that allows for both the universal and the relative and context-bound nature of ethics. To lay the foundations of such a view of moral change, I will draw on an understanding of change in moral thinking found in the work of Cora Diamond, but I will eventually depart from Diamond’s view to develop an understanding of moral change in what guides moral thinking as tied to changes in forms of life. So this is what I will do: I will present Diamond’s early work on ethical sentences as guiding moral thought in relation to what we ‘want or need’ in moral life; the idea that we use parts of ordinary language as linguistic resources that guide how we are attentive to, understand, think about and talk of moral life. I will then connect this to Diamond’s discussion of extraordinary moral disagreement in the discussion of slavery and the idea that such disagreement is characterized by one or both parties in the discussion seeing the thinking of the other party as having gone off the rails. For Diamond, the discussion of slavery should be understood as a change in moral rationality, but by investigating a number of different examples of moral disagreement, I show that there are various possible forms of moral change involving guiding ethical sentences. Finally, I will argue that these different forms of change connect to differences in forms of life. Changes in guiding ethical sentences may indicate a universal change in rationality, as in the example of slavery investigated by Diamond, or they may be fuelled by differences in what human beings ‘want and need’ in moral life and be a form of relative moral change. In this way, I will show that we need a differentiated understanding of the connection between guiding uses of language, forms of life and moral change.

Ethical and Guiding Uses of Sentences In the following, I am interested in a specific type of moral change. This means that I will not be trying to develop a general account of moral change; rather, I will try to describe and elucidate a specific form of moral change that, in my view, comes in different degrees. The form of moral change in focus here is change in what guides moral thinking. The background idea is something like the following: moral thinking concerns that which is significant, of value or importance to human beings, which means that learning to think about moral matters is learning to be guided in one’s thinking to consider what is indeed significant, valuable or important. It is, however, not particularly easy to describe this form of guidance, and here I find that Cora Diamond’s early work on the ethical implications of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy is the best source of inspiration.

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In one of her classic articles, ‘Wittgenstein, Mathematics, and Ethics’ (1996), Diamond proposes that philosophers take to heart Wittgenstein’s reminder that ‘a word had meaning only as part of a sentence’ (2009: §49), and shift their focus of attention in moral philosophy, looking not at the uses of single words but rather at the uses of sentences, considering whether ‘a sentence’s belonging to ethics is a classification by use rather than by subject matter?’ (Diamond 1996: 237).5 Diamond believes that this would make philosophers attentive to the difference between two kinds of uses of sentences, ‘the difference between activities in which we develop our means of description and linguistic activities in which we are using, in experiential propositions, the means of description we have developed’ (1996: 233). Normally, philosophers focus on the second activity, investigating descriptive uses of sentences that aim to say something true about reality, but Diamond thinks the first activity of developing our means of description is central to ethics, and she describes it through an analogy with mathematical uses of sentences. According to Diamond, mathematical sentences such as ‘2 and 2 equals 4’ and ‘4 is an even number’ cannot be described as experiential or descriptive sentences, as they do not reflect any particular state of affairs. Rather than describing the world, mathematical sentences are part of an activity that helps us prepare and develop such descriptions, and thus they precede description. As a ‘means of description’, mathematical sentences relate to reality in a way that is very different from the way in which descriptive sentences relate to reality. They do not describe facts; indeed, they do not reflect anything that is (possible or actually) in the world. Rather, they relate to the world in so far as they facilitate different activities of description that allow us to engage with reality in different ways, in this case by counting things, adding, subtracting or dividing, etc. The question is, what does this analogy with mathematics mean for an understanding of ethical uses of sentences? First of all, it suggests that ethical uses of sentences are different from experiential uses, aiming to inform us about the world, and that they are instead part of activities whereby we develop means of description. This does not mean that the purpose of ethics is to prepare for description in the same way as mathematics. Rather, ethical sentences, in the same way as mathematical sentences, belong to the resources available in language; they are forms of ‘linguistic instruments’. In Diamond’s view, a sentence thus has an ethical use if it allows us to do something that is important for us to do in moral life. An ethical sentence may allow us to see something as morally relevant, and thus shape moral attention; it may be concerned with how to conceptualise particular situations or how we ought to act in these situations, etc. (cf. 1996: 248). As I phrased it in the introduction to this section, they help us think about what is significant, valuable, important. In this way, ethical uses of sentences can guide ethical attention, thinking and acting. As the resources established by ethical uses of sentence do not refer to reality in any straightforward sense, we need to account for their relation to reality in a way that is different from the way that we account for descriptive



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sentences’ relation to reality. In Diamond’s words, what is meant by ‘“responsibility to reality” in the case of linguistic resources … is different from what it is in the case of ordinary experiential propositions: do the world, and our nature, make the resource in question one that we shall want or need?’ (1996a: 249). Ethical uses of sentences can be evaluated in relation to reality in terms of what these sentences allow language users to see, do, think or talk about in the world. More specifically, Diamond suggests that we can evaluate ethical sentences by asking whether they establish resources that we ‘want or need’ – want or need in moral thinking and in moral life more generally. Furthermore, the linguistic resources that are helpful in becoming attentive to morally relevant aspects of human life may differ significantly from situation to situation and from culture to culture, as Diamond herself notes: Whole sentences, stories, images, the image we have of a person, words, rules: anything made of the resources of ordinary language may be brought into such a relation to our lives and actions and understanding of the world that we might speak of the thinking involved in that connection as ‘moral’. (1996: 248)

An ethical sentence is whatever part of ordinary language that has an ethical use, and this may in principle be any piece of language. There is no limit to the kinds of language that can be morally relevant and, as a consequence of this, it is impossible to delineate once and for all a specific ethically relevant group of words or a moral vocabulary. Whatever people use in language to guide moral thinking and enable descriptions of moral relevance, whether this be Kantian principles, bedtime stories, personal anecdotes or social media slogans, is, according to this view, a form of ethical language guiding moral thought.

The Case of Slavery: Moral Change as Change in Rationality In general, I am suggesting that one significant kind of moral change is change in the linguistic resources that guide moral thinking and I will begin investigating this form of moral change by engaging with an example from one of Diamond’s most recent articles, ‘Truth in Ethics: Williams and Wiggins’ (2019a). Diamond does not use the concept of moral change herself; rather, she frames her discussion as one concerned with ethical truth and rationality and aims to show the possibility of a form of moral development that enables us to distinguish between instances of failed thought and what ‘guides thought well’ (171). Diamond is especially interested in philosopher David Wiggins’s claim that given what is now known about slavery, there is really nothing else to think than that slavery is unjust and insupportable.6 According to Wiggins, in light of the many considerations ruling against slavery and the importance of notions such as justice, human equality and respect for humanity in Western moral thinking, if you do not think that slavery is unjust, then you are, in Diamond’s phrasing of Wiggins’s point, ‘at risk of depriving yourself, at the same time, of

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any workable scheme of moral ideas’ (155). In this sense, Wiggins argues, it is true that slavery is unjust. According to Diamond, this gives rise to a dilemma. On the one hand, Wiggins’s argument has a strong appeal for us today; we would indeed like to be able to say that ‘there is really nothing else to think than that slavery is unjust and insupportable’. On the other hand, it is also a fact that, historically, the claim that slavery is unjust has not always been obvious to everyone, for example, it was not obvious to slave-owners in the heated debate about the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century. Diamond therefore makes a detailed investigation of some of the arguments of pro-slave thinkers in the United States, for example, the argument, partly informed by Aristotle’s thinking, that slavery may be just if the enslaved person is, for racial reasons, a ‘natural slave’. In this case, or so the argument goes, slavery would benefit that person. Thus, Diamond takes a step back and uses claims such as the claim about ‘natural slaves’ to highlight an important difference between two forms of ethical disagreement: There are disagreements about ethics where one group of people thinks that the other side has got things wrong, but there are also, I think, disagreements in which people take some way that other people are thinking about ethics not just to be wrong, not just to be something they disagree with – but to be a case of the other people’s thinking having gone off the rails. (2019a: 159–60)

We can imagine two different forms of moral disagreement. The first form is ‘ordinary’ disagreement, where people make different moral judgements about a specific moral issue, but where they also (at least implicitly) share the framework in which their disagreement unfolds. Diamond notes that, at an early point, the discussion of slavery took this form, with discussants on both side of the disagreement presenting arguments for and against slavery and assessing these arguments in terms of consequences, values, importance, etc. We can call the second form of disagreement ‘extraordinary’ disagreement, that is, disagreement between people who have come to disagree fundamentally about what they consider the conditions or framework of their discussion, with people on one or both sides of the discussion believing that there is something fundamentally wrong with the thinking of the other party and therefore refusing to even consider their arguments. With time, the discussion of slavery assumed the form of extraordinary disagreement, as anti-slavers came to think that there was something fundamentally amiss with the claims of the proslavers, for example, claims that some people are natural slaves and that slavery can be a form of justice. According to Diamond, this second form of extraordinary disagreement is characterized by at least one party in the discussion believing ‘that the thinking of the others has gone totally astray, that it is a kind of mis-use of our thinking capacity’ (2019a: 161). In my view, the description of extraordinary ethical disagreements is helpful because this type of disagreement often indicates that some form of moral



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change is occurring or has already occurred. It is also helpful because it illuminates how it is possible to be morally worried about what other people say – for example, in claiming that some human beings are natural slaves – not because it involves a claim with which one disagrees, but because it involves a claim that one finds both morally repugnant and rationally puzzling – a claim one believes the other party should not have come to make and in fact should not have even considered. Diamond describes cases of extraordinary disagreement as cases in which we think that even if the other party is going down one apparently possible road of thinking, very compelling reasons exist for them – and for anyone else – not to go down that road, that, in fact, they are disregarding signs announcing that this road leads to a dead end for thought. And Diamond develops this idea by pointing out that ‘in the dispute about slavery, it appears that each side was trying to indicate a path of thought that we should not take’ (2019a: 170), arguing further that in the case of slavery, ‘indeed there was such a sign that was put up, the statement that men are by nature equal’ (161). Thus, the sentence ‘All humans are by nature equal’ is part of the linguistic resources that now guide moral thinking; to say that the sentence works as a sign in this way is to say not that it describes some fact, but rather that it is a part of what guides moral thinking well. If we go a little beyond Diamond’s own discussion and connect it to the investigation of moral change, we can see the dispute about slavery as undergoing a change from a symmetrical weighting of two opposed thoughts fuelled by an exchange of pros and cons, to a case of which many people would say that we have ‘failed thought on the one hand and what we hope is thinking that guides thought well on the other’ (2019a: 171). In this sense, the thought ‘Slavery is unjust’ is asymmetrical; it is a true thought, but the opposite thought, ‘Slavery is just’, is not false, but rather failed. This idea is difficult, but Sophie-Grace Chappell describes it as follows in an illuminating review of Diamond’s Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going on to Ethics (2019b): To class ethical propositions as asymmetrical is to class them … with syntactical and logical and grammatical propositions. Propositions of those sorts are asymmetrical in that, when true, they constitute guidance, knowledge how, the expression of (correct) attitudes, or the like. But their false negations cannot be described, as the negations of true bipolar propositions can, as equally truth-apt … [rather] their negations do not even make sense. (Chappell 2020: 599–600)

For ethical or guiding uses of sentences, truth is related to the quality of their guidance in a way that parallels the truth of grammatical or mathematical sentences. For Diamond, the asymmetry of ethical sentences is connected to their guiding role in moral thought, which means that even if an ethical sentence can be characterized as true, its negation is not false, but rather failed or meaningless. According to this view, a thought such as ‘Murder is morally right’ is not false, but rather failed. Examples from grammar and mathematics do not work in precisely the same way, but to flesh out the analogy, if we take guiding

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sentences such as ‘A bachelor is an unmarried man’ and ‘The number 7 is either odd or even’, we can see that their negations result in thoughts such as ‘The bachelor is married’ and ‘The number 7 is neither odd nor even’, which are not straightforwardly false, but rather are confused. In relation to Diamond’s analysis of the debate about slavery, the setting up of the sign ‘All humans are by nature equal’ was the moral change through which the thought ‘Slavery is just’ came to stand out as a failed thought. To describe this specific form of moral change, Diamond introduces the idea of moral thinking as subject to forms of change that make thinking more able as thinking and make rationality more adequate as rationality. ‘The statement that all men are created equal has a history: it comes to be understood as a standing rebuke to justifications of slavery’, Diamond writes, ‘where this, then, is one of the things that feeds into the cumulative process of shaping rationality, shaping how we think thinking needs to go’ (2019a: 169). What is distinctive about Diamond’s understanding of the development of moral thought is that, on the one hand, she acknowledges that the conditions of thinking may change, and thus may be different for different people, while, on the other, she argues that this is a change in rationality. Coming to see the truth of the guidance in the sentence ‘All humans are by nature equal’ and the failure in the sentence ‘Slavery is just’ is a change that develops moral thought in a more rational direction. In Diamond’s view, this particular form of moral change does not open up the possibility of distinguishing between what is rational ‘for us’ and what is rational ‘for them’. Rather, it enables a distinction between those who share in a developed form of rationality, one that offers better guidance for moral thinking, and those who do not. What the discussion of slavery exemplifies is that there is a form of moral change through which ‘it can become clear (though it may not always have been clear) that there is only one thing to think here’ (2019a: 172). Diamond’s point is not that it is impossible to think about how it would be to treat some people as natural slaves. We can imagine this, for example, and create fictions about it. Her point does not concern thinkability but rather rationality, that we refuse to even consider the view that some people are natural slaves as a morally acceptable view. As I understand Diamond, this is why we think we have a reason, in the rather special case of slavery, to call out the thinking of others as failed, as ‘having gone off the rails’ (2019a: 160), because we see no reasons speaking for a moral form of life where it is possible that some human beings may be held as slaves. What this change in our view of slavery allows us to see, according to Diamond, is that Wiggins is indeed right to claim that, rationally, there is really nothing else to think than that slavery is unjust – or that it is true that slavery is unjust. The understanding of moral rationality in play in Diamond’s thought is open to criticism on two fronts. Anyone positively inclined towards a traditional and universal view of rationality will object to describing the case of thinking about slavery as an example of moral change and will instead argue that embracing



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the truth of the thought that ‘slavery is unjust’ constitutes a move from falsehood to truth. Such an objection would be in line with the universalist thought identified at the beginning of this chapter. On the other hand, anyone more inclined towards a relativistic understanding of rationality will object to describing the moral change in the perception of slavery as a change in rationality or will at least argue that any talk of rationality would have to involve plural rationalities, and that the case of slavery is a historically specific and contextual conditioned change in one specific, culturally determined form of rationality. Such an objection would be in line with the relativist thought identified at the beginning of the chapter. In my interpretation, Diamond attempts to steer a course between these two extremes by trying to show that sometimes we, collectively, as members of a common life form, reach a point at which we have investigated all the possible reasons for and against a certain issue and found that all viable roads lead us to the same place, in this case the thought that slavery is unjust. Others (other people, other cultures, other thinkers) may travel through the same area, but they will, after travelling – or so Diamond claims – end up reaching the same conclusion, that there really is nothing else to think than that slavery is unjust. The mapped out of this area is a common human achievement, resulting in a change in moral rationality for the better. What Diamond shows is that there is a universal dimension to moral thinking, but also that moral thinking has historical and contextual conditions and is indeed subject to moral change.

Different Forms of Moral Guidance and Moral Change Diamond aims to present an example of moral change that has allowed us to give up certain forms of failed thought and share in a form of rationality that guides thought better. In my view, this still leaves two interesting questions to be explored. One is whether it is possible to provide support for Diamond’s idea that some forms of moral change in what guides moral thinking help shape rationality into the right form. I will return to this question in the next section. The other question is whether all forms of change in what guides moral thought are to be understood as shaping rationality in this way, or whether some of these changes open up the possibility of distinguishing between what is rational ‘for us’ and what is rational ‘for them’. I think the latter view is right and that Diamond only presents us with one (rather rare) form of change in what guides moral thinking. Furthermore, I think it is possible to bring to light these different forms of moral change in ethical guidance by investigating examples that differ from the dispute about slavery and connect more to the relativistic than the universal thought about moral change introduced in the beginning of this chapter. To proceed, I need to add another dimension to the discussion of truth in ethics, supplementing Diamond’s suggestion that ethical sentences are used as

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means of description, which guide moral thought (and which can be said to be true if they guide thinking well), with the suggestion that we also find descriptive uses of sentences in morality, for example, when a sentence is used to describe something that has moral relevance in a specific situation. That is, I would like to explore a distinction between uses of ethical sentences that establish means of description and what I will call uses of moral sentences in which we employ these means of description, that is, descriptive uses of sentences with moral relevance.7 What I want to bring out is a very general difference between descriptive and guiding uses of sentences, which implies that morally relevant sentences can have very different relations to truth. If we use descriptive moral sentences and are successful, then these uses result in true sentences, the negations of which are plainly false. One example of such a descriptive sentence (one that seems to offer itself at time of writing, that is, during the period of rioting after the death of George Floyd) is as follows: ‘In 2020, US police forces practised systemic racial profiling.’ There is much evidence to support that this sentence provides a correct description of reality – that it is true8 – and there is no awkwardness involved in labelling its negation as false. But in relation to the same moral issue, we could offer another sentence, ‘It is wrong for the police to practise systemic racial profiling’, which is not in any direct sense a description of reality, and in addition to which we may find it rather more difficult to say that its negation is plainly false. For many people, the sentence ‘It is right for the police to practise systemic racial profiling’ seems puzzling, infuriating and somewhat contradictory. For these people, it is not clear what it would mean to consider it morally right or good for the police to engage in racial profiling, which means that this use of the sentence seems to be excluded from language in a way that resembles the exclusion of more blatantly meaningless sentences. Thus, they would find that the sentence about the wrongness of racial profiling is similar to the sentence ‘Slavery is unjust’ in that they cannot see any rational reasons for having the opposite thought. At the same time, I know that racial profiling is an activity that is carried out (by the police in the United States in 2020, for example) and this may indicate that, for others, it is still an open question whether the police should make use of racial profiling. For such people, the sentence ‘It is right for the police to practise systemic racial profiling’ is still open to debate and ordinary disagreement. This raises the question of the difference between those who find the sentence puzzling or meaningless and those who see it as an intelligible object of debate (or consider it to be true, in the sense of guiding thought well). For the latter group, it must be the case that they have to consider not just the possibility that racial profiling may be an effective form of crime prevention, but also the possible truth of a number of more general assumptions, for example, that under some circumstances, it is morally good (or at least acceptable) to live in a country where people may be treated differently based on their race and where race itself may be a relevant factor in one’s standing in



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relation to law enforcement. They must be open to consider the possibility of a life in which racial profiling is not something to be opposed and fought, but something to be valued and supported. In contrast, those who see the thought that ‘It is right for the police to practise systemic racial profiling’ as an example of a failed thought, think that it leads down a road heading towards unacceptable assumptions, and they reject that this is a road that could in principle be travelled, holding that it would only lead us to a dead end where moral thinking is concerned. Here, we re-encounter Diamond’s idea of the asymmetry of ethical sentences, but in this case not as a universally accepted feature of a sentence, but rather as something contested. This could be a sign that racial profiling is at the centre of an ongoing moral change in rationality.9 Or it could be a sign of the possibility of differences in moral frameworks, that is, differences in what it would make sense for people to discuss based on whether they think that the sentence ‘It is right for the police to practise systemic racial profiling’ is open to dispute or not. If we turn to another example, it becomes even clearer that the asymmetry of a guiding ethical sentence does not always mark a change in rationality. We can imagine two friends, Peter and Paul, discussing the life crisis of a third, mutual friend, Ava, whose behaviour has become increasingly erratic and untrustworthy. Peter remarks that ‘Ava really needs our loyalty right now’, and while Paul agrees that loyalty in friendship is important, he nevertheless insists that the present situation calls, rather, for a friendly intervention. Peter’s remark is morally relevant, but it is also plainly descriptive, and the disagreement between the two friends is about whether it is true or not – whether Ava primarily needs loyalty or something else, such as an intervention from her friends. However, it is possible to connect this descriptive moral sentence to the guiding sentence ‘Loyalty is an important part of friendship’. This second, ethical sentence is shared by the two friends and in this discussion it has some appearance of asymmetry; it may, for example, be hard to find anyone who wholeheartedly disagrees with it in Peter and Paul’s community, and if the two met someone who really did disagree, this would lead to a wider discussion of their general understanding of friendship. Still, the negation of the guiding sentence, ‘Loyalty is not an important part of friendship’, does not seem puzzling or meaningless in the same way as the sentence ‘Slavery is just’ (or ‘It is right for the police to practise systemic racial profiling’, for that matter). It seems that Peter and Paul can consider, for example, whether an understanding of friendship as tied to loyalty is a resource that they ‘shall want or need’ (Diamond 1996a: 246), that is, whether this sentence guides a life with friendships that they want to live. However, this consideration does not directly concern their specific relationships with Ava or any other friend, but rather the way that they think about friendships, the kind of relationships they think that friendships are, and what they want and need them to be. Furthermore, we can imagine Peter and Paul meeting a person, Sue, from another culture perhaps, who thinks about friendship differently; she does not

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think that friendship has a special connection to loyalty and thus does not fully share their concept of friendship. We can say that Sue’s life with friendships is different, takes a different shape, because, in some ways, she has different expectations of friends and different duties towards them. This also means that Peter and Paul could encounter difficulties if they were to have a discussion with Sue about the challenges in their friendship with Ava. Peter and Paul could become puzzled and infuriated upon discovering that Sue does not expect people to live up to special duties of loyalty towards friends. Sue could become puzzled and infuriated upon discovering that Peter and Paul do have expectations of loyalty even towards friends who are unreasonable or even cruel. Their discussion could develop into something that looks like a form of extraordinary disagreement, with each party seeing the thinking of the other party as having gone off the rails. However, this example still differs markedly from the disputes about slavery. It is possible that if Sue were to describe her life with friendships, Peter and Paul could come to see the possibility and value of this way of living and they could, in light of their knowledge of Sue’s way of living, come to ascribe less significance to the guiding thought that loyalty is an important part of friendship. Peter and Paul’s lives with friendships could undergo a moral change. In my view, the difference between Peter and Paul’s two discussions about friendship is a difference in the forms of moral disagreement involved. The first discussion of their friendship with Ava is a clear example of ordinary disagreement, in contrast to their discussion with Sue, in which the guiding sentences of the two parties differ. The latter is an example of extraordinary disagreement that could have two different results, either one or both parties to see the thinking of the other side as having gone off the rails or a moral change occurs in the thinking of one or both parties. I want to offer a final example in which all of these different forms of disagreement are at play at one and the same time, namely, the discussion of what we should do in the face of climate change. For some, this question is debated within a common field of discourse, with shared guiding ethical sentences that are often consequentialist in character, concerned mainly with human welfare and leading to, for example, discussion of how to weigh initiatives that reduce CO2 emissions against other societal concerns, such as support for national health care, economic growth or the fight to end hunger globally. This is, for instance, the way that the goal to reduce climate change figures in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, alongside other pressing global concerns.10 In this discussion, the parties offer arguments for and against specific initiatives combatting climate change, but, within the vast field of human interest, these initiatives have no special status and often come up short, for example because the participants in the discussion are reluctant to make significant sacrifices for the sake of the climate. For others, concerns about climate change do carry special weight and can be given up only in special circumstances, when the cost, economically or in terms of some basic value or right, is too high. And, finally, there are participants in



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this discussion who see attempts to weigh initiatives that aim to reduce climate change against other social concerns as thinking having gone off the rails. One representative of this position is the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. For Thunberg, the issue of combatting climate change is not on an equal footing with other concerns, and she insists that it is simply irrational to claim that it is. As she puts it in an interview in Der Spiegel, ‘I am a realist. I see facts’ (Luley 2019). In her view, it is irrational, it is deluded, it is, to use Diamond’s phrase, a ‘mis-use of our thinking capacity’ (2019b: 161) if we think that climate change should only be addressed if the costs, nationally and globally, are not too high. In contrast, we could say that in Thunberg’s view, the consequences of not fighting climate change silence considerations about costs.11 Thus, her thinking is guided by the ethical sentence ‘Currently, climate change is humanity’s most important and overriding concern’. Furthermore, the form of moral rationality guided by this sentence shapes the way Thunberg lives: she is vegan, she never flies, she spends every Friday striking for climate action and almost all the rest of her spare time working to make politicians and the global community acknowledge the need to make drastic changes in response to climate change. What this shows, I think, is that what one is justified in labelling as morally rational or irrational is, in a very direct way, connected to the form of life in which one engages. I will explore this connection in the next section. One way to describe what Thunberg is doing is that she is fighting for a pervasive change in moral thinking. She insists that the view of climate change as just one moral and political concern among many is an example of failed thought, thinkable in principle but without any rational support, and she holds that this view must change to one guided by the idea that climate change is the overriding concern of humanity. Furthermore, her reason for working towards this change is that the form of life that will be available to human beings if we remain passive in the face of climate change is not a form of life that we may rationally ‘want or need’ – in the same way that life with slavery is not a form of life we may rationally ‘want or need’. However, for most people, even those who agree with Thunberg, this moral change (or, in Thunberg’s view, increase in rationality) is not (yet) a reality. That is, even if the fight against climate change has taken on an ethical, guiding role in the moral thinking of many people, it is still often only one ethical concern among others and, consequently, most people do not, like Thunberg, share in a form of rationality guided by the idea of climate change as an overriding moral concern. We can describe this situation in various ways. We can say that humanity is still travelling through the area of climate change and has not yet discovered where all the possible roads lead. Or we can say that here we encounter a difference between what is rational ‘for Thunberg’ and what is rational ‘for most people’. That is, even if Thunberg argues that moral thinking guided by an exclusive focus on fighting climate change is more rational, it is still an open question. Thus, this constitutes extraordinary disagreement, not between failed and rational thought, but between moral rationalities.

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Different Forms of Moral Change and Different Connections to Form(s) of Life Up to this point, I have argued that one type of moral change consists in change in what guides moral thinking, I have presented Diamond’s investigation of one instance of such change as a change of rationality and, finally, I have tried to show that this type of change comes in various forms. What I am interested in now is further exploring and expanding on the differences between various forms of change in what guides moral thinking. I will do this by invoking a Wittgensteinian notion of form of life. As my starting point, I take an element of Diamond’s view, which I consider particularly significant, but which she does not unfold in much detail, namely, her linking of changes in moral rationality with changes in what Wittgenstein calls form of life (see, e.g., 2009: §23).12 Diamond herself is doubtful whether the idea of a shared human form of life understood as ‘the common behaviour of mankind’ (Wittgenstein 2009: §206) is of much help in investigations of extraordinary disagreement: ‘I don’t think that the notion of a shared form of life goes very far when we think about the debate about slavery’ (2019a: 169), she states, arguing that the notion of form of life does not constitute a measure of objectivity in moral life and therefore does not do much work towards helping us answer ‘whether pro-slavery thinkers and anti-slavery thinkers were or weren’t answering the same question, or whether they were or weren’t, some of them, opting out of the moral point of view’ (2019a: 169). I agree with Diamond, but also think that the notion of form of life offers us a valuable tool when exploring how different forms of moral change connect to ways of living. In Anna Boncompagni’s words, Wittgenstein’s ‘idea of Lebensform was meant to enlighten the importance of directing our gaze towards the way we live, the way others live, the way imaginary others live, the way we may live’ (2015: 172). In line with this, I think the notion of form of life may help us to understand the difference between various forms of moral disagreement and moral change, especially the way that guiding ethical sentences connect in different ways to what we can think of as a form of life that we could want or need or come to share. In Diamond’s view, the rejection of the idea of ‘natural slaves’ reflects the fact that we have gone through a process of shaping human life with the result that if we exclude a specific group of people from the field of justice, we lose what Diamond and Wiggins call ‘any workable scheme of moral ideas’ (2019a: 155). For her, the discussion of slavery can be described as ‘a cumulative process; a process through which we construct a form of life, including how we understand what is and isn’t rational’ (2019a: 169), which means that ‘[w]ithin the way this form of life has developed, we can see to be blocked off, as failed thought, any conception of justice that excludes from justice-thought some group of human beings’ (171). As I interpret Diamond’s point, she shows that the discussion of slavery constitutes not just a development in rationality, but a development in our common or shared form of life, as this has come to depend



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on the idea that the moral point of view must be shared by all human beings, that it is a point of view whereby human beings are by nature equal. The development in rationality and human form of life are, in this way, two sides of the same coin. The connection between change in rationality and change in form of life also explains why some ideas seem thinkable without being so: these ideas no longer have a foothold in a morally relevant life form given how these lives have developed. The rejection of the idea of ‘natural slaves’ as thinking having gone off the rails is connected to a rejection of a life with slaves on the basis that it is a form of moral life that we cannot morally inhabit. It is at one and the same time a rejection of both a form of thinking and a form of living.13 According to this reading, the answer to the question of whether we should agree with Diamond’s description of the dispute about slavery as an example of moral change that constitutes an advancement of rationality depends on whether we think that earlier discussions of slavery have brought about a change in form of life whereby it is now impossible to see life with slavery as one that could be rationally chosen. This is the question that Diamond’s discussion gives rise to: whether we can see any value in living a life that cannot be shared with anyone, that is not guided by the thought ‘All humans are by nature equal’. The remaining question is how we are to understand the differences between the discussion of slavery and my other examples, of racial profiling, friendship and different ways of engaging in the discussion of climate change, that is, how we are to understand the differences in uses of guiding ethical sentences, changes in these uses and the associated differences in moral lives? The question is, how we are to understand the connection between guiding ethical sentences and form of life? In cases that reintroduce the possibility of distinguishing between what is rational ‘for us’ and what is rational ‘for them’, the notion of form of life must play a different role, because the evaluation of this guidance is tied not to what is rational or liveable, but rather to categories based on what we ‘want or need’ in moral life. This opens up the possibility of change in that which guides moral thinking as what we ‘want or need’ in moral life changes with time and in different contexts. It also opens up the possibility of examples of extraordinary disagreement that do not involve an opposition between failed thought and what guides thought well, but rather an opposition between what is rational ‘for us’ and what is rational ‘for them’, as in the discussion of friendship between Peter and Paul, on the one hand, and Sue, on the other. Such cases thus allow for relativity in moral thinking. I hope that I have laid the groundwork for the claim that we should understand the differences in our attitudes towards the possibility of moral change in the examples as connected to differences in our willingness to consider alternative ways of thinking and living, and thus to differences in our attitudes towards alternative forms of life (in the plural).14 In the example of seeing loyalty as a part of friendship, it seems to be possible to consider alternative ways of seeing the connection between loyalty and friendship and living with friendships

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(even if these alternatives are extremely hard to survey), indicating that in this and similar cases a moral change does not indicate a difference between what is morally rational and irrational, but rather a line between different but morally possible ways of living. In contrast, it is not possible to consider living with slavery as a real alternative in the same way. The asymmetry of the true sentence ‘Slavery is unjust’ (and maybe also of the sentence ‘It is wrong for the police to practise systemic racial profiling’) is tied to the absence of any morally acceptable way of living that would involve the negation of this sentence. When Wiggins argues that if we accept this sentence, we are depriving ourselves ‘of any workable scheme of moral ideas’ (2019a: 155), he captures the idea that some thoughts are excluded, whatever the circumstances, because they are, not unthinkable, but irrational both as ways of thinking and living. We can no longer ‘want or need’ to engage in a form of life with slavery. It is, however, important to note that the use of sentences such as ‘Slavery is unjust’ are limited to cases in which humankind has shut off a road of thought for good – a form of universal moral change. I think that in such cases it is illuminating to refer to ‘life form’ in the singular, because the increase in rationality relates to the outer limits of the ways of living that are rational for creatures such as us. The form of moral change described by Diamond is universal in the sense described in the introduction and, given this process of development in rationality, the sentence ‘Slavery is unjust’ is now a guide for rational moral thought. As the examples show, there are, however, other types of cases. There are cases in which the framework of rationality of a moral discussion is part of that which is debated and cases in which there is no consensus about where to place the road signs for rational thought, as in the case of the discussion of climate change. And there are cases, such as the case of friendship and loyalty, in which the sentences guiding rational thought differ and the forms of life differ, such that a road of thinking may appear to be closed in one life form, at least for the time being, while it may be open in another. In cases with different possible ways of thinking, the uses of guiding ethical sentences do not have exclusive ties to rationality, leaving room for various good ways of living. This allows for the possibility of thinking about, exploring and even coming to want to develop different forms of life, and thus the possibility of a type of moral change that is relative in the sense described at the beginning of this chapter, binding only in relation to particular circumstances and communities. This form of relative moral change is tied to the use of life forms in the plural because change here is to be understood against the background of several morally possible and rational ways of thinking and living.15 In my view, it is important to be aware of the possibility of both forms of moral change, as well as the difference between the two. The possibility of universal moral change is important because it demonstrates the possibility of cumulative development of rationality and calling out certain moral views as definitely closed off for rational thought. It is, however, also important to be aware that this form of moral change in rationality is rare and that moral



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differences and changes in moral thinking are often of another kind, understandable against the background of various different ways of living, thus allowing for several forms of equally rational but more or less incompatible forms of moral thought. One advantage of recognizing the possibility of a relative form of moral change is that it may open our eyes to real differences and distances in how we approach the world ethically and it may lead to the understanding that, in some cases, there is value in the ways of living and thinking on both sides of a moral difference or a moral change. This makes it possible to consider why it is of value (‘for us’ or ‘for them’) to live this way – to have different concepts of friendship, for example – as well as making it possible to consider whether our current moral life is a way of living that we want and need or whether we should indeed begin to develop and change our linguistic resources in ethics and work towards moral change. Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen is Professor of Practical Philosophy at the Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark. Her main research interests are Wittgensteinian ethics, applied ethics, especially ethics of health, as well as the status of moral philosophy. She is the author of Moral Philosophy and Moral Life (Oxford University Press, 2020), and she is currently working on a project on contextual ethics. She is director of the Centre for Philosophy of Health and Ethics, also at University of Southern Denmark, and she serves as Chair of the Independent Research Fund Denmark for the Humanities.

Notes   1. I have presented earlier versions of this chapter at two conferences, ‘Logic and Ethics: The Philosophy of Cora Diamond’ at the University of Leipzig in 2018 and ‘Life and Ethics. A View from the Ordinary’ at Sapienza University, Rome, in 2019. I want to thank James Conant, Gilad Nir, Johannes Sudau and Piergiorgio Donatelli for inviting me to talk at these events and the audiences at both for their comments and constructive discussion. I also want to thank the editors of this volume, Cecilie Eriksen and Nora Hämäläinen, for perceptive and insightful comments that made me think again, and – hopefully – think better.   2. In the following, I will make use of a rough distinction between ‘ethics’/‘ethical’ and ‘morality’/‘moral’, using the ‘e-words’ in discussions of abstract reflections on moral matters and the ‘m-words’ in discussions of how these matters unfold and are experienced in moral life. The purpose of the distinction is heuristic; it is made in an attempt to increase the clarity of the following and should not be taken to reflect some deeper difference between what is ethical and what is moral.   3. The idea of the universality of ethics is, of course, not universally accepted, neither in moral philosophy nor in moral life, and there will be differences in the degree of acceptance across positions in moral philosophy and across different people, cultures and historical periods. Furthermore, the same point also applies to the idea of the relativity of ethics.   4. In my view, the philosopher K.E. Løgstrup provides us with one of the best descriptions of how to combine the insights into the universality and the context-bound nature of

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ethics by claiming, first, that the fundamental, and actually the only, ethical demand is a completely universal demand to care for the other, and, second, that any answer to this demand can only be settled with reference to the particularities of the concrete situation: the people involved, the circumstances, the possibilities available and so on (Løgstrup 2020). I argue for this way of reading Løgstrup in Christensen 2020a, chapter 4. In Christensen 2020b, I argue for the pervasive importance of context in moral life.   5. Looking at how meaning is established in the use of sentences is a fundamental move in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (cf. Wittgenstein 2009: §43). In later writings, Diamond also connects this idea to Wittgenstein’s view of ethics in the Tractatus; see Diamond 2000.   6. Wiggins’s claim appears in an exchange between him and Bernard Williams on the morality of slavery. The discussion originates from a 1995 issue of Ratio dedicated to the question of truth and objectivity in ethics, to which both philosophers contributed.   7. I am not sure whether Diamond would endorse this way of distinguishing between descriptive and guiding uses of sentences in ethics, but some support for the distinction can be found in places where she talks about a tension between two different ways of talking and thinking about ethics, ‘between the idea of moral discourse as a sphere of discourse, with its subject matter, and the idea that there are no limits to what may be thought of in such a way as to be morally interesting, that is, to belong to ethics’ (1997: 83). Diamond does not push for a choice between these two ways of thinking. Instead, she continues, ‘[t]he attractive response to this tension would be to suggest that … both ways of thinking about ethics are present and important in what we want to pick out as ethics; something would be lost if we were to leave out either of the two modes of thought’ (ibid.).   8. For an article backing up this claim, see Hassett-Walker 2020.   9. As Nora Hämäläinen notes in a discussion of a change in the conception of sex disambiguation surgery performed on children who are born with ambiguous sex, the process of moral change may be drawn out, messy and somewhat bewildering: ‘Thinking of the change (e.g. over sex disambiguation) as a complete paradigm shift (within the individual or in a society) is in many cases not true to the facts. A consideration of the pros and cons may leave us bewildered, equally capable of seeing the operation as “helping” and as “violating”, at least until a more or less stable collective interpretation of the matter is achieved’ (2017: 57–58). 10. See https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals. 11. John McDowell introduces this metaphor for the virtuous person’s appreciation of situations in which reasons other than the morally right one fall away as irrelevant; see McDowell 1979. Please note that I am not using the framework surrounding the metaphor in McDowell’s work and do not take a stance regarding whether this means that Thunberg should be considered fully virtuous. 12. For an overview of Wittgenstein’s concept of form of life, see Boncompagni 2015. 13. What I present here is my interpretation of the connection between Diamond’s idea of change in moral rationality and life form. I am rather uncertain as to whether Diamond would, in fact, agree with it. 14. There are examples of the use of the tool of forms of life (in the plural) in Wittgenstein’s works, for example, when he notes, ‘What has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life’ (2009: 192) and when he reminds us that ‘to imagine a language means to imagine a life-form’ (§19). 15. This possibility of change can also be elucidated by looking at the connection between life form and Weltbild in Wittgenstein’s later thinking. I explicate this connection in Christensen 2011.



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References Anscombe, G.E.M. 1958. ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy 33(124): 1–19. Boncompagni, Anna. 2015. ‘Elucidating Forms of Life: The Evolution of a Philosophical Tool’, special issue, ‘Wittgenstein and Forms of Life’, eds Danièle Moyal-Sharrock and Piergiorgio Donatelli, Nordic Wittgenstein Review 4: 155–75. Chappell, Sophie-Grace. 2020. ‘Review Essay: Cora Diamond: Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going on to Ethics’, Ethics 130(4): 588–608. Christensen, Anne-Marie Søndergaard. 2011. ‘What Matters to Us: Wittgenstein’s Weltbild, Rock and Sand, Men and Women’, Humana.Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies 18: 141–63. . 2020a. Moral Philosophy and Moral Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 2020b. ‘What Is Context in Moral Philosophy?’, special issue, ‘Contextual Ethics’, eds C. Eriksen and A.M.S. Christensen, SATS – Northern Journal of Philosophy 21(2): 159–78. Diamond, Cora. 1996. ‘Wittgenstein, Mathematics, and Ethics: Resisting the Attractions of Realism’, in Hans D. Sluga and David G. Stern (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 226–60. . 1997. ‘Realism and Resolution: Reply to Warren Goldfarb and Sabina Lovibond’, Journal of Philosophical Research 22: 75–86. . 2000. ‘Ethics, Imagination and the Attractions of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’, in A. Crary and R. Read (eds), The New Wittgenstein. London: Routledge, pp. 149–73. . 2019a. ‘Truth in Ethics: Williams and Wiggins’, in Benjamin de Mesel and Oskari Kuusela (eds), Ethics in the Wake of Wittgenstein. London: Routledge, pp. 149–79. (Also published as chapter 7 in Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going on to Ethics.) . 2019b. Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going on to Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hämäläinen, Nora. 2007. ‘Three Metaphors Toward a Conception of Moral Change’, Nordic Wittgenstein Review 6(2): 47–69. Hassett-Walker, Connie. 2020. ‘The Racist Roots of American Policing: From Slave Patrols to Traffic Stops’, The Conversation, 4 June. Retrieved 20 May from https:// theconversation.com/the-racist-roots-of-american-policing-from-slave-patrols-totraffic-stops-112816. Løgstrup, K.E. 2020. The Ethical Demand. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luley, Peter. 2019. ‘Ich bin Realistin. Ich sehe Fakten’, Der Spiegel, 1 April. Retrieved 20 May 2021 from https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/tv/anne-will-mit-greta-thunbergich-bin-realistin-ich-sehe-fakten-a-1260424.html. McDowell, John. 1979. ‘Virtue and Reason’, The Monist 62(3): 331–50. United Nations. 2020. ‘Take Action for the Sustainable Development Goals’. Retrieved 20 May 2021 from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainabledevelopment-goals/. Wiggins, David. 1995. ‘Objective and Subjective in Ethics, with Two Postscripts about Truth’, Ratio 8(3): 243–58. Williams, Bernard. 1995. ‘Truth in Ethics’, Ratio 8(3): 227–36. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Philosophische Untersuchungen, revised 4th edn, eds P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

12 Two Historical Periods within One Human Breast Niklas Forsberg

‘Father’ – Variations on a Concept ‘What is a good father?’ This question appears to be clear and unambiguous, and we all instinctively feel that we have something to say in response to it. Answering this question in a satisfactory way may be difficult and I am sure that there are many opinions and beliefs about what a good father is nowadays that are in tension. But it does not render us speechless and we (we, inside a given, though perhaps loosely bounded, cultural setting, in my own case a variety of the early twenty-first-century Northern European mainstream) do not expect our various answers and emphases to be radically different. In order to start thinking clearly about how such answers come about, and how they are grounded, we need a couple of imaginative examples. First, imagine Director Magnusson, fifty-eight years old, the director of one of Scotland’s largest steel companies, founder of a renowned business and chair of a social network (for men of importance). Father of three. In 1912, he was interviewed by a local newspaper and was asked this very question: ‘What is a good father?’ Director Magnusson stressed the importance of being a provider for the household and ‘setting a good example’. It was important to him that the children learn good manners and he appreciated good education, discipline and respect. He mentioned the importance of morning prayer and going to church each Sunday. These are the things ‘good father’ means to him, as tasks placed on his shoulders. He added, at the very end, that he sometimes played with his children too. Next, imagine Alice, thirty-four. She works as a social worker in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She also has three children. In 2021, she participated in a sociological study (of the qualitative kind) in which the same question was asked. Alice’s answers were distinctively different. Our imagined Alice



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emphasized things like the importance of the dad’s presence in the children’s daily life, participation in play, reading bedtime stories, cooking and planning field trips and vacations that the children would like (and possibly benefit from). If the kids need assistance to get to hockey practice or piano lessons or a build-a-robot-course, Alice stressed the importance of knowing that the father not only takes part in keeping the family’s weekly schedule running, but also takes the initiative to organize things and is prepared to reshuffle his own meetings and so on. A good father today is supportive of her career choices and makes sure to co-ordinate his own ‘extracurricular’ activities with her, so that she can attend her choir practice and karate class. Of course, he is expected to be faithful, because ‘serial monogamy’ has become the established way of describing the most common form of ordering one’s life where relationships are concerned in Western, secularized (speaking loosely) society with liberal (broadly speaking) aspirations. If one thinks that these brief imagined examples of two lives (in which the same word plays a central role, though it is inflected differently) make sense, one should also see that what a ‘good father’ is, has changed. Therefore, it would seem strange to insist that the two notions of a good father are the same and mean the same thing. Perhaps one could even say that we are confronted with two concepts of ‘father’. Of course, it is probably inevitable that someone with naturalist or scientistic inclinations – that is, a person that thinks that everything of importance can and should be explained by means of scientific explorations of effects and causes in the natural (physical and biological) world – will say something like ‘Yes, there is a sense in which these notions have changed, but that is just a matter of preference and new evaluative patterns. What a father is, does not change; that is settled biologically. A father is a father is a father, no matter how one evaluates things!’ Well, is that so? Suppose you grow up with a mum and dad, in a perfectly ‘normal’ (in the sense of ‘common’) way. Not the best of upbringings, not the worst. Not the most adventurous of families, not the quietest. Neither perfect harmony, nor recurrent fights. Not the best neighbourhood, not the worst. You have a sibling or two. You are close but not joined at the hip. However, one day, an episode from the past resurfaces and confronts your mother. A DNA test is taken on a request from a man claiming to be your biological father and, as it turns out, the episode was not as self-contained as it might have seemed. It has some rather significant reverberations. Your father is not your father. The man from the past is in your DNA. How a scenario like this will pan out is certainly not given. But one can easily imagine at least two likely, almost opposing, ways in which it can unfold. Either this new information affects you profoundly or it does not. This depends on how one inflects the concept of father – and that, as it turns out, is a rather complex matter. This is a moment, one could say, when one’s understanding of a concept is put to the test and one part of this particular form of conceptual hesitancy is caused by new knowledge about a biological fact. Or, to put it more succinctly: one thing that one would have to consider in a situation such as this

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is how much weight one is inclined to attribute to this biological fact as a feature of one’s concept of fatherhood, which may also include ways of discovering the weight such features already have – and the ‘how much weight’ one attributes to the biological fact is not determined by the biological fact itself. If the imagined ‘you’ finds that the biological fact is of less importance, you might very well say ‘You are not my father’ to your biological father. To insist that this would be a false claim, on the grounds that it contradicts a biological fact, would be to misunderstand language, the function of concepts, the grammar of our lives, as it were. For this is not a sentence one could say to just anyone. It is precisely because that fact exists and challenges you that the point of saying it comes about – and what is left of meaning something, if we remove the point of saying something (cf. Baz 2003)? Walk up to a complete stranger, half your age, and say ‘You are not my father’ …1 What would those words mean? Most likely, doing this would only be considered a frightening act. It would be a form of radicalized semantical extremism to say that this was merely an expression of a true statement. Walk up to the person who really is your father and say it – and you’ll find no shortage of meaning. In this case – when the biological father is told that the biological fact does not fundamentally change the son’s or daughter’s concept of a father – saying it (‘You are not my father’) is a way of clarifying for oneself and others the role played by biology. There is a point in saying that the utterance ‘You are not my father’ weighs heaviest in cases in which the father who is being denied actually is the biological father. Notably, one can be denied as a (rightful) father in more ways than one (the biological). To deny the fatherhood of one’s father is indeed to reject him – based on, say, deeds or character flaws or crimes or disappointments. This can, of course, be done to various degrees, from scenarios in which a newly self-conscious pre-teen child discovers that her dad is an embarrassment, to scenes in which one has to cut off all bonds in order to survive. But, again, these scenarios build on the fact that dad is dad. Similarly, one can easily imagine someone saying ‘My father is not my father’ when confronted with these new facts. Such a response could perhaps appear to be a complete surrender to the importance of biology. But it could equally well be an expression of a sense that the concept of fatherhood is not fundamentally challenged by the genetic evidence. One can imagine the imagined ‘you’ saying this (‘My father is not my father’) to a friend, out of a wish to discuss the matter with someone you trust. I picture the imagined you wanting to hold on to your father, your ‘non-biological father’, as your real father, pushing the DNA test down the ladder of importance. Picture this expression in this context as a way of retrieving a notion of fatherhood that was challenged by a biological interruption. Thus, actually using father for your ‘non-biological father’ puts an emphasis on how the concept of fatherhood is to be inflected in this person’s life. Interestingly, if you had used the father’s name, it would have signalled less intimacy in the relation, rather than more (and less still if you had used his name and surname: ‘Dietrich Ericson is not my father’).



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So where does this leave us in relation to the initial example of Director Magnusson’s and Alice’s different concepts of father, one trying to describe what a good father means in 1912, the other in 2021? First, it makes it clear that the notion of father cannot be exhaustively elucidated by reducing it to a biological issue. But the example of the newly discovered biological father also shows that biology is never completely insignificant. Biology is, one might say, part of the grammar of that concept. It is one of the many features of life that feed into the concept, partaking in forming the connotative logic in which it has its sense. Now, if we were to ask Director Magnusson and Alice what they think the relevance of biology is to their respective understandings of ‘fatherhood’, it again seems likely that their answers would differ. Director Magnusson lived in a time when the notion of ‘bastard’ signified a person born outside of marriage, with an absent father, and therefore not a legitimate offspring. Alice lives in a time when ‘bastard’ is just foul language, a way to scorn just about anyone – and in Alice’s time, the ‘literal’ meaning of ‘bastard’ as an ‘illegitimate offspring’ is often characterized as an etymological curiosity. So it is fair to assume that biology played a role then (for Director Magnusson) than it does now (for Alice). What I think it is most important to recognize, though, is that the shift in connotative logics that can be discerned by reflecting upon various imagined contexts of use – and the very brief imaginative acts presented here have only scratched the surface of Magnusson’s and Alice’s concepts of fatherhood – does not come about because we have discovered a new fact (such as ‘biology doesn’t determine questions of fatherhood’) or because some clever and intelligent person managed to sell a new definition to the world. Religion; marital law; notions of work, sex and gender; the birth and rise of feminism and communal forms of childcare; and all sorts of cultural and sociological differences (this list could obviously be made longer) feed into this particular conceptual change. That is, when a concept such as ‘good father’ changes, much more has changed than the concept of ‘good father’. Words have a life, are lived, are lived by, are sometimes drained of content, and that means that conceptual changes are matters of changes in life and how we lead it. Furthermore, ‘My father is not my father’ is, in many of its sensible contexts of use, a sentence in which the word ‘father’ occurs twice, expressing two different concepts. So this should lead us to say that not only do concepts change over time, and ‘belong’, as it were, to different forms of life. The same word can ‘carry’ two different concepts in a single utterance. Thus, meaning is at least as much a matter of carrying or failing to carry as it is a matter of lexicons and grammar.2 The idea, mentioned at the beginning, that a father is a father is a father, and how we think about that is merely a matter of personal preference and new evaluative norms, now begins to crumble. For there now seems to be very little reason to say that two ‘epochs’ simply have different evaluative norms about the same ‘thing’. The notion of ‘fatherhood’ is one of those notions that so clearly illustrates that concepts are something one earns, or lives up to – or fails to live up to – especially if one reaches into the depths of that concept. Sure, not all

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fathers make enough of an effort to be good fathers and some might even want to deny their fatherhood, but in the context of utterances such as ‘You are not my father’ or ‘You may not be my biological father, but you are my father’ (as they come into play in similar ways to the examples given above), it is clear that the notion of fatherhood carries, as it were, goodness within it. To put it technically, ‘good’ in ‘good father’ is not a modifier in the same way as ‘tall’ or ‘short’ can be said to be.3 Being good, or failing to be all that one thinks one ought to be as a father, or simply denying the responsibility to struggle to be good – all of these are, as it were, internally related to the concept of father. It is one of those concepts one lives up to and seeks to earn one’s right to carry. It is also one of those concepts with which most fathers feel they still have a long way to go… Since the evaluative core of the notion seems to be inherent to many of the uses we make of it, we must also be open to the following thought: not only does the concept of ‘father’ change, but the concept of ‘the good’ also changes. If ‘the good’ is more than just a form of personal preference or subjective evaluation, though not a specific ‘thing’, one may perhaps talk about it as one of the words that gives us a sense of direction, or even pulls us in a certain direction. What my examples relating to how differently one can understand the notion of a ‘good father’ show is that when a concept changes, it is not a matter of one word simply shifting in meaning, a point that may need to be emphasized. Put differently, when a word shifts in meaning, it does not do so in isolation, but rather in relation to a number of other changes in various social registers of human life (including, of course, changes that are effected in the natural sciences too). What has changed is not merely the sense of a term, but the (connotative) logic. A ‘connotative logic’ is not a thing and it is with good reason that thinkers whose work veers in this direction resort to metaphors, such as riverbeds and fabrics and webs.4 One thing that these example show is how ‘structures of value’, as Iris Murdoch called them, are built up all the time, ‘continuously’ and ‘imperceptibly’ (Murdoch 1999a: 329), and how central features of morality (including the sense we attribute to obviously moral words such as ‘good’ and ‘right’) constantly take form and reshape themselves. Morally acute events and situations feed on this. What we now need to add to that thought is that ‘goodness’ does not exist outside these varying connotative logics, structures, riverbeds, fabrics or webs. But are we now tempted to think that meaning ‘comes from’ or ‘belongs to’ different epochs – as if their sense is clear if they ‘fit’ their particular period and maybe even context? I think that would be a rushed conclusion. Imagine now a third person, Johannes, born in Stockholm in 1952, again a father of three. He studied history, sociology and literature at university and attained a master’s degree. His parents were conservative and his upbringing resembled Director Magnusson’s more than Alice’s. However, his own cultural setting during his formative years at university was in the midst of radical changes. Intellectually, heavily influenced by his wife’s argumentative skills, he started to endorse, and tried to implement, liberal ideas about family,



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parenthood, religion, marriage and so on and so forth. They talked about moving to a collective. They went to great lengths to make sure they did not colour-code their children when buying clothes and struggled hard to ensure that their daughter played with cars (too) and that their sons got dolls (though certainly not Barbies!) for Christmas. They experimented by widening their sexual comfort zones. When the young family visited Johannes’s parents, Johannes was, more than once, politely reprimanded for not correcting his kids and was forced to present arguments about why their kids had not been baptized. Johannes struggled. He did not feel like he was succeeding at being a good father. Nor did he feel like a good son. When he sometimes prayed secretly on Sunday mornings, it felt like he was betraying his wife, and he even created various stories that he told himself about how these secret prayers were not in any way an expression of his being a Christian; rather, he was merely making wishes for his children and their family in order to, as it were, maintain his contemporary secular liberal-mindedness intact. During dinners with his parents, Johannes found it necessary, but increasingly difficult, to side with his wife when confronted with arguments about the importance of teaching children ‘respect for the older generations’. A part of him – a part that became increasingly difficult to suppress – wanted to say that his mother and father were right. Johannes was indeed worried about how wild and uncivilized his kids could be. And when he lost his job, Johannes sank into a deep depression, which he would hide through poor efforts at painting and playing in a progressive band that wrote songs that were too difficult for the band members to play with accuracy and the required level of effortlessness. On dark days, he would wonder if all three children were really his. One way (there are others) to describe Johannes’s situation is to say that he was torn between two different concepts of fatherhood. Ideals clashed with each other and it became unclear to him what goals he should be darting towards in order to be true to himself and to his children. He existed in the midst of a conceptual renegotiation that he was unable to navigate comfortably. He wanted to be a good father, but what that actually meant was rather unclear to him. The world of his parents and his own youth, on the one hand, and the world of his reasoned beliefs and his intellectual conviction that he had to play his part in the cultural revolution, on the other, were bearing down on him and he found that he was unable to feel at home just about anywhere. He did not own the concept of a father. Perhaps one could say that Johannes existed at an historical (in a broad sense of the term) juncture, one foot on each side of a fissure, feeling the earth under his feet moving further apart.

Conceptual Uneasiness At this point, I would like to insert (if it has not arrived naturally already) a certain uneasiness with the terminology I have used to present and discuss the three figures (Director Magnusson, Alice and Johannes) and their varying

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understandings of the concept of a good father. I have described the differences between the three forms of life in terms of conceptual differences, and I have described the differences between Director Magnusson and Alice as a question of different concepts (for the same word), whereas I described Johannes as dithering between concepts while using one word. The risk of using this terminology is that one may be led to think about this in overly intellectualistic terms, as if it were a matter of three parents endorsing different doctrines, or ideas, by defining their concepts differently (or, in Johannes’s case, by dithering between two concepts while using one word). But that clearly is not the case. The uneasiness one may feel in calling these difficulties ‘conceptual’ stems from how tempting it may be to think of the study of concepts as merely (a word of which one should always be suspicious when it occurs in a philosophical text) a linguistic matter, a question pertaining to ‘the philosophy of language’ but not – perhaps even ‘and therefore not’ – to morality and cultural analysis and politics. What the three parents’ struggles with the concept of ‘father’ show is that such a view of language is not true to the facts. Conceptual change is not disconnected from social change, and owning a concept is not a matter of agreeing with a definition, but is rather a matter of leading a life where one is at home, as it were, in one’s language. Compartmentalization and specialization in intellectual reflection come in here, more as distortions than as sharp tools to be used to facilitate conceptual clarity. One may, if one wishes, see Johannes’s struggles as a result of a failure of living, rather than an intellectual error concerning the sense of our words. And it is in that sense, as experiences of either being at home in one’s language or feeling a vague sense of discomfort with one’s efforts to word the world, that I want to talk about these phenomena as conceptual. Thus, the struggle for conceptual clarity is not necessarily a matter of precision in definitions. It is also important to highlight that an exploration of conceptual ways of owning or failing to own concepts will inevitably include studies (of concepts) that are at once historical and anthropological. Conceptual clarity is, in that sense, cultural clarity. (I will return to this thought below.) The dialectic of this chapter thus far has been as follows: I began by inviting you to imagine two persons who were living at different times in order to illustrate that even seemingly simple concepts such as ‘father’ vary and, in that sense, resist compartmentalization and objectification. I am thereby trying to show that even as simple a notion as ‘father’ has a historical and processual character that results in all efforts to attain a final definition being partial and specific. Obviously, by showing how words stay the same while concepts change (cf. Murdoch 1999a, p. 322), one challenges traditional philosophical theories about what a concept is, for it is commonly assumed that a concept is stable and functions as a guarantee that all our ‘uses of language’, which so clearly vary, have something in common to fall back on. (For those who need an overview of traditional concepts of the concept, see Margolis and Laurence 2021.) It would probably be possible to write a paper in which one critiques standardized theories of what a concept is – some say concepts are abstract entities,



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some semantical properties, some mental images, and so on and so forth – and then proposes an alternative metaphysics of the concept of a concept. That kind of confrontational work – proposing a theory as an alternative to existing theories – would, however, betray its own insights and contribute to a very different discourse. Instead of suggesting a new metaphysics of concepts or an ‘alternative theory of language’, I seek here to let the examples themselves speak, making conceptual change evident and necessary for us to think about if we want to think clearly about almost anything. In that respect, Director Magnusson, Alice and Johannes are, in a certain sense, not examples of anything else. They work in a different way: they suggest that conceptual clarity is not a matter of more theorizing about language, but rather a matter of efforts to widen one’s sensibility to encompass broader cultural and temporal horizons. Theorization often works in the opposite direction, functioning as the countering effort. The aim in this chapter is not to propose a hypothesis and back it up with arguments, but to let things, as it were, fall into place. The longer a reader nods along, the harder it will be for him or her to hold on to certain theoretical theses – but that is of secondary importance to me. At the very beginning of this chapter, we were introduced to two characters with two different concepts of father – illustrating the difference between the notions of a good father in two different historical epochs. Supposedly stable features, such as biology, also turned out to be of varying significance.5 This gives us a picture of the development of a concept as a historical succession (‘In that time x meant …’). The introduction of Johannes, though, hopefully makes that picture seem simplistic. Johannes displays how conceptual clarity has a ‘processual’ character and the appeal of his choosing between placing his feet in ‘either camp’ is meant to gradually decrease. Director Magnusson and Alice differ from Johannes in the sense that they are, as it were, observing or reporting, whereas Johannes is struggling. Director Magnusson and Alice are not actively renegotiating their respective concepts of fatherhood. That is why they can act and think as if their concepts are not really vulnerable to change. Thus, there is a sense in which Director Magnusson and Alice offer a picture that is too static – one of ‘competing conceptual schemes’ or different ‘forms of life’, in which one can disregard the extent to which our concepts actually are lived. Johannes did not have that luxury and perhaps one could say that as long as Johannes thinks that he is required to choose one of the two sides, conceptual clarity is unattainable. If the examples engage one’s imagination, they should lead one to see that there is a bit of Johannes in all of us (and, thus, in Director Magnusson and Alice too). The point of this chapter is not to outline the history of the concept ‘father’. The dialectic of this chapter is darting towards a different aim: making us think about conceptual clarity as a matter of clarity concerning conceptual change. The examples work if they lead the reader to say, ‘There’s so much more that needs to be taken into consideration!’ The examples fail if they lead the reader to yearn for a stricter definition of ‘concept’. The dialectic of the chapter has been to move us from one, to two, to a nagging sense of the need for further

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elaboration, and thereby to open us up to the thought that values do not exist apart from these fabrics, riverbeds, structures, forms of life or whatever name one prefers to give them. A concept such as father is complex. The goodness or badness of each father is not something that can be decided from a perspective outside all of this and it is not an additional evaluation placed on top of ‘that’.

Convening: Two Senses of ‘Conventional’ In what I have said above, it is clear that we go wrong in philosophy not only when we think that the route to conceptual clarity must involve an effort to find increasingly precise articulations of an already existing (strangely atemporal) singular conceptual content. By showing that ‘meaning’ is not a thing that is ‘out there’ for us to discover through various forms of linguistic excavations, but rather a matter of convening in language (since concepts are subject to change), one must also confront the worry that language is ‘merely conventional’ (and, as I said above, the word ‘merely’ should be seen as a warning sign). Talking about conceptual clarity in terms of the effort to lead a life in which one is at home in one’s language is also a way of underlining the ways in which sense is a matter of convening in language and conceptual clarity is cultural clarity. Obviously, as soon as one says that, two familiar threats seem to emerge from the shadows. One is that of linguistic (and hence ethico-political) conservatism. But talking about ways of convening in language, that is, sharing not only words but concepts, is not necessarily a matter of accepting what is given, of endorsing traditions or customs. Convening in language becomes an issue at precisely those moments when one recognizes a form of uneasiness, or hesitancy, about how our concepts currently are turned. The way that leads onwards – backwards or forwards (into a lesser known)? – is what is up for grabs. To seek to convene (out of discomfort or concern), to seek attunement, is not a matter of agreeing with an imagined status quo. Sometimes it is a matter of becoming Rosa Parks, sitting where one is not ‘supposed’ to sit, making it clear that the world has changed, even though one’s society has not seen or accepted or tolerated the change – which also means that ‘moral saints’ are responsive too and not angels that descend to us with new meanings and truths. At other times, it is a matter of displaying that something of the utmost importance is on the verge of being lost. Even ‘the rule of law’ is always vulnerable to change. And when these changes are not in tune with the world, we create space for tyrannical decrees. What is inevitable, though, is conceptual change. For as our lives change, so do our concepts. And one of the things I wanted to show in my fairly long discussion of my three imagined parents is that these changes rarely happen haphazardly or without reason or without an obvious and wellgrounded rootedness in the cultural climate, in nature; that is, they are natural in a difficult but not banal sense.



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By emphasizing that the meaning of our words is subject to change and that ‘historicity’ is thus a central element of fruitful philosophical inquiries (cf. Murdoch 1999b: 84; Forsberg 2018), and by making it clear that these changes cannot be disconnected from human efforts to convene, or seek agreement, in various contexts, it seems natural to say that language is therefore conventional. And, at this point, the other familiar threat emerges from the shadows. As soon as one says that language, or meaning, is conventional and subject to historical change, the worry about linguistic relativism (a sibling of linguistic conservatism), as well as the fear that we may ‘convene in language’ in very harmful ways, will surface. And rightly so. I do think that the risk of ‘us’ convening in language in harmful ways is a danger, but it is also a risk that is easy to overestimate, or, better, a risk that is easily misunderstood. First of all, there are at least two ways of thinking about ‘convening in language’ or thinking about sense as conventional. In one, the notion of ‘conventional’ is understood as more or less equivalent to ‘contractual’. That is, we think of agreement as something that has been deliberated upon, something we have established by democratic-like procedures setting up ‘rules’ – which inevitably leave some people disappointed. This ‘contractual’ understanding of conventionality opens the door to both relativistic worries and worries that language is merely a human affair, in which ‘the world’ is set aside. Another way of thinking about conventionality is to think of it as very natural ways of being together, as convening in the form of responsiveness to each other and to the world. One may, for example, say that there is no law of nature that forces us to stand on the right side of an escalator so that people in a hurry can walk by on our left side. In that sense, ‘standing on the right side, walking on the left’ is conventional. But it is conventional in that it is a form of responsiveness to each other and to the world. Habits and customs grow and are established by these forms of responsiveness (cf. Forsberg 2022, chapter 7). The temptation to think of the conventional as something that is merely conventional, and thereby a form of regulation that constitutes a breach with nature, should now begin to loosen its grip. As Stanley Cavell remarks: ‘Very little of what goes on among human beings, very little of what goes on in so limited an activity as a game, is merely conventional (done solely for convenience)’ (1979: 119). The number of players in a football (soccer) team is conventional; there is no natural law that says 10 + 1 here and one can easily imagine that these numbers could have been different. But the idea of one on one on a surface of 100 x 60 metres seems strained or simply unpractical, as does the idea of 67 + 14 players on each team. So ‘conventional’, in this sense, does not mean ‘unnatural’ and it is never, or hardly ever, a matter of following one person’s whims. Responsiveness is the key here – responsiveness to others and to nature. Thus, ‘our conventions’ are not best thought of in terms of external decrees, as if they were idiosyncratic laws formed by a wicked queen and her allies. With these thoughts in mind, we may now begin to see that it is in order to stay true to the concept of fatherhood that the concept of father needs to change and that this may also mean that some fathers will think of their sons as

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bad fathers, since their sons’ efforts to be true to the concept require a different form of responsiveness as they are responding to a changed nature. Of course, since our language is our own, since our concepts are our own, and since earning these concepts may have required a great deal of work, it is perhaps inevitable that the older generation will sometimes find the younger generation’s efforts to stay true to these concepts as deviations and perhaps even falsifications. Having argued that conceptual change is inevitable, for concepts are lived and life changes, and that older generations will sometimes think that the younger generation’s ways of conceptualizing constitute distortions, one question naturally arises: well, aren’t the older generations sometimes right? And, of course, they sometimes are. The distinction between conventions as natural reactions or forms of responsiveness and conventions as contractual can also be described as a distinction between a thought that is being transformed from within that thought’s practice and a thought that is being introduced by means of decree. For contracts are formed when we have failed to convene naturally, just as laws come about not only to reflect a given society’s habits, but also to explicitly go against the will of some to the benefit of the whole. If one group has decided that something is the rule or the norm, others will naturally feel excluded. This way of explaining the distinction helps us see why a new way of understanding a concept may sometimes be a distortion. Only masters of a game, perfect slaves to that project, are in a position to establish conventions which better serve its essence. This is why deep revolutionary changes can result from attempts to conserve a project, to take it back to its idea, keep it in touch with its history. To demand that the law be fulfilled, every jot and tittle, will destroy the law as it stands, if it has moved too far from its origins. Only a priest could have confronted his set of practices with its origins so deeply as to set the terms of Reformation. (Cavell 1979: 121)

The term ‘perfect slaves’ may invite romanticized postures, but the key issue here relates to who is ‘in a position to establish conventions which better serve its essence’. What this means, in my view, is that there is a sense in which one must be not only ‘attuned with one’s time’, as it were, but also, importantly, exploring a concept from within. Does this mean that one needs to be an ‘expert in the field’? It seems strange to say that only fathers are entitled to reform the concept of ‘father’, for two reasons. One is obvious: we are all, in one way or another, part of the field of play where there are fathers. The other is the recollection that what a father is, and means to us, cannot be determined in isolation. What is true, though, is that all fathers must explore the concept of father, just as each married couple is assigned the task of exploring the concept of marriage. Only participants in ‘the game’ can lead the conversation in which the concept becomes successfully renegotiated. In a similar vein, only a master of chess can argue that we need to change the rules of the game to stay true to the game. Making sure that a concept is ‘in tune with its time’ is thus not a



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popularity contest, or a claim that concepts need to tag along, whichever way the wind blows. As an example, think about the ways in which ideas of New Public Management seem to have infiltrated universities worldwide (see, e.g., Bleikli et al. 2010; Widmalm 2012). Making universities more ‘business-like’ has been seen, by a great number of people, as necessary in order to ensure that the universities are ‘in touch’ with ‘our times’. And, on some weird level, these people are right. Efforts to make things more ‘business-like’ are everywhere in our culture, so this is evidently the way the wind is blowing. These efforts to make institutions more business-like are obviously most easily discernible in areas of cultural and societal life in which business is not business, such as health care and education, and they therefore seem like ruptures and distortions. Clearly, as government-funded institutions, it is necessary that they serve the public interest and that the money spent is monitored by elected officials. But the question is: who are the ‘perfect slaves’ of a concept and a practice like the concept and the practice of a university? This is the question one must answer before one can say anything about who has the right to transform such a concept. And one cannot answer that question by holding up a finger to see ‘where the wind blows’. It is for this reason that so many university teachers and researchers raise their voices in rebellion against their own leadership and governors, shouting, ‘This university is not a university!’ This is why one needs to stress that the fact of change, the necessity of it, the absolute impossibility of concepts remaining unchanged throughout history – the fact that the projection of our words must not only allow, but invite, ‘further projections’ (Cavell 1979: 180, 198), together with the recognition that sense is conventional – does not mean that sense can be redefined at some group’s leisure or desire. This is why one needs to stress that the conventional ‘rules’ that guide us are (even as they are being re-interpreted, renegotiated, reformed) formed and formative inside a practice, and that they are formed in terms of a responsiveness to that practice. If not, they become decrees. If they become decrees (‘By x you shall henceforth mean y!’), it would be more accurate to say that we are no longer witnessing conceptual change, but conceptual demise. It is in the name of the idea of philosophy, and against a vision that it has become false to itself, or that it has stopped thinking, that such figures as Descartes and Kant and Marx and Nietzsche and Heidegger and Wittgenstein seek to revolutionize philosophy. It is because certain human beings crave the conservation of their art that they seek to discover how, under altered circumstances, paintings and pieces of music can still be made, and hence revolutionize their art beyond the recognition of many. (Cavell 1979: 121)

‘Modernism’ is Cavell’s name for the state in which a cultural register examines itself (1976b, 1976a). Paintings that are not painted, sculptures that are not sculpted, music that is not composed, are all instances of various art forms that are investigating and exploring the limits of their own concept in order to stay true to it and ‘take it further’. Art thereby models something that happens all

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the time, even though it may be hard to see because we are in the midst of it. In these art forms, ‘modernism’ is the name for the time when this feature was heightened and elevated and there is a sense in which art forms enter philosophy by means of modernism, for it is a central feature of philosophy that serves as a place where reason investigates itself (cf. Conant and Cavell 1989: 59). Given that conceptual renegotiations happen all the time, in the midst of, and as an essential part of, our practices, there is a sense in which philosophy happens all the time. Now, that is exactly the kind of statement that will invite misunderstanding and is thereby not true to itself, for what happens all the time is not that people philosophize and reason reasonably about their own reasoning – in fact, it seems fair to say that that is far too uncommon, even in the academic institutions that wear philosophy’s name. What happens all the time is conceptual change, and conceptual change often (but certainly not always) gives rise to the necessity to think about such change and to think about it with an elastic mind and big ears. When universities are being transformed, from institutions where a culture is supposed to be able to critically investigate itself without either guidance or interference from a culture’s power centres (in our case, the market and the state, but not the church) to institutions that are supposed to be in the service of our culture’s power centres (the market and the state, but not the church), it is clear that the concept of a university is undergoing change. But this begs the question: is this a case where a practice reorganizes itself, reinterprets itself, from within its practice, in order to be true to itself? For those of us who still think of a university in ‘Humboldtian’ terms – a concept of the university that itself became established as part of a breach, changing an already existing institution6 – the answer is clearly and sadly ‘no’. This is a decree that comes mostly from outside, from people who are very far from being ‘perfect slaves’ of the project; indeed, sometimes from people that oppose the project: This is how, in my illiteracy, I read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: that only a master of the science can accept a revolutionary change as a natural extension of that science; and that he accepts it, or proposes it, in order to maintain touch with the idea of that science, with its internal canons of comprehensibility and comprehensiveness, as if against the vision that, under altered circumstances, the normal progress of explanation and exception no longer seem to him to be science. And then what he does may not seem scientific to the old master. If this difference is taken to be a difference in their natural reactions (and Kuhn’s use of the idea of a ‘paradigm’ seems to me to suggest this more than it suggests a difference in conventions) then we may wish to speak here of conceptual divergence. (Cavell 1979: 121)

This is exactly why it is helpful to distinguish between two senses of ‘conventional’. One is the result of the hard work done by the ‘perfect slaves’ of the project, in order to stay true to the project. Another involves external rules, implemented from outside, effecting a shift that leads to the demise of the previous concept. If we understand ‘conventions’ as an external set of rules that we



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are forced to obey, we lose our grip on the point of conversing and conventions as forms of convening. Instead of encouraging people to meet in language, such a view of the conventional would imply that the sense and relevance of such meetings are to be measured by an external law. (In many respects, the idea of an ‘expert’, say, in morality, handing down the true definitions of our concepts, telling us what to think, is an idea that caters to the thought that conceptual development should come in the form of decrees, instead of efforts to seek understanding and to convene.) As Cavell says: ‘it is internal to a convention that it be open to change in convention, in the convening of those subject to it, in whose behavior it lives. So it is a first order of business of a tyranny to deny the freedom to convene’ (1979: 120).

Natural Reactions (in Conclusion) I started by clarifying how the same word can be an expression of different concepts. We had two different people, aiming to perfect two different concepts of ‘a good father’. Central to these examples is the fact that both the notion of ‘father’ and the notion of ‘the good’ are concepts that mean what they do and take on the kinds of importance they do through the way in which they relate to a great number of things. The concept of a good father is developed from within a practice in a culture, in which biology, religion, legal norms, and so on and so forth all give shape to each other, by establishing something like a connotative logic. By acknowledging that connotative logics differ, it follows, logically, that our concepts change. But if one discovers that one is using one word for two concepts, one may begin to ask which of the concepts is true. But true to what? The question of which of the two uses of the word captures reality is itself spurious, grounded in the belief that we are confronted with two definitions of the same concept (thing). This way of trying to resolve conceptual change disregards the kind of historicity that the examples highlight. Yet, such a worry, natural to anyone of a philosophical bent, cannot be easily dissolved. The philosophical demand for solidity does not go away just because change is recognized. It is integral to the inside perspective (that also includes a call for an openness to change), for which I am arguing, that these changes are something that all of us engage with on a more or less daily basis (even if the sense of acuteness and emergency is rare, and even if these conceptual renegotiations, our efforts to convene in language, seldom appear as objects for consciousness, as some ‘thing’ for us to relate to). Thus, I conceived of Johannes, who is in the midst of a renegotiation, trying to lead a life that allows him to dither between concepts. For him, the issue of what a good father is, is a pressing issue and he may very well have to pass through life without ever finding a resolution. The route to clarity that I can see – which is not to say that this is the only route or that I have seen everything there is to see – involves trying to demonstrate the ways in which true changes of our conceptual habitat come from

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within a practice; and in our practices, we are obliged to reach out to one another, to seek to convene. Johannes was not in tune with himself and he could not be as long as he thought that he had to choose between two conceptual schemes. Efforts to change our conceptual worlds from outside – be it through the arguments of highly educated philosophy professors who have convinced themselves that they are in possession of the true sense of our concepts, or through political decrees from people who do not belong inside, and hence do not understand, the practices – should be seen for what they are: reasons not to comply and reasons to think further, to look for a more groundbound and engaged understanding of the practices these concepts partake in forming. Given that concepts are tied to practices, and given that practices are something we engage in (and not merely reflect upon), the element of natural responsiveness to concepts can never, or at least should never, be cut off. Perhaps the idea of a new historical period is an idea of a generation whose natural reactions – not merely whose ideas or mores – diverge from the old; it is an idea of a new (human) nature. And different historical periods may exist side by side, over long stretches, and within one human breast. (Cavell 1979: 121)

Conceptual change, as well as the introduction of new projections of our words, is never a strictly linguistic affair, which also means that it would be wrong to say that changes in practices and the way we relate to one another are not linguistic. It is precisely the idea that concepts must have one stable sense and function as a fence that encloses a firmly established, delimited area – where things are either inside or outside – that blocks conversation. In that respect, relativism (as the confused view that you have your padlock and I have mine) and dogmatism (as the confused idea that I have my padlock and yours is fake, not real, mistaken) are two strikingly similar expressions of the same confused idea: that concepts stay the same. The idea of concepts as closed is what blocks communication and prevents people from seeking one another out. Imagine a couple in which each partner is supremely convinced that their respective concept of marriage is unquestionably true and firmly established and secured and enclosed; how well do you think they would do? This way of speaking about these conceptual differences as differences in ‘natural reactions’, in contrast to differences in belief systems (reasoned, argued, theoretically defined), also caters to the thought that conceptual differences are efforts to stay true to one’s concepts, true to the world, and that one can only do this in conversation with people, things and nature. And these (people, things and nature) change.7 Niklas Forsberg is Senior Researcher and Head of Research at the Centre for Ethics at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic, and the author of Language Lost and Found: Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary: Language and Morality in J.L. Austin’s Philosophy (Routledge, 2022).



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Notes   1. Seriously, don’t.   2. This is a point Stanley Cavell has argued successfully, for example, by saying that ‘Grammar cannot, or ought not, of itself dictate what you mean, what it is up to you to say’ (1984: 45).   3. My thanks to Nat Hansen for helping me make this clarification.   4. This is not one thought that is expressed in different metaphors, of course, and there are a great number of thinkers whose work points in this direction, for example, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, J.L. Austin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, W.V.O. Quine and Jacques Derrida, to name but a few. The disparate nature of these thinkers’ views signals just how broad and varied the response to these phenomena may be.   5. I should also say, at this point, that the biological aspects of the concept of father are much more complicated nowadays, when it is possible, at least in theory, to ‘let’ DNA from more than two persons contribute to the formation of a child. We are also living in a time of cultural change in which our notions of parenting will most certainly be affected by some thoroughgoing reverberations.   6. For helpful discussions of the Humboldtian notion of the university, see Josephson, Karlsohn and Östling 2014.   7. My thanks to the participants at the Research Seminar at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice, and the participants of the Higher Seminar for the Philosophy of Language and Culture, Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University, for helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. This publication was supported as part of the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), ‘Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value’, registration no. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.

References Baz, A. 2003. ‘On When Words Are Called For: Cavell, McDowell, and the Wording of the World’, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 46(4): 473–500. doi:10.1080/00201740310003379. Bleikli, I., et al. 2010. ‘NPM, Network Governance and the University as a Changing Professional Organization’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to New Public Management. Farnham: Routledge, pp. 150–63. Cavell, S. 1976a. ‘A Matter of Meaning It’, in Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 213–37. . 1976b. ‘Music Discomposed’, in Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 180–212. . 1979. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press. . 1984. ‘The Politics of Interpretation (Politics as Opposed to What?)’, in Themes out of School: Effects and Causes. San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, pp. 27–59. Conant, J., and S. Cavell. 1989. ‘Conant: Interview with Cavell’, in R. Fleming and M. Payne (eds), The Senses of Stanley Cavell. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, pp. 35–72. Forsberg, N. 2018. ‘Taking the Linguistic Method Seriously: On Iris Murdoch on Language and Linguistic Philosophy’, in Murdoch on Truth and Love. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 109–32.

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. 2022. Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary: Language and Morality in J.L. Austin’s Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Josephson, P., T. Karlsohn and J. Östling (eds). 2014. The Humboldtian Tradition: Origins and Legacies. Lam edition. Leiden: Brill. Margolis, E., and S. Laurence. 2021. ‘Concepts’, in E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2021. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 28 February 2021 from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2021/entries/concepts/. Murdoch, I. 1999a. ‘The Idea of Perfection’, in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Penguin, pp. 299–336. . 1999b. ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Penguin, pp. 76–98. Widmalm, S. 2012. ‘Innovation and Control: Performative Research Policy in Sweden’, in S. Rider, Y. Hasselberg, and A. Waluszewski (eds), Transformations in Research, Higher Education and the Academic Market: The Breakdown of Scientific Thought. New York: Springer, pp. 39–52.

Conclusion Morality in Action Nora Hämäläinen

One of the true pleasures of academic life is bringing people together to speak about something you care about but think is not talked about quite enough or not talked about in the ways you think are required. Classrooms, seminars, conferences and symposia are, of course, the primary sites for such encounters, for a semester, a week, a day, a few hours or sometimes just those few minutes needed to plant the seed for further conversations. But the spoken word, though profound in its impact, is elusive. The collection of essays offers a format for preserving or creating the polyphony of a conversation for a larger and future audience. Many of the authors of this book have never met or read each other’s work. They are assembled in this volume, not as contributors to an already solidified interdisciplinary conversation on moral change, but as researchers whose work contributes ideas to what such a conversation could be. They are united by a shared interest in morality or ethics as dynamic and changing, and the conviction that any investigation of ethics needs to be ‘contextual’, attentive to the complex material, institutional, cultural, conceptual and/or existential modulations that shape people’s lives. What this means for each in practice varies greatly, according to the disciplinary contexts and conversation in which they are most at home. But this variety harbours a promise of dynamism in this area for years to come. Bringing people from different fields together around a topic seems like an easy enough thing to do, especially if one is not adamant that they share a distinctive theoretical outlook. Yet, for me personally, arriving at this intersection of philosophy and anthropology has taken a long time and I believe that I am not alone in this. As Robert Baker observes in his chapter, and as we discuss in the introduction, philosophical ethics has not warmed to thinking about morality as changing, even though the theme has recurred and resurfaced at various times and in varying forms. Furthermore, input from

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ethnography and the social sciences more broadly has been apt to engender worries about relevance. I have been drawn to and shaped by traditions of contemporary ethics that emphasize the situatedness and contextuality of morality: Wittgensteinian ethics, virtue ethics, the ethical work of Iris Murdoch, as well as discussions on ethics and literature. Yet, for a long time, I pursued these avenues with a nagging sense that I did not have sufficient tools and materials to study moral life. Especially when moving towards questions of historical change and renegotiations, my education was inapt and my fellow philosophers kept asking questions that seemed to me unhelpful for moving forward: ‘So, you are interested in mores rather than morality?’, ‘But is there really such a thing as change in morality proper?’, ‘I see, you are interested in moral progress’, ‘Does this not amount to endorsing a form of moral relativism?’, ‘Aren’t you historicizing/ anthropologizing/sociologizing morality?’, ‘This is all very interesting, but what’s the moral/philosophical import of it?’ These are philosopher’s questions, and good ones to be able to answer, but also ones in which it is easy to get stuck. They prompt explications of where one might want to climb, and why, but fail to offer footholds for the ascent. Thus, it is hard to get past the gesture of beginning and thus impossible to return with proof that a certain path is worth pursuing. In research, we are necessarily collective animals. Intellectually, we might wander off in different directions, but there is no academic life outside the herd. At the moment, both attention to moral change and collaborations with researchers from other fields in the human and social sciences are becoming more common in the areas of philosophy where I am at home. Yet, bringing current beginnings to fruition requires the active efforts of many people. Even when they are sympathetic to the possibility of moral changes being genuine and going deep, philosophical attempts to understand changes in morality run the risk of underestimating the plurality of moving parts in any process of moral change, the varieties of structures and dynamics at work (Eriksen 2020). As noted in the introduction, the professional habits of philosophers foreground explanatory theories that tend towards universality and generality, using case studies as illustrations rather than sources of complication and new understanding. Lived morality usually enters philosophy through examples that are already loaded with specific theoretical aims and expectations. The disciplinary patterns of attention in moral philosophy still do not encourage dwelling in kitchens, bedrooms, courtrooms and wards for longer periods, in order to hear people out in relation to the ethical concerns and rhythms of their lives. Yet, in such sites of lived ethical negotiation, the practical, economic, historical and social pressures are made visible, and we are allowed to eavesdrop on the active interpretive and transformative work of people whose inherited ethical categories do not stretch to cover what they are experiencing. We gain access to morality in action.

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Modernity has been considered the great devourer of moral certainty (Williams 1985), not least because it has brought faster cycles of societal change upon us. We continue to live in times in which we have reason to expect major upheavals in living conditions all over the world. Climate change, changing ecosystems, demographic changes, migration, science, technology, social movements and political upheavals are among the things that disrupt people’s livelihoods, family ties, priorities, possibilities, and access to and conception of the necessities of life. All of these affect people’s ethical lives in profound ways, altering points of orientation, matters of concern, conceptions of personhood, and registers of duty and entitlement. Jonathan Lear talks about these things in terms of a collective sense of vulnerability: We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable. Events around the world – terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even natural catastrophes – have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name. I suspect that this feeling has provoked the widespread intolerance that we see around us today – from all points on the political spectrum. It is as though, without our insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse. Perhaps if we could give a name to our shared sense of vulnerability, we could find better ways to live with it. (2008: 7)

Attending to the moral collapse and reinvention of the Crow nation offers Lear a manner of dealing with this sense of vulnerability while avoiding the impulse to seek security in assertive moral certainty and dogmatism. There is something touching and beautifully comforting in the tentative, melancholy asking for a name for our situation. But rather than actually seeking to name, he plunges into the modulations of an ethical form of life. Similarly, rather than seeking to name our moral predicaments today, I would like to see their modulations enveloped in an active, philosophically resonant, empirically curious discourse, alive to the new as well as the old, gains as well as losses, to lived possibilities and potentialities, to the ethical productivity and inventiveness of human beings living together. I am grateful for the growing interest in issues of moral change displayed in the work of contributors to this volume, in the pioneering work of thinkers such as Lear and Kwame Anthony Appiah, in discussions of the possibility of moral progress and in anthropological work of the ethical turn, and I look forward to seeing these conversations develop in collaboration. Through such collaborations, researchers may together provide academic ethics with something that it did not have when I entered the field as a student in the late 1990s and that it still does not have: a platform for the study of moral change, with the intellectual resources of several disciplines close at hand. The following four points are intended as a wish list for this purpose. These are things we need, and need to build on.

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1. The Academic Study of Morality as a Collaborative Enterprise between Contributors of Different Fields Research today is more accessible than it has ever been. We can relatively easily read up on interesting conversations in other fields and other regions. But carrying over insights or perspectives from other disciplines often takes heaps of self-confidence, encouragement, institutional luck and, more often than not, academic maturity. Paths of legitimate attention and influence are created only through sufficient pedestrian traffic. Often references to well-known thinkers who have crossed a certain boundary serve as a licence for young scholars to smuggle in their more idiosyncratic interests. Dissertation supervisors want to see precedents that prove the feasibility of a connection and thus given paths tend to become overused, sometimes making it more, rather than less, difficult to try one’s academic intuitions over disciplinary boundaries in new ways. Rather than occasional paths, I would like to see an open field of possibilities for the study of morality and moral change, with permission (borrowing from Ian Hacking 2004: 17) to help ourselves to whatever we can, from everywhere. There should be enough relevant literature around to provide nourishment and legitimacy to a broad variety of inter- and cross-disciplinary projects relating to changing moralities.

2. The Study of Moral Change as an Integral Part of Studying Morality The habit of thinking academically about moral change should be inaugurated when people are introduced to thinking academically about morality. It should be the stuff of introductory courses to ethics. This is, of course, a variety of the partisan view of anyone trying to boost interest in their specialism, but thinking about moral change goes to the roots of what morality is. Think of ethics as the study of universal structures of the good, and change will always be ephemeral, a mere matter of mores, or a potential menace, undermining the possibility of morality. Bring in change of different scales and at different levels from the start, and it will appear ordinary and something we can learn from, even when pursuing normative and universalist projects.

3. The Study of Morality as an Integral Part of Studying Society Similarly (though I am not in a disciplinary position to argue for this), thinking about moral change could be made part of the introduction to thinking about social change. Following people’s own sense of moral or ethical importance as distinct from prudential issues or social conventions, as James Laidlaw, Jarrett Zigon, Veena Das, Cheryl Mattingly and Joel Robbins, among others, have

Conclusion 231

done, highlights a register of concerns that would otherwise remain invisible and paves the way for the collaborations that would greatly enrich the study of ethics.

4. A Roadmap of Dynamics, Drivers, Rhythms, Areas, Scales and Metaphors of Moral Change For the purposes of enhancing research, we need a repository of ideas of where and how to look, what not to forget and what to expect to encounter when studying moral change. While attempts at comprehensive theories of moral change should be hoped for, we should not expect such a theory to provide the grounding for future research on a large scale. Cases will speak to different thinkers in different ways, depending on their disciplinary and more personal backgrounds, their different academic concerns and problematizations, and their reasons for engaging with the topic. This plurality is a great asset. Yet, a shared roadmap of different dynamics, drivers, rhythms and scales of moral change, along with a variety of issues pertaining to normativity, is crucial for overcoming unnecessary simplifications and oversights. This book offers us a range of ideas on a variety of topics contributing to such a map, along with a plenitude of references for further exploration. Having gone through the essays once more before submitting the final manuscript to the publisher, I find myself looking forward with great optimism to the coming years of exploration in this area. Nora Hämäläinen is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic, and the author of Literature and Moral Theory (Bloomsbury, 2015), Descriptive Ethics: What Does Moral Philosophy Know about Morality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Är Trump Postmodern: En essä om sanning och populism (Förlaget M, 2019).

References Eriksen, Cecilie. 2020. Moral Change: Dynamics, Structure and Normativity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hacking, Ian. 2004. Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lear, Jonathan. 2008. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana.

Index

A ‘Ayb, 12, 39–40, 45–46, 48–53. See also shame A Proper Marriage, 159 Abdoun, 21–22 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 7 activism, 2, 40, 47, 93, 159 activist(s), 1, 12, 39, 47, 51, 203 Adely, Fida, 22, 28 affect(s), 22, 24 affective, 23, 35, 111, 116–117, 120, 122 affectively, 115, 117, 120 African American, 60, 68, 92, 102n, 134, 139, 140n Agamben, Giorgio, 150, 154 Ahmed, Sara, 12, 51, 52 Ajnabiya, 43. See also foreigner America, 60, 137–138, 185 American, 12, 13, 21, 25, 48, 60n, 87, 72, 100, 133, 135–139, 150, 160, 168 American South, 162, 167 Amman, 11–12, 21–25, 39–45, 47–53, 53n, 54n Ammani(s), 42–44, 48 Ancient Greece, Greece, 4, 167 animal rights, 2 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 7, 187–189, 190n Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 75–76, 78, 84, 127, 136, 172, 173n, 229 Arendt, Hannah, 5, 51, 154 Aristotle, 5, 167, 196 B Baker, Robert, 2, 13, 75–76, 82, 84, 172, 173n, 228

Beauvoir, Simone de, 46 Benedict, Ruth, 165 Berlin, Isaiah, 83, 164 Bilgrami, Akeel, 180, 181, 189 bodily schemas, 110 Boncompagni, Anna, 204 Brahe, Tycho, 131, 132, 138 Braine, David, 188 Buber, Martin, 110 C care, 1, 13, 39–40, 45, 47, 49–52, 58, 65, 90, 96–97, 108–111, 113–114, 119, 120–122, 143, 145, 148–152, 154–155, 202, 208n care ethics, 114 care, institutional, 13 care, medical, 88, 133 care, person-centred, 108–110, 113, 121–122 care, relationship centred, 112 care, world-open, 108, 109, 119, 121–122 childcare, 213 ethics of care, 2 health care, 96, 98, 133–134, 137, 202, 221 Cavell, Stanley, 14, 219, 221, 223, 225n Chenault, Scott, 94 Children of Violence (the), 159 Christianity, 2, 12, 79–81, 146 civil rights, 2, 133, 143 Clark, Claire, 137, 139 Clark, Stephen, 188 Clifford, James, 31 climate change, 202–203, 205–206, 229

234 Index

cloning, 179, 181–182, 184 cognitive difference, 120 Cohen, I.B., 138, 140n conceptual change, 14, 213, 216–218, 220–222, 224 conceptual schemes, 217, 224 connotative logic, 213, 214, 223 convene, 218–220, 223, 224 conventional, 47, 52, 178, 182, 187, 218–219, 221–223 Cook, John, 83 Copernicus, Nicolas, 128–131, 138 Covid, 1–2 creativity, 64, 65, 70, 108–109, 119, 121 critical phenomenology, 46, 51, 72n Crow (nation), 1, 172, 229 D Danaher, John, 137–139 Das, Veena, 7, 11, 59, 230 dating, 22, 27, 29 Deeb, Lara, 46 dementia, 13, 106, 108–109, 111–115, 119, 121–122, 123n, 154 Denmark, 13, 109 Der Spiegel, 203 Derrida, Jacques, 13, 225 Desjarlais, Robert, 149 Dewey, John, 172 Diamond, Cora, 193–199, 201, 203–206, 208n disorientation, 51, 52, 143, 153 drill team, 56–57, 59–61, 64–66, 68–70 drum squad, 56–57, 60 duelling, 75 Dumond, Luis, 78 Durkheim, Émile, 4, 6, 27, 107 dynamics, 2, 91, 95, 109, 111, 112, 114–115, 228, 231 E Edel, Abraham, 4 Edel, Mary, 4 Edmonds, Bill Russell, 89 Embodiment, 110 end of ethics, 13, 143, 144, 146–148, 153– 155, 156n Enlightenment, 139, 167, 183 Eriksen, Cecilie, 13, 127, 137, 172, 173n

ethical affordances, 101 ethical demand, 2, 58, 65, 71, 208n ethical turn, 4, 58, 59, 229 ethics of care, 5 Euro-American, 29, 75 Eurocentric, 5 everyday (the), 4, 7, 10, 15n, 22, 24, 30–31, 35, 44, 51, 53, 59, 61, 64, 68–71, 72n, 79, 107, 109, 115, 120, 121, 122, 145– 146, 160–162, 169 F Fadil, Nadia, 23 Fassin, Didier, 87, 94–96, 99, 102n fatherhood, 212–215, 217, 219 Feigl, Herbert, 128, 130, 139 Feil, Naomi, 113–117, 120 feminist, 7, 15, 53 feminist ethics, 5 feminism, 213 Fieldwork in Familiar Places, 14, 163 First World War, 159 Floyd, George, 126, 200 foot-binding, 75, 76 form of life, 13, 58, 150, 161, 172, 198, 203– 206, 208n, 229 foreigner, 42, 43, 48 Foucault, Michel, 5, 8, 225n Frankenstein, 184 Frazer, Nancy, 171 freedom, 2, 4, 6–7, 46, 52, 76, 78, 168, 223 friendship, 28, 41, 47, 201, 202, 205–207 G Gaita, Raimond, 188 Galilei, Galileo, 132 gaps, 28, 39, 50, 53, 98 Gracia, Diego, 128 Geertz, Clifford, 165–166 Gill, Harmandeep, 51 Gilligan, Carol, 77, 83 God Is Not Here, 98 gossip, 27, 47, 52 Greimas, Algirdas Julien, 31 Guenther, Lisa, 12, 46 H Harb, Mona, 46 Hampshire, Stuart, 182–184, 186–187

Index 235

Harman, Gilbert, 165 Harvard Business Review, 23 hay al-ayyam, 11, 24, 26 Heidegger, Martin, 5, 107, 145, 221 Heraclitus, 8 high-level values, 77–78, 81–82 Hirschkind, Charles, 23 homeless life, 13, 148–150, 154 honour, 39. 76, 88–91, 97, 130, 178, 188–189 honourable, 46, 49, 76, 178 Huges, Geoff, 22 Hughes, Everett, 93 Hume, David, 176–181, 183, 185, 188–189, 190n hypergoods, 78 I immanent, 4, 10, 15n, 69, 109, 120, 146 impiety, 176, 178–179, 181–182, 185–189 in vitro fertilization, 179, 181, 182 individual (noun), 1, 2, 4, 6–8, 11, 13, 22, 24, 29, 46, 76, 78, 81, 95, 99, 110, 113, 117, 119, 121, 132, 154, 169, 208n individualism/t, 7, 50, 76, 78, 81–83, 110 Infitah, 22 intercorporeal capabilties, 112–114, 117– 118, 120 Iraq, 25–26, 89 ironic experience, 12, 13, 49, 53, 146–147, 153, 155n irony, 12, 39, 40, 44, 47, 49, 52, 67, 143, 144, 146, 148, 153, 155n Islam, 46, 50 Islamic, 1, 7, 26, 34, 48, 50 J Jaeggi, Rahel, 171 James, William, 163, 172 Jordan, 12, 21–22, 24–26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 35, 39, 41, 46, 48 Jordanian, 21, 22, 24–26, 28–30, 40, 42, 45, 48–49 K Kafka, Franz, 143–145, 147–148, 150, 153, 156n Kalam al nas, 47. See also gossip Käll, Lisa F., 114

Kant, Immanuel, 5, 9, 139, 185–186, 188– 189, 190n, 221 Keane, Webb, 101 Kepler, Johannes, 129, 132, 138 Kitwood, Tom, 109–113, 120–121 Klenk, Michael, 137 Kontos, Pia, 110 Kuhn, Thomas, 13, 75, 82, 126–131, 133– 139, 222 L Laidlaw, James, 6, 230 Lear, Jonathan, 2, 13, 72n, 143–144, 146, 155, 172, 229 Lebensform, 204 Lessing, Doris, 159, 161–162, 168, 172 Levi, Primo, 150, 152–154, 156n Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 46 LGBTQ+, 2, 130 liminal spaces, 143–144, 153, 156n liminality, 144–146, 148–149, 153 Litz, Brett, 91 Locke, John, 139 loyalty, 61, 201–202, 206 Lu, Mathew, 188 M MacIntyre, Alasdair, 9, 14, 162 Mahmood, Saba, 7 malignant social environment, 109 malignant social psychology, 109 Man Without Qualities, 63 marriage, 11–12, 21–22, 24, 26–32, 34–35, 50, 76, 79, 80, 82, 126, 159, 213, 215, 220, 224 Mattingly, Cheryl, 2, 4, 5, 12, 156, 230 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 110, 116, 225n Mead, Margaret, 165 Medicaid, 133–134, 136 Medicare, 133–134, 136 metaethics, 9, 128 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 162 Metoo, 126 Middle East, Middle Eastern, 39, 45, 52 Military, 12, 25, 60–61, 66, 86–100 Mill, John Stuart, 127–137 Modernism, 221–222 Moody-Adams Michele, 14, 163–172 moral anthropology, 3–6, 8, 155n, 173n

236 Index

moral breakdown, 13, 23, 144, 145–146, 148, 153 moral disagreement, 14, 164–165, 193, 196, 202, 204 moral drift, 137 moral economy, 87, 89, 90, 92, 95–101 moral experience, 7, 14, 114 moral injury, 12, 13, 86–87, 89–91, 96–100, 102n moral language, 9, 14 moral moods, 23 moral progress, 9, 12, 15n, 76, 78, 82–84, 130, 173n, 228–229 moral psychology, 10, 12, 80–81 moral revolution, 2, 12, 13, 15n, 75–76, 78, 82–84, 126–132, 135–140 moral sentence, 200, 201 morality system, 4, 5 movement (social), 2, 7, 25, 79, 97, 132–134, 160, 167, 229 Murdoch, Iris, 7, 162, 164, 180, 214, 228 Muselmänner, 143, 147, 150, 151, 155n, 156n Musil, Robert, 63–65, 70, 72 Muslim, 24, 155n N Naisargi, Dave, 40, 47 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 13 Native American, 172 Nazi Regime, 150 neuro-normative, 13, 108 New Public Management, 221 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 58, 221 Nolan, Mike, 110 normativity, 3, 8, 10, 13, 15n, 53, 65, 143– 144, 147–148, 153–154, 171, 231 North America, 47 Norway, 109 Nussbaum, Martha, 171 O O’Byrne, Anne, 13, 143–144, 146–147, 154, 156n O’Hare, Kate, 93 openness, 40, 46, 51–52, 108–109, 112, 114, 120–122 Ordinary (ethics), 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 57, 59, 61–63, 69, 70–71, 72n, 143, 145–146,

148, 150, , 153–155, 155n, 183, 187, 192–193, 195 ordinary/extraordinary disagreement, 196–197, 202–205 ordinary language, 59, 193, 195 P Papua New Guinea, 2, 12, 78, 79 paramount value, 78 Parsons, Kathryn Pine, 127 Parsons, Talcott, 133 paternalism, 150 perfect slave, 220–222 personhood, 3, 7, 9, 13, 108–113, 121, 154, 159–161, 229 phenomenological ethics, 5 phenomenology, 5, 7, 52, 57–59, 61–63, 69–71, 72n, 107, 115, 122 Plato, 2, 8, 170 Pleasants, Nigel, 75–76, 82, 84 Plessner, Helmuth, 116–118 post-traumatic stress disorder, 88. See also PTSD potentiality, 12, 39, 46–47, 52, 58–59, 65, 70, 107, 108, 112, 118 potentiated interval, 108, 113–115, 117–118, 120 prison, 12, 13, 65, 87, 92–95, 97–101 prisoner, 147–148, 150–154, 156n PTSD, 88–90, 96. See also post-traumatic stress disorder Q Quakers, 168 queer, 12, 39–40, 45–47, 49, 51–53, 54n queering, 12, 39, 52, 53 Queer Phenomenology, 52 R racial injustice, 99 racial profiling, 200–201, 205–206 rationality, 172, 193, 195, 198–199, 201, 203–207, 208n Rawld, John, 9 relationalism, 80–81, 83 relativism, 8–9, 77, 83–84, 136, 139, 164– 167, 167, 224, 228 relativism, linguistic, 219

Index 237

religion, 2, 15n, 50, 176–177, 182, 187, 213, 215, 223 responsiveness, 64, 70, 121, 180, 219–221, 224 Robbins, Joel, 6, 12, 23, 161, 230 romance, 22, 49 Rorty, Richard, 167 S Samsa, Gregor, 13, 143–145, 147–148, 150, 153–155 Sandel, Michael, 188 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 46, 116 Sayer, Andrew, 96 Scheler, Max, 78 Scruton, Roger, 183–184, 186–187 Second World War, 13, 60, 91, 94, 96, 137, 143, 147–148, 150, 159 self-cultivation, 4 self-formation, 4 sexuality, 46, 47, 75, 155, 183, 186 shame, 12, 39–41, 44–51, 53, 89, 90, 97 Shay, Jonathan, 89–91, 102n Shelley, Mary, 184 Sherman, Nancy, 79 Simon, Jonathan, 93 slavery, 8, 14, 60, 75, 83, 92, 139, 167–169, 193–194, 196–206, 208 social ontology, 13, 108, 110–111, 113, 120, 122 solidarity, 46–47, 97 Song, 88, 107, 111, 115–118, 120, 215 Southeast Asia, 88–89, 96 Souq, 42, 45 Stevenson, Lisa, 107, 115, 116 Stewart, Kathleen, 22 structure of feeling, 11, 22, 25, 29, 31, 35 structures of value, 214 suicide, 176, 178–181, 184–186, 190 T Tanaaqud, 43 Taussig, Joseph, 132, 138 Taylor, Charles, 5, 14, 78 The Copernican Revolution, 128 The Metamorphosis, 13, 143, 144–145, 147, 148, 150–151, 156 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 13, 126

Throop, C. Jason, 23 Thunberg, Greta, 2, 203, 208n truth, 9, 14, 39, 136, 140, 162–164, 169–170, 172, 192, 196–200, 208n, 218 Turner, Victor, 144 U United Kingdom, 109 universal moral change, 206 universalism, 14, 161, 164, 166 Urapmin, 1, 12, 23, 78–83 US Civil War, 92 US Revolution, 92 V validation therapy, 109, 113 van Gennep, Arnold, 144 Veatch, Robert, 134 Velleman, J. David, 165 violence, 13, 66, 86–89, 91–92, 94–101 violence, state-sanctioned, 13, 86, 87, 96–101 violence, state-sponsored, 87 virtue ethics, 5, 6, 7, 9, 228 Virtues, 1, 4, 5–7, 58–59, 69, 87–89, 91–92, 97–99, 116, 121, 135, 160, 166, 168, 170, 183, 187–188, 228 void (ethical), 7, 13, 154, 163 VUCA, 23–24, 35 vulnerability, 39, 40, 99, 229 W Waldenfels, Bernhard, 12, 57, 59, 61–65, 67, 70–71, 72n Warnock, Mary, 181–182, 184, 186–187 Weil, Simone, 188 welfare state, 13 West, Western, 2, 4, 13, 14, 15n, 52, 75–76, 78, 81–82, 148, 155n, 176, 185, 195, 211 Western Europe, 185 Whewell, William, 131 Wiggins, David, 195–196, 198, 204, 206, 208n Williams, Bernard, 5, 14, 162, 164, 167, 185, 208n Williams, Raymond, 11, 24, 96 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 5, 59, 136, 160–161, 173n, 190n, 193–194, 204, 208n, 221, 225n, 228

238 Index

women’s rights, 2 Wong, David B., 165 Worldhood, 111, 120–121 world-making, 14, 161 X x-phi, 10

Z Zeiler, Kristin, 113, 114, 116, 120 Zigon, Jarrett, 6, 10, 13, 23, 107, 143–146, 155, 156n, 230