Cheryl Mattingly, Rasmus Dyring, Maria Louw, and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (eds.) Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018; 266 pages, hardcover $135.00/£99.00; ISBN 978-1-78533-693-5
By Paul van Trigt
What does it mean to be human? It feels like a cliché to ask this question, but it is undeniably high on the agenda of public and scholarly debates. Technological developments have fed these discussions, as well as identity politics, in which the human norm presented as a white, heterosexual man is questioned. An interesting contribution has recently been delivered by a collective of anthropologists and philosophers, under the banner of ‘new humanism’, which is characterized by a charming combination of theoretical and empirical approaches. In this review I will discuss one of their main contributions, the volume Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life (2018), by situating it in scholarly debates and by exploring the meaning of their enterprise for other disciplines, history in particular.
In the prologue of Moral Engines one of the editors, anthropologist Cheryl Mattingly, describes the book project as partly a local history: ‘The Aarhus Story’. By this she refers to an interdisciplinary network at Aarhus University on ‘Health, Humanity and Culture’ founded by the philosopher Uffe Juul Jensen, led by the ‘very strong belief that philosophy could not, by itself, think through crucial issues like health (or suffering) without reaching out to create a cross-disciplinary conversation that not only spanned different disciplines but also involved health practitioners’.[i] An intense collaboration between philosophers and anthropologists arose within this network and led to various publications, including Moral Engines.
Before I turn to this volume, I will first discuss the introduction to a special issue in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory in which some of the same editors explain the agenda of their philosophical anthropology. Thomas Schwarz Wentzer and Cheryl Mattingly start by considering what they believe to be, ‘an increasing dehumanization of social sciences in the aftermath of poststructuralism and the rise of various naturalisms’. Although they do not doubt that ethnography will keep its focus on living human beings, they argue that more reflection on the ‘human’ and humanism is needed. Moreover, they aim to integrate the anti- and posthumanist critiques in their new humanist project. With this concept they refer to a model of an ethnographically based philosophical anthropology, which acknowledges the situatedness of human life, keeping in mind its reference to humankind.[ii] Moreover, societal debates about climate change challenge to reflect on the human influence on our species and planet.[iii]
Interestingly, the authors link this societal challenge to the ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology. The protagonists of this turn are ‘concerned to give an account of situated human (inter)subjectivity’ that seems to be relevant in times of climate change and debates about the role of human’s responsibility. These protoganists have in common that they consider humans as ethical beings, who ‘act in the space of ethical claims to which they must respond, often through deliberation and judgment’. Wentzer and Mattingly’s aim is, however, not an intervention in societal debates. They mainly want to convince fellow scholars that the ethical domain marks ‘a fundamental feature of the human’.[iv]
It is right there, where the volume Moral Engines takes its starting point. The first sentence of the volume’s introduction says: ‘in the last two decades there has been a virtual explosion of anthropological literature arguing that ethics or morality (we use the terms interchangeably) should be considered a central dimension of human practice’. Within this ‘explosion’ the question of, ‘what actually commits and drives us to understand our lives in ethical terms?’ has remained underexplored. That is why the volume has ethical drives or moral engines as its focus.[v] The authors were asked to ‘engage the question of what the moral drives in human life are, where they are located and how they present themselves to us’.[vi] As the editors explain, the authors have approached these questions in three fundamental ways. I will discuss these three approaches and try to give some representative snapshots from individual chapters.
The first approach to moral engines highlights the ‘category of “moral facts”, of cultural, historical, discursive schematics that grant certain practical possibilities’. This approach is indebted to a Durkheimian understanding of morality, focussed on rules and regulations, but is in addition sensitive to ‘an Aristotelian focus on action and practical judgement’.[vii] The chapters in which this approach is applied are written by the anthropologists Michael Lambek, Joel Robbins and James Laidlaw who reflect on the central concepts of the volume, moral engines in particular. Robbins, for instance, argues that values are ‘moral engines that have the ability to act as drivers of people’s moral behaviours’. In a Durkheimian understanding of morality people combine a ‘sense of both duty and desire’ and, according to Robbins, values have to be related to the latter. Based on his fieldwork on exemplarity in the Urapmin community in Papua New Guinea, Robbins argues that values often do not come to people in abstract form, but through ‘people and institutions that exemply them’.[viii]
The focus of the second approach is on moral experience and a first-person perspective. The key term of this approach is (ethical) responsiveness, which refers to often unreflected and unintended responses to what people experience and highlights the relevance of taking ‘pathos, sentiments, moods’ into account.[ix] Five chapters apply this approach and present case studies about the narrative selves of mothers in a Los Angeles hospital (Cheryl Mattingly), regret, morality and mood in the Yap Sate (Jason Throop), ethical striving and moral aporias among Sufis in Uzbekistan (Maria Louw), forgiving after war in Northern Uganda (Lotte Meinert) and the moral experience that Marco Evaristti’s art installation Helena and El Pescador elicits (Rasmus Dyring). How moral experience is approached in this volume becomes clear, for instance, in Maria Louw’s chapter ‘Haunting as Moral Engine’. Louw starts her chapter with the story of Rustam, a young Sufi, who told her that he is feeling ‘evil things’ such as improper thoughts about girls ‘as even stronger forces in his life the more he attempted to avoid them’ since he has entered the Sufi path. In her research she has come across Sufis who ‘are frequently haunted by the moral choices they could have made’. This haunting is often part of their everyday life and is a reminder of ‘how every intersubjective encounter may be a moral “engine” in the sense of having the potential to redirect one’s care and concern’. Louw positions this findings in the recent literature about self-cultivation through religious practice in Islam and in particular Saba Mahmood’s study of religious women in Egypt who has provided ‘important critiques of liberal assumptions about agency’. She also includes critiques against the focus on self-cultivation, as formulated by Cheryl Mattingly and Samuli Schielke, because people often balance between different values and have to deal with value conflicts. Moreover, she highlights the moral force of emotions. According to her the haunting as experienced by Rustam and other informants often takes ‘the form of shifting moods and emotions that seemed to have a life of their own, overwhelming them in ways that were beyond their control and understanding, complicating moral principles and decisions, and revealing moral concerns in flux’.[x]
The third approach to moral engines, which is applied in the last three chapters, is closely related to the ‘new humanism’ agenda and explores the relationship between ethics and the human condition. This approach tries to not ‘presuppose too much about what it means to be human or to be an ethical being’ and recognizes, comparable to the second approach, how humans are always ‘respondents, not absolute beginners’.[xi] In a chapter about anti-drug war activism, Jarrett Zigon shows the limitations of a well-known concept such as ‘dignity’ and proposes instead ‘dwelling’ as a relatively open concept to investigate the human condition. In discussion with anthropologists, Thomas Schwart Wentzer developes in his chapter a responsive ethics that takes up ‘human responsiveness to be the existential condition that helps us to understand the roots – rather than the engine – of ethics and human agency’. Finally, Francois Raffoul’s chapter ‘The History of Responsibility’ contains a genealogy of philosophical approaches to this concept and argues to understand responsibility as ‘responsiveness to a call, rather than as the traditional accountability of the willful and powerful subject or agent’.
All the chapters show, in their own way, that philosophical anthropology offers a very sophisticated approach to understand how humans live. I have not previously come across such a rich analysis of what propels humans to act in light of ethical ideals in my own discipline, history. Historians have of course reflected on the classic distinction between agency and structure and studied the history of ethics and morality, but the ‘borderland inquiry’, as presented in this volume, has resulted in fine-grained understandings of human life from which historians only can benefit. Disability history, for instance, one of the historiographical subfields related to my own work, tends sometimes to favor an activist’s understanding of agency, assuming a self-reliant and reflective subject. Philosophical anthropology offers an approach to agency in which very different ways of being in the world could be included: for instance, the agency of people with cognitive disabilites, as shown by anthropologists Patrick McKearney and Tyler Zoanni.[xii]
Interdisciplinary exchange was, and is, important for the development of the above mentioned approaches. In the ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology, philosophy has already played an important role. In anthropological reflections on the relations between ‘selfhood’ and ‘world’, and agency and structure, philosophers such as Alisdair MacIntyre and (the late) Michel Foucault have been intensively discussed. Reflection about issues such as the possibilities of human freedom ‘presses inquiry into the very basic ontological considerations about the human condition as such’. However, philosophers are not only needed as ‘professional experts in ontology’, the editors of Moral Engines advocate for a more intensive ‘borderland inquiry’.[xiii] They aim for a dialogue in which participants ‘take up “roles” generally associated with the other discipline’.[xiv] This dialogue is possible because, as Karen Sykes has put it, cultural phenomena could be understood as responses to ontological questions.[xv]
The dialogue between anthopology and philosophy that underlies this volume has clearly enriched the understanding of ethical drives in human life. It was probably thanks to this dialogue and collaboration that the editors, in this volume and elsewhere, position themselves under the flag of ‘new humanism’: a very careful position, but nevertheless a position from where they are challenged to pronounce normative statements about what it means to be human. Here I would suggest that the ‘border inquiry’ could benefit from inviting other disciplines, history in particular. Not only because history enriches the understanding of humans as ethical beings, as Louw for instance does by understanding her interlocutors against the background of the post-Soviet era. But also because history enables philosophical anthropology to historicize the categories used by informants (emic) and by scholars (etic). As Cheryl Mattingly and Jason Throop have argued, ‘one of the driving forces motivating some of the earliest contributions to the ethical turn’ was a concern ‘to distinguish it from the realm of the political’.[xvi] It is probably no accident that the ethical turn was put forward in a neoliberal era characterized by a specific configuration of the ‘political’ and by ‘responsibilization’ policies. How does an anthropology of ethics and morality relate to this neoliberal regime? In order to better understand this relation, a next step after this excellent volume could be the integration of (conceptual) history in order to further evaluate the scholarly drive beyond the exploration of ethical drives in human life, and to reconsider the political.
Paul van Trigt (@paulvantrigt) is postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-project Rethinking Disability: the Impact of the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) in Global Perspective at the Institute for History, Leiden University. He has published about the modern history of the welfare state, human rights, disability and religion. His monograph Blind in een gidsland (Blind in a guiding country) was published in 2013. Currently, he is writing a genealogy of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
[i] Cheryl Mattingly, ‘Prologue’, in Cheryl Mattingly, Rasmus Dyring, Maria Louw, and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (eds.), Moral Engines. Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018) 6.
[ii] Thomas Schwarz Wentzer and Cheryl Mattingly, ‘Toward a new humanism. An approach from philosophical anthropology’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8, 1/2 (2018) 145-157: 145, 146.
[iii] Wentzer and Mattingly, ‘Toward a new humanism’, 147.
[iv] Ibidem, 148-149.
[v] Rasmus Dyring, Cheryl Mattingly and Maria Louw, ‘The Question of “Moral Engines”: Introducing a Philosophical Anthropological Dialogue’, Moral Engines, 9-36: 9.
[vi] Ibid, 20.
[vii] Ibid, 21.
[viii] Joel Robbins, ‘Where in the World are Values? Exemplarity and Moral Motivation’, Moral Engines, 155-173.
[ix] Dyring, Mattingly and Louw, ‘The Question’, 28.
[x] Maria Louw, ‘Haunting as Moral Engine: Ethical Striving and Moral Aporias among Sufis in Uzbekistan’, Moral Engines, 83-99.
[xi] Dyring, Mattingly and Louw, ‘The Question’, 30-31.
[xii] Patrick McKearney and Tyler Zoanni, ‘Introduction. For an Anthropology of Cognitive Disability’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 36, 1 (2018) 1-22.
[xiii] Dyring, Mattingly and Louw, ‘The Question’, 13.
[xiv] Dyring, Mattingly and Louw, ‘The Question’, 14.
[xv] Ibidem, 15.
[xvi] Cheryl Mattingly and Jason Throop, ‘The Anthropology of Ethics and Morality’, Annual Review of Anthropology 47 (2018) 475-492: 483.