Session 4a: Ethical Questions

2nd Global Conference

Friday 12th March – Sunday 14th March 2010
Salzburg, Austria

What About The Nonhumans In Communities Experiencing Conflict? A Case For Revising Perceptions On Democracy And Freedom
Artwell Nhemachena
University of Cape Town, South Africa

Human communities have traditionally been given pre-eminence right from the works of Ferdinard Tonnies and Emile Durkheim to contemporary perceptions of political, economic and cultural communities. For Latourans, there has been the objectification of nature coupled with its treatment as cold and uninterested in human affairs because of the binarism between nature and culture in modern societies. Political ecology has not gone deep enough in bridging the divide between humans and nonhumans and thus the notion community still focuses on humans. Non-human beings are affected and in some societies they are held to participate in conflicts yet they are not considered worthy members of the community to reconcile with or to extend healing processes to. Efforts at mediation, conciliation and arbitration focus on humans and their interests, including interest to dominate over non human beings: the land, seas, animals, birds, plants etc. Bill of rights in the constitutions focus on human beings, discourses on democracy focus on human beings and it is only human beings who can be sued and who can sue to enforce the observance of their rights. Could this kind of exclusion not be deemed to be colonisation, subjugation, apartheid, discrimination, enslavement of the nonhumans by the humans worldwide? Is everyone not guilty of colonialism and imperialism? This paper seeks to explore some of these questions with import from Bruno latour’s views on Cosmo politics.

General Disadvantage and the Intermingling ‘ethos’ of Work, Consumption and Authenticity
Isaac González-Balletbó and Roger Martínez-Sanmartí
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain

During the last decades, the study of the openness and fluidity of identity work through commodities and popular culture has left aside the attempt to seriously understand the intermingling between the changes in the way we culturally make sense of our social world and the process of social structuration of socioeconomic inequality. Although many works have focused during this period on ethnic, gender, sexual and geographic social hierarchies, general disadvantage has not generally been successfully approached.

This paper states that to understand the importance of class is important to analyse how the normative drives of work, consumerism and authenticity intermingle in different ways depending on the social location in socioeconomic hierarchies. In order to bring general disadvantage back to the centre of the analysis, in spite of the apparent blurredness of contemporary society stressed by postmodern approaches, it is crucial to take the deep ethical and normative patterns generating action into account. This means that the anti-institutionalism, anti-conventionalism and expressive individualism of contemporary Western societies run parallel to new forms of social structuration that cannot be simply grasped with a bourdieaunian approach to cultural distinction and need to incorporate the importance of “authenticity” in the process of social distinction.

The paper, although theoretical in nature, draws upon a 15-year research trajectory of the two authors in the fields of youth, popular culture, cultural consumption, the internet and schooling.

“New Ethics” In Understanding Politics?
Gülşen Seven
Department of Political Science, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

The objective of the paper is to provide an alternative reading of contemporary political theories that claim to posit a challenge to liberal way of theorizing about politics, from the perspective of the relationship between theory and practice or thought and action, in order to shed light on “crisis of contemporary political theory” and asses the success of the proposed theories in transgressing what they deem to be “moralizing or ethical” form of theorizing about politics through their proposed “new ethics”. Two broad approaches that are going to be elaborated upon within the confines of this paper are, what I call, radical and sceptical approaches. As representatives of the radical approach, the paper concentrates on the works of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Slavoj Zizek. Raymond Geuss and John Dunn are grouped together as the representatives of the sceptical approach. The common theme that unites these two approaches is a claim that contemporary political philosophy or theory is in crisis. The crisis of political theory is identified as a lack of alternatives to liberal form of theorizing about politics, which, in turn, is mainly associated with moralizing of politics or the subsumption of politics under ethics. This is argued to have led to misrepresentation of the realm of the political on the one hand, and to “inertia” of the political practice/action on the other. The contention of the paper is that, while combating the moralizing impact of contemporary liberal political theory, the radical approach posits some kind of a notion of “good”, which may not be considered to be so different from its target. Sceptical approach, on the other hand, is reluctant even to accept the existence of some form of a “good” around which people may be brought together to act. Rather than a notion of good, what pushes people to act and, thus, what is constitutive of politics is the practical necessities of social, economic and political world. On the basis of this main difference, the paper aims to assess the respective strength of each tradition in transgressing the boundaries of liberal form of theorizing and in formulating new form of ethics in understanding politics.