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 in responsible politics. (shrink)

Many political theorists assume that Kant's categorical imperative can only present itself to politics epistemologically—that is, as a test or procedure for acquiring more certain knowledge of duties. This study retrieves the ontological aspect of the categorical imperative by showing that the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals is a conversion narrative. In the Groundwork Kant describes a transformative encounter with the categorical imperative as a principle that discloses our ontological condition. This encounter opens a new mode of being characterized (...) by the feeling of awe. In its ontological aspect, the categorical imperative discloses human freedom and demands an unflagging thoughtfulness, but offers no material guidance about duties. When understood in both its ontological and epistemological aspects, the categorical imperative offers a rich portrait of human responsibility and can help illuminate the ethical stance appropriate to politics without becoming a standard to be imposed upon politics. (shrink)

Political commentators claim that the rule of law relies, in part, on those bound by law having a sense of shame. I elucidate shame’s underlying structure and its role in law’s rule through a study of aidōs in Plato’s Laws and Phaedrus. The Greek aidōs names a feeling in which one pulls back from violating a limit. It signifies shame, but also reverence, awe, and modesty. I argue that aidōs is an affect in which we pause before limits and are (...) invited to a perception of the whole, whether it be our lives or the polity or the cosmos, which animates and is constituted by those limits. I then identify an implicit sense of aidōs in the Laws: reverence for the law-bound polity as a fragile whole. Such reverence shares shame’s bare structure, but offers affective support for law’s rule that is less vulnerable to shame’s moralizing and exclusionary effects. (shrink)