Abstract
Enactive cognitive science combines questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics by conceiving of bodies as open-ended and mutually transforming through activity. While enaction is not a theory of ethics, it can contribute to its foundations. We present a schematization of enactive ideas that underlie traditional distinctions between Being, Knowing, and Doing. Ethics in this scheme begins in the relation between knowing and becoming. Critical of dichotomous thinking, we approach the questions of alterity and ethical reality. Alterity is relevant to the enactive approach, but not in the radical sense of transcendental arguments. We propose difference, instead, as a more generative concept. Following Simondon, we see norms and values manifest in webs of past and future acts together with their potentialities for becoming. We propose a transindividual concept of moral attunement that includes ethical know-how and consciousness raising. Through generative difference and attunement to configurations of becoming, enaction underpins an ethics of participation linking virtue ethics and ethics of care.
Highlights
The relation between moral philosophy and moral psychology has been the subject of ongoing debate (e.g., Flanagan 1996; Goldman 1993; Machery 2010; Johnson 2014)
Moral philosophers argue that psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science provide an understanding of how we engage in moral behaviour or arrive at moral judgments, but that this knowledge falls short of the task of ethics which
Following the work of Gilbert Simondon, we introduce a distinction between norms and values based on how webs and meshworks of acts in becoming define an ethical reality
Summary
The relation between moral philosophy and moral psychology has been the subject of ongoing debate (e.g., Flanagan 1996; Goldman 1993; Machery 2010; Johnson 2014). Ethical questions cannot be exhausted theoretically; they concern the open and changing practices of human communities and are rooted in shifting, diverse, and contested territories about which abstract thought cannot be either complete or neutral In this sense, enaction finds affinity in the writings of diverse philosophers such as John Dewey (1922), Charles Taylor (1982), Bernard Williams (1985), and Enrique Dussel (2016), philosophers who (in different ways) question the tasks of theorising in ethics given that it takes as its object historically situated, once-occurrent, concrete circumstances that exceed simple codification or standardization. We discuss how the enactive perspective on difference and becoming allows us to formulate an ethics of participation linking together virtue ethics and ethics of care
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