The Symptom of Ethics

The Symptom of Ethics

The Symptom of Ethics

If Žižek is correct, then the system of ethics must have its symptom, or better, its sinthome. For according to Žižek, “each subject or system has one fundamental symptom that contains the key to its structure and holds this structure together. This fundamental symptom is what Lacan calls the sinthome” (McGowan, 2014, pp. 242–243). And the sinthome—or the “constitutive exception,” if one prefers to avoid psychoanalytic “jargon”—of the system of ethics will have been the machine, and it “will have been” because the symptom arrives not from the depths of the past but from the future (but more on this later, that is, in the future.).

It was, we might say parroting Žižek, none other than René Descartes who invented the symptom of modern science. This is because Descartes, in the course of developing his particular brand of philosophical self-reflection, cordoned off the human from its others, specifically the animal and the machine. In fact, Descartes executes this exclusion by associating the animal with the machine, introducing an influential concept—the doctrine of the bête-machine or animal-machine. “Perhaps the most notorious of the dualistic thinkers,” Akira Mizuta Lippit (2000) writes,

Descartes has come to stand for the insistent segregation of the human and animal worlds in philosophy. Likening animals to automata, Descartes argues in the 1637 Discourse on the Method that not only ‘do the beasts have less reason than men, but they have no reason at all.’ (p. 33)

For Descartes, the human being was considered the sole creature capable of rational thought—the one entity able to say and be certain in its saying, cogito ergo sum. Following from this, he had concluded that other nonhuman animals not only lacked reason but were nothing less than mindless automata that, like clockwork mechanisms, simply followed preprogrammed instructions.

Conceptualized in this fashion, the animal and machine were effectively indistinguishable and ontologically the same. “If any such machine,” Descartes (1988) wrote, “had the organs and outward shape of a monkey or of some other animal that lacks reason, we should have no means of knowing that they did not possess entirely the same nature as these animals” (p. 44). Beginning with Descartes, then, the animal and machine share a common form of alterity that situates them as completely different from and distinctly other than human. [¹] Despite pursuing a method of doubt that, as Jacques Derrida (2008) describes it, reaches “a level of hyperbole,” Descartes “never doubted that the animal was only a machine” (p. 75). The bête-machine, we can say following Žižek, is the symptom of Cartesian thought. It is the necessarily excluded other of human rationality, and it is only through this mechanism of exclusion and its exclusivity that the system of human rationality (and rationality as specifically defined by an act of self-knowing) emerges and functions.

Following Descartes’s exclusive ontological decision, animals have not traditionally been considered a legitimate subject of moral consideration. Determined to be mere mechanisms, they were nothing more than instruments to be used more or less effectively by human beings who were typically the only subjects who mattered. When Immanuel Kant (1985), for instance, defined morality as involving the rational determination of the will, the animal, which does not by definition possess reason, is immediately and categorically excluded. [²] The practical employment of reason does not concern the animal and, when Kant does make mention of animality [Tierheit], he only does so in order to use it as a foil by which to define the limits of humanity proper. The same exclusions have been instituted and supported by subsequent works. According to Tom Regan, this decision also affects and is apparent in the seminal work of analytic ethics.

It was in 1903 when analytic philosophy’s patron saint, George Edward Moore, published his classic, Principia Ethica. You can read every word in it. You can read between every line of it. Look where you will, you will not find the slightest hint of attention to ‘the animal question.’ Natural and nonnatural properties, yes. Definitions and analyses, yes. The open-question argument and the method of isolation, yes. But so much as a word about non-human animals? No. Serious moral philosophy, of the analytic variety, back then did not traffic with such ideas. (Regan, 1999, p. xii)

Consequently, ethics, like any closed system, must have and cannot do without its symptoms—the constitutive exception that although excluded from participation, necessarily make it what it is. This exclusivity is fundamental, structural, and systemic. It is not accidental, contingent, or prejudicial in the usual sense of those words. “When it comes to moral considerability,” Thomas Birch (1993) explains, “there are, and ought to be, insiders and outsiders, citizens and non-citizens . . . ‘members of the club’ of consideranda versus the rest” (p. 315). And because this exclusivity is systemic, little or nothing changes as moral theory and practice has developed and matured over time. Even when membership in the exclusive club of moral subjects has, slowly and not without considerable resistance and struggle, been extended to previously excluded others, there have remained other, apparently more fundamental and necessary exclusions. Or to put it another way, every new seemingly progressive inclusion has been made at the expense of others, who are necessarily excluded in the process.

Take, for example, innovations in animal rights. This rather recent development in moral thinking, not only challenged the anthropocentric tradition in ethics but redefined the club of consideranda by taking a distinctly animo-centric approach, where the qualifying criteria for inclusion in the community of moral subjects was not determined by some list of indeterminate humanlike capabilities—consciousness, rationality, free will, and so on—but sentience and the capacity to suffer. Although Jeremy Bentham is often credited with introducing the innovation, the movement does not coalesce until the later part of the 20th century. Tom Regan (1999) identifies the crucial turning point in a single work: “In 1971, three Oxford philosophers—Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch, and John Harris— published Animals, Men and Morals. The volume marked the first time philosophers had collaborated to craft a book that dealt with the moral status of nonhuman animals” (p. xi). According to Regan, this particular publication is not only credited with introducing what is now called the “animal question,” but launched an entire subdiscipline of ethics where the animal (or at least some order of animal) is considered to be a legitimate subject of moral inquiry.

What is remarkable about this development is that at a time when this other form of nonhuman otherness is increasingly recognized as a legitimate moral subject, its other, the machine, remains conspicuously absent and marginalized. Despite all the ink that has been spilled on the animal question, little or nothing has been written about the machine. One could, in fact, redeploy Regan’s critique of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (2005) and apply it, with a high degree of accuracy, to any work purporting to address the animal question: “You can read every word in it. You can read between every line of it. Look where you will, you will not find the slightest hint of attention to ‘the machine question.’” Even though the fate of the machine, from Descartes forward, was intimately coupled with that of the animal, only one of the pair has qualified for any level of ethical consideration. [3] Technology, as Jean-François Lyotard (1993, p. 44) reminds us, is only a matter of efficiency. Technical devices do not participate in the big questions of metaphysics, aesthetics, or ethics. They are nothing more than contrivances or extensions of human agency, used more or less responsibly by human agents with the outcome affecting other human individuals. Consequently, machines like computers, robots, and other kinds of mechanisms do not, at least for the majority philosophical opinion, have an appropriate place within ethics. Although other kinds of previously excluded others have been slowly and not without struggle been granted membership in the community of moral subjects—women, people of color, some animals, and even the environment—the machine remains on the periphery. No matter how automatic, interactive, or intelligent it might appear to be, the machine remains the excluded other of the other—the constitutive exception of moral philosophy’s increasing attention to previously excluded others.

The Symptom of Ethics

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