Ethics without immanence: A reply to Michael Lambek

Abstract

A virtue of the turn called ‘ordinary ethics’ is that it can steer us toward the often tacit and seemingly pervasive presence of ethics in everyday social practice. Yet what is the status of this presence? Is ethics somehow intrinsic to discursive interaction, as suggested by Michael Lambek and by earlier writers ranging from Goffman to Habermas? I argue that ordinary ethics’ notion of ethical immanence poses risks for the anthropology of ethics. This notion indulges an old desire to trace ethics back to its roots, to some purportedly singular, determinate ‘source’ – here, a disciplinary defined object of knowledge like ‘interaction’ or ‘language’. The notion also risks making us complacent with respect to studying the diverse forms of communicative labor by which actors themselves frame and construe behavior as ‘ethical’. And without taking as our guide what actors do, it becomes difficult methodologically for us to distinguish the ethical from non-ethical dimensions of social life in a given context.