Four Lectures on Ethics Hau Books

FOUR LECTURES ON ETHICS Hau BOOKS E xecutive Editor Giovanni da Col Managing Editor Sean M. Dowdy Editorial Board Anne-Christine Taylor Carlos Fausto Danilyn Rutherford Ilana Gershon Jason Throop Joel Robbins Jonathan Parry Michael Lempert Stephan Palmié www.haubooks.com FOUR LECTURES ON ETHICS ANthrOPOLOGICAL PERSPEctiVES Masterclass Series Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane Hau Books Chicago © 2015 Hau Books, Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane Hau Books Masterclass Series (Volume 3) TheH AU Books Masterclass Series is dedicated to the publication of seminal lectures by key, influential anthropologists. Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9905050-7-5 LCCN: 2015952085 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is marketed and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Contents Contributors vii Preface 1 1. Living as if it mattered Michael Lambek 5 2. What does ordinary ethics look like? Veena Das 53 3. Varieties of ethical stance Webb Keane 127 4. Troubled waters. At the confluence of ethics and politics Didier Fassin 175 Index 211 Contributors Michael Lambek is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough where he holds the Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Ethical Life. His latest book is The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value (Chicago 2015). Other books include The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar (Palgrave Macmillan 2002), the edited Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action (Fordham 2010), and the co-edited A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion (Wiley-Blackwell 2013). Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent books are Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (2007), Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (2015), and three co-edited volumes: The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy (2014), Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium (2015), and Politics of the Urban Poor (forthcoming). Didier Fassin is James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Insti- tute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of The Empire of Trauma. Inquiry into the Condition of Victim (with Richard Rechtman, Prince- ton, 2009), Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present (California, 2011), Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (Polity, 2013), At the Heart of the State. The Moral Life of Institutions (Pluto, 2015), Prison Worlds. An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition (Polity, forthcoming). viii FOUR LECTURES ON ETHICS Webb Keane is George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His new book, Ethi- cal Life: Its Natural and Social Histories, will appear in 2015. His books include Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian So- ciety (California, 1997); Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (California, 2007) and he served as a co-editor of Handbook of Mate- rial Culture (Sage, 2006). Preface The book you hold is the product of a collaboration among four authors and this is how it happened: Giovanni da Col invited Michael Lambek to write a set of lectures on ethics for the Hau masterclass series in 2014. Michael, in turn, invited Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane to join the project, thinking it would be engaging to have four voices, each of which would bring to the topic of ethics a different tonality and pitch, arising from the way we have individu- ally confronted what matters most to us in our lives and our work. We intend neither to offer a survey of the field nor to develop or propagate a single school of thought. The reasoning, as an astute referee has pointed out, is that we are “close enough to make dialogue readily possible but distinct enough to make it interesting.” The book is a result of our joint efforts but each lecture stands on its own like an opera with successive arias in four distinct voices. Think of a “we” that retains the individuality of the “I” rather than merging it into a larger col- lective. It follows that the reader might read the lectures in any order she pleases. We were tasked to write lectures. In fact, these have never been publicly delivered and are doubtless each too long to do so comfortably. But they ap- proximate lectures insofar as we have kept a relatively informal and somewhat pedagogical tone. We hope that the perception of resonances between argu- ments, variations on the same theme, as well points and counterpoints, will invite the reader to explore the text as one might listen to a piece of music that is familiar but still holds the promise of new discoveries. We are in general agreement that the topic of ethics challenges us as anthropologists both to hone our ethnographic perceptions and to reflect on the overt and hidden disorders as well as new potentials of our times. Why have subjects 2 FOUR LECTURES ON ETHICS of ethics and morality acquired such urgency in both public discourse and in anthropological discussions? None of us aim to take the voice of prophecy in which anthropology is asked to reinvent itself. Yet tectonic shifts in the worlds we inhabit, along with transformations in the boundaries of disciplines, chal- lenge us to think carefully of what is new as well as what has long been present. This volume stems from a conviction that these challenges call for new atten- tion to ethics. On the one hand, anthropology has been reinvigorated by urgent summons to more direct engagement with our contemporary troubles. On the other hand, founded in part on a critique of ethnocentrism, anthropology has also always fostered a critical perspective on the moral certainties that drive efforts—our own and others’—to right wrongs around the world. The question of ethics lies at the heart of this paradox and demands both conceptual reflec- tion and empirical insight. In different ways the essays attend to these issues by asking not how sharp boundaries might be drawn around the concept of ethics (versus, say, morality), nor what the content of ethics may be, but rather how to depict the forms under which politics appears through the lens of ethics, or how the social might be reconfigured in relation to the natural, or how everyday forms of repair might stand up to the horrific. We are more interested in under- standing what is at stake around ethical issues in the public sphere as well as in the private lives of individuals, how ethical questions emerge, are debated and resolved—or left unresolved—than in circumscribing or defining what is ethics. Talk of ethics is everywhere. Protocols for establishing ethical sensibility in the workplace are widespread and rely heavily on standardization and measure- ment. Laws and codes of ethical practices multiply in the domains of medicine as well as research and determine purified norms and ideals with little con- sideration for how things actually are. In various parts of the world projects ranging from wars to humanitarian intervention on behalf of their victims are undertaken and justifications offered in terms that make claims to ethical utter- ances. Even torture, rape, and violence against children can be couched in the language of morality, or worse, experienced as performance of religious, moral, or legal acts. Yet, it is clear that the value of such language has been eroded, for one does not know or trust that the ethical enunciations are tethered to any serious concern for those whose lives are sought to be “improved” through these ethical projects. Unlike certain other anthropologists and some powerful strands in moral theory we refrain from treating ethics as an object or as an isolable domain of theory. Each of us argues against such objectification albeit along different PREFACE 3 avenues. We realize, however, that such objectification is itself a part of the milieu we inhabit and are sharply aware of its potential for diminishing the very life that it seeks to improve. We recently laughed together over a New Yorker cartoon in which a leering wolf and modest rabbit sit across a table from one another above the caption, “I’ve never understood—what is the difference between morals and ethics?” We are not sure of the wisdom of trying to make such distinctions, other than for restricted heuristic purposes or as part of the life of institutions, and suspect that it might sometimes be a result of the fal- lacy of misplaced concreteness; we are mindful of the message of the cartoon that talk about ethics is all too readily hypocritical or self-interested and that making conceptual distinctions has political consequences and can be a form of violence. At the same time, we acknowledge the fact that making conceptual distinctions and discerning situations, evaluating acts, and making judgments are part of everyday life, whether that concerns ordinary acts or political decisions. Some of us take this ubiquity as intrinsic to the human condition—others see this more in terms of social conventions emphasized in law courts or as a way of talking in situations of heightened intensity. We are agreed, though, that there is no moral or ethical essence to be studied. Ethics can never be pure or abso- lute. It may be seen for some of us as a dimension of action, for others as part of our life in language, or both.

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