The Ethical Condition

Essays on Action, Person, and Value

Michael Lambek

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780226292243, 9780226292106
• eBook ISBN: 9780226292380
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

Written over a thirty-year span, Michael Lambek's essays in this collection point with definitive force toward a single central truth: ethics is intrinsic to social life. As he shows through rich ethnographic accounts and multiple theoretical traditions, our human condition is at heart an ethical one—we may not always be good or just, but we are always subject to their criteria. Detailing Lambek's trajectory as one anthropologist thinking deeply throughout a career on the nature of ethical life, the essays accumulate into a vibrant demonstration of the relevance of ethics as a practice and its crucial importance to ethnography, social theory, and philosophy.

Organized chronologically, the essays begin among Malagasy speakers on the island of Mayotte and in northwest Madagascar. Building from ethnographic accounts there, they synthesize Aristotelian notions of practical judgment and virtuous action with Wittgensteinian notions of the ordinariness of ethical life and the importance of language, everyday speech, and ritual in order to understand how ethics are lived. They illustrate the multiple ways in which ethics informs personhood, character, and practice; explore the centrality of judgment, action, and irony to ethical life; and consider the relation of virtue to value. The result is a fully fleshed-out picture of ethics as a deeply rooted aspect of the human experience. 

INDEX

accountability, 75n17, 81–82, 249, 266, 272, 308, 314–15; forensic accountability, 304, 306, 310, 312, 321–22, 326 (see also personhood, forensic and mimetic); internal and external, 314–15; local constructions of, 124, 268, 292; for misfortune, 25; of relational persons, 154, 158, 325 (see also persons: relational); to self, 314, 326. See also commitment; responsibility

acknowledgment: of acts, 24, 265–66, 289; of criteria, 248–49, 265–66; ethical importance of, 17–19; limits of, 261–64, 315–16; mutual, 298, 300, 301; of the past, 259–60; of responsibility, 24; of self, 160, 255–56, 324; in speech, 21, 23–24. See also recognition

Ackrill, J. L., 125

activity. See acts

acts, 1, 31, 36, 122, 160, 173–74, 205–6, 253–55, 286–88; circulation of, 295–98, 300 (see also exchange); consequentiality of, 12–13, 70–71, 254, 826; ethical dimension of, xx, xxi–xxii, 8, 10, 33, 119, 123, 242–43, 253, 255, 266, 288–90, 292 (see also ethics); felicitous performance of, 11–12, 246, 313 (see also felicity conditions); irreversibility of, 253, 254–56, 288–89; and labor, 254, 286–87...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• ONE The Ethical Condition
• TWO Virgin Marriage and the Autonomy of Women in Mayotte
• THREE Taboo as Cultural Practice among Malagasy Speakers
• FOUR The Past Imperfect: Remembering as Moral Practice
• FIVE The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy
• SIX Just Anger: Scenarios of Indignation in Botswana and Madagascar
• SEVEN Rheumatic Irony: Questions of Agency and Self-Deception as Refracted Through the Art of Living with Spirits
• EIGHT On Catching Up with Oneself: Learning to Know That One Means What One Does
• NINE Sacrifice and the Problem of Beginning: Reflections from Sakalava Mythopraxis
• TEN Value and Virtue
• ELEVEN Toward an Ethics of the Act
• TWELVE Ethics Out of the Ordinary
• THIRTEEN The Value of (Performative) Acts
• FOURTEEN The Continuous and Discontinuous Person: Two Dimensions of Ethical Life
• References
• Index