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2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 485–492
BOOK SYMPOSIUM
Ethics without guarantees
Webb Keane, University of Michigan
Response to Hau Symposium on Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical life: Its
natural and social histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
I want to thank the reviewers for the seriousness of their criticism. I also appreciate the range of different directions from which they approach it, which
reflects the book’s cross-disciplinary ambitions. There’s not enough space here
to respond to every point they raise, but I’ll try to address the most central and
difficult ones.
Relative to the limited amount of space the Ethical life devotes to psychology,
Chapters 1 and 2 have received a disproportionate degree of attention from the
critics, both in Hau and elsewhere. This is not surprising; it’s there that my challenge to mainstream (socio-cultural) anthropology is most direct. Given this challenge, I appreciate James Laidlaw’s astute remark that the distinction between the
first and second parts of the book is somewhat artificial, since the methodological
individualism dominant in psychology has to be situated within the dynamics of
social interaction. He is also right to observe that the sequence of chapters may be
misleading: the reader should not take the psychological components to be foundational to the rest. He captures the spirit of the argument neatly when he suggests
that both the psychological and the historical sections radiate outward from the
account of interaction. Having said that, I should make clear that the goal of the
book is not just to replace one foundationalism with another. Nor is it an exercise in
debunking. Rather, those first chapters attempt to persuade skeptical anthropologists to expand the range of the resources they can draw on.
Cheryl Mattingly suggests I take the psychological research too seriously; Rita
Astuti that I don’t take it seriously enough. As their divergence suggests, this aspect
of the book is the riskiest, not least because it takes me furthest from my own training, my own most deeply rooted ethnographic and theoretical sensibilities, and
his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Webb Keane.
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ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.1.028
Webb Keane
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the common ground I share with so many anthropologists. By the same token, it’s
precisely for these reasons that I want to push hard at this pressure point. The book
starts from an intuition that it is in the borderlands between the disciplines that we
stand some of the best chances for unsettling our most complacent assumptions
and for discovering emergent possibilities—or at least, it’s here where we might
find the poaching to be good.
Mattingly faults me for not raising more doubts about the findings of psychological research. This reflects a decision I made right from the start. On the one
hand, Ethical life does point to weaknesses in the ways psychological researchers
have conceived of ethics and how they interpret their results. Moreover, I take care
to frame their findings in the conditional mode (“If so-and-so is correct”) rather
than as revealed truth. But I do not intend to perform a wholesale critique of the
field. A basic premise of the book is that anthropologists must find ways to engage productively other disciplines, if we ourselves are to gain new insights from
those who are working on problems that interest us as well, and if we’re to stand
a chance of exerting influence beyond our too-often closed conversations among
ourselves. By now anthropologists should be self-confident enough that we don’t
need to always repeat in the same terms our century-long struggle for disciplinary autonomy. Of course doesn’t mean we should naively accept the premises and
methods of other fields—but we shouldn’t dismiss them out of hand either, which
can be just as naive. The critiques of psychology coming from anthropology, critical theory, cultural studies, and STS are well known by now—no one needs me
to repeat them. Instead, Ethical life attempts to give a reading of psychology sufficiently charitable that it opens the possibility of learning something new. When
Mattingly asks if we can “trust the data that psychology produces that is so often
grounded in highly artificial environments?” she’s echoing a question that anyone
who works in a fieldwork-based discipline will ask. But every research tradition
involves some methodological decisions. The point should not be to eliminate them
but rather to understand what is gained and lost in each case. After all, isn’t this
is exactly how we would want a psychologist to approach anthropology—not by
attacking us for being anecdotal, subjective, politicized, working with miniscule
samples, not eliminating selection bias, or criticizing our lack of control populations, verification procedures, and replicable results but by grasping why we take
the peculiar approach we do, and what we hope to gain by that choice?
Mattingly is especially worried that the so-called Theory of Mind Theory in
developmental psychology may define the ethical subject too narrowly. Admittedly
this problem is noted only fleetingly in Ethical life. Mattingly’s own powerful research on families with children in the autism spectrum has convinced me I should
give this issue more weight than I was able to do in the book. But her objection
to the empirical claims of the psychologists still seems to support my basic account of ethical life, writing “there is a good deal of evidence that the intersubjective domain of both human and nonhuman interaction is extremely important to
autistics, however daunting to discern.” In other words, it is not that we should
rethink the place of intersubjectivity in ethics because autistic children are ethical
subjects but not capable of intersubjectivity. Nor is it the case that autistic children
are incapable of intersubjectivity and therefore we should not count them as ethical
subjects. Rather, because autistic children struggle with intersubjectivity, therefore
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they have to be included as ethical subjects. This is wholly within the spirit of my
approach.
Astuti objects that I haven’t taken on board enough psychology, in particular the
more ethnographically grounded and non-Eurocentric research carried out by her,
Maurice Bloch, and others. Although the book refers to research in cultural psychology and psychological anthropology, the focus does lie elsewhere. I chose to
pay particular attention to psychological research explicitly devoted to ethics and
morality, and to the dominant paradigms in child development. Astuti says these
choices leave me with little to say about the effects of social history on psychology.
Certainly it would have strengthened my own case to be able to demonstrate, for
instance, what the effects on Korowai psychology are of life within a society that
officially denies or suppresses open intention-reading. But my own sense is the
current state of the research is not yet at a point where I can draw on it heavily.
Astuti also takes me to task for not asserting that ethical life is a result of human
evolution. I have no quarrel with Darwin, and will grant in principle the working
assumption that natural selection is involved in the origins of basic human capacities. But I don’t see precisely what role this should play in my argument. First, I take
as axiomatic that an origin story isn’t in itself sufficient to provide a social analysis (bipedalism didn’t arise in order to make possible football and ballet). More
specifically, whereas the evolutionary models in moral theory tend to be global
in their ambitions, I find it more useful to work along the borders between scales
of analysis, those points of convergence between psychology and social interaction, for instance, or between interaction and social movements. Ethical life is not
meant to resurrect the positivist dream of a unified theory. Even were we to accept
evolutionary explanations of ethics (which tend to be highly speculative) we would
still need to make a case for why what they explain in functionalist terms should
be describable as “ethical.” A hard-core evolutionist like Sam Harris claims that
neuroscience simply reveals the very notion of morality to be an illusion. My book
stages an argument against this kind of eliminationism.
Closer to the ground, Astuti also calls for an account of the constraints that human psychology imposes on social history. In fact, something like that is precisely
the point of my discussion of the “opacity of other minds” doctrine in Korowai
and Mopan Mayan societies, namely, to establish that there are specifically ethnographic insights to be gained from acknowledging the affordances offered by the
general characteristics with which humans are endowed. To summarize the point,
we can learn more about the specific nature of Korowai social existence if we recognize that they are strenuously denying something that they actually do (namely
intention-reading), than if we treat their claims about other minds as just one more
item to add to anthropology’s roster of infinite human creativity, more evidence of
our promethean world-making powers.
Laidlaw’s central challenge to the book is that at times it seems to buy into the
assimilation of ethics to altruism. He is surely right to suggest this view derives
from a specifically Christian background (although Christianity is hardly the only
religion to promote altruism as a moral prime), and the secular moral systems that
emerged from it. Like Williams and Foucault, Laidlaw’s own writings treat virtue
ethics as a more encompassing alternative—a position with which Ethical life is
clearly, if not entirely uncritically, sympathetic. In this light, “altruism” best serves
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as a proxy for a more general concept of value, that which is worth doing for being for its own sake, without further justification—a definition, I suggest, that can
equally well apply to the eudaimonia of virtue ethics.
The central chapters of the book focus on social interaction, which is the topic of
Nicholas Harkness’ comments. Dwelling on the linguistic dimensions of the argument, he lays out with great precision the technical background to the distinctions
among first, second, and third person. He points out that first and second person
are mutually implicated in two respects. First, they define each other: “you” only
exists by virtue of the fact that there is an “I” who addresses it. Second, they are necessarily interchangeable. They only function if “you” and “I” can switch places. This
presupposes a fundamental intersubjectivity, since the ability to say “I” depends
on grasping that I am “you” to your “I.” By contrast, the third person is essentially
a negative category, defined by being outside the interaction altogether. Harkness
also recognizes clearly the implication: because of this fundamental intersubjectivity, ethics is not something added onto interaction, since ethicizing processes are
implicit in, if not always fully realized by, that very dynamic.
Now Harkness writes of language as what he calls a necessary bottleneck. But
just what is the nature of that necessity? After all, if we accept Mattingly’s point
about autism and extend it to the deaf or mute, an account of ethical life can’t completely exclude those with different or limited linguistic abilities. So what is the role
of language in ethical life? In the book, language plays three analytically distinguishable roles. As a cognitive capacity, it elaborates on the basic intersubjectivity
that is already apparent in infants’ prelinguistic interactions. As a pragmatic function, the self-referential capacities of language contribute to the ethically charged
performativity in interaction such as insult, irony, and praise. And semantically,
language serves the objectifying processes by which specific ethical concepts circulate socially, endure historically, and get taken up by individuals’ self-interpretations. Language facilitates the third-person perspective. As the example of feminist
consciousness-raising shows in Chapter 5, the formulation of new categories of action (“date rape”) and person (“feminist”) at a particular historical moment facilitated new ways of being a person that just weren’t possible before. Having said that,
I certainly would not want to reduce either ethics or intersubjectivity to language,
although it’s hard to imagine how either could become recognizably historical or
social phenomena without it.
Although the terminology of first, second, and third person is derived from
language, the book deploys it to indicate stances beyond their strictly linguistic
functions. Mattingly worries about the wide range of reference covered by the first
person pronoun. Linguistically, the first person in any language merely indicates a
starting point: there’s no outer limit to how far it can extend—“I” or “We” can refer
to dyads, triads, nations, ethnicities, religions, all of humanity, life on earth, or,
moving, internally, to bits of what Marilyn Strathern calls “dividuals.” (This openendedness is reflected in the ways in which the circle of ethical concern can be
expanded, as it was by nineteenth-century abolitionism or by present-day animal
rights activists, cases in which the familiar referential reach of “we” is made to scale
upward—encompassing slaves of African ancestry in the first case and certain nonhuman species in the second.)
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In Ethical life, first-, second-, and third-person stances are not restricted to language. They refer to possible stances toward actions, persons, and evaluations. The
first person denotes the ways in which someone (however extensive that “someone” may be) is identified with an action or judgment from the inside. For example,
it’s about the way in which it matters that it is I who stands accused or receives
praise, and not just anyone at all. As I discuss in the book, a founding moment in
utilitarianism was when William Godwin said that, given the choice who to save
from a burning house, ethics demands that I rescue a great humanitarian rather
than my own mother, a chambermaid, remarking “What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my,’ to over turn the decisions of everlasting truth?” With those words, it’s
precisely the first person stance that he’s trying to eliminate. But if we eliminate
the first person altogether in favor of the external perspective I’m calling the third
person, then it becomes hard to understand why anyone should care or feel committed to one ethical position or another—we would find ourselves in the position
of someone watching a sporting event between teams we’ve never heard of, about
whose loss or win we remain indifferent. Conversely, if we eliminate the third person in favor of a purely subjective ethics, we also have trouble understanding things
like one’s ability to respond to an ethical argument on principled grounds. Therefore the book argues that we need to understand the dynamic relations among these
stances, rather than privileging one or another.
One of the modern philosophical traditions in which the first person perspective has been privileged is phenomenology. Whereas Mattingly appreciates the
phenomenological dimension to the book, C. Jason Throop feels I have given insufficient acknowledgment to those who identify themselves with that tradition.
The selective influence of phenomenology in Ethical life is probably most apparent
in the chapters devoted to social interaction, where there’s an obvious intellectual
genealogy one could trace from contemporaries such as Alessandro Duranti back
through Goffman and Garfinkle, to Schutz and Husserl. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the book can, as Throop puts it, resonate with that tradition. Having
said that, it’s incumbent on the critic to suggest what exactly the book would have
gained from a more explicit invocation of phenomenology. It’s not entirely clear to
me just what would be different.
More generally, there are limits to phenomenology as a stand-alone approach to
social life. Starting with its original grounding in the individual subject, phenomenology has had some difficulty getting an analytical grip on institutions, sociology, and history. Compounding this is the influence of Heidegger on more recent
anthropology. To be sure, his early writings have utterly transformed how many of
us think about temporality. But, leaving aside his notorious politics (about whose
relevance we could debate), Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics has a normative
mission whose thrust I find inappropriate for anthropology. Among the anthropologists, this influence too often leads to a rather romantic overvaluing of being
in the flow-of-things, or living in the moment, at the expense of an appreciation
of how various the forms of human self-awareness and self-distantiation actually
are. The moment one speaks, one enters into complex and shifting relations with
the third-person perspective. If you think the very existence of language is already
a kind of “fallen-ness,” then you’ve lost interest in humans. This is one reason why
I resist the terminology of “breakdown,” which, perhaps unintentionally, seems to
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imply that self-awareness, doubt, questioning, reasoning, inner conflict, and reflection are more or less inauthentic or pathological, or at least, departures from the
norm of seamlessly flowing authenticity.
The final section of the book, on social history, is challenged by Mattingly on
two connected grounds, the question of scale and the analysis of typification. She
proposes there is a missing link between interaction and social history, namely, “the
small personal history of longer term intentions” (a topic also implicit in Laidlaw’s
concern with self-cultivation). The scale of personal history she invokes seems
wholly consistent with the overall thrust of the book. Although the biographical
scale is not thematized in the book, it is implicit, for instance, in the Christian and
Muslim piety projects discussed in Chapter 6, as well as Don Gabriel’s narrative discussed in Chapter 4. Paying greater attention to this dimension of ethical life would
flesh out the argument but I don’t think it would significantly change its direction.
The social history of ethics requires attention to mediation by what I call “historical objects,” which include types or typifications. Comments by both Mattingly
and Astuti suggest this idea may need more clarification. First, an ethical type is not
a social role. It’s a value-laden characterization of a person or action, such as being
generous, sneaky, or brave. As such, it mediates how people become recognizable
to one another in ethical terms—in ways that are labile and defeasible. Moreover,
this mediation also enters into any given “first person” self-understanding as well.
I argue that my self-understanding is shaped (but not wholly determined) by the
ethical concepts available to me and my interlocutors. Ethical concepts, like generous, sneaky, or brave, circulate socially as objectifications that I can apply to myself:
“I am the sort of person they’re talking about when they talk about ‘honesty’.” It is
this third person perspective that that I deploy when giving an account of myself to
someone else (addressed as the “second person”). That is, I am most robustly “honest” to myself when (a) honesty is a characterization that’s available to me in my
historical context such that (b) it can enter into the account that I can give of myself
to others, with the result that (c) their affirmation or denial of that self-accounting
becomes part of my ongoing biographical context as I move forward in life.
Typifications of characters and actions emerge and disappear over the course of
specific social histories. Their existence does not determine anything in particular,
nor, in any individual case, are they necessarily stable. Rather, they are affordances
that make possible certain ways to be a person at a given time and in a given social
context—and not in others. Examples from the book include feminist “anger” and
Vietnamese communist “humaneness.” Astuti mentions another one, “condescension,” although we may differ slightly in how we construe it. The point of that example (taken from the political theorist Don Herzog) is this: in eighteenth-century
England, the condescension of a lord to a commoner could be construed as a positive virtue, a gracious, voluntary self-lowering by someone who properly stands
above me. In twentieth-century America, the word “condescension” can only be
negative, the presumptuousness of someone who acts as if they were inherently
superior to me when that cannot be the case—because we don’t live in the kind of
society where I will accept fixed social hierarchies as given. The difference is not
simply that there is one thing in the world, condescension, about which people
have changed their value judgments from being a virtue to a vice. Rather, today it
has simply become impossible altogether for anyone to condescend to someone
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in the eighteenth-century sense of the term. This is because there no longer exists
a social reality in which it’s possible to accept someone else’s social superiority as
legitimate and natural. In addition, “condescension” is not something an individual
can simply chose to enact, since it requires a whole world of others for whom that is
also an ethically meaningful possibility. Thus the ethics of condescension is not just
a matter of interpretation (condescension is good or bad), since how those other
people respond to me will facilitate or constrain (but not determine) my possible
actions in the future. Typifications work in coordination with the social worlds that
sustain them conceptually and practically. When a certain ethical type vanishes, so
too does a certain way of being a person—try as I might, being an ancient Athenian
warrior or a Confucian sage aren’t options for me.
Parenthetically, none of this means people are trapped in fixed characters, as
Mattingly suggests. First, because the very reality of character consistency has been
subjected to challenges on both psychological and ethnographic grounds. But as
my discussions of religious piety, the Vietnamese revolution, and feminism should
make clear, even in societies where people believe in character, and place a high value on it, they may try to subject their character to all kinds of effort and discipline.
Those disciplines typically rely on, and foster, the objectifications that appear in
morality systems. As Laidlaw usefully suggests, at this point the discussion can be
pushed further, to show more thoroughly how ethical life articulates with political
economy, formal institutions, the contest among interests, and, I would add, law.
But to do this adequately would require a much longer volume.
Finally I want to thank Richard Shweder for his terrifically stimulating challenge. I can’t remotely do justice to it in the space allocated here, and I refer the
reader to the final chapter of Ethical life for more detail. Here I will briefly touch on
three questions. First, Shweder asks me to choose among the first-, second-, and
third-person stances, but the heart of my argument is there is no definitive choosing among them, and we cannot avoid moving among them. To treat the third
person stance as trumping all others (something Kohlberg’s stage model implies)
would confine us to so disinterested a perspective as to eliminate the possibility of
ethical commitments altogether. Next, he asks whether morality must be based on
absolutes. I think the answer has to be a qualified “no.” Although, as I note in the
book, Shweder’s own inventory of moral universals is a plausible set of constraints
on, and affordances for, possible ethics, these are not determinants, nor do they
eliminate the inevitability of ethical contradiction, and thus the necessity of choosing among contending options. I would further argue that they are not normative absolutes in any philosophical sense. Anthropologists have enough experience
with local relativisms (your clan’s virtue isn’t mine, divine law for my people isn’t
law for yours) to know that the metaethical idea that my ethics must be based on
absolutes is not universally accepted. The idea of affordance is meant to suggest
that whatever bases human ethical life may have, they can only be realized as “ethical” within particular projects—at the level of universal endowments they do not
yet rise to that level of specification. This is a story of becoming, not of origins, of
movement, not of grounding.
Finally, must the anthropologist of morality be herself or himself a moral philosopher willing to render ultimate normative judgments? As I argue in the book,
the answer must be no, at least not in the terms that Shweder lays out. To quote
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Ethical life, “We should not expect that empirical knowledge will lead us to some
position so utterly transcendent that it will secure our ethical intuitions once and
for all—granting us a supreme authority that no one else could challenge” (2016:
260). Does this absolve me from normativity? No. We cannot avoid being within
ethical life, and finding ourselves taking stances, nor can we elude the inevitability
that there will be others whose stances conflict with ours. But I can’t ask anthropology to do all the work for me. We have to accept that we take our ethics without
guarantees.
Webb Keane
Dept. of Anthropology
101 West Hall
1085 South University Ave.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107
[email protected]
2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 485–492