Geography and ethics III: Whither the next moral turn?

Abstract

The 20 years since geography’s ‘moral turn’ have generated a robust field of scholarship around diverse ethical engagements. However, as geographers continue to build articulate claims to care and justice in and beyond the academy, the role of ‘the moral’ has often been resigned to the margins of our theories and empirical work. In my third and final progress report on geography and ethics, I suggest that new approaches toward moral geographies and economies are already signaling directions for geography’s next moral turn. Some of these approaches use more traditional theoretical and empirical options to explain and raise challenges for confronting harmful moral projects endorsed by states. But other more critical and controversial shifts are also evident in the speculative ethics of post-humanism which destabilize and reassemble what we think we know about moral status and moral agency.

Keywords

care justice moral agency moral economy moral geography posthuman ethics

I Introduction

For my third report on ethics, I consider how conceptions of ‘the moral’ are changing, and how new theorizations may offer different ways of thinking about the relationship between the moral and the political. Moral philosophy has long been preoccupied with deciding which things deserve moral consideration and demand moral responsibility, and geography draws from some of these ideas to understand how ‘the moral’ operates in space, place, and politics. Though fundamental to the subfield, the construction and active consideration of morality – both theoretically and empirically – has tended to receive relatively less attention than ethical questions that are more overtly political in character. Justice, for instance, has been productively examined in intersection with theories of class (Hanafi, 2017), spatial inequality (Israel and Frenkel, 2017), and the ethics of care (Williams, 2017). There are new critical reflections on (in)justice (Barkan and Pulido, 2017; Barnett, 2016), and self-reflective scholarship about how we as scholars engage with place memory (Till and Kuusisto-Arponen, 2015) and our own institutions (Roy, 2016). In comparison to the urgency of this work, reflections on morality can appear problematically a-political. Yet as I complete this report, ‘the moral’ has landed squarely in the US political conscience and in the media: in responding to an assembly of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other alt-right groups that led to the death of a counter-protestor in Charlottesville, Virginia, and terror for citizens across the country, President Donald J. Trump has argued that the blame is shared equally by the counter-protestors. Across the political spectrum, commentators and activists have responded with condemnations of Trump’s broken ‘moral compass’, and with speculations that he either lacks empathy, harbors hate deep within his heart, or was raised by a racist and thus is likely to be one himself. Political pundits are now debating nightly whether or not our current political problems are also moral problems, ones that will require deep reflection and difficult solutions. Yet how we will address our moral problems, and whether we should accept that they are moral problems in the first place, is contested in our society and in our discipline.

My discussion focuses on geographies that explicitly deploy concepts of morality and its construction. Moral geographies are closely related to other ethical engagements in our discipline which extend theories of justice and care into diverse themes, including animals (Buller, 2016; Gillespie and Lawson, 2017), legal geographies (Delaney, 2016; Jeffery and Jakala, 2015), resources and agriculture (Herman, 2015; Moragues-Faus, 2017), environment and climate (Bailey, 2017; Edwards et al., 2016; Jackson and Palmer, 2015), race and diaspora (Ho et al., 2015; Pulido, 2016), health and biological sciences (Herrick, 2017; Lejano and Funderburg, 2016; Neimark and Vermeylen, 2017), and youth and childhood (Cheng, 2016; Kallio and Bartos, 2017), and have continued to extend into new areas (Griffiths, 2017; Kershaw et al, 2014; Lake, 2014), alongside calls to clarify ideological commitments in practice (Tolia-Kelly, 2016; Mullings et al., 2016; Radcliffe, 2017). With so much to show in the two decades following Smith’s (1997) questioning of a moral turn, however, it is not clear where the next turn will take us. Barnett (2016: 112) notes that ‘Geography is a resolutely moralist discipline, and yet geographers remain rather averse to spending much time on normative questions about whether and how and why observable patterns of inequity, discrimination, or unevenness are actually unjust’. My aim is to show how old and new ways of thinking through moral geographies are beginning to answer these questions, while also extending our explanatory and normative analyses along less-travelled paths that bring together the moral and the political in challenging and often ambivalent ways. I begin by reviewing select work on moral geographies and economies, and then turn to post-human ethics to consider emerging issues surrounding moral status and agency.

II Moral geographies and economies

Moral geographies and moral economies continue to generate important insights into the role of space in processes of inclusion and exclusion, or ‘the relationship between the geographical ordering of the world and ideas about what is good, right and true’ (Cresswell, 2007: 132). Some scholars embrace a normative approach toward these geographies (Olson and Sayer, 2009), evaluating how a particular geography influences flourishing or suffering. Other approaches are largely explanatory, describing and analyzing the mores that shape arrangements of people, places and things when certain normative judgements become institutionalized or enforced. Frequently, work in moral geographies and moral economies are both explanatory and normative and thus address how certain configurations contribute to justice, hinder care, or secure flourishing. By focusing on the ways that morality and space structure experiences of individuals and groups in the everyday, moral geographies also signal changes in our political, social, and cultural institutions. Here I turn to emerging moral geographies and economies in relation to religion and to moral projects of the state, two areas where geographers have been particularly attentive to the intersections – but distinctiveness – of the moral and the political.

Research on the construction of the modern (moral) state in relation to moral geographies of the religious or pious subject has provided a counterbalance to hegemonic depictions of religious ‘others’ in both contemporary and historical contexts, with a notable emphasis on the interplay between space, exclusion, and religious morality through the embodied experiences of religious individuals and groups. Gökariksel and Secor (2017), in their exploration of devout male Muslim masculinity, find that both urban areas and Islam are transformed through interpretations of piety across space. Men’s experiences of the cities of Konya and Istanbul are shaped not only by their internal interpretations of piety, but also by uneven enforcement of certain norms in different parts of each city. The characteristics of a pious Muslim man, and the embodied expressions of that piety (walking with men or women, piercings), also differ across space. These ‘coordinates of masculinity’ (Gökariksel and Secor, 2017: 398) function as a means of interpreting the moral landscape of the city, and acknowledging the differences between public and religious morality. Other analyses, such as Es’ (2016) study of Turkish-Dutch mosques, point to the importance of religious places in intergenerational moral subject formation, particularly in the education and moral development of Muslim youth growing up in non-Muslim majority countries. Mills (2016) offers an historical insight into intergenerational morality through her study of Jewish Lads’ Brigade and Club (JLB & C) in Manchester, England, following the Second World War. Attitudes around interfaith mixing at the JLB & C provided opportunities to raise questions about Anglo-Jewish attitudes toward faith and intermarriage that could not be raised with parents or religious leaders. It also both shaped and reflected anxiety over the place of Jewish communities in the future of Britain. While contributing distinctive perspectives on the negotiation of social exclusion over time and space, religious moral geographies thus complement other work on children and families (Hall, 2016; Mele, 2017; Moosa-Mitha, 2016; Turner and Almack, 2017) and intersectionality of sexuality, gender, and ethnicity/race (Hubbard et al., 2017; Isoke, 2014; Maginn and Ellison, 2017; Prior and Gorman-Murray, 2014).

Insights into the moral geographies of religion also speak to a broader body of work on the moral projects of modern states. With anti-globalization protests closing the 20th century and the Occupy movement welcoming the 21st, claims to public space are both a technique for contesting state moral projects, and a goal or endpoint that is viewed as essential for combatting repressive moral projects of states. The spaces of moral geographies of protest and resistance are often created through a networking of virtual and material technologies. Erol’s (2018) engagement with blogs written by queer activists at the Gezi Park protests of 2013 and Jackson and Valentine’s (2014) analysis of digitally-mediated discussions about abortion are reminders that protests ‘on the ground’ are also virtual. The materiality of protest or resistance in the form of tent-cities, bodies marching, pussy-hats, Nazi symbols, and even cyber-disruption (hacking) are used to interrupt and confront state-sponsored moral projects, including white supremacy (e.g. Inwood and Bonds, 2016). Though through these mobilizations they often create the impression of coherence and coordination, they too belie an internally-variegated moral geography. For example, Gökariksel and Smith (2017) explain that the women’s movement against Trumpism is crucial to confronting emerging moral projects enhancing gender and sexual discrimination, but is also ambivalent in its struggle to adequately account for intersections of class and race in its articulations of feminist ethics. Protest and resistance also emerge slowly in everyday spaces that are shot through with the moral projects of the state, such as in the workplace (Rogaly and Quershi, 2017). Indeed, one of the challenges in an era of media-worthy protest and resistance will be to account for the quieter, slower, or hidden resistance to state moral projects that are evident in smaller-scale, local experiments such as refugee befriending schemes and climate resilience workshops (Askins, 2016; Ryan, 2016). These works do not reanimate ‘the local’ as the site of moral platitude, but rather as a place where proximity between people of different nationalities or vested interests provides a different kind of engagement. Everyday and intimate encounters can also be important mechanisms for enforcing moral projects of the state that excuse and incite prejudice (Valentine and Harris, 2014), perhaps especially in hybrid spaces such as schools and airports where self-appointed and official agents of the state vigorously enact moral projects of exclusion toward religious and racialized others (Hopkins et al., 2017).

The proposition that we are living in, through, and with ethically-compromised states features heavily in contemporary moral economies, where governance is often seen as protecting capital and economic value over values such as care, justice, equality, or dignity. This is evident from the scale of the individual to that of the global economy, as when the protection of capital accumulation for the rich is institutionalized through the structuring of financialization features including normalized practices like usury (Sayer, 2015). State institutions protect the property of people or corporations with capital, while restricting the ability of others – the undomiciled (Langegger, 2016), Native people (Robertson, 2015) – to make legal or moral claims to property. Global, systematic attempts to sensitize the economy to fairness for producers can lack both moral and political recognition of producers as compared to consumers (Wilson and Jackson, 2016). These global efforts, which often carry their own trademarked brand, produce new geographic imaginaries that integrate consumption with moral sensibility. In research on cause-related marketing (Hawkins, 2015) and Fair Trade market creation in the Global South (Doherty et al., 2015), economic exchange also reinforced new forms of nationalism. States also shape and are shaped by how moral dimensions of the economy become formalized in policies or adjudications. Gregson and Crang’s (2017) analysis demonstrates that even illegal and illicit activities can be accepted and protected by states – through anemic enforcement, lack of oversight, or weak policies – as necessary for ‘doing business’. These global networks and relationships of cultural capitalism take on different characteristics when examined at the scale of the neighborhood. For example, in the everyday informal marketing of crafts in Cape Town, producers and consumers must negotiate more than a desire to sell or purchase in a context where it is perhaps more evident that ‘all consumption practices have a moral dimension’ (Daya, 2016: 128).

Our accounts of moral geographies and moral economies suggest that geographers have long seen political problems as moral problems, particularly as democratic institutions struggle to demonstrate the capacities or commitments to care, justice, or dignity. Even when moral projects of states appear to align with ethical commitments to care or justice, they can be shaped in ways that produce harmful restrictions and exclusions. Mitchell’s (2017) genealogy of humanitarianism for the education of black populations in the US illustrates that moral projects of care can also be integral to imperialist projects (see also Cuttitta, 2018). Assessing the harms that emerge from moral projects therefore requires determining, and making viable claims about, what has been harmed and who is responsible for those harms. In the next section, I shift toward discussions of moral status and agency in order to explain their sometimes unacknowledged role in our analyses, and to raise questions about how new post-human ethics and its critiques might indicate new turns in moral geographies.

III Moral status and moral agency: The next moral turn?

‘Why am I not a box?’

My seven-year-old asked me this question, seemingly unprompted, walking between places on a scorching summer day. I offered some distracted explanations, each one received with growing impatience, while searching for my keys. After telling me that I didn’t understand her question, she elaborated this way: ‘There’s my brain. But there is something else separate from my brain. A box has its parts too, like my brain. And other things control my brain, not just me. So what makes me not a box?’

Most moral philosophers would characterize this exchange as a demonstration of elevated consciousness, thus placing my daughter high on a spectrum of things that demand moral consideration. Self-awareness is just one starting-point for considerations of moral status, or whether something – human, slug, soil, climate – is capable of being wronged (McMahan, 2002; Ekeli and Gamlund, 2011). Debates about moral status revolve around identifying and appraising the categories that determine where a thing sits on a spectrum from ‘full moral status’ to none at all. The enslavement and killing of African people over a period of 400 years is an example of denying full moral status to large groups. To deny personhood to the extent justified in slavery, African people and their decedents had to be produced through laws, symbols, and everyday interactions as not suffering in the same way as whites, and possessing diminished capacity to possess moral thought and reason (Hartman, 1997; see also Gombay, 2015). In this example, it is the denial of both full moral status and moral agency which produce harm. These are related but distinct, for though moral status can be based on features of agency, such as Sebo’s (2017) inclusion of non-human animals as perceptual agents, moral agency suggests a responsibilization of a thing, thus acknowledging its capacity to be moral (Arpaly, 2002). Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, and Piaget would each provide different reasons justifying my daughter’s elevated moral status, but all would caution that at the age of seven her agency may be different from the mature agency possessed by some – but not all – adults. It is because of moral agency that a court of law might, in fact, treat her more like a box than like an adult human if she commits a crime.

These examples illustrate how the institutionalization of ethics relies upon the assignment of moral status and moral agency to groups or individuals, and how moral status and agency differently shape, and are differently shaped by, politics. Children are instructive for delving a bit deeper into the difference between moral status and moral agency. Assessments about children’s moral status and agency are evident in laws related to child protection, and the age at which she can vote, drive a car, leave school, or be incarcerated. However, these age boundaries vary across time and space depending on social constructions of childhood in given places (Holloway and Valentine, 2005), and its intersection with characteristics including race, gender, religion, and class. Denying children the moral agency assigned to most adults can have a protective effect, such as when it designates special courts for dealing with children who lack experience and neurological capacity to assess their actions in the same way that an adult is expected to do. It can also be harmful if assumptions about inferior moral agency undermine recognition of already existing moral responsibilization, as in the case of children who are caregivers (Olson, 2017; Wihstutz, 2011). Denying moral agency is one approach toward denying personhood, and it is related to but distinct from the subjectivity produced through citizenship or other forms of cultural ‘capital’ (Valverde, 1994). Scholars such as Mullin (2007) offer more nuanced readings into moral status and agency, granting local autonomy in some areas of life that allow for recognition of moral agency, while acknowledging a lack of experience or information to make moral decisions in others. These ideas of moral status and moral agency work not just in formalized ethics, but also as symbols of moral reliability or inferiority.

Returning to the case of Trump’s broken moral compass, the frequent references to his juvenile or childlike moral reasoning illustrates the normalization of children as one important cultural cipher of degraded moral agency (Frankel, 2012). As Jessica Valenti (2017) wrote in The Guardian newspaper, ‘It’s not a great week when you wish the president of the United States had the moral compass of a six-year-old.’ The statement, written before the events in Charlottesville, inverts what we have come to expect about the relationship between life experience and our moral agency (e.g. Tiboris, 2014). Having now gained this new life experience ourselves, we might be inclined in the future to refer to Trump’s failure of moral agency when challenging the reliability of age for anticipating or judging the capacity for exercise of moral agency (e.g. Frankel, 2012; see also Rooney, 2016).

Moral status and moral agency are not phrases commonly used in geographic writing, but they are evident in all of our scholarship, most notably in debates that draw upon post-humanism and post-human ethics. In animal geographies and associated subfields, the concepts of moral status and the agency of things are used to challenge existing formal and informal human ethics that dictate how non-human animals live and die (see Buller, 2016). Like humans, animals are assigned differentiated moral status based on their perceived characteristics – species stereotypes and behaviors seen through an anthropomorphic lens (Carter and Palmer, 2017; Shapiro, 2006) – or based on their relationships with humans (Doubleday, 2017). Across animal geographies, several different theoretical influences are mobilized to shift from traditional definitions of moral status toward a relational view, including but not limited to relational materialism (Clark, 2011), material feminism (Gaard, 2011), and ethics of care (Fox, 2006). There is a notable emphasis on revealing hidden or normalized ontological and epistemological boundaries, such as the boundary ‘circle’ that distinguishes humans from things such as marine plastic (Mitchell, 2015).

Reconsidering how space and boundaries are constructed in ways that support human exceptionalism are important starting-points for new interpretations of moral and ethical status (see Neo and Ngiam, 2014), and the mechanisms for making previously obscured relationships visible between, for instance, bears, humans and the military (Forsyth, 2017). By understanding non-humans as co-constituents of space (Carter and Palmer, 2017) and allowing for intimate recognition through communion and communication (Adams, 2015), human agency is reframed as emergent and conditional rather than innate or thing-specific. As one agent amongst many others, humans’ moral status is reconsidered, though there remains a strong evidence of bias toward life qualities when ethical concerns turn toward appraising how animals (now including humans) should be treated (see Singer, 1981).

Proposing changes to the moral status of non-humans by recognizing them as acting agents in relationships of moral concern is very different from challenging the centrality of humans in moral agency. To expand the purview of moral agency to non-humans would mean altering the requirement that moral agents must be able to reason and evidence reasoning, even if the quality of that reasoning is fallible or deemed immature, and there are two theoretical trajectories in post-human ethics that are disruptive to many of the current human-centric assumptions underpinning much of existing moral geography. The first trajectory uses and transforms human-centric moral elements – things such as responsibility or care – by identifying harmful exclusions of things from that element. This is similar to the approach taken in animal geographies to challenge moral status, but goes further by taking moral actions considered to be characteristic of humans and considering when and where nonhuman things exhibit similar functions. In her ongoing work on ethics of care and human/scientific relations with soil, de la Bellacasa (2017) takes a speculative ethics position that emphasizes the experimental character of examining more-than-human care agencies. To do this, she acknowledges the challenges faced in understanding a community that lives and dies on a non-linear schedule, and suspends the requirement of intentionality for identifying a moral agency related to care. Though she acknowledges that this move might leave her ethics open to charges of anthropomorphism, the role of intentionality has also been reexamined in humanist ethics (Arpaly, 2002), and – given that many humans were and are denied moral agency due to characteristics perceived by powerful others – it could be argued that this kind of speculative ethics could guard against denying forms of moral agency.

For Simonsen (2013: 23), who views agency as ‘emerging contingently within an interworld of material and meaningful flesh’, it is less clear how moral agency emerges or is destroyed through this epistemological opening. This gestures to the second trajectory in post-human ethics, which rejects moral characteristics that are generally associated with the human, or rejects the usefulness of the moral for explaining or understanding the world from a post-human perspective. Hynes’ (2016: 28–9) proposition of a post-human approach toward indifference pivots around the observation that ‘“nature” is nothing but a differentiating force’. She suggests that the analysis of an episode of racial harassment, judged from a moral perspective as the bystander effect, might therefore be less concerned about the rightness and wrongness of inaction, and instead be more attentive to the range of forces that produce that event, its openness and plurality of possibilities. Simandan’s (2017: 4) non-representational proposition for demonic geographies offers a slightly different approach, stripping humans of the deceit of the soul and replacing it with a fully materialistic form of agency for a ‘disenchanted anti-humanist view of meaning-making’. In both of these trajectories, affect and nonrepresentational theory plays a central role for allowing new posthuman engagements and opening space for new relational understandings. When complemented by concepts of justice or care, they also point toward new responsibilities, or an understanding of responsibilities as also emergent from shared space, and therefore not things that can be individualized in the form of human moral agency.

There are considerable critiques of the formulation and the consequences of post-human ethics, most notably from scholarship in post-colonialism and critical race and gender studies. Sundberg (2014) cautions that post-humanism reproduces Eurocentric theories and methodologies, and has a tendency to under-examine or simply ignore its reliance upon the inferiority of humans deemed ‘other’ (than white, educated, modern). In her discussion of scholarship that is taking on this challenge of expanding post-humanism’s theoretical bias, Jackson (2013) asks what it would look like to collapse the categorical distinctions between critical theory/philosophy and non-Western cosmology (see also Banerji and Paranjape, 2016). The answer, she argues, is not to elevate the moral status of previously marginalized things or people, but instead to work deliberately through the vestiges of Enlightenment-inspired liberal humanism. This entails an engagement with blackness rather than a move beyond it, which she views as deeply problematic:

…one cannot help but sense that there is something else amiss in the call to move ‘beyond the human’: a refusal afoot that could be described as an attempt to move beyond race, and in particular blackness, a subject that I argue cannot be escaped but only disavowed or dissimulated in prevailing articulations of movement ‘beyond the human.’ […] the resounding silence in the post-humanist, object-oriented, and new materialist literatures with respect to race is remarkable, persisting even despite the reach of antiblackness into the nonhuman – as blackness conditions and constitutes the very nonhuman disruption and/or displacement they invite. (Jackson, 2015: 216, emphasis in original)

To animate and clarify how I interpret Jackson’s critique, I offer a very brief narrative construction of chimera, or tissues that contain two different sets of DNA. Chimera can be hybrid in multiple ways, human and non-human, natural and technological, and when part-human, complicate the biological claims for the special status of humans (DeGrazia, 2007). They exist as material, rather than just theoretical, things because of the life and death of Henrietta Lacks. Her cancer cells, given the name HeLa by the scientist who harvested them from her ill body, were the first cells to survive culture and reproduction seemingly without dying. Their life was possible for many reasons, but their origins begin with Mrs. Lacks being denied the ability to consent to the culturing of her cancer cells. Techniques and technologies – laboratories, shipping containers, special environments, vaccines – were developed in order to keep her cells alive, transport them, send them into space, and transform them into ‘human-mice’ chimera (Pluchino et al., 2016).

The role of blackness can’t be separated from the nonhuman, because the non-human would not have existed without blackness and the many legal, cultural, social, and political institutions that lead to it. Furthermore, accounting for blackness requires retaining the moral in our ethics. Without the moral, it would be less essential to include in this narrative, or analyze in our theories, the moment when Mrs. Lacks was assigned a moral status (i.e. the right to be treated, though not like white or wealthy patients) and denied her moral agency (i.e. the ability to consent), and then to speculate how this might change understandings of responsibility. It might be that post-human ethics will not lead toward evacuating or abandoning the moral, but instead toward a more robust engagement that can better take account of times and spaces that we still struggle to incorporate into frameworks of responsibility. This may require treating moral agency as a source of power that becomes enacted through institutions such as the state, and as a way that humans use to think about things such as justice, care, and responsibility.

IV Conclusion

In this report, I’ve reviewed how moral geographies and economies offer both explanatory value and normative reflection upon dimensions of exclusion and justice that are too frequently conflated with analyses of culture or politics. I’ve also drawn together scholarship that critiques the presumptions of moral status and agency, and I hope that I have made an introductory case for understanding these not as abstract constructions of moral philosophy, but as essential considerations to speculating about new ethics. Asking why and how moral agency and moral status are defined and enacted can help us better understand and explain things such as inequality or unnecessary suffering. Rethinking questions regarding moral status also makes us aware of the complexity of the embodiment of morality and the scope of relevant questions that might be asked. Moral geographies has long attended to the assignment of moral authority and moral subjectivity, but attentiveness to the political effects of these configurations could also could help us both explain and critique harm or flourishing that result from their denial. Nonetheless, these kinds of ventures into speculative ethics in post-humanism will need to be more responsive to the trap of ‘thin post-humanist politics’ (Tolia-Kelly, 2016: 372), and I’ve suggested that this might be partly accomplished if geographers consider a more meaningful engagement with theories of moral status and moral agency in support of our political dedications.

Finally, I would like to end my three reports with an encouragement for geographers to develop more avenues for interdisciplinary contributions to ethics and moral philosophy. It is instructive that Flanagan’s (2016) The Geography of Morals, though an admirable critique of the (Western white) parochialism of most ethics, doesn’t mention a geographer and only refers to geography once in the introduction. As I’ve argued in my previous reviews, geographers bring different perspectives to the moral philosophy table, including theories and vocabularies that facilitate robust analyses of space. We have produced diverse, rich insights on ethics since the moral turn (Smith, 1997). It shouldn’t take us 20 more years to convince moral philosophers and ethicists that space is not inert, and geography is more than a metaphor.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Noel Castree for his support, to Mark Ortiz and Callan Baruch for compelling conversations, and to Arabelle Baruch for asking impossible questions.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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