A common question arises with respect to OOO: Does OOO have an ethics. My initial response to this question is perplexity.
Well yeah, sure, OOO has an ethics. Why wouldn’t it? As a person I clearly make value judgments and think some things are right and wrong. Why would that somehow change with OOO? Do you think we’re saying that you should allow the shark to eat your child?
So I’ll keep this post very short as I’m really interested in hearing from all of you. Here are a few things that occur to me:
1) What is it about OOO that prompts this question? Lurking in the question “does OOO have an ethics?” I hear the unarticulated worry that somehow OOO precludes an ethics. What assumption is being made that might lead to this worry?
2) Or maybe it’s that people think that OOO should generate a new ethics. What is it about OOO that would lead us to think about ethical issues differently?
3) What are the conditions for having an ethics? Sometimes I get the sense that folks think that OOO fails to meet the conditions for having an ethics. This worry seems based on an idea of what an ethics must be. So what is the conception of what an ethics must be that OOO is supposed to meet?
I stop at these questions and hopefully others will be so kind as to say a word or two about their thoughts on these issues.
Larval Subjects . 
May 29, 2012 at 9:56 pm
In response to #1: I think the fear inspired by all forms of materialism is that it leads to determinism and therefore undermines the necessary conditions of will or judgement necessary for ethical behavior. In part this is an anxiety inspired by an impoverished view of matter. For those most worried about the implosion of the noumenal and phenomenal worlds the presumption is that matter is mechanistic or worse yet is malleable but by others than ourselves. The Brazil/Manchurian Candidate scenario if you will. The same people are terrified by neuroscience because of the possibility of mind control or worse yet change who we authentically are. This is Habermas’ fear in the Future of Humanity. He thinks that human dignity and human rights require that one’s singularity be causeless that is no other human can claim cause for your singularity. This for him is a necessary condition of freedom and therefore necessary groundwork for responsibility and ethical action. So as a result he is terrified by genetics, neuroscience, all forms of what he calls ‘self-styled Nietzschean posthumanism.” The irony of this position is also the dead end of most normative theory. It responds to the fear of something real by saying it ought not be real. As if one could alter physics and biology if you wish upon a moral star. This is, I think, the stakes of the debate over plasticity. If the will and agent of the will are plastic and at the same time inter and intra-subjectively (not to mention inter-objectively) plastic then how do we proceed. These seem to be the same debates from the 80s and 90s about the ‘relativism’ or ‘nihilism’ of constructivism. The only difference is now the ‘hard kernel’ of the subject is as plastic as the discourse that shapes it. However, just as many a good Foucauldian was able to refocus the discussion of ethics away from morality and towards practices or techniques of ethical living it would seem OOO could do the same. However it would have to think even more experimentally as the debate is not just the enunciative subject vs. subject of enunciation but also the entire ecology that makes that debate possible. I think Jane Bennett’s work on enchantment as well WIlliam Connolly’s work in Neuropolitics is an attempt at this. However when Jane published an article on the effects of Omega-3 fatty acids on violence people were outraged. Bill similarly has been all but accused of inspiring evil by Arendtian’s and ‘intentionalists’ like Ruth Leys (see the rather heated debate from Critical Inquiry last year.
Both of these interventions point to a second failing disavowed by the ‘determinist paranoia’. That is life after the call of the moral imperative (aka the death of god). There is no call. So the normative conflation of defining the good and the presumed subsequent inspiration by duty to follow the good has been an catastrophic failure on a global scale. Part of what OOO, New Materialism, and other complex materialism can accomplish is thinking about how the inspiration (as it is not we need to rid the problem of the ‘spritu’ presumed by the word) for ethics works. Why is it insufficient to merely define the good etc.
Put in that light OOO/New Materialism et all is a disaster for most normative theory. Moralists desperate to prove there was a foundation for moral judgement fought a 40 year war with post-structuralism et all over that foundations/universalism of the good and now after losing in a fairly bloody defeat they are being told there is a foundation, i.e. things are real and not constructed by humans or reducible to human discourse BUT that real hard stuff is not only indifferent to morality it is indifferent to the entire species of humans. Its kind of a kick in the teeth. So the fever pitch of affective attachment is not surprising.
May 29, 2012 at 10:18 pm
In response #2: As many dark materialism suggest there is no one particular ethics that comes from taking matter more seriously. However it does seem like there is a chastening effect that can take place particularly among arrogant/anthropocentric materialist. For instance many advocates of global scale geoengineering accept and even champion a certain kind of materialism. Unfortunately they still proceed on the presumption that complexity is under the dominion of human knowledge. So while the planetary system is complicated the variables and their interactions can be modeled sufficiently to intervene in the global climate system. When your computer crashes you reboot it but the idea of a global climate control system having to be rebooted or worse yet falling into disrepair because of congressional budget cuts makes me a little nervous. So, I think, OOO/Materialism can undermine the ‘king of the jungle’ presumption that this kind of absurd techno-optimism relies on.
That being said part of my attraction to new materialism/OOO is that I find the desire for the human species to survive (as it currently exists) forever equally absurd and arrogant. But this is one more thing to inspire ire amongst the Arendtian and Kantian humanists, which is why they are generally opposed to philosophies of becoming. As they both suffer from a kind of somatic fundamentalism. They have an image of the human that is abstracted from natural history. In this way I think ontologically speaking Kantians and Arendtians are as opposed to evolution as wing-nut creationists. The idea that the condition of possibility (biological humans) could change is as bad as extinction. One need only read the introduction to Kant’s Anthropology in which he says that science will never be able to understand the function of the brain because if it could philosophy would no longer be necessary. Silly. So OOO can serve as a kind of immanent critique of humanist ethics but I do not see any reason it could or should produce a particular ethics. The idea of some kind of new moral imperative being based on better understanding the nature of the universe just sounds hokey. I imagine a new cult that worships heat death or the non-locatability of electrons.
May 29, 2012 at 10:21 pm
For an example at a recent conference held at Bard’s Hannah Arendt center for Politics and Humanities a prominent Arendtian in the audience responded to a talk given by Ray Kurzweil by giving him the Nazi salute. Kurzweil’s ideas about human consciousness are philosophically problematic but to accuse him of being a Nazi shows the emotional investment in these debates.
May 29, 2012 at 10:25 pm
Pretty much what you said, Jairus. I didn’t realize Bennett’s observations about omega-3 fatty acids caused such an uproar. Aren’t these the sorts of things we would like to know in order to achieve the maximal degree of autonomy? Perhaps part of the problem arises from seeing agency and autonomy as things we have at the outset as God given or a priori features of our being. It seems to me that agency is something that has to be achieved, not something that is always-already there. A big part of achieving that agency lies in understanding the assemblages within which we’re enmeshed and how the affect us.
May 29, 2012 at 11:23 pm
I think there are two problems: 1. We are dealing with the return of the repressed. What is the old Freudian saying, “What gets kicked out the door, sneaks back in the window.” These are all thinkers that declared themselves post-metaphysical and now they have to defend something as a belief that they thought was given or at least agreed upon. So the affective charge is disproportionate with the substance of the argument. 2. They have simplistic even newtonian understanding of efficient causality. So if Omega-3 fatty acids improve say the decision time such that a subject may enact dialogue rather than react violently then ‘decision’ is not autonomous because it possess contingencies such as omega-3 fatty acids. So the complexity/liveliness of matter has to also be supplemented with more complex understandings of process and emergence so that the infr-assemblage of consciousness can produce actions that are not mechanistically derivable and also give credence that we are not entirely ‘ourselves’. That razor’s edge makes people nervous. So the a priori/god problem is because of a causality deficiency as well as a kind of outmoded religion about freedom.
The slightly more sophisticated but equally whiny position is that if we admit that something like omegas or some other contribution or restriction on neural function is possible we enter a political danger zone. So what if the biopolitical state saturates some populations with yummy peace inducing salmon or some aerosolized mood stabilizer and deprives others. The market of course has been doing this for years. People critical of school lunch programs ignore stacks of evidence that being hungry plus malnutrition severely restrict academic performance. The left humanist join into this paranoid frenzy by arguing that this makes forms of social eugenics at both an individual and population scale ‘thinkable.’ Unfortunately I think this falls under the wishing the sky was a different color problem. If its doable its thinkable. Norbert Weiner once said he was so terrified of the insights of cybernetics that he wanted to destroy all of his research. His response though I think was right: “We have contributed to the initiation of a new science which, as I have said, embraces technical developments with grew possibility for good and evil. We can only hand it over to the world of Belsen and Hiroshima. We do not even have the choice of suppressing these new technical developments. They belong to the age, and the most any of us can do by suppression is to put the development of the subject into the hands of the most irresponsible and most venal of our engineers.”
Or to put it a different way the metaphysical and political problems do not go away if we ignore them more likely they will be used as insights for control and violence by the people that have no sense of revulsion for such things. That all being said Weiner’s point is well taken the reactionary response is partially right there is danger afoot. However it would seem tactics developed from understandings of, as you say, “assemblages within which we’re” enmeshed seem all the more vital.
May 30, 2012 at 12:00 am
To the extent that OOO may have an ethics, ever since reading Morton’s “The Ecological Thought” and his thoughts on Levinas’ “strange stranger” I’ve seen the ethics of OOO as actually a kind of radical Levinasian openness to the Other. Now, there is a lot Levinas probably wouldn’t like in OOO, first of all that it’s an ontology at all, but I do think the focus on things and their irreducibility is a way of radicalizing the encounter with the Other to include all things as “Other,” not just the face to face relation with humans. We can’t necessarily dialogue with things as we do humans, but OOO does point out the way things, if we really focus on them, can call the subject into question and their assumed mastery over things and nature. This calling into question by things may inspire more humble approaches to dealing with complex problems, both in terms of climate change and human society. At least that’s my hunch.
May 30, 2012 at 1:17 am
I don’t know if this is an answer to your question, but I am interested in how an object-oriented ethics might work. How far does one extend ethical relations among objects? Is ethics dependent upon agency and/or cognition or does it produce them? No theory we might propose could really alter our ontological capacity for ethical behavior. Rather than a theory that tells us what we “should” do, which is the hallmark of the -isms of critical theory, by investigating how ethics operate (or fail to operate at crucial moments) OOO might give us better insight into developing ethics into the future without providing specifics as to what those ethics should be. I can see why that would concern some people (as if providing specific guidelines for ethical behavior ever stopped Christianity, Marxism, fill-in-the-blank from becoming destructive forces), but in my view it just means there is more work to do that would be built out from OOO.
May 30, 2012 at 1:37 am
Alex,
I think that’s the interesting ethical question. I’m hesitant but interested to see how those meditations play out.
May 30, 2012 at 2:57 am
The ethics of OOO are simple: act/think/be in ways that does not privilege the human over other objects. The (non-Derridian) impossibility of this task becomes clear when it is recalled that the question of ethics is a human question.
May 30, 2012 at 3:32 am
I think it’s quite understandable to wonder whether the flatness of being has anything decisive to say about ethics, or whether an ethical position depends on a particular variation of OOO. Take the mind/body problem. According to OOO, it’s equally legitimate to consider as objects the body and the mind, or a single entity comprising the two. These objects suggest different ethical considerations. So which kind of object does a flat ontologist choose to consider, and why? Is there a basis from within OOO for deciding one way or the other? It’s not only a fear of materialism. There is a question of how broad the scope of OOO can be.
May 30, 2012 at 3:59 am
I think OOO is ontology, and so it doesn’t concern ethics. There is a fixation on ethical discussions in continental philosophy. Ethics is something highly personal, and ontologies are inherently ethically neutral. An ontology could have any ethical force, depending on who was adopting it. And why “an” ethics? Why is it assumed that there is one? It seems the insistence on ethical questions reveals a moralistic obsession.
May 30, 2012 at 5:40 am
this brings up the issue of whether this has any business calling itself realism. realism has nothing to do with ethical questions. these days there is lots of sophisticated ethics in circulation (i.e. zizek), and so speculative realism should remain ethically neutral. it should remain ontological, which means flat. ethics striates around the subjective sphere.
May 30, 2012 at 9:05 am
I think that this ‘conservative’ jibe says more about those lobbing it than those on the receiving end.
What it seems to suggest, fundamentally, is that a philosophy that is not in the service of a particular ethical or political position cannot ever do justice to either ethics or politics (and those two things oddly get used interchangeably).
Or:
1. Continental philosophy for the past few decades has made ethics/politics first philosophy (that first, most fundamental set of questions from which all else derives or is addended).
2. OOO dethrones ethics/politics from this status and puts ontology in their place.
3. Many people interpret this dethroning as a diminution of ethics/politics and hence take OOO to be anti-ethical, anti-political or (the most grave of all intellectual insults) ‘conservative.’
It is supposed that a philosophy that doesn’t make ethics/politics everything cannot do anything with them. Frankly, I find this to be the truly conservative notion — that there is no more to life than ethics/politics. Its logic is totalitarian and it tends to go hand in hand with an approach to conversation that denounces rather than debates.
With regard to constructing an OOO ethics: Latour’s recent article ‘Morality or Moralism,’ written with Émilie Hache, outlines an approach to ethics that could be described as ‘object oriented’ insofar as it attempts to remove anthropocentric prejudice from the concept.
May 30, 2012 at 1:40 pm
I think part of the issue is that OOO doesn’t foreground things like race, class, gender, etc. That is, it doesn’t explain by means of these categories, but rather, it seeks to explain them. For critical theorists, everything revolves around these constructions, and to not foreground them is itself an act of political/ethical violence. For example, I recently wrote an exam describing how I would study the practice of composing computer models of the Chesapeake Bay. I was given a set of theorists I could choose to work with – I choose Althusser, De Certeau, and Foucault, I think, but it doesn’t matter. The professor who wrote the questions – a very well known critical archaeologist – told me that the reason I didn’t get a “high pass” was because I didn’t delve into the experiences of African Americans on the Bay. He has also said a few times that environmental anthropology can’t be theoretical. Now the issue of African Americans on the Bay is a relevant issue, and I did mention it, but in terms of the Bay model I don’t think it’s the central issue. More important to me (and thus what I discussed most) is the issue of the relationship between the humans and the non-humans that constitute the Bay ecology. In other words, because I didn’t foreground the issue of race in my paper, my paper was not deemed adequately theoretical in spite of the abundance of effort put into theorizing the human/non-human interaction, and the relationships that constitute the bay ecology – including social, political, and ethical issues. For this professor – and many other critical theorists – failing to foreground the African American experience on the Bay – in whatever research project – is an act of violence because it fails to de-marginalize them.
May 30, 2012 at 3:17 pm
Just a brief thought to say that I love this post. Instead of spending so much time defending an individual position, make OOO more collaborative by crowdsourcing some basic questions. Awesome.
May 30, 2012 at 3:20 pm
Oh, and IMO, you are performing one of the premises of an OOO ethics with the openness you are demonstrating here.
May 30, 2012 at 3:44 pm
In response to #2, my biggest interest OOO on ethics is a useful way around the is-ought problem. Taking objects seriously means, among other things, having an account of what an object values. By simply having limited potentials of translation (i.e. no such thing as perfect translation between objects), all objects have some set of values by way of being able to interact with it, and doing so in certain ways. With this, we have an understanding of how object promotes certain values, which we can then use in concert with whatever set of values we have/make as humans. It seems to me to provide an answer on the side of is whereas most continental philosophy works on the ought side.
May 30, 2012 at 7:03 pm
Basically, I completely support everything Philip said above. I had started to type something similar, but he presents the matter perfectly.
I simply cannot see there being a strong rationale for an OOO “is” to deliver an ethical or political “ought”. There is probably some interesting meta-ethical and meta-political terrain for OOO to demarcate and map out, and the request for this is certainly understandable, but the demand for anything normative seems laughable (or else to be simply ignored, or met with silence, which seemed to be Harman’s suggestion to the piece that initiated these last couple of blog entries).
May 31, 2012 at 9:55 am
As others have commented, the problem could be that the goal of decentralising the human seems (on first glance) to marginalise ethics. It needn’t, of course. But that brings you to the second problem: that OOO – in common with most contemporary ontology in my view – privileges metaphysics in a way that seems to sideline ethics. This has been a consequence of the rise of positivism in the twentieth century, and I view it as a very serious problem in contemporary philosophy – although I am still hopeful.
I remain interested in OOO, but I’d be a hell of a lot more interested in it if I could see anyone in speculative realism engaging in an ethics of something other than truth. That, for me, is the root of your problem.
June 1, 2012 at 10:34 pm
[…] to the questions of an earlier post, it seems to me that perhaps the central concern with OOO and SR is that flat ontology leads to a […]
June 3, 2012 at 1:12 pm
[…] criticisms of object-oriented ontology and its perceived negligence on matters of politics and ethics, he argues that a flat ontology does not imply a flat ethics. While I am personally on the fence […]
June 3, 2012 at 10:39 pm
Nick,
I adore your points about the Joker! I have to steal this!
June 27, 2012 at 1:58 am
I’m catching up on a month of not reading blogs, so I’m getting to this post really really late, but I find these kinds of questions fascinating. It reminds me of the demand/lament made about Derrida prior to about 1990 or so, that he never wrote about ethics or politics and deconstruction was somehow devoid of ethical or political relevance. This looks ridiculous to us today, but at the time it was dogma. Derrida lived long enough and wrote enough that he was able to touch on most of the pressing issues and figures that people wanted him to (except Wittgenstein, that would have been nice).
I attribute this to a few things.
1) We like systems. Any new philosophical position has to start somewhere, some big question that it’s trying to address. For OOO these starting points are, obviously, ontological. But then we want it to spread into every area of thought. We want it’s unique solution to it’s starting point to become the capstone of an entire structure, one that leaves no question unturned.
2) Ethics and politics are really really important and really important to how people actually try to live their lives. I think there is a pretty big disconnect between how the industry of philosophy is practiced in the university, and what people actually care about and need. Sure, a lot of us have been trained by the university to ask our questions in a particular way, and a lot of us like thinking and being challenged by curious strange ideas, and some of us have even gotten really good at thinking this way. But there is something of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy that is missing from the way philosophy is practiced in the university today. People still basically want to now how we should live our lives and what kinds of societies we should create together. This is why I maintain that Gandhi is actually the most far reaching philosopher of the 20th century. Wittgenstein or Heidegger might be more intellectually gifted, but Gandhi’s experiments broke new ground in the questions of how we should actually live. Really really smart people like toying around with ideas, but then they want those ideas to help them with this fundamental problems that they care about. Can OOO provide them with new levers to figure out how to live? In a way, no philosophy is very good unless it keeps coming back to the phil 101 questions.