Extraordinary Responsibility: Politics beyond the Moral Calculus - Softcover

Satkunanandan, Shalini

Softcover

ISBN 10: 110744313X ISBN 13: 9781107443136

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Careful attention to contemporary political debates, including those around global warming, the federal debt, and the use of drone strikes on suspected terrorists, reveals that we often view our responsibility as something that can be quantified and discharged. Shalini Satkunanandan shows how Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Weber, and Heidegger each suggest that this calculative or bookkeeping mindset both belongs to "morality", understood as part of our ordinary approach to responsibility, and effaces the incalculable, undischargeable, and more onerous dimensions of our responsibility. These thinkers also reveal how the view of responsibility as calculable is at the heart of "moralism" - the pettifogging, mindless, legalistic, excessively judgmental, or punitive policing of our own or others' compliance with moral duties. By elaborating their narratives of a difficult "conversion" to the open-ended and relentless character of responsibility, Satkunanandan explores how we might be less moralistic and more responsible in politics. She ultimately argues for a political ethos attentive to how calculative thinking can limit our responsibility, but that still accepts a circumscribed place for calculation (and morality) in responsible politics.

About this title

Book Description

Extraordinary Responsibility: Politics Beyond the Moral Calculus explores how an impoverished understanding of human responsibility as quantifiable and dischargeable encourages moralistic politics. By reconstructing narratives of "conversion" from "calculable responsibility," which are offered by Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Weber, and Heidegger, Extraordinary Responsibility elaborates an ethos for a less moralized politics.

About the Author

Shalini Satkunanandan has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Davis since 2011. She is a past Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago. She has published articles in Political Theory, the American Political Science Review, and Law, Culture and the Humanities.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 110744313X
• ISBN 13: 9781107443136
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 263