Fragility, Tragedy and Politics

脆弱性、悲剧与政治

• 批准号: 2387877
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2387877
• 关键词: Fragility; Tragedy; Politics

Exhausted after a week of double-shifts, a chef plates up some contaminated food, despite having been as diligent as she had been all week; the customer falls severely ill. Despite following the usual protocol, a social worker at a cash-strapped local authority overlooks the indicators of severe mental distress; the service user subsequently self-harms. At a university dinner, a young patrician gets chatting to a working-class group, and finds that certain things he says are liable to insult, though they are the same things he has been saying all week amongst his independently wealthy friends. Situations like these will no doubt be familiar from our own experiences, whether they feel personal, political or somewhere in between. They show that even with the best will in the world-that is, despite having sufficient reason or excuse-sometimes the course of human life renders us responsible for wrongful acts and attitudes. They show that we can be faultlessly responsible for wrongdoing. Faultless wrongdoings are of a distinctively moral interest because despite their faultlessness they get entered, as it were, into the moral ledgers of the lives that incur them, blemishing their moral status. They reveal how people are brought morally low by contingencies that lie beyond their powers of agency. When the world exploits this exposure, human life suffers bad moral luck, and is exhibited in its fragile nature.Classical antiquity gave the name 'tragedy' to the literary form that insisted on human fragility, and the richness and complexity it brings to people's lives. Seeing this, thinkers like Aristotle made room for luck in ancient morality, which took the human condition to be an irredeemably tragic affair. A more modern sensibility has tended to recoil from the perceived unfairness of the ancient conception, arguing that the metaphysics of normativity guarantees that what lies beyond people's powers of agency is not relevantly theirs to be blemished by. Modern philosophy recognises no place for luck within the correct conception of morality.Call this telling of the ancients-moderns dialectic the 'standard story.' According to its division of conceptual space, we can either accept the fragility of human nature or reject it as unfair. Captivated by the standard story, the contemporary moral luck debate has seemed unable to move beyond the dialectic, with the ancient view best represented by Martha Nussbaum (2001), and the modern view perhaps by David Enoch (2012). Though these contemporary views are subtle and powerful, they nevertheless inherit the difficulties of the standard story. Whilst the modern view attempts to explain away the palpable reality of human fragility, the ancient view ineptly conceives of bad moral luck as akin to natural disasters, that is, as tragedy. Neither view convincingly explains all the philosophically interesting features of the examples we began with.My aim in this project is to contribute a novel position to the ongoing moral luck debate. Drawing on recent developments in legal theory, I will claim that moral luck is part and parcel of the practices by which fair political communities socially distribute strict duties. Against the moderns this implies that human fragility is after all a reality, whilst against the ancients this implies that its reality is political rather than brutely natural. Human fragility is therefore not an unchangeable matter that renders our lives tragic, but rather a matter for human politics, to be settled by material and conceptual forms of struggle.

经过一周的两班倒后，一位厨师筋疲力尽，尽管她一周来一直很勤奋，但还是做了一些受污染的食物;顾客福尔斯病得很重。尽管遵循了通常的协议，但一名在资金短缺的地方当局工作的社会工作者忽视了严重精神痛苦的指标;服务使用者随后自残。在一次大学晚宴上，一位年轻的贵族与一群工人阶级聊天，发现他说的某些话可能会受到侮辱，尽管他们是他整个星期都在和他的独立富裕的朋友们说同样的话。这样的情况无疑会从我们自己的经验中熟悉，无论它们是个人的，政治的还是介于两者之间的。他们表明，即使有世界上最好的意愿，也就是说，尽管有足够的理由或借口，有时人类生活的过程使我们对错误的行为和态度负责。它们表明，我们可以对错误行为负完全责任。无过错的错误行为具有独特的道德意义，因为尽管它们是无过错的，但它们会被记入导致它们的生活的道德账簿，玷污它们的道德地位。它们揭示了人们是如何被超越其代理能力的突发事件所降低道德水平的。当世界利用这种暴露时，人类的生活遭受了道德上的厄运，并表现在其脆弱的本性中。古典古代将“悲剧”命名为坚持人类脆弱的文学形式，以及它给人们生活带来的丰富性和复杂性。看到这一点，像亚里士多德这样的思想家在古代道德中为运气腾出了空间，认为人类的状况是一个不可挽回的悲剧事件。一种更现代的感性倾向于从古代概念的不公平中退缩，认为规范性的形而上学保证了人们的代理权力之外的东西与他们无关，不会受到玷污。现代哲学认为，在正确的道德观念中，运气是没有地位的。把这种对古今辩证法的讲述称为"标准故事"。根据它对概念空间的划分，我们可以接受人性的脆弱，也可以拒绝人性的不公平。当代关于道德运气的辩论被标准故事所吸引，似乎无法超越辩证法，古代观点最好的代表是玛莎·努斯鲍姆（Martha Nussbaum，2001），现代观点可能是大卫·伊诺克（David Enoch，2012）。尽管这些当代观点微妙而有力，但它们仍然继承了标准故事的困难。虽然现代观点试图解释人类脆弱的明显现实，但古代观点不恰当地将坏的道德运气视为类似于自然灾害，即悲剧。这两种观点都不能令人信服地解释我们开始时的例子中所有有趣的特征。我在这个项目中的目标是为正在进行的道德运气辩论贡献一个新的立场。根据法律的理论的最新发展，我将主张，道德运气是公平的政治共同体在社会上分配严格义务的做法的一部分。对现代人来说，这意味着人类的脆弱毕竟是一个现实，而对古人来说，这意味着它的现实是政治的，而不是野蛮的自然。因此，人类的脆弱性并不是一个使我们的生活变得悲惨的不可改变的问题，而是一个人类政治的问题，需要通过物质和概念形式的斗争来解决。