The Democratic Limits of the Ethical Turn: Myers’s Worldly Ethics

Ella Myers’s new and debut book offers a timely and most welcome invitation to democratic theorists to rethink two influential versions of the so-called “ethical turn” that has, for some time now, influenced much of the discussion in contemporary democratic theory—namely, Foucault’s ethics of self-care and Levinas’s ethics of care for the Other. Having lived through the Kantian moral constructivist approach inaugurated by the groundbreaking work of John Rawls, and then the strong initial critique that articulated itself in the form of communitarian virtue ethics, contemporary democratic theory came to eventually face a new and peculiar “ethical turn” effected by various critical democratic theorists (agonists, feminists, and post-structuralists) who were initially voicing strong opposition to an ethics-first approach to politics, whether in the guise of Kantian universalist deontology or Aristotelian virtue ethics. Inspired by Foucault’s and Levinas’s ethical writings, such contemporary democratic theorists—most notably, for Myers, William Connolly, Simon Critchley, and Judith Butler—have offered influential accounts of the relation between character (ethos) and democratic politics. Like the owl of Minerva that flies only at dusk, Myers departs from a critical and retrospective acknowledgment of this fact, if only to invite us then to rethink the same for the rest of her provocative book.

Importantly, she does not see this particular version of the turn to ethics in contemporary democratic theory as an inherent mistake. Quite the contrary, and rightly so, she thinks that conceptions of ethics are a necessary part of the theoretical battles over accounts of democratic agency (10). As a result, the book is positively committed to working out a new—arguably more political and more democratic—conception of ethics, what she calls “worldly ethics.” The crucial question, then, is not whether we should affirm the inquiry into the relation between ethics and democratic politics at all, but rather what type of ethics is the right one for “associative democracy,” understood as a commitment to contentious and collaborative action, taking place especially in the informal political public sphere, and always animated by a common worldly object that both brings together and separates democratic actors (11). The last part is especially crucial to Myers because it is the world, understood as “a home” and “an in-between,” that in her view seems to have been forgotten by the major protagonists of the contemporary ethical turn in democratic theory.

Myers defends this conception of ethics that puts care for the world at the center of attention by a serious engagement with theoretical adversaries and the world of actual emancipatory politics. She insists that while we should not shy away from theoretical debates over the right account of ethics for democratic politics, we would do well not to forget that such debates should not be severed from the lively political context where the battle for equality and autonomy is fought daily by admirable democratic activism. To this end, the book combines theoretical arguments with admirable and very illuminating discussions of the inspiring work of various contemporary political movements, such as No More Deaths, the Right to the City Movement, and Beacons Programs in NYC Public Schools. Taking seriously the “worldly thing” that both connects and divides us, Myers brings the world of political activism back in the discussion, instructively reinterpreting it in light of the shortcomings of her theoretical adversaries and the strengths of her own conception of democratic ethics.

Although more interested in their respective effective histories in contemporary democratic theory—via Connolly, Critchley, and Butler—than either Foucault’s or Levinas’s ethical theory per se, Myers nevertheless thinks that the democratic impasses of the ethical turn cannot be adequately addressed if we do not begin with their original accounts. To get to what she views as the political and democratic deficits of these two influential conceptions of ethics, Myers does not engage them from the perspective of philosophical metaethics, but rather from that...