Skip to main content

Latour and distributed morality

I just finished our reading course of Latour's AIME. The least chapter is dedicated to MOR, the fifteenth and last of his modes of existence. MOR is the mode of existence of the scruples and he says morality is spread everywhere. Morality is neither human nor a human second creation but rather is built from felicity conditions that feature in each mode of existence. To be sure, different modes have different norms associated to it - for the beings of metamorphosis, felicity is to stop existing, like for a trickster while for the beings of reproduction success is to persist. Persistence itself carries a felicity, but it is morality only for some modes - morality is in the world as much as its relativity. These are genuine norm, I guess, because they can be completely different within different modes that are also distinct tonalities of morality. Morality is therefore spread everywhere, and I guess it is therefore distributed - no part is the single guardian of morality. This comes with no surprise in a monadologist like Latour: each being carries morals (or values) as much as each being carries some knowledge. Values are therefore entwined in the way things are - the complexity of organizing desires and passions has to do with the difference between the different things and their different ways to exist. Morality carries therefore an unavoidable relativity.

As a consequence, everything can appeal to me. This can be read in a (perverted) Lévinasian way. Not only the (human) face appeal to me as an other that takes me out of the same, but all others could appeal to me. Latour talks about how a glacier could appeal to me while flying over the pole. A rebuttal according to which if everything is equally an appealing other, nothing is an appealing other - and we are outside the realm of ethics and heading back to ontology - to the same - wouldn't work. Everything can appeal to me, can call me ethically, but not everything does, or does at once. So, I am hostage to what appeals to me. Hence, plurimorality. However, a (nonperverted) Lévinasian could still say that this would be only compassion, and not duty. But then again, this is not clear if we make a particularist turn: each other appeals me (or not) in a different way. The Lévinasian, I guess, would still be unsatisfied for there is a dimension of law that is lost. Is it?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev

Talk on ultrametaphysics

 This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque. An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters Hilan Bensusan I begin with some of the words in the title. First, ‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could sound like ‘ autre metaphysics’, intends to address what comes after metaphysics assuming that metaphysics is an endeavor – or an epoch, or a project, or an activity – that reaches an end, perhaps because it is consolidated, perhaps because it has reached its own limits, perhaps because it is accomplished, perhaps because it is misconceived. In this sense, other names could apply, first of all, ‘meta-metaphysics’ – that alludes to metaphysics coming after physics, the books of Aristotle that came after Physics , or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what can be reached only if the nature of things is considered. ‘Meta-m

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I