Haven’t been able to get this tweet out of my head all day, so here’s my attempt to think thru why. This is your fault, @internetdaniel https://twitter.com/internetdaniel/status/1387034985849397248

Also adding in @ShannonVallor response, because also good. And gestures toward part of what I am stuck on... https://twitter.com/shannonvallor/status/1387117902084591620

First, can’t overstate the “cynical charade” piece. So much tech criticism - whether couched as ethics, critical [whatever], values & [whatever], [whatever] for social good, human-centered [whatever]* - is wholly reducible to branding.

*whatever=design, AI, data, algos, etc

The cheapest, easiest brand is “don’t think x, think y.” It positions one as in privileged possession of a heretofore unrealized truth/reality that’ll untangle all those knots in your brain. Fund my center/project/beach house/Davos trip and I’ll bring u critical enlightenment!

So, “not ethics, but power” or “not ethics, justice” is a good schtick because, hey, gotta find your niche in the ol’ marketplace of ideas. Never mind that it means fundamentally confusing those terms and their rich histories/debates/connections.

BUT that doesn’t explain every instance, and not everyone separating terms is acting cynically. So, what then? We can’t just say “wrong! X & Y are actually this.” Cuz that’s the same flat and totalizing move.

Like, “but justice is ethics!” Well, yes and also not exactly.

Now this is the part where I confess to be currently reading a bunch of Lewis Gordon and also listened to him give a talk today, so it’s at the front of my mind...but this passage from Re-Imagining Liberations struck me as relevant:

So, taking that as a starting point, it strikes me that what some critical takes are doing by making the “don’t talk about ethics” is struggling with the languages they’ve been handed, with terms that have taken on particular shapes in particular hands.

And I’m sympathetic. I mean, you don’t look at a center on technology ethics bankrolled by, I dunno, a company that sold tech to nazis and go “ethics is a useful and not at all compromised term for today’s most pressing challenges.”

I get the impulse! I feel it myself often! And we should call bullshit when we see it! (TOTALLY UNRELATED but Tr*st*n H*rr*s was speaking on Capitol Hill today. Huh! Anyway...)

And outside these sorts of cases, we can also look at the many and varied examples of values or features of ethical theories shown to be idealized, synonymous with whiteness, complicit in violence, etc...

(I have in mind Mills’ ideal theory as ideology, obvs. But the critiques come from all over. I mean, I think wholesale pessimism about the language and project of “ethics” is not an unreasonable reaction upon finishing a piece like Montag’s Universalization of Enlightenment!)

For the first cases, it is important to not mistake a brand or opportunistic rhetorical move for the substance of a term. If your critique or alternative frame is only built as a counter to a bag of wind then it’s either gonna be weak or irrelevant when the wind shifts.

Even worse, though, is you end up inadvertently giving the ethics grifters and opportunists more intellectual legitimacy than they deserve! You’ve created a “two sides” argument where there shouldn’t be one! And now the grifters can come to the table for “good-faith discussion.”

For the second kind, well...just do the work. The salvageability (or not) of particular concepts for projects of liberation, justice, or even “ethics” is absolutely core to debates about normative life. But that’s probs not work that’s gonna land you 6 or 7 figure $ awards.

So, to return to Gordon, “being accountable to the political” means - among other things - making yourself accountable to the terms and to the *futures created by your deployments of them.* (“Politics involves the power of speech in the production of power...” -LG)

A key dimension of that point comes later, in Gordon’s discussion of Frederick Douglass’s account of his mother.

(Disclaimer: I’m not gonna do full justice to what’s going on in this section and it’s role in setting up Gordon’s conception of Black revolutionary consciousness. And honestly it’s not my story to tell. But it hinges on isolating an important dynamic in dominance/subjugation.)

It is this line: “Only masters bestow value.”

I think the most important thing to keep in mind when making the kinds of conceptual distinctions that inspired this thread is - following @internetdaniel’s point - paying attention to what’s being conceded in a broader sense.

If you think “ethics” only has value because dominant groups prop it up, then in some ways you are conceding that “only masters concede value.” And I encourage you not to concede that. Don’t do the masters’ job for them. /fin

*”...confer value...”