On Ethics

Posted on March 23, 2010
Filed Under Ethics, Heidegger, Philosophy | Leave a Comment

Paul Ennis has up a good post on Heidegger and the Social. It’s really a kind of reflection on intellectual development. It got me thinking though about my own engagement with Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida and Ethics. Now regular readers know I have a somewhat disparaging view of philosophical ethics. Part of that is more directed towards the standard meta-ethical conceptions (primarily Kantian or various guises of Utilitarianism). I’m just really skeptical that the Good can be so defined. Further much of ethics is really looking at various implications that I think are dubious from the start.

It’s not that I don’t think ethics is important. I simply am dubious about most philosophical inquiry as it is typically conducted. Even the more Moorean styled inquiry seems off somehow, although I’m more sympathetic to it. (At least Moore recognizes the problematic status of our starting points, even if he doesn’t tease out the implications of that problem)

My own approach is highly influenced by Levinas, Heidegger and Derrida. (Contra Levinas’ view of Heideger I think there’s a lot in Heidegger on this even if Heidegger himself doesn’t necessarily make use of it) Without appearing to be too much of a Dreyfus devoté I think the key characteristic in Ethics is risk. That is we receive a call or demand (as per Levinas or Heidegger) but this call always exceeds our ability to comprehend it. We never really know what to do. Ethics demands that we step outside of what we know into the unknown and act. It is essentially tied up with the risk of that move. I’d go so far as to say that without that element of risk it really isn’t ethical behavior. (This is more controversial of course)

In Heidegger we see this element of risk appear over and over again. Put most broadly and abstractly there is an essential gap between sign and object and interpretant. (This is the more Peircean way of putting the insight) Because of this gap we can never be sure of the ends or beginnings of any sign. We make a “leap” (in Peircean terms abductive logic) which we then over time test. But we have to always accept the possibility of radical failure.

We as humans don’t like that element of risk. Traditional ethics of most kinds are really the attempt to overcome this element of risk. While many philosophers are willing to acknowledge a degree of fallibilism it is always the fallibilism of the difficulty of calculating the good or the problem of limited data on hand. It seems to me that Heidegger, Levinas and especially Derrida point to something more radical. An essential ontological gap such that there never will be an overcoming of this gap. The Ethical for them is essentially the encountering with the gap of our radical finitude.

Now in practice, of course, we recognize stable answers to many ethical questions. (So, for instance, we know that in general it is wrong to kill someone unnecessarily) Common sense ethics is really what we know due to long term social testing through our communal history. Common sense knowledge changes, but does so slowly. (Although due to the rapid pace of technology we find ourselves in more and more contexts for which our common sense experience can tell us nothing) As Derrida likes to put it, these points of relative stability constitute the selection by greater forces. The problem of traditional ethics is that it is so bound up with a certain epistemological approach to knowledge in terms of judgments rather than selection by these forces.

So to me, we always have a demand for the ethical but philosophy just isn’t up to the task of fulfilling the demand. We take a risk (perhaps informed by philosophical inquiry, but more likely informed by empirical studies in psychology, sociology and common sense)

Related posts:

  1. Ethics
  2. Ethics and an Other Book
  3. Ethics without God, Aristotle style
  4. Derrida and Animals
  5. My Ethics Philosophy
  6. Being Ethical

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