The Ties to Bind: Techno-science, Ethics and Democracy

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 159-186

  Kurasawa, Fuyuki ^a  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

autonomy; democracy; ethics; public sphere; technoscience

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248058151     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453704041242     Document Type: Article

References (142)

1. H. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, trans. H. Jonas and D. Herr (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984[1979–81]).
2. J. Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964[1954]);
3. N. Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1992).
4. Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989);
5. Z. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993);
6. Z. Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995);
7. R. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985);
8. R. Bellah et al., The Good Society (New York: Vintage, 1991);
9. M. Garber et al. (eds), The Turn to Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 2000);
10. N. Haan et al. (eds), Social Science as Moral Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983);
11. E. Lévinas, Totalité et infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971);
12. A. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984[1981]);
13. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989);
14. A. Wolfe, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
15. A. Feenberg, Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
16. S. Harding (ed.), The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993);
17. F.-A. Isambert, De la Religion à l'éthique (Paris: Cerf, 1992);
18. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility;
19. M. Kranzberg (ed.), Ethics in an Age of Pervasive Technology (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980);
20. E. Morin, La Complexité humaine (Paris: Flammarion, 1994).
21. G. Canguilhem, Le Normal et le pathologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966);
22. P. Feyerabend, Against Method (London and New York: Verso, 1975);
23. T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
24. D. J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991);
25. D. J. Haraway, Modest Witness@ Second Millennium.FemaleManMeetsOncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York and London: Routledge, 1997);
26. B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987);
27. B. Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999);
28. P. Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996);
29. P. Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
30. A. Ross (ed.), Science Wars (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
31. Z. Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-modernity and Intellectuals (Cambridge: Polity, 1987);
32. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
33. Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason, p. 155.
34. C. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. K. Blamey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987[1975]), pp. 156–60, 369–73;
35. C. Castoriadis, ‘Done and to be Done’, in D. A. Curtis (ed. and trans.), The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997b[1989]), pp. 361–417;
36. J. P. Arnason, ‘The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity’, Revue européenne des sciences sociales 86 (1989): 323–37;
37. J. P. Arnason, ‘Modernity as Project and as Field of Tensions’, in A. Honneth and H. Joas (eds), Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas's The Theory of Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 181–213.
38. J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II, Lifeworld and System, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987[1981]), p. 355;
39. H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998[1958]), p. 157.
40. ‘On the basis of the hidden but apparently self-evident postulate that economy is just about producing more (outputs) with less (inputs), nothing — physical or human “nature,” tradition, or other “values” — ought to stand in the way of the maximization process. Everything is called before the Tribunal of (productive) Reason and must prove its right to exist on the basis of the criterion of the unlimited expansion of “rational mastery.”’ C. Castoriadis, ‘The Retreat from Autonomy: Postmodernism as Generalized Conformism’, in D. A. Curtis (ed. and trans.), World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997[1992]), p. 38;
41. see also Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, pp. 156–60). Weber himself makes the connection between the rationalization of the state and economic domains: ‘The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production. Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs — these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration, and especially in its monocratic form.’
42. M. Weber, Economy and Society: An Essay in Interpretive Sociology, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978[1921–2]), p. 973.
43. M. Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds and trans.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946[1919]).
44. Borrowing James Mill's image of polytheism, Weber represents this situation as a struggle between gods. He illustrates the point by evoking Nietzsche's philosophy and Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil. M. Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in Gerth and Wright Mills (eds and trans.), From Max Weber, pp. 147–8.
45. M. Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 340–72;
46. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, pp. 4–5.
47. K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1944);
48. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II.
49. N. Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. J. Bednarz, Jr with D. Baecker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995[1984]).
50. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility.
51. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, pp. 28–9, 46;
52. Castoriadis, ‘Done and to be Done’, p. 415;
53. Wolfe, Whose Keeper?
54. C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 79.
55. Wolfe, Whose Keeper? p. 107;
56. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, pp. 182–3.
57. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, p. 46;
58. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, pp. 124–5;
59. C. Castoriadis, ‘The Ethicists’ New Clothes', in Curtis (ed. and trans.), World in Fragments, p. 121. Durkheim's notion of anomie stands as the classical illustration of the pathological outcomes of morality's weakening by way of its displacement.
60. E. Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. J. A. Spalding and G. Simpson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952[1897]), pp. 291–309.
61. Bauman, Life in Fragments, p. 149;
62. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, pp. 125–9.
63. Bauman terms this process the ‘floating’ of responsibility. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, pp. 18, 126.
64. Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn, p. 229;
65. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, pp. 68–9, 123–4;
66. Bellah et al., The Good Society, pp. 90–7, 114–19;
67. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II; Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, pp. 78–9;
68. Polanyi, The Great Transformation; Wolfe, Whose Keeper?, p. 20.
69. ‘The honor of the civil servant is vested in his ability to execute conscientiously the order of the superior authorities, exactly as if the order agreed with his own conviction. This holds even if the order appears wrong to him and if, despite the civil servant's remonstrances, the authority insists on the order. Without this moral discipline and self-denial, in the highest sense, the whole apparatus would fall to pieces’: M. Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in Gerth and Wright Mills (eds and trans.), From Max Weber, p. 95.
70. Arendt's haunting analysis of the Eichmann case reveals the existence of all three processes of transformation of ethics. Indeed, the banality of evil becomes fully comprehensible once they are taken in conjunction with one another. Eichmann displaces ethical questions by leaving them to be answered by the state, or by viewing them as private issues (e.g. the inconsistency between his occasional personal interventions to assist Jewish acquaintances and his execution of orders leading to the mass deportation of Jews to extermination camps). Adiaphorization is manifest in the self-understanding of his own decisions as somehow outside of morality or morally neutral because strictly conforming to existing rules or orders. The colonization of ethics is strongly evidenced by his perversion of the Kantian categorical imperative, which becomes interpreted as a moral obligation to obey the law. H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964).
71. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, p. 195;
72. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, p. 156;
73. Ellul, The Technological Society; Postman, Technopoly.
74. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, pp. 128–9;
75. C. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, in Curtis (ed. and trans.), The Castoriadis Reader, p. 277;
76. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II, p. 230.
77. More than 30 years ago, Habermas commented: ‘It is only recently that bureaucrats, the military, and politicians have been orienting themselves to strictly scientific recommendations in the exercise of their public functions — indeed, this practice has only existed on a large scale since World War II. This marks a new or second stage of that “rationalization” which Max Weber had already comprehended as the basis for the development of bureaucratic domination. It is not as though scientists had seized state power; but the exercise of power domestically and its assertion against external enemies are no longer rationalized only through the mediation of administrative activity organized through the division of labor, regulated according to differentiated responsibilities, and linked to instituted norms. Instead they have been structurally transformed by the objective exigencies of new technologies and strategies.’ J. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. J. J. Shapiro (London: Heinemann, 1971[1968–9]), p. 62.
78. C. Taylor, ‘Liberal Politics and the Public Sphere’, in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 259.
79. J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989[1962]).
80. Many of the contributions to Calhoun provide other instances of the contemporary pluralization of public spheres as well as of the meaning of public life. Also, see Calhoun's critique of Habermas's unitary conception of the public sphere. ‘The language of “spheres” may mislead. If we are speaking about a mode of establishing relationships between human beings, then publicness can be instantiated in a variety of social spaces by no means all of which are institutionalized as political by their relationship to the state.’ C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
81. C. Calhoun, ‘Plurality, Promises, and Public Spaces’, in C. Calhoun and J. McGowan (eds), Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 232–59.
82. Benhabib's contrast of Arendt's ‘agonistic’ view of public space and Habermas's ‘discursive’ understanding of the concept provides a different interpretation, one that privileges the latter over the former. S. Benhabib, ‘Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition and Jürgen Habermas’, in C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 73–98.
83. In his later work, Habermas has attempted to pluralize his understanding of the contemporary public sphere by incorporating within it a notion of civil society composed of overlapping networks of collective social actors. J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996[1990]), pp. 352–86.
84. H. Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963);
85. Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn;
86. Calhoun, ‘Plurality, Promises, and Public Spaces’, in Calhoun and McGowan (eds), Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics;
87. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, in Curtis (ed. and trans.), The Castoriadis Reader;
88. C. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, in Curtis (ed. and trans.), World in Fragments.
89. For a stimulating and detailed discussion along these lines, see J. Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
90. N. Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, pp. 110–11.
91. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 253;
92. Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn, pp. 50–1. This is not to deny that, both in the past and the present, publicness has been undermined by existing socio-economic inequalities.
93. See Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, in Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, pp. 118–21.
94. Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 93–4, 174, 225–7, 245;
95. Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn, pp. 57, 175–6, 220–1;
96. Bellah et al., The Good Society, pp. 138–40, 292–3, 304–6;
97. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, in Curtis (ed. and trans.), The Castoriadis Reader, pp. 272, 280;
98. Castoriadis, ‘Done and to be Done’, in Curtis (ed. and trans.), The Castoriadis Reader, p. 413.
99. Bellah et al., The Good Society, p. 306. As early as in Toward a Rational Society, Habermas (1970: 61) warns us about societal dependence on expertise: ‘Only if we succeed in directing the mediation of technical progress and the conduct of social life, which until now has occurred as an extension of natural history; its conditions being left outside the framework of discussion and planning. The fact that this is a matter for reflection means that it does not belong to the professional competence of specialists. … Our only hope for the rationalization of the power structure lies in conditions that favor political power for thought developing through dialogue. The redeeming power of reflection cannot be supplanted by the extension of technically exploitable knowledge.’
100. Arendt, On Revolution;
101. Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn;
102. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, in Curtis (ed. and trans.), The Castoriadis Reader;
103. Castoriadis, ‘Done and to be Done’, in Curtis (ed. and trans.), The Castoriadis Reader, p. 407;
104. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, in Curtis (ed. and trans.), World in Fragments;
105. Castoriadis, ‘The Ethicists' New Clothes', in Curtis (ed. and trans.), World in Fragments, pp. 117, 122.
106. This distinction between two versions of the public good partially follows Berlin's juxtaposition of negative and positive concepts of liberty, as well as Taylor's arguments in favour of the latter vis-à-vis the former. I. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997[1969]), pp. 191–242.
107. C. Taylor, ‘What's Wrong with Negative Liberty’, in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 211–29.
108. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility.
109. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 171.
110. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart.
111. Castoriadis, ‘The Ethicists' New Clothes', in Curtis (ed. and trans.), World in Fragments, p. 122.
112. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics;
113. Bauman, Life in Fragments.
114. Taylor, Sources of the Self.
115. In the modern era, this pre-societal view of ethics extends from Rousseau's ideas of animal compassion and pity to Bauman's concept of ‘the moral impulse’. J.-J. Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (London: Dent, 1973[1755]);
116. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics;
117. Bauman, Life in Fragments.
118. Ferrara has made a case for an intersubjective approach to authenticity which addresses some of the flaws of an under-socialized conception of conscience. A. Ferrara, Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
119. E. Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, trans. C. Brookfield (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957[1950]);
120. E. Durkheim, Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education, ed. E. K. Wilson, trans. E. K. Wilson and H. Schnurer (New York: Free Press, 1973[1925]);
121. E. Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Macmillan, 1984[1893]);
122. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, pp. 170–5;
123. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, pp. 312–14;
124. Wolfe, Whose Keeper?
125. M. Weber, ‘The Social Psychology of the World Religions’, in Gerth and Wright Mills (eds and trans.), From Max Weber, pp. 292–3.
126. P. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. A. I. Davidson, trans. M. Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995);
127. Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’, in Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, pp. 340–72;
128. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985[1984]);
129. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 3, The Care of the Self, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1986[1984]);
130. M. Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds), The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988[1984]);
131. M. Foucault, ‘Truth, Power, Self: An Interview’, in L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. H. Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988);
132. M. Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self,’.;
133. M. Foucault, ‘The Political Technology of Individuals,’ in L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. H. Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). What is useful for the purposes of this paper is less Foucault's interest in the care of the self as an aesthetics of existence than his vision of the individual's training and search for the good as an affirmative mode of subjectivity.
134. Calhoun, ‘Plurality, Promises, and Public Spaces’, in Calhoun and McGowan (eds), Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, p. 247.
135. Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 3–4, 27, 33–6, 42.
136. Taylor, Sources of the Self.
137. Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn, p. 45;
138. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, p. 126.
139. This distinction partly follows Jonas's differentiation between formal and substantive conceptions of responsibility. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, pp. 90–3.
140. Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in Gerth and Wright Mills (eds and trans.), From Max Weber;
141. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility.
142. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, pp. 21–2.