Premium
An ethics of dwelling and a politics of world‐building: a critical response to ordinary ethics
Author(s) -
Zigon Jarrett
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9655.12133
Subject(s) - morality , politics , sociology , meta ethics , normative ethics , environmental ethics , critical theory , epistemology , applied ethics , hermeneutics , information ethics , ethnography , social science , law , philosophy , political science , anthropology
In this essay I provide a critical reading of so‐called ‘ordinary ethics’ in order to disclose how it ultimately undoes two of the three major contributions of the anthropology of moralities and ethics: that is, ordinary ethics ultimately equates morality/ethics with all social activity and at the same time only accounts for morality/ethics in terms of the moral concepts already provided by the Western moral philosophical tradition. In the second part of this essay I provide an ethnographic example from anti‐drug war political activism that shows how a critical hermeneutics provides a theoretical‐analytical framework for the radical rethinking of both the moral tradition and the social and political worlds that mobilize the concepts and assumptions of this tradition.