Contingent Ethics Research Articles

The Ethics of Contingency: An Alternative (to) Morality in the Analects

An appreciation of the emphasis on flexibility in the Analects is one of the most consistent motifs in the various interpretations of this text. When applied specifically to normative readings, embracing adaptability, having malleable standards, and taking particulars into account are both promising and challenging ways to think about whether something might be moral or ethical. This paper attempts to deconstruct this familiar discussion along novel lines that can reveal new ways to reflect on the importance of flexibility in the Analects, while, at the same time, it reconstrues ways in which comparative projects might be oriented. The main argument is this: the Analects does not recognize a categorical distinction between a moral and non-moral realm. Whereas, in much modern academic thought, there is a distinction between what counts as contingencies and what is up to the individual, which, in turn, loosely corresponds to the non-moral and moral realms, the Analects does not make such clear distinctions. Everything, including core moral issues such as the individual’s own choice, moral guidelines, and the contextualization of (moral) models, is all ultimately grounded in contingencies. Nevertheless, the Analects provides ways of reflecting on choices and actions that aim to steer people in specific directions. We may understand this as a type of morality, but one that is significantly distinct from those wherein the difference between the moral (non-contingent) and non-moral (contingent) is foundational.

Forgive me for so speaking: towards a hermeneutics of wounded embodiment and an ethics of contingency

ABSTRACT I begin here, at my wounds, writing to reach out and touch, writing to find a way of being with you. Drawing on Julietta Singh’s conception of the body archive, I conceptualise my body here as marked by wounds, in particular relation to my embodiment as a person that is queer, racialised and experiences a physical impairment. I give my account of these wounds as traces of a history of being hurt, where I have been impressed upon by what I come to feel as the surfaces of the world. I argue this leads my body, in the repetition of its misfitting, to come to inhabit a position of bodily instability, which orients my perception towards the anticipation of pain. While this might read this as a re-inscription of a deficit narrative about the othered body, or a hypochondriacal logic, I argue this embodiment and its anticipation in my work of interpretation to be the beginning for a way of living and seeing differently, justified in the way that its’ contingent touch it might bring us closer together in relation, as a means to survive.

The Ethics of Contingency

Moving from pragmatism and drawing on a fascinating and accurate interpretation of Richard Rorty’s work, Rosa Calcaterra’s Contingency and Normativity. The Challenges of Richard Rorty (Brill-Rodopi, 2019) proposes a philosophical investigation of the relationship between normativity and contingency. Calcaterra’s longstanding familiarity with pragmatist philosophy strongly marks her attitude towards these topics and their related issues. The author takes up some of the pragmatists’ constructiv...

Neorealism, Contingency and the Linguistic Turn

Since the publication of Roman Jakobson’s famous 1956 essay “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances”, we have tended to read the relationship between metaphor and metonymy as a dialectical one. The essay argues that this approach stands in need of revision, since metonymy, as a trope—and as a trope, moreover, of contingency—undermines the dialectical relationship between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic axes. This has far-reaching implications, specifically for the assessment of literature and its ethics. Since metaphor functions structurally analogous to dialectics itself, metonymy and its role in realism and neorealism might offer us a way to think an “ethics of contingency” that acknowledges the role of contingency, rather that suppressing it and its role in preventing closure through sublation.

Old Words, New Words, Wrong Words: Coleridge’s Poetics of Interruption in “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere”

ABSTRACT This essay examines a poetics of interruption in “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.” It argues that in Coleridge’s verse as well as in his philosophical prose, anachronisms, neologisms, and other words “unsuited to the time, place, and company” disrupt habitual forms of thought. This poetics of interruption produces a contingent ethics that can help illuminate a middle ground between extreme positions concerning the status of narrative in contemporary theory. Straddling the divide between essentialist claims among advocates of narrative ethics and the anti-narrativity that characterizes much of the work in the so-called descriptive turn, Coleridge handles words as antiquarian relics that tell stories about groups who use them.

Steven Salaita, the Critical Importance of Context, and Our Professional Ethics

Shared professional ethics are an important aspect of North American librarianship; these ethics highlight values including diversity, social responsibility, and intellectual freedom. However, these values are contested, politically charged signifiers that are often in conflict. This paper proposes an “ethics of contingency” for librarianship that acknowledges that our values are contextually bound and negotiated and explicitly draws attention to power. As a case study, the paper considers Steven Salaita’s dismissal from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the context of institutional oppression—a context that has been under-examined in discussions of the case within librarianship. Interrogating the issue through these lenses can help illuminate the stakes of this debate, and others like it, for our work as academic librarians.

Interrogating the Master: Lacan and Radical Politics

This paper explores the implications of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory for radical politics today. Focusing on anarchism as a revolutionary alternative to Marxism, the paper develops Lacan's argument about the paradoxical relationship between freedom, transgression and authority, as well as his theory of the four discourses, in order to rethink the anti-authoritarian project in non-utopian and non-essentialist terms. It concludes by calling for a new form of radical politics that seeks to avoid the discourse of the Master through an ethics of contingency, and discusses the contemporary anti-globalization movement as an example.