The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person & Value

The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person & Value

by Michael Lambek
The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person & Value

The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person & Value

by Michael Lambek

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Overview

Written over a thirty-year span, Michael Lambek’s essays in this collection point with definitive force toward a single central truth: ethics is intrinsic to social life. As he shows through rich ethnographic accounts and multiple theoretical traditions, our human condition is at heart an ethical one—we may not always be good or just, but we are always subject to their criteria. Detailing Lambek’s trajectory as one anthropologist thinking deeply throughout a career on the nature of ethical life, the essays accumulate into a vibrant demonstration of the relevance of ethics as a practice and its crucial importance to ethnography, social theory, and philosophy.

Organized chronologically, the essays begin among Malagasy speakers on the island of Mayotte and in northwest Madagascar. Building from ethnographic accounts there, they synthesize Aristotelian notions of practical judgment and virtuous action with Wittgensteinian notions of the ordinariness of ethical life and the importance of language, everyday speech, and ritual in order to understand how ethics are lived. They illustrate the multiple ways in which ethics informs personhood, character, and practice; explore the centrality of judgment, action, and irony to ethical life; and consider the relation of virtue to value. The result is a fully fleshed-out picture of ethics as a deeply rooted aspect of the human experience. 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226292380
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 12/22/2022
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 390
File size: 875 KB

About the Author

Michael Lambek is professor of anthropology and a Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is the author of several books, most recently The Weight of the Past, and editor or coeditor of several more, including Ordinary Ethics and A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion

Read an Excerpt

The Ethical Condition

Essays on Action, Person, and Value


By Michael Lambek

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-29238-0



CHAPTER 1

The Ethical Condition

Ethics is intrinsic to human life and can be understood as immanent within it even while it is frequently claimed to transcend it. In this chapter I make the case for this claim. I do so less by means of direct argument than by a kind of survey or glossary of what have become some (but not all) of the "key words" in the emerging conversation that is the anthropology of ethics. It matters whether the central issue is conceived as one of action, freedom, goals for living, judgment, justification (the giving of reasons), responsibility (or responsiveness), or subject-formation (or self-fashioning), let alone the following of rules, convention, or a professional code. At the same time, these words or concepts need to be understood in relation to one another; they each orient us to interesting paths through the forest but are better seen as diverging and converging at various points than as heading out in radically different directions. Moreover, to speak of immanence at one level is not to deny, overlook, or contradict the prevalence of ethical declaration, elaboration, rationalization, experimentation, and disputation evident at another.

The aim of the chapter is not to survey the range of achievements and arguments within the anthropological conversation on ethics (for which see the outstanding work by Laidlaw [2014]), but to unpack concepts that point in the direction of what I call the ethical condition. I have reached the position developed here as a result of working through the arguments in the chapters that follow. But unlike the chapters that start from something distinctive about ethical life among Malagasy speakers in Mayotte or northwest Madagascar, and hence develop frameworks for thinking about particularity or difference, this one is unabashedly general, broadly anthropological rather than specifically ethnographic. Additionally, the goal is to begin to describe things simply as they are; a few lapses aside, the argument is not (consciously) normative.


Underdeterminism

Where some authors emphasize freedom as both an existential condition and the precondition (necessary and perhaps sufficient) for ethics, I prefer to speak of being underdetermined. Human beings have a degree of autonomy, in some domains and from some social locations more than others; nowhere is our behavior programmed, fully rule-bound, obligatory, or predictable. People can surprise us — and we can surprise ourselves. We are shaped and constrained in all kinds of ways, but we are not fully determined by circumstances, rules, forces, or causes, known or unknown to us, genetic, neurological, cognitive, hormonal, or psychological (whatever that means); never fully determined by destiny, the unconscious, culture, class or other economic forces, oppression, self-interest, or the search for power, esteem, food, or sex. And even if we were so determined, the fact that we are not aware of it (even when we claim it) is critical for human experience.

If we were fully and knowingly determined, life would be mechanical and dead boring — indeed, it would be dead. But if we were fully free, and free of criteria, we would have no way of knowing what we wanted or how to orient ourselves, and no means to keep us on the same path long enough to achieve satisfaction of anything but immediate wants. At either extreme we would be akin to that vegetable-like state that Geertz described of a human organism devoid of culture (1973b; Faubion 2011, Lear 2011).

The insight is not that people are absolutely free but that as our actions are not fully directed or determined, they require the exercise of some form of judgment. Arguments of freedom and determinism must confront the fact that we are constantly faced with the challenge of alternatives, free to choose but also forced to do so. Do I turn right or left at this crossroads, address you in one language or another, propose or not propose, extend my hand or avert my eyes? I am free to choose but not free not to choose. Socialization is never complete, not so much or only because of the continuing power of nature, sexual drives, and aggressive urges, but because it imposes or proposes multiple, incommensurable, competing, or inconsistent paths, relationships, responsibilities, goals, and solutions. Moreover it raises the question of consistency; once I set forth along one path, how committed to it am I, how readily can I change paths, and with what consequences? Freedom is premised on prior commitment and hence, as it were, unfreedom.

In sum, we should examine both the manner and consequences of our being (relatively) underdetermined and the manner and consequences of our being (relatively) unfree. What I find most significant with respect to our unfreedom is how we are always already committed — to an identity, a particular language, a mode of life, an orientation in the world, and to particular relationships with significant others. We can abandon these commitments, but not without consequences. The steps we are free to take next draw force and meaning from the steps we have already taken (or that have been taken for us).

These arguments by means of negation (underdeterminism, unfreedom) are ones I learned from Madagascar, where states of affairs are frequently described by what they are not and people by what they do not do, rather than what they are or do. Thus, the name Tsimihety, referring now to a large ethnic group in northern Madagascar, means "those who do not cut their hair," recalling an original refusal to follow a deferential mortuary observance on the death of a Sakalava overlord. It describes not what people do or must do, but a once politically salient refusal to do something (a historical event) and what, since then, they do not do. This leaves a space that is underdetermined or underdefined, albeit not a space that is free in any absolute sense. Taboos (prohibitions, or fady) are widely prevalent in Madagascar, indexing many levels of identity and ascription but always by defining a small space of proscription rather than a specific prescription. Malagasy are, in effect, free outside the limits imposed by their taboos.

This is akin to a theory that emphasizes constraints over rules. Or, starting from a positive rather than negative direction, we could speak of affordances, as does Webb Keane, or of capacities, as so well set out by C. B. Macpherson. Affordances and capacities shape our condition, enable our projects and actions, and perhaps invite us to turn in one direction or another (tennis or track, sport or music), but they do not determine anything or enable everything. One could also start by thinking of ethics along the lines of play (or playfulness).

Any discussion of human freedom sits in an interesting place between what is and what ought to be, which is what some consider the true realm of the ethical. What "is" is the realm of fact, the way the world is now; what "ought to be" is the realm of value, as we imagine something better (perhaps "freer" or perhaps less free). "Ought" can be stultifying (you ought to act respectfully, keep your front lawn free of weeds, and not do anything that will cause the neighbors to gossip) or wildly utopian (the world ought to be a place where we can all live happily ever after, with equivalent life chances, in flourishing, just societies, without conflict and undue hardship but not boring or without goals, where we can all exercise our capacities as we desire, grow organic vegetables in the morning, and play violin, football, or computer games in the afternoon). Any reasonably realistic vision of the good life must lie between these; we do want conventions, goals, and directions as well as the freedom to reject them. In fact, conventions and goals are meaningless in the absence of alternatives, freedom is meaningless without constraint, and life is boring without challenge.

Making freedom the centerpiece of a depiction of ethics runs up against two further challenges. First, behind any advocation of freedom there always looms the question of whether my freedom is not at someone else's expense. The tragic history of Zionism (and perhaps of all nationalisms) exemplifies this point. Second, any depiction of freedom as a universal existential or ethical condition needs to be purified of the connotations that come with "freedom" as a particular value. The word carries a great deal of ideological baggage since at least the Cold War, with respect to both politics and the market. It has hardly been a salient term beyond the sphere of the West, and to say this is not to join in the triumphalism of the West but to express a genuine doubt about its universal value. It is certainly one of the tasks of an anthropological approach to ethics to question the prevalence and salience of freedom as a concept or value and to show how flourishing lives can be lived in the absence of such a concept. In Madagascar, as I briefly indicated, freedom is a practical outcome of the system of prohibitions, but it is hardly an explicit value in itself. Indeed, there, as in many places, perhaps especially in kinship-based societies, the idea of pure freedom would be quite shocking and the condition a radically unethical one. To be free would be to repudiate others.


Freedom and Convention

If freedom is contrasted by some thinkers with determinism, for others the first thing to establish is the difference between the obedient following of rules or convention and the freedom, courage, and imagination to refuse or escape convention. Frequently these are distinguished as ethical and moral. However, the two terms are applied inconsistently in the literature and at times to opposite effect. The need for making such a distinction central comes from a particular approach to ethics and a history that are not mine. The distinction figures in interesting debates between Kantian and Nietzschean positions, the one premised on reason and rule and the other on imagination and freedom. The Kantian position enters social theory via Durkheim, while the Nietzschean one is developed in Foucault. Those who adopt a version of the latter position do so in part from a resistance to the former that stems from one or more dissatisfactions with the idea of ethics or morality understood narrowly and normatively as the following of rules (albeit such adherence to rule is to be taken up freely, according to Kant).

Some thinkers seem to start from an intuition of the difference between doing what you are told and thinking for yourself. That is a fairly shallow distinction, since what you are told may sometimes be to go think for yourself, and thinking for yourself often leads to the conclusion to do what you have been told or what others are doing. External "conventions" often become internalized "principles." But more than this, it is impossible to simply do what you are told, since this doesn't take into account contingency, contradictory instructions, or the formation of a human self. Conversely, you cannot think entirely for yourself if you inhabit a common language with others — if you exist, as humans do, within some kind of community. So while this tension between accepting convention and, let us say, self-fashioning may be part of ethical experience and even of great salience in particular cultural contexts and historical circumstances, which might be periods described as revolutionary (say, recently in Egypt), neither pole can be justified intellectually as an absolute position. In philosophy, as might be imagined, the debate has been more complex than I have presented it here and takes diverse forms in particular intellectual contexts — for example, in the various ways in which mid-twentieth-century British analytic philosophers like Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Bernard Williams rejected the narrow ideas of a prescriptive moral system held by some of their teachers — or, comparably, in French existentialism, German phenomenology, or American pragmatism.

While I share the urge to question bourgeois complacency and, of course, the pleasure in doing so, I think that one of the lessons of social theory (in contrast to abstract or passionate philosophy) has been that the distinction between convention and freedom is a false or limited opposition. Existential freedom of the kind idealized by Sartre is rarely encountered in ordinary life (and what he dismisses as bad faith can often be viewed with a good deal more charity). There is an inextricable connection, or productive tension, between freedom and obligation in practice, a relationship that is easier to see when approaching the subject ethnographically than by means of reified abstractions in theory.

Hence, while I remain skeptical of any idealization of absolute freedom, I do not see human action as an unthinking following of rules either. For that matter, neither did Durkheim. For Durkheim, despite all the attention given to his emphasis on the obligatory, rules exist not simply to curtail animal-like individuality or to enforce social order but to produce a kind of self-transcendence that makes human freedom possible or that is, in effect, human freedom (1973; see Hatch 1963). Ethnographically, it is also evident that people, both collectively and individually, often freely and deliberately submit to specific kinds of discipline in order to cultivate an ethical disposition in themselves or their children, as though the ordinary social rules or conventional cultural ends were not enough, but equally as though sheer freedom was at least as dangerous an alternative. We cannot think how to live in the absence of postulated ends and instantiated criteria, and we cannot actually live in the abstract or only in our minds.

The relation between freedom and rule or convention is evident also in the mundane fact that people are regularly faced with deciding among several competing or incommensurable conventional commitments or obligations. We might feel relatively obligated to spend holidays with family but relatively free to decide whether to spend Christmas with our own parents or those of our partner, and free also to rationalize the fact that we've decided to stay at home this year, go to Mexico, or convert to Islam instead. This entails practical judgment, which is a more useful and realistic concept than either freedom or rule, especially when the latter are understood as mutually exclusive alternatives, or distinct provinces of social life, or moments of social history. In other words, we are not free to live outside any rules or obligations, but we are both free and obliged to distinguish among them. Rather than speak of rules that we follow or break, it is more precise to talk about multiple criteria, diverse commitments, and incommensurable values. And rather than speaking of choosing among them, I think it is clearer to say that we exercise some kind of judgment with respect to them.

My theoretical inspirations have been, on the one side, various modern interpretations of Aristotle's discussion of practical judgment and virtue (chapters 4 and 5 below) and, on the other side, ordinary language (chapters 8 and 11). In neither of these conversations is the following of rules central; hence there is not an obvious or necessary distinction to be made between the two modalities of convention and freedom, to be distinguished as ethics and morality. Even when the distinction proves useful, for example, in observing social change, the further step by some to objectify ethics and morality as distinct entities of a quasi-positivistic social science is nothing short of absurd. I use the words somewhat interchangeably but have come over time to prefer ethics. I cannot justify this on rational grounds; perhaps I prefer it because it is the word first and most commonly used in philosophy, the word with the Greek rather than the Latin root. Nevertheless, I do use the words ethics and ethical in more than one sense, and this needs to be clarified.


On the Meaning of Ethical

By ethical I do not mean, in the first instance, what is good or just, nor the kinds of prescriptions or theories that have been developed to tell us what is good or just; rather, I mean the simple but profound fact that our actions and words are susceptible to judgment according to whether and how they fit established criteria. So the ethical is not in the first instance what is done right or what ought to be done, but the conceptual possibility of doing right and of discriminating right from wrong, or better from worse. To go further, it is what marks the near impossibility of acting in ways that do not fall under, or are not susceptible to, description or evaluation according to such criteria. Not all human acts are ethical in the sense of good and just, and no human beings, a few saints possibly excepted, are good or just all of the time. But we are all always (almost always) subject to criteria, to acting, thinking, and being thought about with respect to them. Some would say the most salient ethical moments are when we no longer have criteria, but then we are responding precisely to their absence.


(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

One. The Ethical Condition
Two. Virgin Marriage and the Autonomy of Women in Mayotte
Three. Taboo as Cultural Practice among Malagasy Speakers
Four. The Past Imperfect: Remembering as Moral Practice
Five. The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy
Six. Just Anger: Scenarios of Indignation in Botswana and Madagascar
Coauthored by Jacqueline Solway
Seven. Rheumatic Irony: Questions of Agency and Self-Deception as Refracted Through the Art of Living with Spirits
Eight. On Catching Up with Oneself: Learning to Know That One Means What One Does
Nine. Sacrifice and the Problem of Beginning: Reflections from Sakalava Mythopraxis
Ten. Value and Virtue
Eleven. Toward an Ethics of the Act
Twelve. Ethics Out of the Ordinary
Thirteen. The Value of (Performative) Acts
Fourteen. The Continuous and Discontinuous Person: Two Dimensions of Ethical Life

References
Index

What People are Saying About This

James Laidlaw

“Lambek has come to be identified with a distinctive position within the anthropology of ethics—one that recognizes the ethical as an imminent dimension of all human social life, that sees the human condition as necessarily and pervasively an ethical one. The argument for this position is richly developed across the essays in this collection and rooted in Lambek’s exemplary, detailed ethnography and fine readings of a distinctive range of thinkers. The result is beautifully written, scrupulous scholarship of the highest order that will be indispensible for this important and growing field of anthropology.”

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