Morality or Moralism: an Exercice in Sentization
Émilie Hache, Bruno Latour
Publications – Article/chapter
The ANT argument has often been suspected of dubious moral grounds ; the accusation is made by those who use a roughly Kantian definition of what it is to occupy a moral upper ground. By following the contrasts between four different texts (Comte-Sponville, Kant, Serres and Lovelock), the paper explores what an ‘objective morality’ would look like and how to compare the Kantian axiology with the ANT’s possible definition of an object-oriented-morality. Especially important is the semiotic definition of the moral intensity of a text, this intensity bein defined by the ability for someone to feel responsible by responding to the calling of more beings than the ones expected from the moralist tradition.