Ethics of Transitions

Book IVWe Have Never Been Human

To the world to come, the world to come to, to inhabit together, the worlds in each one, the worlds we make and which make us, to the world amongst all, it is here, it is upon us, it calls upon us.

Preliminaries:

Ethics, Transitions, and something out of sight

We are coming to the end of this sequence of perplexities and experimentations, of decompositions and recompositions. On the basis of the four Books (and of the four Intersections) which precede this, of the eight Volumes, it now behooves us, ultimate ambition, to trace the lineaments of an ethics for the digital and genetic age.

“Digital” and “genetic” open new spaces of possibilities and new interlacings of empowerment and exploitation. They are two of a kind, both fraught with consequences and pregnant with transformations as to the subject, the moral subject, moral agency, as to the selves and relations and collectives, as to humanity, life, and world-making.

Ethics of Transitions, drawing lessons from the deliberative and participatory turns, and further to our analyses of the three deficits (deficit of the public; democratic deficit; deficit scheme), cannot rest on some opinion of some group of experts, be it “interdisciplinary” or “interfaith” or “international”.

It cannot be based on a conception of the good or the righteous that results from power relations of exploitation and alienation, be they old, widespread, forgotten or well established.

Even if the ancient regime style ...