Review - Gay Hawkins, Ethics of Waste

8/11/2019 Review - Gay Hawkins, Ethics of Waste

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The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/513574.

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guided this ambitious expedition to success. But instead Fried chose a contraryapproach, leaving his argument stranded in desperate and biting conditions.

Lucas Swaine

Dartmouth College

Hawkins, Gay.The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish.Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Pp. xii154. $69.00 (cloth); $23.95(paper).

Gay Hawkinss book will present a challenge to readers who, like myself, arenot particularly well versed in poststructuralist cultural studies. Although theconventions of that discourse often make for a frustrating experience with the

book, there is undoubtedly value to be found in the encounter with the disci-plinary other. Not least is the value in bringing into fuller awareness ones basicunderstanding of what ethics is; confronting a radically different conception ofethics can alert one to limitations in ones own view, or increase ones confidencein the fundamental intuitions on which ones view is based. This is not at all tosay that Hawkins has little of interest to say about the subject of waste. But, onbalance, what is most interesting about her book is what she says about thesubject of ethics.

The provocative quality of Hawkinss approach can be seen in her bookstitle, in particular, the specification of ethics implied by the subtitle. The ethicalaspect of waste, she suggests, is in our relation to stuffto the material we discardas rubbish. Now I dont take it to be especially controversial that ethics has todo with relations, though Hawkins intimates that a focus on relations is part ofwhat distinguishes her (poststructuralist inspired) outlook from the more or-

dinary understanding of ethics as a matter of principles or rules. What doesstrike me as controversial, to say the least, is the notion that our relations tothings as things has ethical significance. Obviously, our relations with things spillover into (or just are) relations with people; these are the paradigms of theethically significant. And of course it is not simply relations with people that areethically significant; concern for animals (and even inorganic natural systems)has prompted debate in conventional ethics (at least the kind studied in phi-losophy departments) about the extension of moral standing beyond humanbeings. But it does seem to me that the basic Kantian intuition that there is adecisive ethical difference between people and things lies very close to the coreof the conventional ethical view. The most fundamental way of grasping whatit means to treat (i.e., relate to) a person immorally is to see that it involvestreating (i.e., relating to) him or her as if he or she were a thing. For, of course,in so doing we would deny in him or her the desideratum of ethical status, the

capacity for agency.A provocation in Hawkinss book, therefore, is that it insists on the notion

that things have agency, in virtue of which they make a claim on us to enterrelations with them. The things whose agency she seeks to highlight are thosethat have been discarded. Waste makes claims on us. Reducing waste is notsimply a matter of the moral reform of the human. It is also about acknowledging

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that waste has a kind of agency; that it shares in some of the agency we ascribeonly to ourselves (85). The failure to acknowledge agency in things is part ofa more generalized disenchantment by which human beings are alienatedfrom the natural world, having lost their connection to the physical environmenton which their very survival depends (8). Entering into a relation with thematerial stuff of rubbish can promote a reenchantment and can serve as thefirst step toward an alternative (and presumably preferable) ethics of waste inwhich the claims waste actively makes on us are indeed fully acknowledged, and,in an ethical sense, fully integrated into our lives.

In my view it is not worthwhile to approach claims like these with an eyeto establishing their truth or falsity. My own intuition, that very little is accom-plished by bridging the moral chasm between people and things, remains un-disturbed by a careful reading of Hawkinss discussion. Nonetheless, it is worth-while to examine the alternative ethics of waste that Hawkins envisions, since it

contains some valuable elements which can be detached from the thing theoryshe invokes on its behalf.

What then is Hawkinss general view of ethics? Hawkins contrasts ethicswith morality, which she characterizes as a code of imperatives. Morality, shesuggests, inevitably turns into moralizing and prompts resentment and resistancein response. Ethics, on the other hand, is particularized rather than universaland is rooted in relationships rather than constituted by commands. Hawkinsbroadly follows Foucault and Deleuze in holding that ethics revolve aroundembodied practices and micropolitics of the self (15). Thus, in speaking ofethics generally she refers to the cultivation of an identity for oneself in termsof a set of norms through the activities of daily life. However, the activities ofdaily life can be categorized. Particular categories of activities are thus particularethical domains, to be understood in terms of the particularized practices foundthere. Thus, when Hawkins cites the ethics of waste in her title she does not

mean to apply a universal ethical standard to the question of wastebut ratherto identify the ways in which our practices of classifying and then disposing ofcertain materials as waste contribute to our self-maintenance. The ethics ofwaste should thus be understood as an ethic: it is an aspect of life picked outfrom among others through attention to the relevant activities.

This outlook undoubtedly yields some interesting insights. For example,Hawkins observes that the eminently private activity of going to the bathroomis made possible by a massive public structurethe sewage systemof whichones own toilet is a single node (56). It is no doubt true that, for members ofindustrialized societies which have systems of indoor plumbing, the sense ofdecency (which as thinkers from Adam Smith on have recognized as a conditionof membership in society) involves the kind of cleanliness that access to a bath-room facilitates. There is, therefore, plenty of room for detailed examinationof how that intimate aspect of peoples sense of self has a historyand haschanged

in response to external developments.For Hawkins, the range of practices associated with the bathroom thus

constitute an ethic: they have to do with our conformity to norms. But she iscritical of the conventional ethics of the bathroom she describes; she celebratesefforts to bring forth a revised ethics in this domain. Her critical stance ispuzzling, however: what is the status of the grounds of her critique? She refers



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in broad ways to the unsustainability of the profligate use of water that modernbathrooms encourage. But because her conception of ethics is, finally, descriptiverather than normative (granting that it involves descriptions of norms), andbecause she has disparaged universalistic moral imperatives, it is hard to un-derstand the source of her critiques ethical or moral force. Her repeated ref-erences to the prospect of new or alternative ethics of waste, not just regardingthe bathroom but across domains of life, display her belief that they would bebetter in some way than the conventional ethics they would replace. But I donot see how her conception of ethics gives her the resources for that kind ofevaluation.

Nonetheless, the cultural studies approach that Hawkins pursues does ad-dress something to which more conventional ethical approaches give short shrift:the psychological mechanisms underlying collective action. Examples of wastemanagement are prime examples of collective action problems, and concepts

in the field of collective action such as the tragedy of the commons and thenotion of externalities are ready to hand to articulate our ethical intuitions.These conceptual tools are standardly deployed to justify public institutionsdesigned to manage waste. But, as Hawkins observes, the presence of advertisingcampaigns and even regulations designed to increase participation in a publicprogram by no means guarantees compliance. In particular, standard moralappeals run the risk that they come off as moralizing, generating resentmentand lessening compliance, as her example of opposition to mandates for low-flow toilets (60) demonstrates. But for collective action programs to succeedthey must incorporate a nuanced understanding of how the norms they seekto instill can in fact be internalized, given the complex psychological resistancethey are likely to face. Although the details of Hawkinss account of responsesto recycling programs in chapter 5 were not entirely persuasive to me, her focuson the individualized experience of waste management practices (what she calls

their micro-politics) exemplifies a way to enrich our understanding of collec-tive action. Collective action occurs within the matrix of culture; the motivationsof the individuals who act collectively are shaped by that matrix. To the extentthat collective action theory gives shape to an outlook on ethics it ought to beopen to the contributions of cultural studies.

I began by suggesting that Hawkinss book is most interesting as an en-gagement with ethics generallyrather than as an account of the ethics of wastein particular. I will conclude with a comment on the books limitation regardingthat particular subject. As a feature, I take it, of her engagement with poststruc-turalist theory, Hawkins emphasizes the body, and materiality in general. Thus,as we noted above, waste for her means stuff. But a more salient connotationof the term, and one that I take to have equal if not greater ethical significance,does not tie the concept of waste to material: we speak readily and withnormativeforce about wasting energy, wasting time, wasting opportunities. Thus, to focus

on waste as stuff, while obviously important, seems not to engage the full rangeof ethically relevant cases of waste. A complete treatment of the subject mightperhaps look at waste in less material and more functional terms. An obvioustouchstone for such an approach is Lockes theory of property, in which theconcept of waste plays an essential role. Locke does define waste in terms offunction: something is wasted if it does not fulfill its divinely appointed role of



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contributing to human well-being. In Lockes argument that property is a naturalright (in chap. 5 of the Second Treatise of Government), the prohibition on wasteserves to justify the accumulation of imperishable goods, that is, capital. Further,propertyless people are implicitly condemned for having, in effect, wasted theirtime and labor power by not producing goods. Waste, that is, is a central ethicalcategory for Locke. Given Hawkinss interest in the concept of value, which sheconsiders throughout the book, it was surprising that she did not address Lockestheory.

Zev M. Trachtenberg

University of Oklahoma

Nadler, Steven. Spinozas Ethics: An Introduction.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xvii281. $28.99 (paper).

Steven Nadlers new bookSpinozas Ethics: An Introductionis an excellentguide to Spinozas magnum opus and a substantial contribution to Spinozascholarship. This is precisely the kind of book that Spinoza scholarship in Englishhas needed for a very long time. Spinoza scholars looking for a clear, compre-hensive, and up-to-date introduction to theEthicshave had to settle for second-best solutions. Henry AllisonsBenedict de Spinoza: An Introduction(New Haven,CT: Yale University Press, 1987) and Frederick Pollocks Spinoza: His Life andPhilosophy(1899; reissued by American Scholar Publications, New York, 1966)are quite helpful, but both are out of date and out of print. The field of Spinozascholarship has changed dramatically over the past thirty to forty years, changesthat were largely instigated by the publication of Edwin Curleys groundbreakingwork Spinozas Metaphysics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).

These developments have partly reflected deep changes in the face of Anglo-American philosophy (particularly, the emergence of a new openness to thehistory of philosophy, even when philosophers of the past advocated positionscounter to common sensewhatever common sense means) and in partformed a critical reaction to the enormous interest in Spinoza that emerged inEuropeprimarily France, Italy, and Spainin the last quarter of the twentiethcentury.

Nadler rightly characterizes the Ethicsas an extraordinarily difficult book.. . . To the modern reader its mode of presentation will seem opaque, its vo-cabulary strange, and its themes extremely complicated, even impenetrable (x).Indeed, the Ethicsis a dense text. It appears short, but were its demonstrationsto be explicated it would spread over a fair number of volumes. The Ethicsis aconceptual labyrinth, and Nadlers guide to this labyrinth is very helpful. Hiseloquent style, clear presentation, excellent mapping of problems and possible

solutions, and impressive command of Spinozas early texts and correspondenceresult in one of the best introductions to a key philosophical text. His successin providing such an introduction in no more than 280 pages is really admirable.

The nine chapters of the book cover virtually every major doctrine of theEthics. The first chapter is a concise intellectual biography of Spinoza. Nadlersmasterful study of Spinozas life (Spinoza: A Life[Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-


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Review - Gay Hawkins, Ethics of Waste