ABSTRACT
In what follows, I want to imagine the ethically good life as emergent from the interanimation of contextual and ecological embeddedness, creaturely needs and capacities, knowledge practices, and encounters with and engenderment of meaningful artifacts and performances. The normative upshot of such a praxis can be stated precisely: ethical practices are right and good just insofar as they acknowledge humans’ ecological embeddedness (need, dependence, and interdependence); are constitutive of a just social ontology (relational egalitarianism); engage the depth and dimensions of all forms of knowledge (historical, performative, empirical, rational, and imaginative); and are responsive to practices that explore the limits of creaturely possibility and meaning (through works of labor, imagination, play, art, action, and agency). What I aim to do in this chapter is to outline the lineaments of a meta-ethical ontology that takes seriously human creatureliness in all its variety – not only biologically, socially, and imaginatively, but also as particular kinds of historical and structural actors living in the twenty-first century. It is in light of the meta-ethical account mapped out in this chapter that I will turn, in Chapter 4, to making a normative case for a particular conception of the ethical life as proceeding from the relational and creative engenderment of ground projects. As will be clear below, the kind of meta-ethical account articulated in
this chapter also cuts against major meta-ethical traditions in the North Atlantic philosophical tradition and certain reigning ones in African philosophical discourse. On the one hand, it departs from premodern and modern meta-ethical accounts that aim to ground ethics on a singular metaphysical agency, property, capacity, or goal – such as theistic accounts (God); Aristotelian accounts (telos); or Kantian accounts (reason). Thus,
against foundationalism, this meta-ethical account avers that meta-ethics is articulated. The meta-ethical picture that emerges from conceiving of ethics as articulated is less that of an immovable and irresistible arché and more of a web of thick relationships; an emergent patchwork of interpretive practices and a cluster of gripping values that have come to be appreciated in light of history. Additionally, as I will argue in detail below, dominant North Atlantic and African meta-ethical accounts are not only metaphysically dubious, but do not do justice to the pluralism and variability in ethical reflection and practice found across many societies and cultures. In that sense, the meta-ethical account articulated below seeks to make intelligible the commonalities as well as differences in ethical practices across widely diverse societies. On the other hand, the meta-ethical account developed in this chapter
offers a manner of thinking about ethics that also significantly critiques antimodern and postmodern notions that characterize ethics as ungrounded leaps of faith (Kierkegaard or late Derrida), error (Nietzsche), a limitless play of signifiers (early Derrida) or even radically socially constructed mythoi (Foucault). These accounts, frustrated by the contradictions of ethical practice, opt either for decisionism or the comforts of relativism. In the following pages, I attempt to chart an alternative trajectory. I advance a critically interpretive meta-ethical stance that is pluralist in the sense that it admits of varying conceptions of the good and the possibility of irreconcilable goods while arguing for the possibility of ethical forms of living that can listen and respond to the sublimely diverse voices and silences echoing across planetary history and societies.
