This topic had already been discussed long ago in The Second Assignment for the Special Topic on Life and Death in Ethics: On the Value of Life and Outline for the First Discussion in the Introduction to Philosophy of Technology, but those earlier discussions were tucked away inside two assignments, and perhaps not prominent enough. Since this issue is quite important for my own “system of thought,” I am putting together a special post on it.
I have not done any etymological detective work myself; I am simply going by Kingsoft PowerWord and a philosophical dictionary. The lineages of words like “value” and “right” are probably something like this: “to make … strong” — “to be worthy” — “to have value”; “to do (something) uprightly” — “to be proper” — “to have a right”; “to release” — “to be free” — “to have freedom.” It seems that the core concepts of ethics all went through a process of verb — adjective — noun evolution, and in modern ethics people are always fond of talking about “having …”: what rights do you have, what freedom do I have, what value does he have, and so on. I have already said that this has the effect of turning issues that originally depend on background and context into something independent and abstract.
Compare the following three expressions: “to make wood burn” — “wood is flammable” — “wood contains phlogiston.” Are these three statements equivalent? “To make wood burn” is a concrete action; the word “make” points to the environment in which this action takes place and to the presence of the person who lights the fire. Wood can be made to burn in air, but if you put it in water it will not burn. “Wood is flammable,” however, does not clearly indicate the background conditions on which wood’s burning must depend. In fact, wood can only be made to burn in certain environments (with oxygen), at certain temperatures, humidity levels, and pressures, and it also has to be ignited. The statement “wood is flammable” leaves out all of these presumed conditions. Omitting them is not wrong, but if one says it too often, there is obviously the danger that people will overlook and forget these background conditions. As for the phlogiston theory, it throws aside the background conditions on which combustion depends altogether, and attributes the possibility of burning to certain “stuff” supposedly contained in wood itself. Of course, history has shown the phlogiston theory to have failed. A similar evolution in ethics is in fact, knowingly or unknowingly, precisely an attempt to ignore background and contextual factors; this trend toward the “reification” of ethics is in the same line of descent as universalism, absolutism, essentialism, and instrumental rationalism.
The term “reification” is a makeshift borrowing from somewhere else (until I think of a better term), and although it has a different context from the reification spoken of in Western Marxism, in fact it shares common ground with mine. I am precisely accepting the West Marxist tradition’s emphasis on human subjectivity: ethics focuses on “things” and forgets “human beings.” Human subjectivity is an old, worn-out topic in this postmodern age, but this issue still deserves attention, or rather, it deserves even more urgent attention. If even “the human sciences” forget about “human beings,” then that would be truly terrible.
It can thus be seen that so-called “environmental ethics,” which discusses “the intrinsic value of nature,” “animal rights,” and so forth—these lines of thought I will not adopt. By the way, let me also mention that environmental ethics’ so-called “ethical expansionism,” which claims that ethics first expanded from being limited to the nobility to all men, and then further to Black people and women, and therefore should next expand to animals, plants, and even nature itself, is also a really superficial Hegelian reading of the history of ethics, and I certainly will not adopt that either.
February 17, 2008
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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