2.19
More than conditions of possibility, I’m interested in onto-ethics.
‘Onto-ethics’ gestures to the inseparability of ontology and ethics. Every ontological understanding includes an ethical understanding, just as every ethical understanding includes an ontological understanding. But, too often, these are thought of as two separate concerns.
Determining what ethics consists in—for example, our responsibilities—is bound up with other concerns: what is responsibility, to whom do we owe it, who is the agent of responsibility, and so on. So, if we say that individual agents are responsible and hence punishable for their acts, we have a whole metaphysics and ontology involved here: what agents, choices, and acts are.
From the other side, determining an ontology will always be defining the realm of possibilities within which ethics is to be concerned (e.g., to reverse the example above: to determine what a subject is, what various objects are, how to categorize them ontologically, and so on, entails ethical possibilities for response). For example, if we take a rock to be an inanimate object, then it’s not the kind of thing towards which we feel any direct ethical responsibility.
Ontologies involve ethics in another sense: the former is determined only through responsive openness to being. But because we already come with a sense of things, our openness and responsivity are already conditioned by an ontology. Therefore, to be responsive, we must heed our sense of ontology — be ethical towards it. Ontology and ethics inseparably dovetail, like a Möbius strip.
In what sense do I prioritize onto-ethics over conditions of possibility? I’m shifting from an emphasis on a descriptive project—what enables things to be the way they are—to a descriptive-prescriptive one: what enables a better responsiveness to how things are. Thus, while ‘onto-ethics’ can describe the dependencies between ontology and ethics, as explained above, it can also prescriptively lead to a responsive openness to beings. In this way, we try to sensitively understand others (§2.14); we learn to respond to what is there. Thus, our new orientation (§2.18) is towards how particular others really are.