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Ethics of Transitions
Robert Gianni and Bernard Reber
First published 2022 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd
27-37 St George’s Road
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
111 River Street London SW19 4EU Hoboken, NJ 07030 UK USA
www.iste.co.uk
www.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2022
The rights of Jim Dratwa to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s), contributor(s) or editor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISTE Group.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932441
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-102-4
1.4. At the roots of violence (Sins of the Fathers) (Must one eat up?) (Winter is coming) .......
1.4.1. Addendum: An eye for an eye ......................
1.4.2. Change in our time .............................
1.5. Is life a game? ..................................
1.5.1. The game of the world
1.5.2. Between game and world: three movements
1.5.3. From the three movements to the fourth premise: from lusory attitude to morality design
1.6. The ethics paradox................................
rapture of Europe ................................
2.1. What Europe do we want to live in together?
2.1.1. Futures (and Europe) (imagined communities)
2.1.2. (Fore)seeing like a State ..........................
2.1.3. The European project ...........................
2.1.4. Futures (and science and technology)
2.1.5. Palimpsest and palinode (imagined communities)
2.2. Precious participation
2.2.1. The three deficits
2.2.1.1.
2.2.1.2. The burnout of the hummingbird (deficit, overflow, responsibility and catastrophe) (a cautionary tail)
2.2.1.3. Against the sovereign scheme and its world
2.2.2. Challenges in
2.2.2.1. Project Transition
2.2.2.2. The two issues of our age: Democracy for Climate?
2.2.2.3. To Chantal (États généraux)
2.2.2.4. Thinking in Transition .........................
2.2.2.5. Transitions in the time of pandemic .................
2.2.2.6. L’autre fin de l’histoire ........................
2.2.2.7. The Democracy Mystique
2.2.2.8. Participatory inclusive deliberative democracy
2.3. Science and politics: divides and alternatives (making sense together).............................
2.3.1. Introducing the courage of alternatives
2.3.2. Openness to the worlds: towards alternatives ...........
2.3.2.1. The cosmopolitical question .....................
2.3.2.2. Political and cosmopolitical epistemologies ............
2.3.2.3. Precautionary principle and regime change
3.1. Institutionalizing ethics: the value of ethicization
3.2. “Ethics of” ....................................
3.2.1. Addendum: the other ethicization
3.3. Europocene ....................................
3.3.1. The Anthropocene Misunderstanding: what’s in a name and how to make the most of it
3.3.2. The Question of Europe
4. For Love
Book IV. We Have Never Been Human
Preliminaries: Ethics, Transitions, and something out of sight ........
4.1. Human dignity, I write your name (touchstone)
4.1.1. The section in brief .............................
4.1.2. The inquiry is underway ..........................
4.1.3. Human dignity and how did we get here?
4.1.4. Conclusions .................................
4.2. Portrait-robot (breaking through the artificialities of intelligence and of free will)
4.3. Human too human (Ecce homo) (us) (last dialogue of Estella and Sophy) ..........
4.3.1. Epilogue ...................................
4.4. Scriptures (changing life) (the code) (the typewriter and the book of life)
4.4.1. The ethical framework ...........................
4.4.2. Political epistemologies
4.4.3. Ethics Governance
4.4.4. The other code… Towards the world – Hacking, Designing, Making ..........
4.5. Letter to Apolline (transhumanism)
4.6. The end ......................................
Good that you are reading the book at this stage.
It is a work of peace and transformation, about Europe, the other, about the human condition and the construction of futures.
It is a philosophical novel on the question of ethics and of how to live one’s values. It is also an engaged academic book and a guide of perplexity.
Particular attention is paid to the particular form – to the multiplicity of voices, to the importance of narratives and to the intertextuality – which comes at the service of the themes and theses developed in this manifesto.
To read it: take something to write with!
This is to note throughout the text the comments and suggestions, sensations and references, subtractions and additions and questions. All the associations of ideas that come, the links and the desires. All which can make the book better. And the world. It is very important, very precious!
Indeed at this stage it is not finished, it is ‘under construction’, we find ourselves in the middle of the action. In the thick of it.
Thank you, I am glad that we are sharing it like this. that way.
Typographer’s note:
This handwritten note, apparently intended for the reader, was found attached to the original manuscript. It is presented here faithfully reproduced.
Foreword
The notion of responsibility, full and complete, as well as its exercise, necessitates going further than typical writing. This book takes this difficulty seriously. To do so, it pushes the boundaries of traditional academic writing as far as possible. Jim Dratwa, who is familiar with the world of policy design, as well as of games and role-playing, offers the reader a real experience of responsibility.
Accustomed as we may now be to hypertextual navigation, we will be immersed here in all kinds of textual creations and literary prowess to make diverse navigations of thought coexist. The stories that mark the progression of the book invite us to thought-and-life experiments. They open up spaces for reflection and probing and reinvention of the world. The book fully lives up to its initial subtitle: songs of resistance. It cultivates questions without quenching them or burying them with answers. The songs, experiments and trials, do not offer closed-off arguments or ready-made conclusions.
Dratwa succeeds in enabling the reader to step up and engage with the thought. It means taking seriously the sense of responsibility as responsiveness, conversation or dialogue, the matrix of ancient philosophy, and even the style of its oral presentation in teaching and seminar practices.
This book also has the merit of questioning how we read and what we look for in a text – and indeed what a book can do. Philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, for example, have tried to escape the overly organized book, the “livre racine”. In A Thousand Plateaus, a book whose editorial form has challenged many, the authors want to free us from the paradigm of simplification and oppose it with the figure of the rhizome, underground stem, bulb, tuber, which obeys a principle of connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity, vanishing line. Their criticism of considering books as instruments of deterministic thinking thus leads to imagining other forms of organization of knowledges. To a certain extent, hypertext
Ethics of Transitions: What World Do We Want to Live in Together?, First Edition. Jim Dratwa. © ISTE Ltd 2022. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
meets this expectation and may appear to be a more appropriate medium for complex thinking than most classic books.
Jim Dratwa proposes a book that liberates as much as it makes available, as the etymology of the word livre reminds us. It is a book that binds and opens. Combining multiplicity and coherence, this book is polymathic, the work of a polymath: senior European public servant and engaged intellectual, physicist and philosopher, award-winning game author and artist, activist for peace and social justice, professor of political philosophy and also of game design and game studies.
The text is carefully helpfully marked out and so are the different levels of interpretation, yet his book does not leave you untroubled and impassible, it is the opposite of a frozen museum in which the route would be imposed and all would be fossilized. The reflection on form also forms the reflection. Mallarmé said that a book does not end and Hugo claimed that form is the content rising to the top. The present project is part of this perspective. It does not only explain how transforming the world calls on developing relations (conviviality and narrations), it also nurtures this and performatively brings it about.
That writing elaboration is particularly well suited to philosophical reflection. This connection has changed over the course of its history, from Socratic dialogues, to medieval summae, to writings today that are sometimes either very literary or as abstruse as mathematical theorems. There are probably no endeavors that have explored as many different and sometimes antithetical styles as philosophy. This book builds gracefully on a far-reaching knowledge and practice of this breadth, creating a singular form.
This concern for intertextuality and dialogue, which leads Jim Dratwa and allows him to achieve feats of minstrelsy and acuteness, is also highly apropos with regard to ethics, as evoked in the erstwhile subtitle of this book of many layers: Ethics to Europe, echoing Aristotle’s Ethics to Nicomachus. Indeed, Europe here is not only the European Union, whose institutional machinery the author knows so well, especially in matters of ethics, environment and innovation, but it is also the mythological figure, along with its questions beyond bounds. Ethics is first and foremost a questioning. Jim Dratwa takes this up unfailingly through the text, also by calling upon the reader. For him it is up to everyone, alone or together, to reflect on these questions. And it is therefore incumbent to offer the reader thought experiments that open up these spaces of possibilities.
How to delineate and to further the Ethics of Transitions, such a vast and crucial challenge. He could have chosen an abstract philosophical style or, as senior European civil servant, the cold style of reports and gray literature. Rather, he offers a writing that is not an obstacle for those who are not necessarily accustomed to
philosophical texts. Sometimes lyrical, very colorful, always attentive, he brings the readers on a journey of individual and collective reflection and transition. To be clear, for Dratwa philosophy is a practice of questioning and of inquiry, reflexivity and reference, perplexity and creation of concepts. It is even a cutting-edge technology, a hard science, a precision technique. With this high standard, remarkable care is taken to accompany the reader on this eventful voyage.
While other books on responsibility and innovation address the importance of roles in relation to responsibility; the confrontation of the different stories accompanying innovations; the interpretation of norms in diverse contexts; the concern for alternative futures; and public participation in relation to innovation and democracy1, this book brings these aspects together, also bringing together narrations in all forms: myths, poesis, exegesis and hermeneutics, scholarly analyses and syntheses, conceptual genealogy, design fiction and speculative fabulation, songs of resistance and open spaces of possibilities, expressed at the crossroads of many languages, much as the histories of Europe.
Here is a book to be experienced, a book-experience. Let us hope that this bookconversation, another way of taking responsibility, which should enable it to develop fully, will reach many readers for whom responsibility and innovation must go beyond forms of ethical compliance. For the sake of the transitions in which we are engaged. For the sake of the futures of our worlds, which technological choices shape.
One of the key questions traversing this book is indeed how to think about ethics, innovation and democracy in other ways; how to think differently about “livingone’s-values” and “making-world-together”. This book traces an ethical and thus political gesture of overturning of narratives and of questioning of relationships and forms of engagement. Ethics of Transitions.
May the publisher who made available to all a text as demanding as it is original be thanked as well.
Bernard
REBER Research
Director,
CNRS Centre de recherches politiques Sciences Po Paris
1. See notably (Pellé and Reber 2016a, 2016b); (Grunwald 2016); (Maesschalck 2017); (Lenoir 2018); (Reber 2016); respectively.
Introductions
Before the first evening
At the end of this sentence, take a moment, just close your eyes and imagine the world a couple of decades from now. How would you like it to be?
This book is about the future, about alternative futures. More specifically, this book on ethics and innovation is about the ways in which futures are made – and made to come to pass. What world do we want to live in together? That is its principal question.
Open your eyes, look around you, lo and behold, all around. And look inside too. We are the authors of the worlds we live in. With what we invent, that which we say and feel, that which we craft and share, what we accept and reject, with our dreams and questions, with the how and why of what we do and who we are, alone and together. That is how worlds1 are made.
We are the builders of the worlds we inhabit.
But wait, it is not just us, some of this was built before our time. Yes, it was.
The Talmud recounts this encounter that Khoni HaMe’agel had2. One day as he was walking along the road, he saw a man planting a carob tree. Khoni said to him:
1. As I write to you, it is this book that gets progressively written. As I type the sentence above, the word processing software underlines the word “worlds”, underscoring and warning: surely you mean world, for there can be only one. It couldn’t be any other way. Oh but it could. It is. Worlds.
2. This is the Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Ta’anit, 23a), compiled around the fifth century, and Khoni the Circle-Drawer, a sage of the first century BCE. Having good encounters, stopping on the way, talking to the other, sharing one’s perplexity, asking questions, recounting and being recounted; preliminary figures of wisdom.
“This tree, in how many years will it bear fruit?” “It will not produce fruit until seventy years have passed,” the man replied. Khoni asked him: “Do you plan to live another seventy years, to expect to enjoy this tree?” The man shook his head: “When I was born, I found a world full of carob trees. Like my ancestors had planted for me, I plant for those who are to come.”
Let us hear the call and questions of the child to come, of the people to come. What have you done? What stories are you leaving us? And what worlds.
In quest of Europe
“The European ideal touches the very foundations of European society. It is about values, and I underline this word: values.”
José Manuel Durão Barroso, President of the European Commission, State of the Union Address, Strasbourg, 11 September 2013
The European Union – the European project – was founded on the burning ashes of the Second World War. From a painful past it was to build a better future. From terrible divisions, it was to build togetherness, to build a community. It is a project of peace, progress and solidarity. In the words of its founding figures, in the texts that have established and re-established the Union, as well as in its concrete achievements and self-image, developed over the past seven decades, such is the founding story – amply woven with values – of the European integration project.
How, then, do values affect political projects? How is the future reflected and shaped? What is the place of science and technology and innovation in this regard? And what about Europe? And so: What ethics of transitions?
In this book we will address these questions and question these stories.
Reopening ethics in the digital and genetic age; repopulating democracy; remaking the world.
Not without stories
One of the theses that explicitly underlies this work is that, while the ethical question has classically been asked (and deployed, and closed) behind the frontispieces of philosophy treatises, it is up to each and every one of us – alone, together, in good company – to ponder such questions. From the moment this is taken seriously, and I take it to heart, it behooves me to offer the reader thought experiments that open up these spaces of possibilities (rather than simply taking (or peddling) this or that model at face value).
Another thesis developed in the book is that ethics – with the tangle of paradoxes that weave it and which will be explained over the course of the book – rests on... stories.
Stories: powerful, enthralling, even dangerous devices which, like an incantation or anointment, like the seal and wax, trace or close off or cover the foundations.
To thwart this fate, to ward off adversity, to enter together into this edifice, partly buried, collapsed, petrified and perennial, we will therefore also have to mobilize... stories.
Retrace, reweave, reinvest, reinvite and reinvent the matricial threads.
How to think ethics and innovation and democracy differently; how to think differently about living-one’s-values and making-world-together. It is a matter here of discerning, drawing and deploying new (old) resources to rethink the relationship with the self, with the other and with the world.
Another life is possible, and another Europe, and another world. It is up to us to invent it3.
3. Wait a minute. Did I use an “us”, a “we”? Yes. Yes that is clearly what just happened! Well, this can indeed happen... But, anytime it does, it is important to stop for a moment and to think about who or what is in the “we”.
Two clarifications need to be made from the outset: as to the we and as to participation in the choices
(1) The “we” traces a vast field of possibilities, modular and uncertain, extending somewhere between the locutor (or the scriptor, the one who expresses) and all the possible entities and relationships. The construction of this “we” is the research question that underlies this book. No conclusion before the inquiry, but these two invitations, these two exhortations now. What would happen if you asked yourself the question, every time you are in front of a “we”: Who is in this we? and who is out, and how is this in-or-out established? Furthermore, what would happen if you asked the question, every time you are in a situation of “choices” (or of “ethics”, of “politics”, of “democracy”, of representation, of participation, of deliberation): where are the others?
(2) “It’s up to you to choose” (or perhaps even more formidable: “it’s up to us”) evokes for me the electoral advertising slogan of the conglomerate to be reinstated in a totalitarian democracy with a single party. Or the end-user license agreement at the bottom of which you must give your consent – click and check the small box – to be able to open your parachute when jumping from a falling plane. The question of choice (choice of life, choice of society, choice of world) is at the heart of this book. Forced choices or real choices? Who is it exactly that frames and participates in these choices? It may be that the choices have been taken out (out of scope, out of reach), abducted. It may be that they are nevertheless recoverable. This book investigates this abduction and partakes in this recovery. To be continued.
In Transitions
“This generation wants to move fast – and they are right. Because in front of us are the major twin ecological and digital transitions.”
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, Op-ed marking her 100th day in office, 07 March 2020
The central thesis of this book is that we can – and ought to – change the world. Building on a questioning of the values it incorporates and holds over.
Values are baked into everything. One can neither act nor govern, nor design nor innovate, without them. No narratives evolve, no decisions are taken, no technologies are developed without values shaping them, whether wittingly or unwittingly, explicitly or implicitly.
From pacifiers to plasticisers, from the Plantagenets to the Plantation, from Europa to the European project, from what has come to pass to what is to come, for all that bears in some way or other the human touch, for constitutions, for institutions, for lands, atmospheres, ecosystems, for devices, processes, events, relations, you name it.
The world is “under construction”. It is full of stuff – such stuff as dreams are made on – and this stuff is full of values… But how to decides what values – shaping and shaped in return – ought to go in?
What if values were not for some small group to decide in everyone else’s stead? What if these considerations – what values, what world – were neither left undone nor left to a happy few, but open instead to a wide societal deliberation?
To summarize the above in the most succinct form: how can the ought be related – not as an afterthought, not as a dogma, but as an ongoing question – to the is?
And to be clear: no need to be in the midst of a catastrophe or for it to lie in wait, on the brink of the abyss or in a post-apocalyptic aftermath, on a desert island disc or on a newly reached planet, to “build (back) better”!
This is how we arrive at the question of Transitions.
The epigraph opening this section underscores the confluence of green and digital under the aegis of the “twin transitions”. In the search for direction – priorities, mobilizations, narratives, not just in Europe – these two broad framings deservedly garner much joint attention.
The twinning can be highly problematic, however, if it is conceived as a “win-win” sleight of hand, assuming or asserting that climate action and digitalization go hand in hand without careful reflection, without balancing, without losers, without contradictions.
What is more, while environmental and digital are the order of the day, the necessary transition is also social, political, conceptual, individual as well as collective.
Further, we will discover that at the heart of the notion of transition is the question of democracy alongside the question of innovation.
But first, wait a moment, what is Transition in the first place?
It is important to note the polysemy of Transition, emanating from a wide diversity of fields. While it is possible merely to marvel at the patchiness and heterogeneousness, I will explicitly opt here – in section I.6 – for connecting the dots, the plots, the threads; for recognizing the differences and for weaving together those diverse endeavors and meanings. Transitional justice, democracy transition, sustainability transitions, transition initiatives, innovation transitions, moving to other important dimensions.
We will see, throughout, the leitmotifs of justice, solidarity, autonomy, dignity, and democracy (or how to care for the connections between the individual, the common, and the relational).
To begin with, and the etymology sticks, transition stems from the Latin verb transire: to go over, across, beyond. A crossing to the other side – and the bridge itself. Be it in thought, in speech, in writing. Be it in rhetoric or in astrology, in linguistics or in music, in life and after. Evoking passing, passing away, dying, agony. Then numb, then in trance. And evoking that which is fleeting, transient, transitory, not durable, not sustainable.
The going beyond and also the in-between.
Deep down, all contemporary mobilizations of the notion of transition have this in common: the realization that a past state is problematic and would – without intervention – lead to a problematic future state. That is to say: change is needed
The epigraph of this section also draws attention to the sens de l’histoire ; it draws attention to the question of temporalities (and of related ascriptions of ordering and of pace), which further down we will unpack as constitutive of the notion of transition.
It is interesting to think of Transition as the answer to the “evolution or revolution?” conundrum. At bottom, Transition denotes a profound transformation, with a particular attention to the question of coexistence, to the question of interweaved temporalities, or simply put: a particular attention to what happens between the “before” and the “after”
Thinking in Transition
For the road
These “Introductions” are not a preliminary notice for the book; they are an integral part of it. No need to wait for the end of the admonitions and reflexive feedback for things to get serious. Without warning, they have already started. It is now. We find ourselves in the heart of the action.
Thinking over the course of stories and through them does not mean advancing a point of view – or “making points”, demonstrating, persuading – with implacable argumentative machinery.
It is not a mathematical construction or a Death Star or a game of chess. It is more of a good meal, a campfire with its evening gathering and songs, a forest trek. It is a
INNER PROLOGUE
Hello, my name is Estella, I have just been recruited to an artificial intelligence research center to work with other colleagues in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, with doctors and engineers, to develop a robot with values, a robot endowed with universal values. Well, it is a little more specific than that in principle, the work has European funding and the robot is supposed to be designed with European values. It is a challenge and an opportunity, that’s what they said. It will be a perfect mix of continuity and change, of tradition and innovation. It sounds good, it’s got a nice ring to it. Or maybe hollow, maybe it just doesn’t ring true. I like traveling, chocolate, gastronomy and good food. I like people, forests, landscapes. That’s it, I’ve unpacked everything for you in one go, that’s because I need to know, to know if you can help me.
The sun was only just beginning to rise and Estella was only just leaving her house when she realized she didn’t know Professor Smith’s exact address. The message indicated a rendezvous at ten o’clock at Liberty Square. Well then, that is where she would go. On her way she was playing out in her mind what she would say to the professor.
When she arrived at the edge of the square, in the middle of the central area, between the statue and the fountain, she saw a silhouette draped in red that seemed to gesticulate in her direction.
A few more steps and Estella recognized the professor’s face, looking like the pictures she had found online. They greeted each other and then settled side by side on a public bench right there.
So then, it was our dear doctor who suggested that we meet.
In response to this mention of their mutual friend, Estella explained to Professor Smith her situation, her arrival, her new project, her aspirations and her doubts.
gleaning accompanying a work of the earth, swarming and cross-pollination. It is an assembly of stories. An invitation.
If sooner or later you find yourself perplexed, lost, disorient ed here, I invite you to live the experience of this perplexity. If and wh en it is too much, then safeguards, guardrails and railings are in place to guide the journey: not only the Table of Contents and the Index, but also sections lik e this one, throughout the book, indicating where this skein comes from and where it leads, how and why it is deployed, indicating the ins and ou ts and the paths less traveled. This book traces a poetics; it calls u pon a poetics
Same here, I also love chocolate, interrupted the professor, glad to be able to squeeze in a warm smile. You can simply call me Sophy.
The sun was high enough in the sky now and it was casting shafts of light straight into the eyes of Estella, who changed position and placed herself in the shadow of her older companion.
Estella: You see professor, all in all that is my problem, I ask myself a lot of questions, I don’t know how to do to do things right!
Sophy: I know, I see, yes, I am familiar with this. “Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul”, warns Rabelais.
Estella: Right, that’s just it. For me it’s a question of responsibility. Research and innovation are inseparable from moral questions, I am acutely conscious of that, but I know nothing about all this.
Sophy: Don’t worry, Estella, between us let me tell you what matters most: you have it all within you!
Estella: In me, I don’t know, but in you, surely, yes: if I understood correctly, you participate as an expert in research ethics reviews for international organizations?
Sophy: That’s right. For me it’s second nature.
Estella: But how can I go about this?
Sophy: For ethics, it is simple, clear and precise: it is a grid with checkboxes. Does this research involve children? Animals? Human embryonic stem cells, and so on? And then, if necessary, participants in the experiment must give their “free and informed consent”. Well, there you go, I am glad I was able to address that
a poiesis, upon creating. Creating and thinking that which is created. It is a book of interactive fiction, a “book of which you are the hero”.
What does the inquiry pertain to? What is the research question? In sum, what is the book talking about?
About our relationship to ourselves, to others and to the world. It talks by asking questions:
How do we live by our values? What is a good life?
What world do we want to live in together?
What is the “we” and what about the others?
The two experiments we will examine in this book are the European project and the ethics project. This is what underlies the architecture of the book in its entirety; following the introductions, we explore the ethics project, then the
concern. No need for more information here. There is a user guide with instructions and you can also find all the answers on Wikipedia.
Estella: The answers, okay, but what about the questions?
Sophy: What I am offering you here on a silver platter is precisely how to do it right, fast and well, how to avoid giving rise to questions.
Estella: But values, responsible research, the future, Europe, the world, all the possible paths?
Sophy: What I am offering you here is morality and responsibility ready-made, plug-and-play. In other words: how to get the process done without any issues, pains or complications.
Estella: I understand and I am very grateful, but how can I say this... Would you agree to guide me through these issues, this pain, these complications?
Sophy: Well… Very well.
Estella saw Sophy Smith’s moue, her air of vexed or resigned disappointment, turning into a sort of glow, of softness, as if at the evocation of a distant place or of a loved one too soon departed.
Sophy: You know, Estella, deep down, all this bodes well. I thought I would tell you quickly how to quickly proceed; satisfying you with a user guide. But it’s good, you remind me of the time of yore...cultivating the questions. The good old
European project, and finally the particular forms of institutionalization of ethics in Europe, pursuing our Ethics of Transitions quest.
On the one hand, the European project: project of peace and fraternity, confronted with the trials of sovereignty and solidarity, with the trials of constructions of stories and of constructions of “we”.
On the other hand, the ethical project: project of “our common values” and of the incommensurability of pluralities, project of universality confronted with the singular experience of living and thinking.
The book offers a reflection on the nature of the good and on the values in the world.
The book offers a reflection on the relationship to stories and histories, on experiments of thought and of life.
Thus the book invites particular forms of introspection. That being so, this manual of perplexity is also a philosophical essay and novel, a joint work of fiction. Talking of stories, yes, but not without living and recounting them.
days when everything surprised me, when everything could arouse in me perplexity or even a singular wonder. The time of questions. So listen, since you don’t want to settle for off-the-shelf, ready-made, ready-toswallow answers, perhaps we could embark together on something much more audacious.
Estella: What do you mean?
Sophy: I mean that you are, or in other words, that we are together, the right people in the right place.
Estella: I am not sure I understand...
Sophy: Here: before his departure, the doctor left an envelope containing a book. Well this book pertains precisely to the questions you told me about, those questions which brought you here.
Estella: What a beautiful synchronicity, it is almost unsettling, even if I brace myself for everything these days! But this book then, can we have access to it?
Sophy: Here is the book. The book is here. * * *
I.1. First evening – First story
It was late. He couldn’t close his eyes. He was half asleep and remained motionless for fear of waking the others. She was slumbering right there. So close and yet so far. In his mother’s face he could see his own features. Behind her not quite closed eyelids, her dark pupils flitted frantically and, with this whirling, they seemed to retrace a dream or perhaps to struggle in search of a way out of it. She exhaled, deeper than before. “I’m not asleep you know”, she whispered gently as she caught her breath. Both of them were waiting for the results of the vote. The Union was not the one of their dreams, for sure, but did this mean that leaving was the answer? He was nine months old when she had fled with him and, as long as he could remember, she had devoted her entire life to this project. Project of peace, project of paper and of smoke. She was well and truly awake now. Lithuanian, Australian, British, subject of Her Gracious Majesty, Jewish, Sufi, feminist, communist, anti-communist, cancerous, European, citizen of the world and aspiring to a different world, she was all that and more. He was too, in his own way. In the way of the story of his life, well beyond his life, woven with multiple identities and multiple alterities. It was a whisper in the night: “I must tell you this, it is a story from when you were little. First and foremost I have to make a confession to you.”
In me there rages a terrible struggle. It is a terrible struggle between two trees: two seeds, two shoots, two trees growing in me. Their roots entangling and estranging and strangling each other.
Two trees.
One is fear, hatred, jealousy and wrath. It is superiority and inferiority, selfishness and resentment. Animosity and avidity. It is fulmination and fury.
The other is trust and sharing, love and giving. Curiosity and desire. It is prudence, courage, respect and benevolence. Hope and peace. It is forbearance and forgiveness.
Two trees in me are waging a terrible struggle. In me and in everyone it is so.
Two trees.
In you too.
These words resonated in the mind of the child. He reflected on them and heard himself asking his mother with empathy and anguish:
“But then: the two trees, the struggle, which of the two prevails?”
The one that you water.
I.2. Second evening – Second story
“I wouldn’t want you to think that this only refers to the ‘big issues’ and ‘big projects’ ”, the mother told her son. Europe, values, justice and solidarity. Our world and the worlds to come, the meaning of life, the human condition, how to do justice to one’s principles, how to fulfill together our highest potential and ideals and be in harmony with our values. Authenticity and quest; simplicity and complexity. “Truth be told, all this is just as important and as relevant for the little things in life, for the big and small things of the everyday”. A child’s joyful laughter, the sun rising on the horizon and everything is possible, the key left on the other side of the door that closes, the misunderstanding despite the precautions and repetitions, how to do things right, how to tell him that there is a problem without causing an even more serious problem, without breakage or wound, how to live together and together heal. And now: What are we eating?
Yes, to think the collective elaboration of decisions as well as meaningful conversations, let’s think about the approaching meal. Let’s think of these five protagonists; each one has a name and a face, desires and cracks, intense feelings and mixed attachments. And at present each one of them has a gurgling stomach. It is almost dinner time; they have to choose where they will eat the evening meal together. Three of them, tempted by the smell, would like to go to the steakhouse grill, a rotisserie in the area. Two others, two young vegan women, are in favor of visiting the communal organic market, fields of transition, held at the end of each day in the neighborhood, down by the gardening commons. This is a thought experiment. Many options are possible. But for now, everyone is hungry.
Our five protagonists choose to resort to a form of democratic reflex: they will vote – and even vote by secret ballot – to determine where it is they will go to eat. At the end of this process, the result comes out: that’s it, it’s decided, the dinner will be at the steakhouse grill.
I do not recount here the end of the evening, nor the arrival at the rotisserie and finding it short of salad, nor the very meagre meal that the two vegan protagonists had a taste of.
One can however imagine a completely different story, a completely different outcome.
A story made of conversations, of shared questions. “What are your desires? And you what would please you? What do you like, what do you love? It would be so good to eat together, what do we expect from this really? What do we want to do together? What is it we hold dear? Where are the others? How together can we decide what we will eat together? What matters to each one and what matters to us together? […]”.
Each of the protagonists listens to the others sharing aspirations and hesitations, tastes and recipes, stories and memories, values and visions, meanings, questions, perplexities, demands and proposals.
At the end of these exchanges, the five guests prepare a meal together where they all meet.
I do not recount here the attention given to each person’s desires; the attention given to the preparation but also to the provenance of the products and to the worlds of justice and of power, of environmental impacts and social relations that each ingredient brings to the table; and even the attention given to the neighbors that the five guests invited, but who were all absent that evening. We can nonetheless observe that the outcome here is much happier, both for each of the protagonists and for the group they form together. The outcome is much happier, moreover, in terms of taking into account the “others” (those who are not part of the group that is favored here).
So these are two similar stories, but they differ in many ways. In contrast to the second one, adventure of felicity4, the first narrative recounts the pitfalls and misdeeds of a form of institutionalization of democratic ideals which is as poor as it is predominant, a form that consists in the reflex of the vote and in the tyranny exercised by a majority against minorities. These parables are rich with insights. But beware; there is also a third dénouement.
In fact, some say that our five companions in misfortune chose to resort to a far more terrible and more deeply rooted form of democratic misunderstanding: they resolved to appoint onto themselves a sovereign! No, they would not converse about important issues to be cultivated together. No, they would not vote to know – black or white, black against white, the majority wins, the majority takes it away – what the answer to these questions would be. No, no short straws being drawn either, no luck of the draw to trump the potluck. Yes, they would submit to another to decide in their place. The (His)story does not say whether their sovereign was designated by casting votes, or by casting lots, or even if he was one of the five crew members. But in any case, yes, once consecrated, it is he who “reconciled the pleaders” and decided who would eat what.
4. Auguring a field of possibilities that will be marked out and traveled in Book II.
Sophy:5 These stories that open the book, I am reading them as parables. That is to say: a trajectory, a curve between the point and the straight line, a short allegorical, familiar, symbolic narrative in which many learnings are found. What do you think of this?
Estella: For me they are stories in the story, experiments about who recounts, what is being recounted, how to hear, how to transmit, how to think together and be together. They are thought experiments. Experimentations of thought and of life.
Sophy: And of worlds.
Estella: I am not sure I understand. What do you mean by that?
Sophy: Worlds. Thus, in this story of the meal, we have different possible worlds. We have a sovereign’s world, the regime of the lord president, the more or less enlightened despot. We have a democratic city where the majority takes it all and the minority takes it on the chin. We have something of the common, the participative, the deliberative, the cooperative, the diverse, the disorder even; a large table of conversation and of preparation and a shared meal; something that opens up to other worlds.
Estella: Is it up to the readers to draw their own conclusions, their own connections and reflections?
Sophy: Yes. Yes, but without rushing. Just taking the time to read, to live.
Estella: Then we have to help them.
Sophy: Well indeed, that is precisely what we’re endeavoring to do.
Estella: I must draw your attention to this short scribbled text right here in the book: it is written in the form of a little dialogue. Take a look.
Sophy: You seem so thoughtful, Estella. And where is the dialogue, pray tell.
Estella: Parable, hyperbole, ellipse... This interlacing of curves, this nest of lines, also traces like an egg to watch over, to hatch. Yes excuse me, it is right here, see:
–– It seems to me that the questions that are addressed here in a way that is concise and full of imagery are also taken up later on in the book in more detail.
5. Typographer’s note: to facilitate easy identification throughout the book, these dialogues between Sophy and Estella are presented enlivened by a hairline to the left of the text.
––
To my eyes these stories are a mapping of the book, they draw an initial map that allows to see its structure.
The first story – and with it the first of the books – refers to values, to living one’s values, and to the framings which make possible and constrain this relationship to values in our lives.
The second pertains to our democracies, their crises and their possible futures, I mean to living together and building together, to convivencia and convivialité to including and excluding, to participation and co-production. Foreshadowing the Sovereign Scheme. It is the question of the public and the State, of the polis (city, State) or rather of the politeia (citizens as a whole, organization of a society, form of life and of government, constitution). With, against, or without the State, it is the question of ‘we-making’ and ‘world-making’. That which is called here Europe.
–– And what about the third then?
–– The third story, still rooted in the thought-and-life experiment, brings together the different themes and theses of the book: the meeting between values and institutions; the question of power in the world and of engagement; the governance of the technologies that govern us; ethics in/and/of transition; the construction of the future and of the human that we want to be.
For that matter, it must be said that the third story raises the stakes, in terms of inviting reflection and also simply in terms of breadth. In fact we are almost there. You are forewarned: fasten your seatbelt.
I.3. Third evening – Ultimate story
The steering wheel. The road. The night. The speed and the calm. The lights passing by. The radio humming. The turn. The crossing. The shadow. The face. The screeching of the tires. The screaming. The dull shock. The silence.
I have two close friends – perhaps you too know someone in such a situation – who have been in a serious car accident. Think of this experience that never ceases to haunt, think of the weight of the responsibility they will bear for the rest of their lives.
Bearing the burden of responsibility. Such is the sword of Damocles that weighs on all those who touch the wheel, on us as on our children, called to take our “place in the traffic”.
But imagine for a moment that we could free ourselves from this yoke of suffering, forever discharge our children from this heavy burden. Yes, we shall see it here, this emancipation is in fact possible. Yet this absolution has a price. That of choice. The choice of worlds.
Imagine driving your new car in a few years’ time, an automated autonomous vehicle. So not exactly behind the wheel, your car doesn’t have one, but comfortably seated alone or rather with your other half and your two young ones. How good and pleasant it is to sit together, all four around the small padded coffee table, playing a game of Moi Président in the passenger compartment while your car (an electric Tusla from Google Alphabet or a zero-emission diesel Duce from VW) takes you to Grandma’s. Grandma is out of cake and wine and butter, yes, out of strong emotions and of stories to tell, but not for much longer.
So here you are, comfortably seated and, the game having come to an end, you can now immerse yourself in this thought experiment, the trolley problem
Let’s imagine the experience facing this tramway driver: “the driver of a runaway tram (or trolley) which he can only steer from one narrow track onto another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed” (Foot 1967). So let’s imagine this: you can operate the switch and prevent the tram from killing five people. But only by directing it to a side track where it will kill one person. You can also do nothing and the five people will be killed. So, would you do it? All you have to do is pull a small lever. To activate the switch or not, that is the question.
Take a moment to consider this dilemma. It is an ethical dilemma. It pertains to the action, its motivations and justifications, the choices and constraints, the responsibilities and consequences, the values and situations, the passions and reasons. Ask yourself the question. You can then indicate below – yes or no –whether or not you are activating the switch. But there is no obligation here; I don’t want to force you to make this choice.
And now what – what to do – if the only way to save the five people is to put (a little push in the back is enough) a bystander (a passer-by, say a traveling salesman) on the path of the trolley so that his body stops the trolley and only the bystander dies? Here too there are two choices: either one person dies or five people die. What would be the right choice?
This thought experiment can give rise to numerous variations: what if the person on the side-track is a person who is dear to you (a friend for example); what if the passer-by is the villain who sabotaged the trolley etc.
The moral dilemma of this “trolley problem” is a thought experiment in ethics as old as the trolleys themselves (Frank Chapman Sharp 1908) and that has had a lasting legacy.
Its mobilization by the British philosopher Philippa Foot for instance, quoted above, is set in an attempt to establish (that there is) a universal, natural moral sense.
Let us consider the two lemmas of the dilemma (i.e. the two propositions, the two terms, the two alternatives of the alternative, the two options). To activate the switch or not
From a utilitarian point of view, namely from the point of view of maximizing collective well-being (understood as the sum or average of the well-being of all affected sentient beings), one must necessarily choose to operate the switch. Better five survivors than one. It is one of the consequentialist conceptions – an ethics of consequences – i.e. for which the consequences6 of the action are more important than other considerations. It thus differs from deontological ethics (which focus on duty, compliance with certain principles, on the type of action rather than on its consequences) and from virtue ethics (which focus on the motivations, characters, intentions of the moral agents – the ones who carry out the action).
Not activating the switch may be based on principles such as the axiom of non-aggression, or the refusal to make an attempt on the life of others. Not sacrificing one life to save five can also be justified in view of the incommensurability of human lives: no, one life is not equivalent to “20% of five lives”. Besides, it can also be argued that the situation is already morally compromised and that any action taken in this context therefore constitutes a contribution to this moral injury, thus making the perpetrator of the action partly responsible for the death. It is here a “principle of abstention” or of non-compromise which is mobilized. However, in the framework of other conceptions of moral obligation, the mere fact of being present in this situation and of being able to influence its outcome results in a requirement to participate. Duty to rescue, nonassistance à personnes en danger, duty of care. In this context, “doing nothing is
6. Judging the morality of an action by its results is an interesting idea. But who calculates or judges, and how, what are the consequences of an action ? And what determines the value of consequences? In other words, what determines a “good” state of things; and what about the distribution of “goods” (of benefits, and costs, and risks)? It is interesting to question consequentialism and we will extend this when the time comes, in Book I.
immoral”; in other words, the choice to refrain from acting is as such an act contrary to the moral obligation – provided that one attaches greater value to five lives than to one.
But now duty calls, enough abstract considerations with trolleys! You are there sitting in your autonomous automated vehicle, your “auto”.
Just a question: Was it an electric Tusla or a zero-emission diesel Duce? If you hadn’t made a choice yet, that is fine, and the time has now come: Tusla or Duce, just indicate your choice here. Simply circle one or cross one out:
Everything is in order now, you are sitting comfortably. No steering wheel. No heavy burden.
The speed and the calm. The lights passing by. The radio humming. The turn. The crossing. The shadow.
Your auto is breezing along at a good pace and all is well – but now a group of children are in the middle of the road just around the corner it is necessary to act immediately: either the auto will hit these pedestrians or it will hit the side wall. Either the auto will kill the pedestrians or it will sacrifice its passengers. In an instant we go from the dream to the drama. We have to act immediately, decide immediately! But just a moment: it is not up to you to decide, not for you to act.
The system of automated autonomous vehicles has of course been programmed in advance – the heavy burden is unloaded there – and indeed relies on its decision algorithm for this kind of exceptional case. Strange and true. The fiction of reality meets the reality of fiction.
We are suddenly faced with this paradigm shift: the abstract and disembodied thought experiment now becomes a real choice to be made, and what is more, a choice that is “implemented”, rolled out. In this new temporality, the fleeting or elusive reflex moment (forerunner of the long run of regrets to be borne) is captured
in the analysis and deployed in anticipation in collective reflexivity7 (preliminary to the abandonment – the moral disinvestment, the clearing, the disengagement – of the moment of decision in the action).
We will delve further in the book into artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making; here it is really about artificial wisdom, about algorithmic morality
How should these vehicles be programmed... Save the pedestrians? Sacrifice them to save the passenger? Sacrifice the latter if it is in the interest of the greatest number? Ethical dilemma.
“Auto-nomous” does not mean – at least not yet – that it is these cars that give themselves their own rules. Upstream, these choices must be made. From the moment it becomes possible to program the making of decisions on the basis of moral choices in machines, will it be the particular interest or the common good that prevails?
Social dilemma.
What happens now if we have some automatic vehicles programmed to protect passengers (even if it means sacrificing pedestrians if need be) and others programmed to protect the pedestrians (even if it means sacrificing passengers if need be)?
Which vehicle would you buy for you and your family in this context?
It is important to note the following:
– if you are in a Tusla, your car is programmed to sacrifice pedestrians, if necessary;
– if you are in a Duce, your car is programmed to sacrifice passengers, if necessary.
Does this affect your choice?
How does it feel to be in such a position?
This book is a “book of which you are the hero”, a “choose your own adventure” book: the choice is yours. You can change cars. Your choices have serious consequences. You can change worlds.
What vehicle would you buy for you and your family in this context?
What world, what future, does this shape?
7. This collective reflexivity is this pause and return upon the ins and outs of such situations. It is the reflexivity of the collective itself. It is the necessary public debate, the vast reflection on the “societal” choices that will then be amenable to be cast into algorithms. Thus, beware: this collective choice might not be collective at all. Beware the distribution of roles – the division of labor – with regard to ethics.
Economic disparities translated into unequal dignity. Thus, on the road to this world, we are neither free nor equal, neither in dignity nor in rights.
Public policy dilemma.
What happens finally if: (a) automatic vehicles are prone to saving more lives than any other form of urban transport; and (b) the potential users are only inclined to adopt them if these vehicles are programmed to prioritize the people in the passenger compartment. Should one then give up on (on the basis of a) saving lives, sacrificed (by refusing b) on the altar of our values? Such is the question that a team of researchers arrived at on the basis of opinion surveys about these ethical dilemmas (Bonnefon et al. 2016).
Also at play here – “What’s wrong with this picture?” in the syllogism above as well as in the trolley problem – is an interesting form of Epistemological Dilemma. To put it simply and clearly: we can reverse all of this and refuse this succession of restricted framings, of either-or’s into a funnel, which loses sight of – or puts out of scope – other ways of thinking.
Thus it may be that the best ethical choice with regard to the dilemma is actually to escape this frame, to place one’s choice outside the two lemmas of the dilemma. To consider that neither of the two options is good, satisfactory, dignified, acceptable.
“To activate the switch or not, that is the question.” And yet... what if it wasn’t the only or the best question?
But good grief what is this sordid violence that is being imposed on us here to sordidly exercise? This marks the beginning of a perplexity (question, embarrassment, recalcitrance, movement, reframing).
A first movement of reframing consists in moving from the “refusal of choice” as a refusal to activate the switch to the “refusal of choice” as refusal of the dilemma (refusal of this configuration of the problem). To refuse Sophie’s Choice and Isaac’s Sacrifice. Refusing this Milgram experiment. Not playing this “game of chicken”. Freeing oneself from this entrapment, from this Prisoner’s Dilemma.
A second movement consists in going from the refusal of this type of problem to the refusal of this type of world.
No world of the illusion of all-powerfulness, of absolute control. No world where pedestrians or passengers are put to death. No heavy burden. No sordid violence. No children left on the side of the road.
In other words it is a matter here of changing the world, of transforming the sociotechnical arrangements which constitute the “inhabiting” or “mobility”, of improving trolleys’ brakes, limiting the speed of autonomous vehicles or putting them in pipes. A world of mellow cars or soft transport.