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Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty

that make us powerful enough to produce awesome risks can also make us wise enough to reflect upon them and therefore do something to limit the damage. Ability to reflect does not translate easily into the ability to act.

Even if the mind is perceptive and judicious enough, the will may prove to be wanting; and even if the will is there, hands may be too short. We introduce our improvements (or medicines to heal the wounds left by earlier failed improvements) locally; yet their effects may reach the nooks and crannies of the globe so that we are only dimly aware of their presence. We act here and now, to deal with nuisances we feel today – and we act without giving ourselves enough time to think about, let alone test, the long-term effects of our doings. But will we still be able to cross that other bridge when we come to it? And what sort of a bridge will it be? Think of the new wonder drugs which one after another burst into our dreams of happiness thanks to the ingenuity of scholars and promoters. Their so called ‘side-effects’ are tested – sometimes over much too short, sometimes over a prudently longer period. The contraceptive pill has been taken by millions of women for over twenty years now, so we may say that we know the risks that come to the surface during this time-span. But do we really know what the human world will be like in, say, a hundred years from now, after several generations of women on the pill? And is there a way of knowing it? Or do we know the several-generations-long effects of artificial insemination and in-vitro conception?

These are serious questions, the kind of which we never had a need to ask before. We seem to require now an entirely new brand of ethics. An ethics made to the measure of the enormous distances of space and time on which we can act and on which we act even when we neither know nor intend it. The ‘first duty’ of such ethics, to quote Jonas again, is ‘visualising the long-range effects of technological enterprise’. Such an ethics must be guided, says Jonas, by a ‘heuristics of fear’ and ‘principle of uncertainty’: even if the arguments of the pessimists and the optimists are finely balanced, ‘the prophecy of doom is to be given greater heed than the prophecy of bliss’. Jonas sums up with an updated (though – as he is quick to admit himself – far from logically self-evident) version of

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Risk and Limits

Kant’s categorical imperative: ‘act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life’. If in doubt – Jonas implies – do not do it. Do not magnify or multiply the risk more than unavoidable; err, if at all, on the side of caution.

The ethical self-limitation Jonas thinks we need is a tall order. Following the‘heuristics of fear’would mean nothing less than resisting, withstanding and defying the pressures exerted by virtually all other aspects of contemporary living: market competition, the on-going undeclared war of redistribution between territorial and non-territorial units and groups, the self-propelling and self-enhancing tendencies of technology and science, our understanding of life-process and collective living as a succession of ‘problems’ to be ‘resolved’ and our deeply ingrained dependence on ever more expert and technique-intensive solutions to problems. Behind all those other aspects stand powerful, well-entrenched institutions which lend their impact the almost elemental power of ‘natural forces’. Behind the new ethical imperative, on the other hand, stands the diffuse feeling that we cannot go on like this for much longer without courting dangers of formidable, perhaps unprecedented, proportions. This feeling has not yet found its institutional haven and it is far from clear where there are the forces likely to inscribe Jonas-type principles on their banners – let alone forces powerful enough to make them victorious.

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New Ethics in Search of

New Politics

Hannah Arendt, a most insightful observer and severe judge of our present human condition, wrote profusely and convincingly of the ‘emptiness of political space’. What she meant was that in our times there are no more obvious sites in the body politic of effacing past scandals and inanities from memory. Commitments are all until further notice, and eternal rights are as mortal as eternity itself has become.

A government that practices and promotes politics so understood, likes its subjects as they come, with their shifting eyes and vagrant attention, however much it waxes lyrical from time to time about a glorious heritage and old family values. Subjects who live their life as a collection of inconsequential and forgettable episodes would do nicely, thank you, for governments whose policies are a series of inconsequential (better to be forgotten) fragments. Such governments act so that nothing can be perceived as lasting and trustworthy, predictable, counted on and relied upon. They remove the places where decisions are taken to where those affected by them cannot see them as decisions, but only as ‘blind fate’. They offer the play of market forces as the only pattern for life, for life lived as play, and promote ‘playing your hand well’ as the supreme standard of decency.

Such lives are not an unmixed bliss. Far from it. The belief in bliss endemic to a life of consumption is anything but ‘trivially true’. What about uncertainty, insecurity, loneliness and the future being a site of fear instead of hope? What of never accumulating anything securely,

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New Ethics in Search of New Politics

of being sure of nothing, of being never able to say with confidence ‘I have arrived’? What about seeing in the neighbourhood only a jungle to be warily and fearfully watched, in the stranger only a beast to hide from; what about the privatised prisons of burglar-proof homes?

Life has not got to be like this. The space we co-habit may be well and consensually structured; in such a space, in which many things vital to the life of each of us (transport, schools, surgeries, media of communication) are shared, we may see each other as conditions, rather than obstacles, to our well-being. Much as the fragmented and discontinuous life promotes the waning of moral impulses, a shared life of continuous and multi-faceted relationships would reinvigorate moral responsibilities and awaken the urge to shoulder the task of managing (now truly common) affairs. Much as the life of episodes and the politics reduced to crisis-management both prompt the exit from politics, sharing of responsibilities would go a long way towards helping citizens to recover the voice they lost or stopped trying to make audible.

Contemporary society speaks in many voices and we know now that it will do so for a very long time to come. The central issue of our times is how to reforge that polyphony into harmony and prevent it from degenerating into cacophony. Harmony is not uniformity; it is always an inter-play of a number of different motifs, each retaining its separate identity and sustaining the resulting melody through, and thanks to, that identity.

Hannah Arendt thought the capacity of inter-play to be the quality of the polis – where we can meet each other as equals, while recognizing our diversity, and caring for the preservation of that diversity as the very purpose of our meeting… How may this be achieved? Through the separate identities stopping short of exclusivity, of refusal to cohabit with other identities. This in turn requires abandoning the tendency to suppress other identities in the name of the self-assertion of one’s own, while accepting, on the contrary, that it is precisely the guarding of other identities that maintains the diversity in which one’s own uniqueness can thrive.

In his highly influential Theory of Justice, John Rawls presented the model of ‘overlapping consensus’, spelling out the assumptions under

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Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty

which the harmony between diversity and unity may be attained. This is how Richard J Mouw and Sander Griffioen summarise his propositions:

The core contention here is that while people come into the public domain from very different metaphysical/religious/ moral starting points, once they have arrived they can agree to operate with the same intuitive ideas about what goes into a just arrangement. They can reach a consensus on such matters as the rule of law, liberty of conscience, freedom of thought, equality of opportunity, a fair share of material means for all citizens…

‘They can’… The question is, would they? And will they? The citizens who used to meet at the public spaces of the polis may have managed on the whole to do it quite well. But they met there with the overt intention of discussing public matters, for which they, and they alone, bore responsibility: nowhere else will the things be done if we do not do them… Whatever overlapping consensus’ there was, it was their common achievement, not the gift they received. They made and made again that consensus as they met and talked and argued. In Jeffrey Weeks’ apt phrase, ‘humanity is not an essence to be realised, but a pragmatic construction, a perspective, to be developed through the articulation of the variety of individual projects, of differences, which constitute our humanity in the broadest sense’.

It was the American political scientist Albert Hirschman who first suggested that people may influence the affairs which concern them in two ways: through voice or through exit (not by accident did Hirschman take as his model the actions undertaken by people in their capacity of consumers): ‘voice’ stands for demanding changes in the kind of things done and the way they are done; ‘exit’ – for turning one’s back on disliked things altogether and going elsewhere to seek satisfaction. The difference between ‘voice’ and ‘exit’ is, to put it bluntly, one between engagement and disengagement; responsibility and indifference. We may say that if the present condition we are in needs people to make

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