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Review
of Aasland, D. (2009) Ethics and
Economy: After Levinas.
London: MayFlyBooks
(Published in: Journal of
Business Ethics Vol. 67, Issue 3
(2009), page 437)
With Ethics and
Economy: After Levinas Dag Aasland
presents another thought provoking work based in
readings of Emmanuel Levinas. Aasland offers his
own critique of mainstream Business Ethics
discourses and using Levinas he suggests a
different and plausible relation between
business and ethics.
Aasland’s position with regard to contemporary
Business Ethics discourses opens by clearly
distinguishing between business for ethics and
business in ethics: the latter being incidents
found in business that are different from simply
pursuing self-interest. According to Aasland this
is not an accepted conceptualisation because in
conventional Business Ethics there is no room for
the idea that it is possible to do anything but
pursue one’s own self-interest. Ethics “has moved
from being primarily a humanistic discipline about
what it means to be a human being, to becoming a
required professional and business ethics,
expected to be a useful tool for professionals,
for industry and for public authorities” (37).
Aasland refuses to acknowledge this as ethics:
“Business for ethics is not an ethics (because it
is for oneself) but instead a part of business
administrative, instrumental knowledge”(20).
Aasland counters with what he claims to be a more
credible concept of the relation between business
and ethics.
To find such a concept he turns to Levinas and in
this manoeuvre he formulates two points of
departure (4). The first is that he doesn’t want
to be moralistic and the second that he wants to
search for the good which is already there, small
as it may be.
Aasland’s principle concern is to explore the
rationalisation of homo oeconomicus: why would one
be interested in doing something other than that
which gives one the highest gains? He then divides
this question again: “1. From where does the idea
(come) that it is possible to do otherwise than
privileging oneself over others?” and “2. This
idea, which we may call ‘the idea of the good’,
or, as we will call it here, ethics – how is it
transformed into practical conduct?”
The motive for the author to turn to Levinas in
his consideration of these questions is that
Levinas’ philosophy – differing from mainstream
Business Ethics – respects the uniqueness of the
individual and the encounter with the Other, and
moreover pays attention to the embeddedness of
that encounter in a society where there is not
only one, but many Others. Aasland names the
phenomenon of being touched by the unique Other as
mercy; the organization of a plurality of Others
in society he names as justice, and Levinas helps
us “in finding a meaningful, general connection
between mercy and justice” (61).
This implies that Levinas, through his discussions
of society, pays attention to the urge for
self-maintenance of the individual (the conatus)
and accords it legitimacy. “What is often denoted
as greed is an expression of the same conatus and
should thus be easy to understand; expressions of
the opposite may easily seem hypocritical” (82).
It is this precisely this kind of realism that
Aasland values in Levinas.
In order to accept Levinas in this context we have
to create some distance from a number of
traditional interpretations of Levinas. For
example, in Aasland there is no room for the
particular kind of pious interpretation, in which
the self always has to give way to the other. Such
a view could not easily be connected to economics.
A certain amount of self-centredness “is neither
meant here as something negative, nor as being
morally blameworthy. Your understanding must be
self-centred” (30).
Furthermore “most presentations of his philosophy
concentrate on the encounter with the Other, and
may thus cause the misunderstanding that this is
his ethics, and consequently a quite impossible
one” (70). They forget about Levinas’ emphasis on
the encounter with the third. “Levinas addresses
here an issue that is often neglected in ethical
literature: I face not only one other person, but
other others as well” (71).
Finally, Levinas’s philosophy is often treated as
dogmatic teaching and Aasland wants to guard
against that for “[Levinas’] philosophy does not
end up with a certain ethical theory, presented as
an addition to knowledge and its understanding of
empirical reality” (76).
Aasland’s reinterpretation of Levinas seems to be
entirely plausible. I agree with him that a
certain – let’s say the pious – kind of
interpretation of Levinas doesn’t bring us any
further. I share his worry about making Levinas
end up with an ethical theory. If nevertheless I
need to expand a bit on that, it is because I am
not so sure whether the author pays enough
attention to this concern and I doubt whether he
manages not to make a new ethical theory. Is
formulating a general idea, be it the Idea of the
Good, not too much of a concession already? Cannot
Aasland’s idea in its turn lead up to an ideology?
It’s undeniably true that Aasland is conscious of
the dangers of formulating ideas and theories.
Before you realise it, you may have fallen “into
the ‘moralising trap’ of an ethical perspective.
By what right do I ask another person why he or
she fails ethically?” (5). But despite this
awareness, at times Aasland comes dangerously
close to such new ideology. For instance when he
wonders what consequences ethics in the sense of
Levinas will have “on how we behave, or, rather,
how we should behave, towards others and in
society” (84). I wonder whether the word “should”
is adequate here?
And is it not close to moralising to say “I cannot
choose not to respond to the call of the Other. I
cannot escape the appeal in the face of the Other.
I have to respond” and if you don’t respond it
means you “pretend that the Other is invisible,
which is a violation of him or her” (69). Rudi
Visker protests about such absolute claims which
can be derived from Levinas’ work. Visker (2003:
263) analyzes that one can very well think of a
kind of irresponsibility and insensivity for the
other which do not have to be called unethical.
Visker may well be right on that point.
I wonder whether Aasland’s coming so close to this
pitfall may be connected with an inclination
towards universalizing and ontologizing which he
cannot get rid of completely, despite his
awareness of its dangers. When the author makes it
clear (23) that general theories cannot explain
the occurrence of the idea of the wrong, he
nevertheless clings to the universal. For he
continues by saying that “[t]he answer must be
found in some universal human reactions that are
not contained in conventional knowledge. There
must be something in humanity which causes our
negative reactions to such acts” (23).
The following is also an indication that Aasland
creates his own ontology. He says, (87) that
language games or ontologies show the tendency to
consider themselves as more ontological than other
language games. “They deny the responsibility that
actually is more
ontological than these linguistic
constructions” (88; italics by the author).
The paradox that becomes visible here – of
fighting ontology by means of new ontology – is
already visible in (especially the later) Levinas
himself. What happens when Levinas in Otherwise than Being
enters into the structure of the subject? His
conception of the subject as consisting of an
underlying layer which comes first and a later
following superlayer appears to me as an
ontological operation. Here Levinas comes near to
his own kind of dogmatics. We hear its echo in
Aasland (47) when he describes the subject in
Solveig (from Ibsen’s Peer Gynt) as
I-for-the-Other, a layer which is prior to her
self-centredness.
I know, my objection that critique of linguistic
constructions in its turn makes use of linguistic
constructions is not original (even if it is no
less true on that account). It is simply very
difficult in countering universalism, to not
reconstruct a different universalism. At some
places the author is explicit in embracing this
new universalism. I would suggest that we need to
restrain ourselves in calling things universal.
I may be too quick in perceiving them as such,
those theories and concepts that seem to hint at
general truths. For I fancy that I perceive them
even where Aasland says they are probably not
around. In this connection I single out one
passage towards the end of the book. The question
is asked whether business theories should be
considered as theories in the usual sense of the
word. Critical dialectic authors think they should
be when, for instance, they criticize the global
market economy, they, mostly tacitly, presuppose
that “business life is also based on some kind of
dogmatic ideas, theories and/or ideologies. The
apparent lack of effect of these attacks on common
business life and the global market economy,
however, may be caused by the possible fact that
business conduct is not based on any dogmatic
thought, nor any ideology – it may not even depend
on a theory” (87).
I do not share these doubts. In my view, at
business schools a lot of think-work is being
performed. I would go further and say that the
concepts created there have many features in
common with the conceptuality of critical
dialectics. They both work with theoretical
models, practice academic debate and examination,
and maybe most important, arouse a kind of
euphoric faith in their own thoughts and
theorising. Even a so limited set of theories,
consisting in ideas about deregulation, financial
innovations and riskinsurance models, turned out
to be able to mobilize a gigantic mass of
believers, from academics to ordinary people. That
the criticism of those ideas from any number of
right-minded people did not have any effect, does
not prove – as Aasland wants to say – that there
was no dogmatic thinking at the business schools.
Perhaps these fashionable ideas embody in an
outstanding way the blindness of thinking which
cleaves – according to Levinas: by definition – to
all theory, ideology and dogmatics.
From this perspective management science as well
as philosophy and ethics are just language games,
ideologies, ontologies. The relativization which
is implied in this observation may, I would
propose, lead us not to attach great value to any
idea – neither in management nor in philosophy.
Not even to the idea of the good or to a
Levinassian ethics. Any idea may grow rampant and
turn into ideology. The idea cannot replace the
experience: so it seems better to take continuing
ethical experiences as our point of departure.
This is what Aasland does when he presents the
idea of the good as an event, which appears now
and then, rather than as a concept, which always
has the character of something stable and
permanent. “It is an important observation that
this idea of the good does not always occur to the
subject, nor that it always arouses attempts to
find more just solutions” (83).
This view at the same time offers the opportunity
to conclude that the pragmatics, which Aasland
proposes (87) as a basis for business instead of
theory, could also be considered as the supporting
ground of critical dialectics. Namely: the
pragmatics of the interaction between people in
which sometimes for a moment somebody feels
responsible for somebody else.
Or is ‘supporting ground’ too much ontology
already?
Literature
R. Visker (2003) Is ethics fundamental? Questioning
Levinas on irresponsibility. In: Continental
Philosophy Review 36, 2003, pp.
263-302.
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