ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we make a case for an object-oriented ethics. By this, we mean, broadly speaking, an ethics that can be seen as partially constitutive of objects and, conversely, is itself enacted by and through objects. As such, an object-oriented ethics aims to address ethics and objects as coemergent. This entails a rethinking of the object that stresses its relationality, emergence, processuality, performativity and virtuality. As such, our position can be contrasted to a more conventional understanding of objects and ethics as distinct ontological and epistemological domains, where the domain of ethics is viewed as an activity external to the presence and operation of a material object. We thus trace the role of ethics in the production of a range of objects that contribute to, and emerge from, the assemblage of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and, in particular, the enactment of HIV through a particular preexposure prophylactic object (a ‘pill’), PrEP, as it is clinically trialled in a number of offshore sites. What we aim to show is that a conventionally understood ethics, insofar as it mobilizes a series of standardized criteria by which to assess the ‘ethicality’ of the trials, performs the ‘pill’ in particular ways. Specifically, ethics serves in the ‘reduction’ of the ‘pill’s’ multiplicity and complexity to what we shall call a ‘quantitative’ object. Against this, we contrast other enactments that acknowledge the multiplicity and complexity of the pill in ways that can affect (i.e. impact upon and change) not only the subjects of those trials, but also the practitioners (clinicians, policy analysts, etc.). In these cases, the ‘pill’ can be viewed as what we call a ‘qualitative thing’. However, we also suggest that, ironically, the ‘pill’ as a thoroughly contingent ‘qualitative’ thing emerges in an assemblage made complex by the reductionist operations of ethics’ quantitative objects.
