How Society Changes: Sociological Enlightenment and a Theory of Social Evolution for Freedom

This article clarifies the relationship between individual freedom and social order by relying on Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory and thereby defines sociology’s contribution to social evolution as sociological enlightenment, which seeks otherwiseness in living experience and action. For this purpose, Luhmann’s theory will specifically be compared with Emile Durkheim’s and Alfred Schutz’s sociological theories. Durkheim, a “child of the Enlightenment,” considered freedom a collective ideal of moral individualism and conceived that the rational state realizes freedom by spreading the civil-religious human ideal for modern social order. In contrast, Schutz, following Henri Bergson, who criticized rationality for spatially fixing inner time, regarded freedom as a given in the individual’s underlying duration, not as a shared ideal. Yet, unlike Bergson, he continued relying on rationalism, and he thought that the sociological observer observes how something appears to people with the epoché of natural attitude, not what it objectively is. Inheriting this phenomenological subjectivism, Luhmann showed that the self-referentiality of consciousness also applies to society: A social system, which path-dependently emerges itself from a double contingency, observes the world in its own way based on its self-referentially constituted eigen-time. On account of this system closure, and contrary to Durkheim’s illuminist belief, there is no controlling entity in a highly evolved society, where freedom results from the enlarged, diversified possibilities of living experience and action (contingency). Thus, sociological enlightenment doubts self-evidence so that society brackets the taken-for-granted social order or social reality and amplifies individuals’ deviations to evolve toward freedom.

How to Recognize Animals’ Vulnerability: Questioning the Orthodoxies of Moral Individualism and Relationalism in Animal Ethics

Keywords: moral individualism; relationalism; vulnerability; recognizability; immanent critique

An Alternative to the Orthodoxy in Animal Ethics? Limits and Merits of the Wittgensteinian Critique of Moral Individualism

In this paper, we analyse the Wittgensteinian critique of the orthodoxy in animal ethics that has been championed by Cora Diamond and Alice Crary. While Crary frames it as a critique of “moral individualism”, we show that their criticism applies most prominently to certain forms of moral individualism (namely, those that follow hedonistic or preference-satisfaction axiologies), and not to moral individualism in itself. Indeed, there is a concrete sense in which the moral individualistic stance cannot be escaped, and we believe that it is this particular limitation that justified Crary’s later move to a qualified version of moral individualism. At the same time, we also argue that there are significant merits to the Wittgensteinian critique of moral individualism, which pertain to its attack on the rationalism, naturalism, and reductionism that characterise orthodox approaches to animal ethics. We show that there is much of value in the Wittgensteinians’ call for an ethics that is more human; an ethics that fully embraces the capacities we are endowed with and one that pays heed to the richness and complexity of our moral lives.

Cognitive Disability and Moral Status

This chapter provides a roadmap of ongoing conversations about cognitive disability and moral status. Its aim is to highlight the political stakes of these conversations for advocates for the cognitively disabled while at the same time bringing out how a fundamental point of divergence within the conversations has to do with what count as appropriate methods of ethics. The main divide is between thinkers who take ethical neutrality to be a regulative ideal for doing empirical justice to the lives of people with cognitive disabilities and those who reject this methodological precept as unduly restrictive. What results is a debate between, on the one hand, fans of various familiar forms of moral individualism and Kantian approaches in ethics and, on the other, a range of disability scholars and activists who implicitly or explicitly make use of philosophically more radical methods.