Negative Ethics: Taking the Bad with the Good. An Introduction

• Published in: Homme 2022, Vol.3/4 (243/244), p.5-30
• Main Authors: Howland, Corinna, Davies, Tom Powell
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anglophones; Anthropology; Ethics; Morality; NEGATIVE ETHICS; Social action; Social life & customs; Social relations
• ISSN: 0439-4216; 1953-8103
• DOI: 10.4000/lhomme.43692

This special issue re-envisages the anthropology of ethics from the point of view of “the negative”. Anthropology often overlooks immorality in its study of ethics, privileging “the good” and people’s positive practices of self-cultivation. This elision reflects a broader tendency within the discipline towards viewing sociality as inherently positive or benign. What might moral life look like, we ask, if we begin our analyses with the study of wrongdoing, misconduct, social trespasses, and people’s anxieties about them? Attending to these negative aspects of social life highlights that there is a strong positional dimension to ethical evaluation: whether something appears good or bad is often a matter of perspective. A perspectival approach to moral life allows us to keep the bad and good in view simultaneously through the analysis of our interlocutors’ situated, reflexive use of ethical ideas as conceptual objects. Contrary to dominant disciplinary common sense, we argue that negative, immoral social action and evaluation does not undermine social life, but rather is generative of it: tempting people, provoking outrage, galvanising action, and prompting innovation around ethical conventions. We identify five patterns in how the negative sets social life in motion: as the foundation of sociality; as a focal point for social action; as failure/falling short; as illicit frisson; and as a frosty quality of relations. Returning to the Anglophone anthropological tendency to conceptualise the social as implicitly good, we suggest divesting such normativity through a strategic “misanthropology”. Approaching social relations from the perspective of our interlocutors’ distrust and moral anxieties about them allows us to re-envision human life in ways that take the bad with the good.