Ethical questions

The questions ‘how should one live?’, ‘what is my duty?’, and ‘how can we bring about the greatest good?’ broadly characterize the basic concerns of the three most influential streams of ethical thinking within the Western philosophical tradition.^[1] The first question is central to virtue ethics, the second to Kantian deontology, the third to utilitarianism. While characteristic of particular ethical theories, these questions also differ in terms of the perspective they adopt. If I ask, ‘how should one live?’ I’m clearly not concerned only with myself (the question is not, after all, how should I live?) but nevertheless I have put my perspective, my point of view, at the very heart of the matter. This is the first person perspective. If on the other hand, I ask ‘what is my duty’ I’m attending to the perspective of others since I can only have duties relative to other persons (including, perhaps, non-human persons) with whom I co-inhabit the world. I’m asking, as it were, about what others expect of me, how they might react and respond to me, what they can demand in terms of how I treat them (and how they treat me). This then is the second person perspective or standpoint (see e.g. Darwall 2006). Finally, if I ask, ‘how can we bring about the greatest good?’ I presume a kind of objective or at least impartial (third person) stance from which one might be able to determine or calculate the overall good that comes from my actions – not good for me or good for you but rather good for everyone concerned (which in many contexts may mean everyone period!).

Ethical theories, such as those that have developed within the Western philosophical tradition, typically comprise an argument for the relatively greater importance of one of these perspectives over the others. As Bernard Williams (1985) points out, insofar as actual, ordinary, non-philosophical thinking may involve multiple considerations and perspectives, any theory of this type is reductive (relative, that is, to what ordinary ethical thinking actually consists in). And, as Williams goes on to argue, if we are trying to develop an ethics that people can use to govern everyday life that kind of reductionism might be warranted (so as, for instance, to make it practically applicable). If, however, we are engaged in description there can be no justification for reductionism of this type. If, that is, we are concerned to know how people actually do go about acting and thinking in ethical ways and living ethical lives, then we must of course take account of all the forms that ethics relevantly takes in the course of their doing so.

Put that way the task set for an anthropology of ethics may well seem daunting, indeed well-nigh impossible. It is one of the great accomplishments of recent work in this area, and one of the features of it that I think most deserves our admiration, that it refuses to engage in reduction even where the temptation to make things more manageable is clearly there. The work reviewed here is no exception. In his book, Webb Keane synthesizes a broad range of research in developmental psychology, the sociology of interaction, philosophy and history in an attempt to provide a coherent and inclusive picture of ethical life.

Self, other and the boundaries of the ethical

We can reasonably expect any form of inquiry to define, at the outset, what it is an inquiry about. To what matters will our questions be principally directed? Ethics, however, is notoriously difficult to define and, indeed, many if not most accounts of ethical life are also arguments about what ethics consists in. What is a distinctively ethical as opposed to an aesthetic, political or legal consideration? Obvious candidates here are of course those relating to virtue, duty and consequence. But, if we take the central question of ethics to be Socrates’ question ‘how should one live?’ even egoistic considerations, i.e. those that pertain to my own enjoyment, position, self-worth etc., may be considered ethical. Indeed, as Williams puts it, ‘it is possible to use the word “ethical” of any scheme of living that would provide an intelligible answer to Socrates’ question’ (1985: 13). Williams immediately rejects this possibility suggesting that ‘however vague it may initially be, we have a conception of the ethical that understandably relates to us and our actions the demands, needs, claims, desires, and, generally, the lives of others’ (1985: 13).

Williams thus draws a line around the outer boundary of ethics and he does this in such a way as to exclude the most flagrant forms of egoism: ethical considerations are those that relate us to the lives of others. This is close to the extreme limit of ethical thinking in the Western tradition (excluding Nietzsche and Foucault) which has generally accorded relations with others a much more central role and has tended to exclude self-directed forms of thinking and self-attending forms of activity much more completely than does Williams. Indeed, many of Williams’s central ideas such as that of integrity, emphasize the importance of self and personal identity to our thinking about ethics (Williams 1973). His suggestion that practical and ethical thinking is, in some sense, irreducibly first-personal supplies one key prong of attack against both utilitarianism and Kantian deontology.

Like Williams, Keane sees ethical thinking as centrally concerned with the lives of others. A central goal of Ethical Life is to set approaches from natural and social history within a common, overarching frame. This involves linking studies in psychology and child development to social historical movements through the intermediary of interaction. Keane employs a broad-ranging semiotic theory to do this, suggesting that psychological studies of child development can provide a sense of the foundation upon which the social and cultural dimensions of ethical life are elaborated. The idea of “affordance” plays a central role here (Gibson 1979). A given objective feature of the environment affords different possibilities for action depending on an agent’s ability to recognize and exploit those possibilities. A chair affords being sat upon, being used as a kind of step-ladder, being put in a parking space so as to block it, being placed on a table upside-down so as to show that the restaurant is closed, etc. but it does not afford being consumed at dinner, being used as a personal computing device, or being leashed and taken for a walk around the park. An important part of the argument about affordances is that they are relative to some agent. So that chair may afford, indeed it seems to invite, as William James put it, being sat upon to someone who is accustomed to sitting on chairs, but placed in a South Indian village where people habitually sit on the floor or squat it may seem more of a curiosity than anything else. And affordances may change over time. So we now are sometimes advised to sit on the floor and change a chair into a desk so as to alleviate back pain. In sum, an affordance is a sign that receives an energetic interpretant (see Kockelman 2005).

Keane’s innovative move is to see various naturally developing psychological dispositions in humans along with the various ways they are harnessed within interaction as affordances for ethical thinking and ethical life. Empathy and altruism, mind reading (intention ascription and theory of mind etc.), moral emotions and a general capacity for self-distancing are not, in and of themselves, constitutive of ethical life. But they afford ethical thinking particularly in so far as they are taken up within occasions of interaction. Part of Keane’s argument is that these psychological capacities are not independent of interactional relations – you can’t, after all, have empathy except in relation to some agent other than yourself. In this way Keane is arguing for the centrality of interaction against the underlying individualism (theoretical, methodological) implicit in much psychological research and experimentation. That said, in locating the foundations of ethics as affordance in empathy, altruism and a more general capacity for self-distancing, Keane, like Williams, draws a line around its outer limit. Ethics on this view involves others and our relations with them.

If ethics is centrally about our relations to the lives of others then an account of ethical life will have to begin with an understanding of what those relations actually consist in. Drawing on explicit native testimony (as collected in interviews for instance), anthropologists have often reified relations, e.g. seeing them solely through the lens of native-speaker typification in kinship terms and the like. So relations are equated with explicit norms governing e.g. (English) mother and daughter, (Guyanese) chacha “father’s brother” and beta “brother’s son”, (Vietnamese) anh “older male sibling” and em “younger sibling”, etc.  But intersubjective reality is built up through relations at a much finer level of granularity than this. Intersubjectivity, which is to say our relations with others, is manifest in moments of joint attention (Tomasello 2014), in joint action (Gilbert 1989), in the collective intentionality that provides for the possibility of institutional reality (Searle 2010) and in the shared understanding that underwrites the organization of action in interaction (Sidnell 2014). As such, ethical life, to the extent that it is an aspect of our relations with others, is realized in and through the moment-to-moment unfolding of social interaction. Ethical judgment, evaluation, concern, commitment is manifest in a glance, in a flicker of mutual gaze, in a tone of voice and so on (see Sidnell 2010, Goffman 1967).^[2]

Keane develops this idea by suggesting that between psychological propensities and historical movements, interaction plays a mediating role. For instance, in a lucid discussion of the human capacity for “mind-reading” or intention-seeking, Keane asks what we are to make of people who disavow an ability to know the minds of others, given that intention-seeking plays an absolutely central role in all forms of human interaction. Drawing on important work by Rupert Stasch, Keane suggests that such a stance points not to a culturally-specific incapacity but rather a profound sense of the problems of social existence in particular communities (Stasch 2008).

Against any kind of deterministic naturalism, Keane argues for the under-determination of ethical life by psychological propensities and capacities.  As he puts it (p. 122) ‘the basic cognitive, emotional, or interactive phenomena are not simply things waiting for someone to name them’. Rather, as affordances, the natural, which is to say psychological, foundation upon which ethics rests, must be taken up in some culturally and historically specific way. To paraphrase Anscombe (1958, 1979) we might say that, on this view, ethics is psychology under a description.

Egoism and altruism

But a vague conception, to paraphrase Williams, is not really sufficient grounds for deciding what we should or should not include within the ethical. A worry here is that such a vague conception is merely a reflection of our own historical inheritance and our own preoccupations. What reason do we actually have for throwing out the possibility that egoism might also be a kind of ethical consideration? And, on the other hand, what do we miss by linking ethics with altruism? Should we dismiss the possibility of an egoistic ethics summarily, without serious consideration?

These, of course, are some of the questions that Nietzsche posed in On the Genealogy of Morals. There he famously challenged the value of all that is “unegoistic” –

the instincts of pity, self-abnegation, self-sacrifice, which Schopenhauer had gilded, deified, and projected into a beyond for so long that at last they became for him ”value-in-itself,” on the basis of which he said No to life and to himself. But it was against precisely these instincts that there spoke from me an ever more fundamental mistrust, an ever more corrosive skepticism (preface §5, 1967 [1887]: 19).

He goes on to suggest that whoever sticks with this line of questioning, ‘will experience what I experienced’:

a tremendous new prospect opens up for him, a new possibility comes over him like a vertigo, every kind of mistrust, suspicion, fear leaps up, his belief in morality, in all morality, falters – finally a new demand becomes audible (preface §6, 1967 [1887]: 20).

Famously, the Genealogy develops the suggestion that this valorization of the unegoistic (and, relatedly, of self-denial and asceticism) is born out of ressentiment, a deep-seated hatred and anger on the part of the powerless (slaves, common folk) towards their socially-defined betters (masters, nobility). The morality we have inherited is the result of a cultural-historical struggle in which an ethics of meekness and self-sacrifice replaced one based in self-affirmation and strength. What Nietzsche encourages us to question then is the seemingly natural connection between morality and a concern for others at the expense of a concern for oneself.

We needn’t accept all of Nietzsche’s arguments to see the larger point. What might a self-directed ethics look like? What if we understood ethics not, primarily, in term of one’s relations with others, but rather in terms of a relation with oneself? Such a self-reflective, self-forming ethics represents, I think, an important alternative conception of ethical life. One form such a self-directed ethics takes, ironically enough, is asceticism but there are other possibilities. For instance, the cultivation of piety among participants in the mosque movement described by Mahmood (2005), the spiritual exercises of the Stoics and Epicureans described by Hadot (1995), even the body techniques to which Mauss 1973 [1931] directed anthropological attention.^[3] Ethical practice on this view involves an askesis – very roughly, “exercise” – by which the individual hopes to effect various transformations productive of a particular ethical subject, a way of being, a type of person and so on (Foucault 1997). In his lectures on epimeleia heautou (care of the self), Foucault (2005) makes the point that from a contemporary point of view such a concern for oneself may well seem like vulgar egoism and withdrawal. But, he argues, for the Greeks it was anything but. As Foucault makes clear through a consideration of Socrates’s admonitions of the Athenian citizens in Plato’s Apology, it is quite wrong to equate care of the self with either egoism or selfishness. When Socrates insists that the citizens of Athens have neglected their most important duties to themselves, he clarifies that he is not talking about the pursuit of wealth or fame or worldly success of any kind. Indeed these are matters upon which much of their attention has been focused. What they have neglected is care of the self in terms of personal character or psuché  “soul”.  Moreover, as Foucault notes the injunction to “take care of oneself” is not an encouragement towards any kind of indulgence but, on the contrary, ‘the basis for the constitution of what have without doubt been the most austere, strict, and restrictive moralities’ (2005:13).

All this is to say that we should perhaps question the easy association of ethics and attentiveness to others. Indeed, we may need to denaturalize this connection. The work in developmental psychology that Keane discusses is compelling and points to the deep ethological roots of human empathy, cooperation and capacity to link ourselves together via collective intentionality in totally unique and powerful ways (for an elaborated statement of such a position see two recent books by Michael Tomasello, 2014, 2016). This is without a doubt at the heart of culture and sociality. But we may want to ask about the limits of the intersubjective and the relational, the possibilities of detachment and self-reflection (see Candea et al 2015). While we are, of course, social creatures by nature and the human condition just is a social condition, we are nevertheless capable of isolation, withdrawal, and forms of self-reflection through which we attempt to understand ourselves independently of particular circumstances. Even if total isolation and abstraction is impossible, the fact that we can, and do, reach in that direction is important.

We talk in metaphors of “stepping back” so as to reflect but of course we are always stepping into something else when we do this. Moreover, all reflection takes place through the medium of social-semiotic and probably linguistic form. For these reasons and others, a totally objective perspective, an Archimedean point as Williams put it, is impossible. That said we should not lose sight of the important capacity to, in some sense, get outside ourselves, to put some distance between what we are and what we would like to be, to see ourselves as simply playing a role that is not reflective of who we really are. As much as we are social creatures embedded in relations we are also reflective creatures capable of stepping outside of those relations, even if only temporarily and partially. This reflective capacity, this relation of the self to itself, shaped as it is by the social arrangements in which it is exercised, is arguably as central to ethical life as is our relations to others.

Morality versus ethics

In Ethical Life, Keane adapts a distinction from Williams suggesting that we might see morality as one particular form that ethics can take. If ethics is centrally concerned with the question ‘how should one live?’ morality is one kind of answer to that question, one that emphasizes the importance of recognizing, and acting in accordance with, various abstract, impersonal obligations by which we are related to others. Keane argues that the morality system Williams critiques represents one possibility among many and he suggests that ethnographers have described others though not necessarily named them as such.^[4] What is crucial, according to Keane, what is definitive of a morality system, is the way in which it constitutes an integrated and coherent framework of obligations by virtue of the God’s-eye point of view around which it is organized. This is an interesting proposal but one may ask whether it does not encourage us to disregard important differences in the ethical lives of the people we study. It is perhaps important to note in this respect that Williams does not link the morality system simply with the presence of an omniscient God through the perspective of which one must see and judge one’s own actions. Rather, it is a specifically “Pelagian” God that is at the centre of the morality system he describes (2011[1985]: 43). Pelagius, was a monk and ascetic who was declared a heretic for his views on freewill since he denied the doctrine of pre-destination. A Pelagian God is then one that reigns over free-willed subjects. Faced with the impersonal obligations of the system, these free-willed agents must act in accordance with them or meet with blame. According to Williams (2011[1985]: 216), ‘The blame system, most of the time, closely concentrates on the conditions of the particular act’ and ignores all that surrounds it.

When we ask whether someone acted voluntarily, we are asking, roughly, whether he really acted, whether he knew what he was doing, and whether he intended this or that aspect of what happened. This practice takes the agent together with his character, and does not raise questions about his freedom to have chosen some other character (2011[1985]: 215-216).

Morality then isolates the act from the surrounding context in which it is performed:

Morality neglects this surrounding and sees only that focused, particularized judgment. There is a pressure within it to require a voluntariness that will be total and will cut through character and psychological or social determination, and allocate blame and responsibility on the ultimately fair basis of the agent’s own contribution, no more and no less (2011[1985]: 216).

There are other important aspects of Williams’ critique of the morality system – for instance what Williams calls ‘the obligation out-obligation in principle’ which is the view that every particular moral obligation requires the authority of a more general moral obligation (of which it is to be explained as an instance), or the idea that moral obligations are inescapable because they are overriding and thus that in a conflict between a moral obligation and some other kind of consideration the moral obligation must always win. Indeed the logic of moral obligations seems to result in the conclusion that,

I could be better employed than in doing something I am under no obligation to do, and, if I could be, then I ought to be: I am under an obligation not to waste time in doing things I am under no obligation to do. At this stage, certainly, only an obligation can beat an obligation, and in order to do what I wanted to do, I shall need one of those fraudulent items, a duty to myself. If obligation is allowed to structure ethical thought, there are several natural ways in which it can come to dominate life altogether (2011[1985]: 202).

So while we can, as Keane argues, identify other systems in which the introduction of an all-seeing, all knowing God and judge appears to provide a coherence that would otherwise be lacking, and to promote a system of obligations that may conflict with many other practicalities of everyday life, to the extent that these systems do not presuppose a absolutely free agent and involve absolute prioritization of moral obligations above all other forms of consideration, they may not conform quite with Williams’ notion of a morality system.

More generally, we should not suppose that ethical practices which come to awareness and are made the objects of explicit doctrine necessarily constitute “morality.” Morality is not the explicit version of an implicit ethics. To be sure, Keane does not actually suggest this but his examples – Cairene Islamic revivalists, Urapmin protestant penitents, Vietnamese revolutionaries – might lead one to this conclusion, since this explicitness is essentially the only thing they have in common. Keane emphasizes the importance of system – in terms of coherence – but it’s not to my mind clear that these various cases exemplify morality, at least in Williams’s sense. Indeed part of what gives these cases the historical specificity they have is the way in which they weave together moral and other kinds of consideration (aesthetic, political and so on).  Rather than “morality systems” I would propose instead seeing these and other forms of life as “ethical projects” – that is explicit, collective, teleological undertakings that are focused much more on ethical than on moral ends.

This leads us back to the important question of the distinction between ethics and morality. While it may be possible to think about it in other ways, morality is too easily understood as pertaining to the “good,” which is to say one historically specific idea of what constitutes the good. Our notion of ethics should be able to accommodate views, judgments, practices that we find repugnant (see Harding 1991, See also Keane p. 100). Ethics, conceived either as forms of discernment, practices of evaluation, or self-constituting activity must include, for instance Nazism, and the ways of thinking that led Hutus to kill Tutsis and Tutsis to kill Hutus in Rwanda. The ethics of White racism is no less a form of ethical life because we find it despicable. The struggle between those who advocate for an absolute right to free speech and those who promote the establishment of safe spaces, which has been much in the news over the past year, is an ethical struggle about how we should live. Even, dare I say it, the supporters of Trump who yell “Trump the bitch” and “Build the wall” and worse at rallies are adopting an ethical stance, one that expresses, in no uncertain terms, their own judgments and which clearly fits within an overall form of life. While all this properly belongs within the domain of ethical life we’d be hard pressed to see such behavior as moral, the word meaning can stretch only so far.

Following along the well-worn path of a racist, misogynist ideology may be to take an ethical stance, to engage in a form of ethical life, but it is not, in my view at least, to participate in an ethical project. An ethical project is an explicit, collective, teleological form of activity through which one works upon one’s self, through which one attempts to make oneself into a different kind of person.

If we want to get, at least partially, outside of our own moral system, our own sense of what is good and bad and so on, our best hope, I think, is to institute a strict distinction between morality and ethics. Without this, we too easily become champions of the good. We will see ethics and morality (equated as they are) in the kind of behavior, the practices, the judgments that to us seem laudable. Very often, of course, this involves sympathy with those who are suffering and identification with those who act from altruistic motives, or at least motives that are not obviously egoistic.

This however raises a much more significant complication – specifically the problem of identifying a place from which to describe another form of ethical life. The problem resides in the fact that our way of relating to those we see as “other” – including their ethical life – is itself part of our ethics.  Insofar as that is so, there’s no neutral position from which to describe, let alone evaluate, the ethical practices of the people we study – rather, our ethical form of life is always implicated in our descriptions.^[5]

Concepts and descriptions

The central aim of Keane’s ambitious book is to link what he terms natural and social histories, that is, the innate propensities and capacities of normally developing infants studied by developmental psychologists on the one hand and the large-scale, historically consequential movements on the other. According to this argument, the emotional and psychological exerts its effects largely from below the level of awareness. Social, historical, collective ethical projects, on the other hand, are more explicit. How then are these forms of ethical life related?

In posing such a question Keane, I think, means to distance himself, or perhaps to synthesize, what he sees as two opposing positions in recent work within the field. So, on the one hand in a well-known passage Lambek (2010:2) writes that what he calls ordinary ethics, ‘is relatively tacit, grounded in agreement rather than rule, in practice rather than knowledge or belief, and happening without calling undue attention to itself’. On the other hand, Laidlaw (2013) and others (e.g. Faubion 2011) who draw on Foucault have tended to emphasize the importance of self-reflection to ethical life. As I read him, Keane is suggesting that ethics involves a kind of tacking back and forth between the tacit and the explicit, the unselfconscious and the self-reflective.

As noted, Keane links the natural to the social through the notion of affordances – i.e. psychological propensities and capacities afford particular practices, structures, relations of interaction which in turn afford various forms of objectification and reflection which feed into historical projects of ethical reform. In one compelling example, for instance, Keane considers the consciousness raising sessions of early feminist mobilization. Drawing on first hand accounts, Keane shows that through the telling of their own, unique experiences, participants in the sessions came to see these as things that happened to them as women. That is, the intersubjective character of conversational interaction provided a lens through which experiences could be seen in a different light. This then allowed for the establishment of a vocabulary for talking about the various forms of oppression that women suffer.  The consciousness raising sessions located and identified the phenomenon of anger.

Keane’s larger argument here is that ethical thinking about how we should relate to one another is in part shaped by concepts that are the product of particular historical traditions. In this regard he discusses the notion of dignity as described, within a Kantian tradition, by philosopher Stephen Darwall (2006), respect as that notion is invoked by the drug dealers of El Barrio (Bourgois 1995), dewa, a Sumbanese concept that links fate with an idea of individual distinctiveness (Keane 1997), and punén among the Chewong which is a condition triggered by suppressed desire that lead to attacks by dangerous animals and other kinds of misfortune (Howell 1989).

These can be understood I think as examples of what Williams calls thick ethical concepts. Thick ethical concepts are those such as the English courage and brutality that include both a descriptive and a prescriptive, which is to say evaluative, aspect. They are opposed, and presumably this is a matter of degree, to thin moral concepts, the prime example of which is “ought” but among which we should also include “good” and “right.” Such thin concepts (Williams does not actually employ the term) are not descriptive, they convey only an evaluative stance. The history of modern philosophy at least since Kant, as Williams portrays it, has been singularly preoccupied with the task of breaking thick ethical concepts down into thin ones. He makes the case with special reference to the language-focused philosophy of Oxford and Cambridge (especially Hare) but suggests that this is a much more general feature of contemporary thinking rooted in the elaborated forms of self-consciousness and reflective analysis characteristic of ethical thinking after Plato.

In a complex and many-sided argument that I only briefly summarise here, Williams suggests that we should see thick ethical concepts as an authentic form of distinctively ethical knowledge even though they do not take the form of systematic, self-reflective theory. Indeed, these concepts are vulnerable to theorizing. Reflection can come to destroy them since in order to be effective world-guided and action-guiding notions they require that we take them at face value. Once we start dissecting our concepts they start to fray and unravel.^[6]

Whereas Williams is concerned with the way thick ethical concepts may, when placed under the microscope of philosophical reflection, start to break apart and dissolve, Anscombe (1958) contended that the relatively thin concept of a specifically moral “ought” has, in the modern period, lost the background context of divine law that made it intelligible. To the extent that that background has eroded, it is as though we were left with the idea of a criminal but no courts or legal system within which it is possible to discern what being a criminal might mean (or who is rightly described as a criminal). Thus the possibility of “losing your concepts” (see Diamond 1988) is a recurrent theme in moral philosophy (see also MacIntyre 1983).

Keane puts an interesting twist on this idea by pointing to the way that the meaning of a concept like condescension for instance can shift as the background assumptions that animate it are transformed. Drawing on the work of Herzog (1998), Keane notes that up until the mid 19th century, condescension was seen as a virtue expressed by ‘the act of a great man who graciously lowers himself to deal with inferiors on a footing of equality’ (Herzog 1998: 206). This understanding rests on an unselfconscious acceptance of social hierarchy. Remove this context of unequivocal acceptance and the significance of condescension reverses:  rather than convey inattention to hierarchy, acts of condescension invoke its relevance.^[7]

It’s not just the background context from which these concepts derive their significance. As Keane notes, concepts such as dignity or dewa fit into larger encompassing systems – their meanings are partly constituted through relations of opposition and contrast with other elements, such that each element has a composite meaning, a combination of what it is and what it is not. Keane (123) writes, ‘Each of these terms takes its meaning from its place within a larger constellation of ethical and psychological concepts, practices, and institutions’.

Considerations of background context and relations to other elements in a system provide two arguments against a kind of ahistorical conceptual atomism to which Keane (121) suggests ethnographic accounts are vulnerable.

Like any ethnography, these accounts have their limits. Written in a fairly traditional ethnographic style, they aim to characterize a collective ethos in a relatively timeless framework, treated without much reference to the “external” sociopolitical context, and rarely enter into details of interaction. But granting those limits, they are useful for showing how intersubjectivity and intentionality have been thematized in quite distinct socio-historical contexts.

There is another form of oversimplification of which we must be wary and perhaps this is what Keane has in mind when he notes that such traditional ethnographic accounts do not attend to the “details of interaction.” Specifically, what’s missing in much of the discussion about thick ethical concepts is recognition of the fact that actions, persons, situations, characteristics, indeed pretty much anything that people talk about can be (accurately, truthfully) described in more than one way. Williams proposes that what distinguishes thick ethical concepts from thin ones is that they are, by virtue of their descriptive component, “world-guided”. They are in some basic sense accountable to reality. Be that as it may, there will always be other descriptive possibilities if only because we can choose to characterize what we talk about at various levels of granularity and scope and so on (he said “hi,” he greeted me, we talked, we exchanged words etc.). It’s not hard to see that the availability of alternative possibilities for description (of actions, of persons) raises a host of questions about ethical life. As Anscombe (1958: 3), speaking of Mill, remarks,

It did not occur to him that acts of murder and theft could be otherwise described. He holds that where a proposed action is of such a kind as to fall under some one principle established on grounds of utility, one must go by that; where it falls under none or several, the several suggesting contrary views of the action, the thing to do is to calculate particular consequences. But pretty well any action can be so described as to make it fall under a variety of principles of utility (as I shall say for short) if it falls under any.

As Anscombe notes, then, even acts as seemingly clear as “murder” and “theft” can by otherwise described – as, for instance, in the case of murder, “abortion” or “state-sponsored execution” or “hunting” and in the case of theft, “liberation”, “repossession” and so on.^[8] They can also be described in ways that make it difficult if not impossible to see the issue as an ethical one, for instance in the case of murder what is done might be described as “pulling the trigger” or “pressing a button” or “performing a medical procedure”.

The availability of alternative descriptive modes is important precisely because it is, as Keane illustrates with his example of feminist consciousness raising sessions, a key technique of many ethical projects. At least some ethical projects work not primarily by transforming the persons engaged in them but rather by changing the way those persons see and describe the world. Whether this is conceived in terms of dispelling a mystifying ideology or as actually changing the nature of intersubjective reality it relies crucially on substituting one set of descriptions for another.

Taking a stand, getting personal

Alternative accounts of ethical life can often be distinguished according to the perspective or standpoint they presume. So for instance, Darwall’s (2006) broadly deontological approach highlights what he calls the second person standpoint. On this view ethical considerations derive from the claims that another can make of me – i.e. for instance the claim that I not step on her foot and, if I do, the claim that I should apologize. Darwall (2006: 119) proposes:

In seeing ourselves as mutually accountable, we accord one another the standing to demand certain conduct of each other as equal members of the moral community. …  I argue that recognition of this authority is an irreducibly second-personal form of respect.

Alternatively, utilitarianism presupposes a kind of “objective” or third-person stance by which one seeks not to advance one’s personal agenda nor to respond to the concerns of a particular other but rather to calculate the greatest good. On this view, in the words of Sidgwick (1874: 382), ‘the good of any one individual is of no more importance… than the good of any other’. This requires, that one adopt, according to Sidgwick ‘the point of view (…) of the Universe’.

Williams spent much of his career arguing against both these views in favor of the irreducible, though clearly not unique, importance of the first person perspective. The problem with ethical theory (or at least one problem) for Williams is that it regularly asks a person to be someone other than who they are, to adopt a perspective other than the one to which they are practically committed and to deny the importance of their actual practical relations to others and with the world. So, for instance, Williams argues that in thinking that his account of rational freedom can apply as much to practical as to factual deliberation Kant makes a fundamental error. Factual deliberation (e.g. whether S is true, whether X is the case etc.) is not “essentially first-personal.” Practical deliberation, which is to say thinking about what I should do (deliberation for action), in contrast, ‘is first-personal, radically so, and involves an I that must be more intimately the I of my desires than this account allows’. (Williams 2011[1985]:74).

Practical deliberation is in every case first-personal, and the first person is not derivative or naturally replaced by anyone. The action I decide on will be mine, and (…) its being mine means not just that it will be arrived at by this deliberation, but that it will involve changes in the world of which I shall be empirically the cause, and of which these desires and this deliberation itself will be, in some part, the cause. (Williams 2011[1985]:77).

While Williams accepts that one can stand back from one’s desires and reflect on them, this is unlike the reflection that underlies theoretical deliberation in so far as it does not require that one take into account the results of others’ practical deliberations, it does not aim to harmonize one’s deliberations with those of anyone else.

Reflective deliberation about the truth indeed brings in a standpoint that is impartial and seeks harmony, but this is because it seeks truth, not because it is reflective deliberation, and those features will not be shared by deliberation about what to do simply because it too is reflective. The I that stands back in rational reflection from my desires is still the I that has those desires and will, empirically and concretely, act; and it is not, simply by standing back in reflection, converted into a being whose fundamental interest lies in the harmony of all interests. (Williams 1995:77).

There is some sense then in which the various points of view implicated in different styles of ethical thinking (first personal, deontological, utilitarian) have been conceptualized, by philosophers, as mutually exclusive. Certainly, Williams, in the passages quoted above, seems to be suggesting that even though I may step back and reflect upon my desires this does not mean that I step outside of the “I” that I inhabit. Reflective practical deliberation, which is to say ethical thinking about what I should do or how I should live, is, on this view, necessarily first personal. Utilitarians similarly suggest that the point of view of the universe, the third-personal perspective that utilitarianism presupposes, is likewise incompatible with any other. Thus in his example of the Fenelon, the Archbishop of Cambray, and his chambermaid, Godwin (1793:83) suggested that we must save the life of the former rather than that of the latter even if the chambermaid is “my wife, my mother or my benefactor.”

The life of Fenelon would still be more valuable than that of the chambermaid; and justice, pure, unadulterated justice, would still have preferred that which was most valuable. Justice would have taught me to save the life of Fenelon at the expense of the other. (1793:83)

In a remarkably revealing turn of phrase (see MacIntyre 1983), Godwin concludes, ‘What magic is there in the pronoun “my”, to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?’ (1793:83).

But what if ethical life is not reducible to any one perspective? This is the intriguing possibility that Keane develops throughout the work under review. In the concluding chapter he writes that the:

capacity to move back and forth between those perspectives (whether or not that capacity is realized in any instance) seems to be a crucial feature of ethical life… sometimes people find themselves in the midst of the action, and sometimes they stand apart from it. There is no reason to expect either position to be the final one: the potential for movement between them is an endemic feature of human life.

Morality system and ethical projects

I have already discussed Keane’s suggestion that we can identify multiple morality systems in the ethnographic literature. His idea is that ethical practices often form a kind of patchwork but that under particular historical conditions of increasing awareness and explicitness efforts are made to provide a coherent and consistent framework through which it is possible to understand all of ethical life. The morality system that results is effective to the extent that it imposes a divine, third person perspective through which anyone can take up an evaluative stance on conduct and character. Keane makes a compelling case here and his argument has much to recommend it. However, I would resist casting such diverse phenomena as the Cairene mosque movement, Urapmin pentecostalism, and Vietnamese revolutionary ideology as “morality systems” for two reasons. First, as already noted, Williams uses the phrase morality system to refer to a particular way of thinking about ethics in relation to moral obligation. In applying the notion to other diverse cases we lose the historical-specificity of the original description. Secondly, to describe these cases in terms of system emphasizes coherence over other important characteristics. A “system” is something within which people operate and by which they are constrained. It suggests a reality, or the perception of a reality, that is at least relatively stable, unchanging and complete.

But the particular cases that Keane discusses are in fact rather remarkable for the fact that they involve persons actively attempting to transform themselves – collectively, explicitly and teleologically. As such I think it is more useful to think of them as ethical projects than as morality systems. These are, after all, forms of joint action in which people have identified a gap between what they are and what they want to be (or think they should be). Techniques of prayer, of confession, of dress and of address are adopted or adapted in an effort to close that gap (see Luong 1988, 1992, Hirschkind 2006, Robbins 2004, Mahmood 2005).

Conclusion

Philosophers are often concerned to arrive at some conception of what we should do (or how we should live, or who we should be) and thus their arguments are intended to reach a definitive conclusion about what might by the best way in which to pose the question of ethics and, following that, how to answer it. For the anthropologist, at least in this respect, things are somewhat more complicated. While it would be impossible to escape totally the normative impulse with respect to ethics (given that ethics is, at some level, about the way things should be), the anthropologist is at least to some extent committed to the task of describing the way things are. But given that we are ourselves ethical, evaluative creatures “describing the way things are” independently of how we see them from a particular ethical vantage point is, of course, impossible.

For these reasons and others the study of ethics from an anthropological perspective is perhaps one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by our discipline. The work reviewed here represents a landmark along the way to a deeper understanding of ethical life.

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1. ^[1]Thanks go to Laura Beach and Michael Lambek for many helpful suggestions and thought provoking comments on this essay.↩
2. ^[2]Which is not to say that persons do not bring their own history to those interactions and to the interpretation of what happens within them.↩
3. ^[3]Mauss (1973 [1931]: 86-87) for instance notes that, ‘I think that the basic education in all these techniques consists of an adaptation of the body to their use. For example, the great tests of stoicism, etc., which constitute initiation for the majority of mankind, have as their aim to teach composure, resistance, seriousness, presence of mind, dignity, etc. The main utility I see in my erstwhile mountaineering was this education of my composure, which enabled me to sleep upright on the narrowest ledge overlooking an abyss.’ And later that, ‘I have studied the Sanskrit texts of Yoga enough to know that the same things occur in India. I believe precisely that at the bottom of all our mystical states there are techniques of the body which we have not studied, but which were perfectly studied by China and India, even in very remote periods. This socio-psychobiological study should be made. I think that there are necessarily biological means of entering into ‘communication with God’. Although in the end breath technique, etc., is only the basic aspect in India and China, I believe this technique is much more widespread.’↩
4. ^[4]In later work, such as Shame and Necessity, Williams is quite explicit about the specifically Christian roots of the contemporary morality system whereas in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy he emphasizes its connection to Kantian deontology. It seems then that Williams saw the morality system he described as an historical specificity not as a general framework that could be realized in various ways.↩
5. ^[5]In this respect, Williams (2011[1985]) argued for a distinction between notional and real confrontations. A notional confrontation is one in which we think about a divergent outlook that is not a real option for us – we could never embrace the outlook of a medieval samurai or a bronze age chief (at least not without losing a grasp on our own reality). A real confrontation is one in which the divergent way of life is a real option for us. Relativism might apply in the case of a notional confrontation since it would be inappropriate and misleading (because anachronistic etc.) to apply our standards to their way of life (to decide for instance whether it was just or unjust). On the other hand, where the alternative outlook represents a real option for us, relativism cannot properly apply since in that case our stance with respect to the alternative is a practical rather than theoretical matter – in so far as it represents a real option for me I must, as a practical matter, evaluate it from the vantage point of my own ethical point of view. ↩
6. ^[6]Williams (2011[1985]) asks us to imagine a “hypertraditional” society the members of which engage in no reflective thinking with respect to their ethical ideas. Although he seems to imply that such a society in which reflection is totally absent is impossible (which is why we only imagine it) he certainly suggests that there has been, at least since Plato, a great increase in the extent and importance of self-reflection. Speaking of Nietzsche’s attitude towards the Greeks, Williams (1993:9) writes:

   The complexity of his attitude comes, in part, from his ever present sense that his own consciousness would not be possible without the developments that he disliked. In particular his view of things—of the Greeks as much as of anything else—depended on a heightened reflectiveness, self-consciousness, and inwardness that, he thought, it was precisely one of the charms, and indeed the power, of the Greeks to have done without. “The Greeks were superficial out of profundity,” he famously said.

   The distinction is reminiscent of the one made by Evans-Pritchard (1937: 194) in characterizing the Azande in relation to their beliefs (see also Horton 1967):

   In this web of belief every strand depends upon every other strand, and a Zande cannot get out of its meshes because it is the only world he knows. The web is not an external structure in which he is enclosed. It is the texture of his thought and he cannot think that his thought is wrong.

   A very real question for the anthropology of ethics is whether and in what respect self-reflection, reflexivity or whatever you want to call it is universal and in what sense is it so. Do some social arrangements encourage self-conscious reflection to a greater extent or more effectively than others? Do some languages impede self-reflection while others promote it?↩

7. ^[7]I’m reminded here of a passage from Williams (2011[1985]: 145) in which he discusses the “linguistic” approach to ethics (associated with Hare):

   It is an obvious enough idea that if we are going to understand how ethical concepts work, and how they change, we have to have some insight into the forms of social organization within which they work. The linguistic approach does not, at some detached level, deny this, but it does not ask any questions that help us to gain that insight or to do anything with it in philosophy if we have gained it. Its concentration on questions of logical analysis have helped to conceal the point, and so has its pure conception of philosophy itself, which indeed emphasizes that language is a social activity but at the same time, oddly enough, rejects from philosophy any concrete interest in societies.↩

8. ^[8]In an article in Forbes it was reported that Donald Trump plans to have ‘the U.S. military re-invade the Middle East and commandeer control of Iraq’s oil fields’. Apparently challenging the wisdom of such a strategy, George Stephanopoulos asked Trump, ‘So, we steal an oil field?’ to which Trump responds, ‘Excuse me. You’re not stealing. Excuse me. You’re not stealing anything. You’re taking– we’re reimbursing ourselves– at least, at a minimum, and I say more. We’re taking back $1.5 trillion to reimburse ourselves.’ See also Sidnell and Barnes 2013.↩