Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (2008) 21:85–89 DOI 10.1007/s10806-007-9064-7 Ó Springer 2007

ALBERT BORGMANN

A REPLY TO MY CRITICS

IÕm indebted to Eric Walker for his introduction and for gathering these four pieces into a suite. IÕm indebted to Marion Hourdequin and Paul Thompson not only for their insightful comments, but also for their prior work. Marion has written a splendid dissertation, biologically expert and philosophically sophisticated, that has given me the confidence to make my views on evolution and ethics public (Hourdequin, 2005). PaulÕs circumspect and stimulating essay on commodification has given me the prompt and the tools to make commodification the analytic tool for my critique both of contemporary American culture and, briefly, of mainstream philosophical ethics (Thompson, 2006). The brevity of my assessment of philosophical ethics vis a` vis commodification belongs to an aspect of the book that concerns both Marion and Paul. She was occasionally frustrated by the sparseness of my arguments, he thinks my concise treatments will earn me grief from aficionados of the various topics. These concerns, or at least MarionÕs, derive from the understanding that the main business of philosophers is to make arguments. We think of arguments in the classic tradition as beginning with a claim, followed by a set of propositions that we stipulate or take to be uncontroversial; we produce inferences from those propositions and end with the initial claim as the conclusion. The point of an argument is to generate belief or conviction in the reader regarding the claim in question. There are lots of claims in the book, and to convince the reader of their truth or validity was certainly my goal. So more explicit and detailed arguments should have helped. Peter van Inwagen has recently pointed out that on this understanding of arguments they are failures.1 In response he and John Martin Fischer have proposed that we trim our forensic ambitions—a fruitless and hopeless idea.2 We should instead, I suggest, look at the work of contemporary philosophers along a Kuhnian continuum that goes from invitations to games. HeideggerÕs Being and Time was an invitation to look at the ground 1 2

Hasker, 2007. Fischer, 2007.

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state of the human condition as practical engagement with the world and to do so by way of a new kind of phenomenology. RawlsÕs A Theory of Justice invited us to see justice as involving not only rights and liberties, but also an effective concern for the worst-off and to see it that way through the original position and the reflective equilibrium. KripkeÕs Naming and Necessity prompted many to think of naming in a more robust and common way and of necessity in a more substantial and naturalist mode via a metaphysics of possible states or worlds. These invitations were widely accepted and led to the acceptance of new objects and methods that in turn gave rise to games with new tokens and rules. Since there is a continuum between invitation and game, some philosophical work is located close to the invitation pole and serves to make the initial invitation more compelling or at least plausible. Work in the vicinity of the game extreme is done mostly for the pleasure of playing though you always have to accept an invitation to join the game. Philosophical games are not like chess. If they were, conviction would be definitive. There would be eliminations and a champion whose views would by consensus prevail as correct or valid. The games of philosopher are in fact more like hacky sack or recreational alpine skiing where you donÕt get a winner, but you do have people who excel, who are quicker and more graceful in executing more difficult and varied moves. Of course I would want Real American Ethics to be an invitation rather than a game, but before you place it near the invitation end of the continuum, remember that there are other dimensions along which to order philosophy. One of them is quality; so if you imagine a graph where the x-axis goes from invitation to game and the y-axis from low quality to high, IÕd like to see RAE in the west. How far north is not for me to decide. If you peruse the Program of the 2007 meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, in San Francisco, youÕd have to infer that most American philosophy resides in the east, and, from what I know of mainstream philosophy, toward the north. At any rate, the presidential address was located in the extreme north-east corner.3 ItÕs true that more fine-grained arguments for the insufficiency of theoretical ethics, the context-dependence of practical ethics, and the force of real ethics could be made. I believe that there are enough indications in RAE as to how that could be done. Any Ph.D. candidate, if assigned the task, could produce creditable such arguments. But whether readers would find them credible would depend on whether they found the wider views of the book inviting or not.

3

Calvin Normore, ‘‘Freedom, Contingency, and Rational Power.’’

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Real American Ethics, to be sure, is an invitation to a general readership as much as to professional philosophers, and both Marion and Paul are worried that the common sensibility is too entrenched in the conventions of technology and economics to be unsettled, urged, and moved. A sense of urgency is certainly an honorable sentiment and can be effective in rousing an audience or readership. And there are causes that lend themselves to urgent appeals. Abortion, the environment, and social justice are among them, and in each of these concerns there is a bit of criticism of contemporary culture and the trace of some vision of a better life, a criticism of the commodification of human life, of the callousness of society, the abuse of the environment, and a concern for human dignity, for inclusive compassion, and for the enjoyment of nature. To make these criticisms illuminating and the underlying concerns compelling is a subtle and demanding task. Distaste for possible rejection and a hunger for cogency makes proponents of these causes reach for urgency—accusations of murder, warnings of unrest, and threats of annihilation. But when these urgencies are shown to be unfounded, the fundamental criticisms and concerns remain and go unanswered. ItÕs as though you donÕt want your teenage son to spend spring break in Vegas and you tell him he shouldnÕt go because the lug nuts on the wheels of his car are loose. ThatÕs an urgent matter, given that he is about to drive off. But it does not go to the heart of the matter. Thus careful and patient discourse is all thatÕs left. Whether a book like that will be successful is beyond anyoneÕs control. When it comes to success, we should apply what Kant has to say about happiness. Going after success is a hopeless and misguided endeavor. Writing so that what we have to say is worthy of success is all we can do. Philosophers particularly have to realize that celebrity is more often the cause than the effect of a bestseller. At this point it must look as though I have talked myself out of any further replies or arguments. But two points need a response and connect with what I have said. The first is MarionÕs question why American and not global ethics. The answer here is the same as to the questions: Where do you start if ethics is to matter? Whom do you address first? Where does our moral discourse have the best chance of making a difference? ItÕs the American people because they are the ones for whose moral conduct we are principally responsible; they are the ones who could act most beneficially in the global community; they share one moral vision in practice and another in aspiration, a vision of technological affluence in fact and a vision of moral excellence when we are ‘‘touched by the better angels of our nature.’’ Since we have first and most fully among nations moved into the first, perhaps we will be first again in reaching for the second.

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The other point I need to acknowledge is PaulÕs comment on commodification. He is right in saying that it has an important place in RAE. ItÕs the crucial analytical tool if not a particularly complex and sophisticated one. Its central feature is the distinction between economic and moral commodification. Paul, in his great essay, begins the discussion of commodification with a general definition of commodity and commodification, and it captures well what I mean by economic commodification. ‘‘Commodities are,’’ Paul says, ‘‘in the most basic sense, goods that are routinely bought and sold. Commodification (or commoditization) is, thus, the transformation of something that is not bought and sold into something that is...’’ There follow qualifications that are explicated through a distinction between structural and technological commodification. The former is straightforward economic commodification brought about by social, political, and legal means. The latter is the more complex phenomenon where something is not only moved into the market, but is also transformed and given new and distinctive characteristics, through alienation, exclusion, rivalry, and standardization. What I call moral commodification is a more formal and specific articulation of alienation—the detachment of a thing or a practice from its context of engagement in a time, a place, and a community. Evidently, I set aside three of the processes or features that are standardly seen to be part of commodification. I do so because to the extent that they are distinct from alienation, they are morally or culturally neither here nor there. That becomes clear when you look at PaulÕs examples where commodification is reversed. Digital and electronic technology undermines exclusion from information and entertainment, and it similarly undoes rivalry. Thus all the goods that are no longer exclusive or rivalrous have been, in PaulÕs basic and in my economic sense, decommodified. Automation, Paul goes on to point out, has reversed standardization through madeto-order goods, but these are still sold and bought and so remain basically or economically commodified. The crucial moral and cultural point is this. These three kinds of decommodification leave goods morally commodified. YouTube entertainment may be free, and your made-to-order computer may be like no other in the known universe, but these items still come to you devoid of contexts of engagement with a time, a place, or a community. To the extent that such goods needlessly displace engaging things and practices, they lead to moral and cultural impoverishment. The issues of commodification and culture are complex, and there is lots of room for clarifications and arguments. In social and cultural philosophy moral gravity lies where invitation is located, and in moving toward

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punctilious distinctions and elaborate defenses we move away from the concreteness of life toward abstraction and games. This brings me to my concluding remark. Marion is right that the recovery of the mundane is a desideratum in contemporary philosophy. The dimension from concreteness to abstraction is yet another way of ordering the types of American philosophy. If you align it with the y-axis going from concreteness to abstraction with the x-axis once more going from invitations to games (the three-dimensional ordering space is left as an exercise for the reader), then most of American philosophy is once more located in the north-east. That region should certainly be populated by philosophers. But more of them should move to the southwest. REFERENCES Fischer, J. M. ‘‘Comments on van Inwagen, P. Philosophical Failure. The Garden of Forking Paths’’http://gfp.typead.com/the_gorden_of_forking_pat/2007/01/so_a_ mysteriani.html. Retrieved on April 12, 2007. Hasker, W. Review of van Inwagen, P. (2006). The problem of evil (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=9064, Retrieved on April 12, 2007. Hourdequin, M. Nature and normativity. Dissertation, Duke University (2005). Thompson, P. B.. (2006), ‘‘Commodification and Secondary Instrumentalization,’’ in T. J. Veak (ed.), Democratizing Technology: Andrew FeenbergÕs Critical Theory of Technology, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 112–135.

Department of Philosophy University of Montana Missoula, MT 59812, USA

Phone: +1-406-2432792 E-mail: [email protected]