Summary and Conclusions

Summary and Conclusions

Summary and Conclusions

“Every philosophy,” Silva Benso (2000) writes in a comprehensive gesture that performs precisely what it seeks to address, “is a quest for wholeness.” This objective, she argues, has been typically targeted in one of two ways. “Traditional Western thought has pursued wholeness by means of reduction, integration, systematization of all its parts. Totality has replaced wholeness, and the result is totalitarianism from which what is truly other escapes, revealing the deficiencies and fallacies of the attempted system” (p. 136). This is precisely the problem with totalizing systems of moral inclusion, like Floridi’s Information Ethics. For all its efforts at achieving a more inclusive form of inclusion, IE still makes a distinction between inside and outside—between who matters and what does not—even if the symptom of IE is nothing. [⁶]

The competing alternative to this totalitarian approach is a philosophy of difference that is oriented otherwise, like that proposed and developed by Levinas, Calarco, and others. This other approach endeavors to achieve moral completion,

by moving not from the same, but from the other, and not only the Other, but also the other of the Other, and, if that is the case, the other of the other of the Other. In this must, it must also be aware of the inescapable injustice embedded in any formulation of the other. (Benso, 2000, p. 136)

For Levinas and those others who endeavor to develop this particular brand of thinking otherwise, every other has its other such that the process of responding to previously excluded others is never fully complete. What is interesting about these two strategies is not what makes them different from one another or how they articulate approaches that proceed from what appears to be opposite ends of the spectrum. What is interesting is what they agree on and hold in common in order to be situated as different from and in opposition to each other in the first place.

Whether taking the form of a totalizing autology or an alternative kind of heterology, both approaches “share the same claim to inclusiveness” (Benso, 2000, p. 136), and that is the problem. We therefore appear to be caught between a proverbial rock and a hard place. On the one hand, inclusion has never been inclusive enough. The machine in particular is from the very beginning situated outside ethics. It is, irrespective of the different philosophical perspectives that come to be mobilized, not a legitimate moral subject. And even when, at the apparent apex of moral inclusivity with the innovative efforts of IE, the machine can be accommodated, this inclusion cannot succeed apart from instituting additional exclusions and marginalizations. On the other hand, alternatives to this tradition have never quite been different enough. Although a concern with and for others promises to transform the status quo in ethics, “thinking otherwise” has never been entirely adequate or suitably different. Many of the so-called alternatives, those efforts that purport to be interested in and oriented otherwise, have typically excluded the machine from the space of difference, from the difference of difference, or from the otherness of the Other. Technological devices certainly have an interface, but they do not it seems, possess a face or confront the human user in a face-to-face encounter that would call for and would be called ethics.

The problem with both approaches is that they seek a utopian outcome. As Žižek (1989/2008) explains, “‘utopian’ conveys the belief in the possibility of a universality without its symptom, without the point of exception functioning as its internal negation” (p. 13). This utopianism, however, never succeeds. Each innovative effort at moral inclusion produces a remainder. Each new system of ethics cannot help but generate its symptom. Or as McGowan (2014) explains in a more politically situated context, “one cannot simply expand representation to include them because some new excluded group will always come to occupy this position” (p. 243). This is because the mechanism of exclusion is systemic and has little or nothing to do with the actual “things” that are subjected to marginalization. The exclusivity of the machine, therefore, is not simply “the last socially accepted prejudice” or what Singer (1989) calls “the last remaining form of discrimination” (p. 148), which may be identified as such only from a perspective that is already open to the possibility of some future inclusion and accommodation. It is systemic and comprises the symptom of ethics.

Although Žižek does not necessarily provide a definitive solution to this impasse, he does indicate what would be necessary for an alternative kind of eccentric moral theory, called this because it would be an ethics without a clearly defined “center” as has been the case for other moral theories like anthropocentrism, animocentrism, biocentrism, and ontocentrism. Unlike Floridi, Levinas, and others, Žižek does not play the game of trying to remediate the symptom of ethics by designing systems for greater inclusivity. Instead, he proposes an ethics of the symptom, which would be not an(other) exclusive moral theory but a moral philosophy of the excluded. He therefore proposes a community of moral subjects consisting of nothing but a loose amalgam of excluded misfits, or what Alphonso Lingis (1994) calls “the community of those who have nothing in common.” Though this proposal can also be called “utopian,” it is a significantly different and somewhat distorted form of utopia. Žižek, as McGowan (2014) explains, does not

dismiss out of hand all utopian thinking. In fact, he constructs a utopianism based on the symptom, a utopianism in which a community forms from the exclude rather than through a universal inclusion. All those who exist outside the system as its symptoms can come together in a universal solidarity. This solidarity would not involve any sense of belonging because what the subjects have in common is only their exclusions or symptomatic status. (pp. 243–244)

What Žižek proposes, therefore, would be an eccentric community of eclectic elements that does not simply oppose one form or method of inclusivity with another, seemingly more inclusive form—the way that, for example, the ontocentrism of IE challenges the exclusions of biocentrism or Calarco’s “radicalizing Levinas” questions the exclusivity of Levinas’s philosophical anthropology. This eccentric form of moral thinking recognizes that the real challenge for ethics is not figuring out a way to include others, but to identify and confront the systemic exclusions of any and all efforts at inclusion as a significant and fundamental aspect of moral thinking itself. What we need to do in the face of the machine, therefore, is not to try to formulate more inclusive forms of moral theory that can account for and incorporate these others, but to recognize the symptom as such and allow it to question the entire history of ethics and its necessary and unavoidable exclusions. This is precisely that kind of thinking that Friedrich Nietzsche (1966) had called “the philosophy of the future,” not only because the symptom of ethics, like the machine, appears to threaten us from the future but because it points in the direction of a kind of thinking that is situated beyond (the very system of) good and evil. This means that the challenge presented to us by the machine is not just a matter of applied ethics; it invites and entrains us to rethink the entire modus operandi of moral philosophy all the way down. This is the task for thinking that is seen in the face or the faceplate of the machine [⁷].

Summary and Conclusions

Table of Contents