Desperate equilibrium: on guilt,law and rationality

Abstract

This paper is about the role of guilt in relation to practical reason. It analyses guilt not as a passive emotion but as a particular kind of strategy at the level of subjective rationality. The concept of guilt occupies a complex and contested semantic space with other concepts, most notably shame. There have been many attempts – philosophical, psychological, sociological – to define these concepts in relation to each other. This paper suggests that whilst guilt is a moral concept that is oriented towards a certain kind of legalism, shame is a moralistic concept. As such, the relations between guilt and shame are discussed in relation to some literary examples, for instance Macbeth's guilt and Conrad's Lord Jim. The conclusion is that on the one hand our confusion over the concept of guilt comes down not least to what may be our confusion over the difficult concept of law and that on the other hand this has consequences that can ultimately be political.     

Guilt and the origins of modern law

Abstract

Tracing the history of legal concepts from the decline of European feudalism to the Reformation, this paper examines ways in which the concept of guilt shaped the first evolution of modern law, and it claims that the early revolutionary junctures in the construction of the law were centred around specific and distinctive conceptions of guilt. It argues that, through the history of medieval and early-modern European society, the law learned positively to abstract and account for itself through internally formative exchanges over the subject of guilt, and changes in law's observation of guilt reflected a growing refinement in law's societal sensibility, in its inclusivity, in its patterns of imputation and in its positive powers of self-legitimation. Guilt formed the term around which the law enacted the necessary stages of its social adaptation and produced constructs to underwrite the requirement for general, abstracted and positively inclusive law that constitutes modern society. The ultimate result of guilt's evolution as a legal figure became visible in the fact that the law progressively intensified its positivity and inclusivity, and it amplified the legal and normative resources that it permitted modern societies to store, utilize and reproduce.     

Implicated: a review paper on guilt

Abstract

The review article examines three books about modern guilt. Each author comes from a different country: Schlink from Germany, Bruckner from France, and Chiarot from the United States. These works either point to or exemplify the problems implicit in concepts of universal guilt. The article explores ways in which each account reflects particular national preoccupations: the German reckoning with the Nazi past, the reassertion of France's global and historical role, and the American culture wars. The article concludes by recognising the importance of Schlink's impulse to deal with guilt scrupulously within the law, while sharing his doubts as to whether legal ways of dealing with guilt can be entirely adequate.     

Antinomies of race: diversity and destiny in Kant

ABSTRACT

Larrimore's essay reads Kant's pioneering work in the theory of race in the context of his thought as a whole. Kant wrote on race for most of his career; at different stages of his thinking, race assured meaning in human diversity, confirmed the value of a practical-reason-informed understanding of human destiny, and provided a model for the ‘pragmatic’ knowledge of what ‘man can and should make of himself’. ‘Race’ was invented in 1775 as an advertisement for the new disciplines of geography and anthropology that Kant inaugurated and promoted throughout his career. Giving new meaning to a foreign (French) term associated with animal husbandry, Kant presented the (supposedly) exceptionlessly hereditary traits of race as the first fruit of a truly scientific ‘natural history’ of humanity. His concerns were not merely classificatory; his four-race schema, modeled on the temperaments, allowed a special status for Whites as at once a race and the transcendence of race (Kant invented ‘whiteness’ as well as ‘race’). The notion of ‘race’ was refined in essays Kant published in the 1780s, in the same journal as his celebrated essays on Enlightenment and the philosophy of history. It was given a new status, rather than displaced, by the critical turn. Granted a sanction ‘similar’ to the postulates of pure practical reason, its empirical verification would confirm Kant's whole critical system. Kant's theory of race came into its own in the 1790s, gaining wide acceptance. He relied on familiarity with it (and its lingering association with animal husbandry) in explaining the larger project of the ‘pragmatic anthropology’ without which he thought human progress impossible. Understanding how the concept of race contributed to Kant's more familiar and still appealing intellectual and practical concerns, we gain a better sense of its fateful and enduring attractiveness in subsequent eras.     

Towards a Kantian Moral Psychology or the Practical Effects of Self-Predicating Judgements of Sublimity

Abstract

This essay develops an account of the link between Kant's aesthetics and his ethics. It does so by articulating a Kantian account of moral psychology by way of aesthetic reflective judgements of sublimity. Since judgements of sublimity enrich the picture of a Kantian subject by forcefully revealing the unbounded power of the faculty of reason, I investigate the possibility that judgements of this kind could serve as a basis for moral motivation. The paper first shows how judgements of sublimity help a subject recognize reason's unbounded nature, and proceeds to analyse the practical effects of a subject judging itself sublime. When judgements of sublimity have as their object the unbounded and unsythesizable power of reason, they may thereby serve as the basis for both the recognition of our moral vocation, and the grounds for determining the will to act from respect for it. Since a judgement of sublimity produces for Kant the experience of an enlivening emotion and an outflowing of vital forces, the paper then develops Kant's concept of “life” motivated by a recognition of its practical orientation. In this way sublimity rather than beauty can be interpreted as symbolic hypotyposis of morality. The paper then takes up less favourable interpretations of the practical effects of self-predicated judgements of sublimity, and constructs critical responses to such positions. I conclude, following Adorno, by stressing the historical and social dimension of the capacities for both making sublime judgements, and being morally enlivened by them.     

From the Morality of Living to the Morality of Dying: Hunger Strikes in Turkish Prisons

Political hunger strikes have been part of the debates on human rights in many countries around the world. This paper explores the preconditions for and motives behind hunger strikes in Turkey by conceiving the hunger strikers as a part of citizenship politics through which strikers not only express their views against certain common issues, but also declare total opposition to an unjust condition within their political community. The paper focuses on the question of why some such “citizens” choose to participate in hunger strikes, which appears as an individual commitment to achieve a certain common objective. In doing so, the meaning of the experiences of hunger strikers and their universal right to live are elaborated in relation to their political and moral views. Hunger strikes are suggested to be seen as voluntary fasting, undertaken as a means of civil disobedience against an injustice within the context of citizenship. As examples of non-violent political acts, hunger strikes are not only part of citizenship politics but also expressions of commitment to achieving one's goals through non-aggressive means for the common good of all citizens. Moreover, they can also be considered examples of martyrdom/heroism because hunger strikers altruistically risk their life for a public cause. As a particular altruistic act, hunger strikes can also be viewed as an effective form of communication directed toward fellow citizens. Moreover, they are expressions of self-determination for having control over and for one's own life conditions. Finally, hunger strikes can be conceptualized as a struggle for transforming the configuration of structures and practices of citizenship about which one is passionately concerned. In this context, hunger strikes seem to be struggles for recognition in a relationship between two subjects, in which one subordinates the other.     

Listening to melancholia: Alice Walker's Meridian

ABSTRACT

Alice Walker's second novel, Meridian (1976), explores both the ways in which racist societies initiate and exacerbate melancholia and how this psychological dynamic can and must be overcome. The novel posits not a simple ‘cure’ but rather a process of questioning and learning from the past and one's painful attachments to it. In this way it negotiates scholarly concerns about psychoanalytic theory, as manifest particularly in literary criticism and critical race studies. Far from normalizing a form of identity focused on the past, this experimental novel depicts psychological transformation as an effort that requires the willingness to untangle the relationships involved in one's present, one's past and broader systems of social injustice.     

Schleiermacher and Post-Metaphysical Thinking

Abstract

Schleiermacher rarely features in the now widespread discussion of the relevance of the German Idealist and Romantic traditions for contemporary philosophy because he has mainly been regarded as a theologian and theorist of textual interpretation. This essay shows that his most important philosophical work, the Dialectic, involves many ideas concerning truth and language which are generally regarded as belonging to what Habermas terms ‘post-metaphysical thinking’. Schleiermacher's views of truth and language are contrasted with those of Habermas and Rorty, and are seen as being of more than merely historical interest. His reflections on self-consciousness are shown to raise important questions for contemporary accounts of the relationship of the subject to language.     

Introduction: The dynamics of ideas

Abstract

Participants in today's financial markets confront a sea of data. While the availability of market data has benefits it also creates problems, notably those relating to questions of meaning, judgement and intervention: how to make sense of these flows – how to see the ‘market’, its futures, and thus act pre-emptively. Over more recent years financial organizations have been turning to new technologies of representation, in particular the design and application of visualization software in an effort to enable better visual imagination of and interaction with markets as they unfold in real time. ‘What you see is what you risk’ in many respects captures the thinking or at least the desire underlying the employment of the latest visualization software. The more powerful one's vision the better able one is to participate in increasingly complex financial markets, at least in theory.

Based on recent interviews with those involved in developing and using the latest visualization software within some of the key markets of global finance, and developing the influential work of Daniel Beunza and David Stark, and Karin Knorr Cetina, in particular, this paper adopts a cultural-economy-of-finance perspective to examine the implications of these new techniques of representation. The paper argues that the latest visual turn within finance should be afforded a more central position in the study of contemporary financial market practices.     

Socialism,knowledge, the instrumental valuation principle and the enhancement of individual dignity

Abstract

Socialism is frequently associated with central planning, public ownership, anathema to markets and the emasculation of the individual. Recent market socialist contributions attempt to overcome socialism's seeming resistance to markets. However, such contributions are frequently undermined by Hayek's invocation of fragmented knowledge. This article endeavours to contribute to a broadly conceived socialism that is not grounded in a particular array of institutions, but one which, via the instrumental valuation principle, the capabilities approach and Dewey's conceptualization of knowledge, offers the prospect of enhancing individual dignity. The instrumental valuation principle is viewed as key to socialism's engagement with dignity as it provides the framework for the enhancement of egalitarianism, democracy and the undermining of invidious institutional arrangements.     

Governance and governmentality: a discussion in the context of UK private pension provision

Abstract

While the governance of pension schemes, and the risk this poses for pension savers, is a prominent issue in current pension debate in the UK, this paper places that debate in, arguably, the more important context of the governance of individual behaviour. Using the concept of governmentality as a means of interpreting the course of recent UK pension policy and its attempts to influence individual saving behaviour, it critiques that policy. The paper then goes on to consider the effect of the introduction of personal accounts upon the pensions landscape, and in particular its potential to push forward the government's recent approach to pension provision. It argues that these reforms, rather than furthering individual saving for retirement, may alternatively create the very real possibility of undermining it.     

Genetic risk and the birth of the somatic individual

This paper considers the implications of the rise of the new molecular genetics for the ways in which we are governed and the ways in which we govern ourselves. Using examples of genetic screening and genetic discrimination in education, employment and insurance, and a case study of debates among those at risk of developing Huntington's Disease and their relatives, we suggest that some of the claims made by critics of these new developments are misplaced. While there are possibilities of genetic discrimination, the key event is the creation of the person 'genetically at risk'. But genetic risk does not imply resignation in the face of an implacable biological destiny: it induces new and active relations to oneself and one's future. In particular, it generates new forms of 'genetic responsibility', locating actually and potentially affected individuals within new communities of obligation and identification. Far from generating fatalism, the rewriting of personhood at a genetic level and its visualization through a 'molecular optic' transforms the relations between patient and expert in unexpected ways, and is linked to the development of novel 'life strategies', involving practices of choice, enterprise, self-actualization and prudence in relation to one's genetic make-up. Most generally, we suggest, the birth of the person 'genetically at risk' is part of a wider reshaping of personhood along somatic lines and a mutation in conceptions of life itself.     

Idleness,Usefulness and Self-Constitution

Abstract

The core argument of the paper is that the modern philosophical notion of self-constitution is directed against the prospect of human beings dissolving into idleness. Arguments for self-constitution are marked by non-philosophical presuppositions about the value of usefulness. Those arguments also assume a particular conception of superior experience as conscious integration of a person’s actions within an identifiable set of chosen commitments. Exploring particular arguments by Hegel, Kant, Korsgaard and Frankfurt the paper claims that those arguments are problematic in the various ways in which they suppose usefulness and explicitly or implicitly take extra-philosophical views of idleness.     

An experimental test of the pivotal voter model under plurality and PR elections

This paper examines the decision to vote or not vote in experimental elections. We replicate the important findings of Duffy and Tavits (2008), though with a different design. Our results support their finding, that is, turnout is affected by the belief that one's vote counts and that overestimation in the perception that one's vote counts does not disappear completely over time. Going beyond previous research, we also find that turnout is not higher under a proportional system than under a plurality system, as well as that beliefs about being in a pivotal position have a greater impact on turnout among the risk averse.     

Becoming Who We Are: Democracy and the Political Problem of Hope

Abstract

In this article I argue that hope is rightly numbered by Hesiod among the evils, as hope cannot be separated from an awareness of the inadequacy of one's current state. Political hope for democrats in particular is tied to the awareness that we have not yet realized ourselves, that, to paraphrase Pindar, we have not yet become who we are. I argue that, although Rorty comes close to articulating this in his book Achieving Our Country, his emphasis on pride ultimately obscures more than it reveals. I conclude that Thoreau's anguished reflection in Walden on the failures of his fellow citizens is a better place to look for instruction on the question of political hope.     

The persistence of collective guilt

Abstract

This paper asks why, despite the obvious difficulties entailed, the notion of ‘collective guilt’ continues to feature in discussions of the responsibilities of one group towards another. The aim is to clarify how it is that the partial success of repeated attempts to distinguish individual from collective guilt and to confine the latter to a pre-modern moment reveals something of our present. The key contributions to this discussion made by Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers in relation to Nazi Germany are examined for their ambivalences in this regard, as are some recent developments in international law and politics. The suspicion is that collective guilt is a notion that modern political reason cannot embrace and yet which it cannot entirely disavow: ‘collective guilt’ and the element of fate that it implies is central to our understanding of citizenship, nationhood and political commitment. The paper thus attempts an analysis of the durability of the concept of collective guilt; it is not an evaluation of its usefulness, but an exploration of its persistence.     

Kant and the critique of the ethics-first approach to politics

Abstract

Contemporary ‘realists’ attack the Kantian influence on political philosophy. A main charge is that Kantians fail to understand the specificity of politics and neglect to develop a ‘distinctively political thought’ that differs from moral philosophy. Instead, the critics say, Kantians are guilty of an ‘ethics-first approach to politics,’ in which political theory is a mere application of moral principles. But what does this ethics-first approach have to do with Kant himself? Very little. This article shows how Kant’s approach to political theory at a fundamental level includes political institutions, power, and coercion as well as disagreement, security, and coordination problems. In contrast to realists, Kant has a fundamental principle, which can explain why and guide how we ought to approach the political question, namely the norm of equal freedom. Yet, Kant’s theory does not take the form of a moralistic ought addressed to the isolated individual, but concerns a problem that we share as interdependent beings and that requires common institutions. The fruitfulness of the Kantian approach, then, is that it can take the political question seriously without being uncritical of actual politics and power, and that it can be normative without being moralistic.     

The Moral Efficacy of Aesthetic Experience: Figures of Meaning in the Moral Field

Abstract

This paper proposes to analyse the process that makes paths of action meaningful. It argues that this process is one of "figuration". The term "figuration" intends to outline how the experience of moral meaning is one that already positively marks out a field and to identify and analyse the mechanisms used for such marking and selection. It is my contention that these mechanisms predate the persuasion to a moral path; they are the process through which this path is constructed as meaningful. This thesis is elucidated through an analysis of the tactics of meaning in Kant's moral theory. Kant turns to aesthetics as a means of corroboration for his moral theory, but he also attempts to limit the scope of the interactions between his aesthetic and moral theory. For instance, when he writes on the topic of form in aesthetic taste or outlines the technical specifications of aesthetic judgment, it is arguably the arcane peculiarities of his system that are met. For this reason, Kant insists on the merely analogical relations between beauty and morality. However, it is also possible to see how certain aspects of Kant's aesthetic theory execute wider, and potentially more important, functions for his practical philosophy, such as providing meaningful orientation for the ascetic moral attitude of his duty-ethics. In this respect, certain figures of Kant's aesthetic theory may well be viewed as complementing the dependence in his moral philosophy, in the important sections on moral pedagogy and methodology, on appeals to heroic models and stories as ways of shaping and inculcating the moral disposition. This paper considers these aspects of interaction between Kant's aesthetic and moral philosophies as both (1) a problem for the consistency of his philosophy given his avowed exclusion of aesthetic and religious elements of meaning in his duty-ethics; and (2) as a case study for the new, schematic analysis of "moral figuration" outlined in the paper.     

Is there an obligation to reduce one's individual carbon footprint?

Moral duties concerning climate change mitigation are – for good reasons – conventionally construed as duties of institutional agents, usually states. Yet, in both scholarly debate and political discourse, it has occasionally been argued that the moral duties lie not only with states and institutional agents, but also with individual citizens. This argument has been made with regard to mitigation efforts, especially those reducing greenhouse gases. This paper focuses on the question of whether individuals in industrialized countries have duties to reduce their individual carbon footprint. To this end it will examine three kinds of arguments that have been brought forward against individuals having such duties: the view that individual emissions cause no harm; the view that individual mitigation efforts would have no morally significant effect; and the view that lifestyle changes would be overly-demanding. The paper shows how all three arguments fail to convince. While collective endeavours may be most efficient and effective in bringing about significant changes, there are still good reasons to contribute individually to reducing emission. After all, for most people the choice is between reducing one's individual emissions and not doing anything. The author hopes this paper shows that one should not opt for the latter.