On The Way To Global Ethics?: Cosmopolitanism, Ethical' Selfhood and Otherness

EPT 2/2 articles 13/3/03 10:23 am Page 183
article
On the Way to Global Ethics? EJPT

Cosmopolitanism, ‘Ethical’ Selfhood and European Journal
Otherness of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
Louiza Odysseos SOAS, University of London issn 1474-8851
2(2) 183–207; 0 31624
a b s t r a c t : In response to varied processes of globalization, the cosmopolitan

perspective has rightly insisted that discussion of global ethics ought to be taken
seriously. This article agrees with cosmopolitan theorists in calling for the
implementation of a perspective that can address the other outside of narrow
communal determinations. Yet it also advances a critique of their reliance on legalist
instruments such as human rights, contending that the bestowal of human rights does
not necessarily or directly lead to an ethics of inclusiveness. While the attribution of
universal humanity to all may appear as an appropriate means of extending ethical
regardedness to all others, this does not immediately follow from such a legalist
gesture. Any attempts to articulate a truly global ethics must begin by questioning the
distinct communal sensibilities which, by the very fact of their distinctiveness, always
already contain within them a ‘xenophobic’ element that cannot be transcended solely
by the bestowal of human rights or other such instruments. This article, therefore,
discusses a different kind of ‘cosmopolitan’ disposition, one which is based on the
recovery of an ethical selfhood that understands itself as an opening to otherness. For
this task, it explores the phenomenological analyses of German philosopher Martin
Heidegger and specifically his examination of how communication can be cultivated
through hearing and silence.
k e y w o r d s : cosmopolitanism, ethics, Heidegger, human rights
Introduction
In response to the vertiginous processes of globalization, the perspective of
cosmopolitanism has rightly considered that the discussion of global ethics ought
to be taken seriously. For many cosmopolitan thinkers, the achievement of
global ethics involves either the deprioritization of communal ethical bonds for
those of a universal humanity, or the explicit grounding of ethical selfhood in
Contact address: Louiza Odysseos, Department of Political Studies, Faculty of Law and
Social Sciences, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London,
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK.
Email: louiza.odysseos@soas.ac.uk 183
Downloaded from ept.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on May 24, 2015
European Journal of Political Theory 2(2)

one’s universal humanity.1 Following from this ethical understanding, the politi-
cal project of cosmopolitanism, according to a recent formulation by Ulrich Beck,
calls for the establishment of an order in which ‘human rights precedes inter-
national law’, which will be quite the reverse of the modern, statist order where
‘international law (and the state) precedes human rights’.2 Beck’s programmatic
statement seeks to bring about the denigration of distinctions, such as ‘war and
peace, domestic (policy) and foreign (policy)’, which had supported the previous
order known to the discipline of international relations as international society.3
Beck advances a worldview in which ‘individualization and globalization are
directly related to each other’ and which presupposes, it is suggested here, that law
and morality ought to converge and be explicitly grounded on ‘a legally binding
world society of individuals’.4 Such a paradigm shift would also entail changes in
governance, such that the upholding and promulgation of human rights would
not be the internal concern of the state (albeit being one of its sources of legiti-
macy), but would form the core of a cosmopolitan law backed by what one might
call a ‘cosmopolitan intervention regime’.
Yet how are human rights understood in the context of this cosmopolitan pro-
posal? Should we conceive of them as the expression of an ethical cosmopolitan
order which grounds political action? Or, should we regard them as the legal
instruments of an emerging post-Westphalian order which can battle the out-
moded morality of the bounded community from above? In other words, are we
conceiving of global ethics as the ground, and reason for the enforcement, of a
kind of cosmo-politics or are we seeking to establish a global ethical order through
the instrument of human rights, expunged from its previous statist grounding?
The debate on global ethics revolves around these questions and it is only appro-
priate that the status of global ethics as a question is maintained.
The importance of this debate, however, sometimes causes us to forget to ask a
set of other equally crucial questions. Is the accordance of human rights to an
increasingly globalized humanity sufficient to inaugurate a global ethics? Can we
simply assume that global ethics can be grounded on a universal humanity, or in
a different vein, that communal ethical bonds can be easily deprioritized or
‘cosmopolitanized’? Might not global ethics require openness to the other, an
openness which is not necessarily brought about through the bestowal of rights?
Could it be that the internationalization of instruments such as human rights, with
which one seeks to regulate morality, merely overlays such instruments on the
structure of already existing communal ethe, that remain closed off to the other?
This article suggests that cosmopolitan theorists are correct in calling for the
implementation of a perspective that can address the other, the stranger or the
xenos, outside of narrow communal determinations. Yet it simultaneously con-
tends that the bestowal of human rights does not necessarily or directly lead to an
ethics of inclusiveness; while the attribution of universal humanity to all may
appear as an appropriate means of extending ethical regardedness to all others,
184 this does not immediately follow from such a legalist gesture. Any attempts to
Odysseos: On the Way to Global Ethics?

articulate a truly global ethics must begin by reconsidering our distinct communal
ethical sensibilities which, by the very fact of their distinctiveness, always already
contain within them a ‘xenophobic’ element. Our sense of selfhood and identity
arises from a local and particular public group, a ‘community’, such that openness
to others requires cultivation. Rather than assuming that the ascription of rights
is a sufficient path to global ethics, this article proposes an alternative path, which
calls for openness to the other. Such openness to the other cannot come from the
imposition of a cosmopolitan legalist perspective but requires a radical question-
ing to confront and expose the ‘xenophobic’ element inherent in communal ethe;
that is, it has to be invoked within ethics, and ethical selfhood, itself. In this way,
the articulation of a global ethics forms part of an existing critique against tradi-
tional understandings of ethics as moral codes, a critique animated by attestations
of otherness and suffering that traditional ethics is said to occlude.
If ethics is considered to be ‘the body of values by which a culture understands
and interprets itself with regard to what is good and bad . . . a group of principles
for both conduct and value judgement’,5 then the discursive creation of moral
norms is shown to be inseparable from communal or local processes of socializa-
tion, habituation and normalization. It is through this connection between
normalcy, normalization and ethos within everyday conceptions of ethics as moral
rules that the occlusion of otherness occurs.6 In the context of this article, this
linkage between ethics and normalcy is discussed through the linguistic develop-
ment of the word ethos, but it is, more importantly, supplemented by the phe-
nomenological analysis of average everydayness found in the early writings of the
German philosopher Martin Heidegger and, particularly, his seminal work Being
and Time.7 Through such an analysis of everydayness the article suggests that it is
by calling our customary ethical practices into question that openness to the other
can be cultivated and global ethics can be properly considered.
Questioning Ethics
If by ethics we understand the emergence of a code or a set of norms expressive of
locally acceptable and expected behaviour, then ‘the possibility of ethical thought
and action is found in traditional “normalcy” and its history’.8 The reference to
normalcy indicates that the construction of norms usually arises within habitual
behaviour, which tends to have a normalization effect. People are socialized by
adjusting their dealings in the world towards what becomes average practice
through infinite and minute adjustments. It is through such socialization and nor-
malization that ‘norms’ develop, in the sense that historical and local habitual
practice tends to coalesce into customary ways of doing things.9 Norms, then, are
representative of current average practice, which is attained through processes of
normalization of behaviour and the power of habituation.10 As such, they are
undeniably public.
Some of these practices also ascend to the level of moral rules, which normally 185

refer to locally desirable ways to regulate action towards others and the collectiv-
ity in general. That such a body of rules exists, however, need not involve the
explicit individual choice of those specific rules as such, nor does it signify each
individual’s conscious agreement to obey them. On the contrary, the everyday
value judgements and moral acts of members of society involves recourse to such
rules without reflexive choice (BT, 164–5). Moral rules derive from acceptable and
desirable practices; indeed they are called ‘moral’ because they have historically
been accorded value within a locally specific public group. Some of these rules
might have been gradually and/or officially codified.11 This connection between
expected behaviour and ethics can still hold even in references to ‘universal
ethics’, which can be seen as the universalization of rules arising within a particu-
lar public group.
A linguistic excursion might help to illustrate the relationship between the
customary and the moral, as well as the transition from one to the other. Charles
Chamberlain’s research in this area shows how in the 5th century BC, the word
éthos can usually be understood and translated as “character”’ but that this was not
true in the case of earlier writers; on the contrary, the term had the prior signifi-
cation of ‘animal haunts’ or ‘dwellings’ and is usually found in its plural form,
éthea.12 Gradually the term became commonly used regarding humans and came
to mean ‘the arena in which people or animals move; further, this essence,
whether in an animal or a human being, resists the imposition of outside influ-
ences’.13 Similarly for Charles Scott, ethos has to do with customary dwelling and
the behaviour or manners which one exhibits in such a homestead. In ethos one
finds a particularist drive which encompasses its own ‘ordering, identity-giving,
and nurturing force’; ethea, then, were places of belonging but the term connoted
a certain disposition to recalcitrance and resistance to ‘civilizing’ influence.14
Furthermore, it can be established that the term, where it referred to humans,
initially did so to barbarians (such as Persians), indicating that these ‘are subject
to a principle of order, a logos all their own . . . off the scale of “normal” – that is,
Greek – expectations’.15
In the 4th century BC, the term’s meaning as a place of belonging was config-
ured and ethos became located in the soul, and was occasionally used in conjunc-
tion with tropos (way or manner). It is from this configuration that the connection
to ‘character’ develops as that which evidences one’s manners. The ‘spatial’ sense
of the term persists, however, and ‘now refers to the peculiar characteristics which
citizens of a polis acquire as part of their civic heritage . . . ta éthé in particular are
often mentioned in connection with trephó and paideuó, that is, with the socializa-
tion of children’.16 Customary habits become gradually codified into rules and
laws, that is, nómos. Nómos, which means ‘both law and melody’, can be seen as the
movement to codify into standardized rules, and perhaps promulgate, that which
belongs to a particular habitual order.17 Nómos, then, raises particular manners to
the level of principles, by which also the recalcitrant ethea are ‘civilized’. The
186 movement towards codification and ordering, in this regard, necessarily involves

struggle between free and differentiated habituation on the one hand, and the
desire to impose an external but principled order, on the other. Ethos, then,
derived from the Indo-European Swedh, means ‘one’s own’, both a person’s char-
acter and the way ‘we are of our own’ as a distinct group: ethos nurtures, socializes
and provides the identificatory processes by which one is one’s own self.18
What is more, the connection between customary ways of life and ethics is ever-
evolving through infinitesimal changes, a process which is historically bounded
and undeniably local. One cannot but perceive ‘of laws and principles for thought
and action as regional, as a group of claims characteristic of one cultural and his-
torical segment’.19 The derivation of the term ‘ethics’ from ethos, from customary
ways of life, does not refer only to mores of small secluded communities, tribes of
anthropological interest or imagined ‘closed’ cultural groups. It could similarly
refer to ‘western culture’, ‘western civilization’ or ‘European ethos’ as a historically
enlarged group with its specific ways of being. In this light, the norms, rules and
ethical practices normally associated with ‘the West’, as well as the legal manifes-
tations of these rules, such as human rights, are shown to be situated in processes
of habituation and socialization of this public group or culture, despite their uni-
versalist aspirations. When the insights of the linguistic development of the term
ethics are allowed to inform ethical inquiry, the universality of such norms is
called into question.
The particular location and basis of ethical codification and construction in
customary ways of behaving brings to the fore the relation between ethics and
habituation, and recalls Martin Heidegger’s discussion of average everydayness as
the initial and primary way in which the existing self, which he called ‘Dasein’,
finds itself as Being-in-the-world.20 The historical development of the term ethos
as a behaviour characteristic of a habitual dwelling place underlies the analysis of
how the existing self is embedded in the world. Communal ethos is constitutive of
the sense (meaning) and norms by which the self lives. The existing self has no
essence for Heidegger; rather it is groundless, an amalgam of ‘shared practices’
and, as such, finds itself in a world already infused with sense already created and
only partly authored by its own practices.21 Hence, the existing self can be under-
stood as thrown into a world through its dealings with available entities (such as
tools) and its concern towards other selves; this thrownness is indicative of an
existential heteronomy, a term which signifies its constitution by and reliance on
others in its world.
Usually, however, the intelligibility which Dasein has within its public group is
average and restricts Dasein’s modes of relating to other entities. Conditioned
through the practices and norms of what Heidegger called the ‘they’,22 Dasein
relates to other entities and other Daseins as merely ‘occurrent’ or present (what
Heidegger calls present-at-hand).23 This is particularly problematic for a discus-
sion of ethics because this ‘misperception’ does not disclose entities in their Being
but rather as manifested presence. Inasmuch as something or someone is accorded
ethical significance, it requires the assignment of ‘value’ as the expression of posi- 187

tivity.24 As regards itself, moreover, the self is ignorant of its heteronomy and
entertains conceptions of autonomous selfhood and action free from constraint,
bestowed upon it by an assumed innate autonomy. This average kind of com-
portment and intelligibility leads to a ‘levelling-down’ of its own possibilities for
Being, but also involves a lack of recognition of this levelling-down and a flight
from its own anxious ability-to-be. Insofar as morality enables this flight away
from one’s becoming-proper by socializing the self within its group, it keeps it
within this average and constricting level of interaction. For Heidegger, then,
‘ethics’ encloses the self in commonplace and average comportment. The moral
subject is, despite its purported autonomy, the subject of averageness, publicness
and conformism, unquestioningly remaining within ‘traditional’ and customary
bounds of behaviour.25 Morality, therefore, is part of the ‘average’ intelligibility
through which the world and beings within the world are disclosed.
This brief discussion of ethics has a number of implications for ethical univer-
salism both for the discipline of international relations and for the international
political practices of states and institutions. The questioning of ethics, as con-
tained within a prevalent communal ethos, enables a contextualization of scholar-
ly ethical work within its particularist location, which in the case of international
relations scholarship is mostly western.26 This ‘locating’ contests its universal
claims and reveals its situated roots.27 Seen in this light, the aspirations of univer-
salist or cosmopolitan ethics are disclosed as particularist drives of socialization
which seek to spread beyond their particularity. Yet, despite the discussion gen-
erated by the well-rehearsed charge of ‘imperialism’, it should not be the primary
reason why global ethics cannot merely assume a universal perspective from the
start. Rather, the hesitation to follow the universal path to global ethics must
come from questioning whether such universality leads to an ethics that is attuned
to the other, enabling an openness that transcends the legal aspect of cohabitation.
Indeed, a global ethics that is open to the other requires precisely the calling into
question both of one’s embedded particular ethical practices and also of the very
claim of their universality. Therefore, no matter how valuable such universalism
is considered to be for the international and global concerns that the discipline of
international relations and global actors wish to address, such ‘locating’ as under-
taken above suggests that universalized customary norms and rules are not the
ideal response to these concerns. Openness to the other might be found in a
different kind of ‘cosmopolitan’ disposition.
Turning Away from Ethics

To call its ethics into question, based on the group ethos as these are, the self must
confront its customary practices and their assigned values, no matter how nur-
turing and comforting they may be, or how much value has been previously
188 accorded to them. Such a critical re-evaluation of ethics, however, is hard to

pursue because of three distinct but related difficulties. The first is that such ques-
tioning is checked by the power of habituation. Since it challenges that which has
been most revered by a particular culture or society, ‘[w]e cannot believe that our
recognition of wrong, our commitment to right, our worship of God, our love of
just laws, and our respect for human beings have as part of their fabric the
inevitability of what we most abhor’.28 Leaving ‘what we most abhor’ for later
consideration, it should be noted that what is required in such a turning away from
ethics is not to proclaim that this or that rule is faulty, or that another may be
better suited to the moral judgement at hand. Rather, the notion of ‘value’ must
itself be brought under scrutiny since it contributes, through its assignment, to the
concealment of our average intelligibility and ways of behaving towards other
entities. The habitual practice and obedience to communal moral norms misleads
the self into believing that it is morally dutiful, while failing to ensure that one’s
ethos is open to the other.
A second difficulty is related to the assumption of sovereign subjectivity men-
tioned briefly.29 The rupture involved in the calling of ethics into question, brings
the self face-to-face with the impropriety (or inauthenticity) of its average every-
dayness: turning away from ethics ‘is nothing less than a twisting free of a body of
selfhood that is given in its investment in not knowing its being or its propriety
vis-à-vis its being’.30 The interruption of ethics arrests one’s self-conception as
autonomous subject and throws it back into anxiety by reminding it that it is the
entity whose Being is an issue for it. Having no definite and determinate substance
or nature, the self is called to itself by ‘being called to a being whose meaning is
mortal temporality and thus has no intrinsic, determinate meaning at all’.31
Questioning ethics, then, is inseparable from reflecting on the subjectivity that
the self posits for itself and the relation that ethics has in sustaining it. The inde-
terminacy and contingency of Dasein’s Being reveals ethical norms and rules to
be the ossification of a communal and shared web of rules for a being it wills itself
to be in its flight from its radical contingency.32
The final and most important difficulty arises from the realization that, for all
our rules and, what is worse, because of them, we have permitted and covered up
that against which we purport to construct all moral rules: suffering.33 Enclosed
within the public group, the self comports itself ambiguously towards the world
and, prompted by curiosity, it moves from one topic of interest to another with-
out relating to entities in a way that would let them be in their Being. Moreover,
average concern reduces communicating to ‘idle talk’ and treats other entities as
merely present in the world, occluding in this way the paramount role of others
and otherness for the self’s constitution. Morally secure within communal norms
and sets of rules set out according to the Being it believes it is, the self drowns
out its anxiety in the volume of idle talk and the speed of its curiosity. Avoiding
anxiety makes its own ‘suffering’ invisible: the truly other, then, is that which is
most familiar, that is, itself. The invisibility of anxiety reduces suffering to the
occurrent, the recognizable, ‘real violence’, as it were. Other people are also 189

reduced to presence and rendered voiceless in the endless transmission of things
of interest. Additionally, the non-communal other, and his suffering, remains
inaudible.
Questioning ethics, therefore, reveals a tension between the affirmative nur-
turing and socialization provided by one’s own ethos on the one hand, and that
which the ethos makes inaudible, namely, the suffering and the very voice of the
other. Ethics, located within normal and habitual behaviour, is deaf to the suffer-
ing and voice both of alterity and of the self’s radically contingent existence. In
this way, ‘[t]he interruption of ethics provides an opening to hear what is inaudi-
ble in our ethos’.34 Is there a way to hear the other embedded within the commu-
nal ethos; how does one find a way to render his/her ethos open to the voice of the
other? Can suffering be made audible without an isolation from one’s own group
and customs? How, moreover, can the self’s own anxiety be acknowledged? In
other words, how can an ethical self, which understands itself as an opening to
otherness, be recovered without a severance from its identity-giving ethos?35
Hearing and Silence: The ‘Conditions of Audibility’

Calling one’s communal ethos into question, it has been suggested, might create
an opening for Dasein to confront the ‘xenophobic’ attitude at the origin of its
ethos and its ethical constructions, and, in this way, to hear the other’s voice and
confront its own suffering. How might everyday morality be questioned, how-
ever? The everyday shared practices, which Heidegger called the ‘they’, absorb
and nurture the self. At the same time, however, such absorption also affects the
self’s openness both to the other and to its own existential otherness. Even if we
conceive of being called away from the morality and habitual practices of the par-
ticular public group to which we belong, this still does not address the question of
how the self can hear such a call. Even if the other calls to us, is not the problem
the inability of the self to recognize both itself as immersed in the normative struc-
tures of the community and the exclusion of the other which this entails? Being
called to question one’s ethos is not in itself sufficient to rouse the self from its
absorption. Therefore, it is necessary to ask about the ‘conditions of audibility’36
of the other and to reflect on how they might be achieved. This article suggests
that the ability to hear, and the very conditions of audibility, have to be under-
stood as a stepping away from the ‘idle talk’ of the public group into silence.
In what way, then, can the ‘conditions of audibility’ be improved and how could
the transformative process begin by which one’s own ethos might open up to
otherness and suffering? Is all that is required ‘a simple ontological [or otologi-
cal?] operation, a small puncture through Dasein’s ears so that it could for a
moment at least escape the deafening sounds of “they” drowning out the question
of (its) Being’?37
In Being and Time Heidegger traced such a possibility to the existential struc-
190 ture of discourse. ‘Hearing is constitutive for discourse’, he noted, because the

ability to listen discloses authentically that the existing self is Being-with others
(BT, 206). Having more than a disclosive function, moreover, ‘[l]istening to . . . is
Dasein’s existential way of Being-open as Being-with for Others’ (BT, 206; empha-
sis added). ‘Da-sein hears because it understands. As being-in-the-world that
understands, with the others, it “listens to” itself and to Mitda-sein, and in this
listening it belongs to these.’38 Hearing is an aspect of the self’s attuned under-
standing that serves to highlight its state of being thrown into the world
(Geworfenheit). For Heidegger, solipsism is an ontological impossibility because
the self is born into discursive relations, so to speak, but it is specifically ‘listening
to’ which enhances the coexistential character of existence. Indeed, ‘Being-with
develops in listening to another’ (BT, 206). The self’s heteronomous constitution
is made concrete through hearing; in other words, the self lives according to its
heteronomy when it listens to the other. When ‘Dasein is, or rather exists, hear-
ingly’ it is brought into communion with itself as Being-with.39
How can the ‘conditions of audibility’ be created? The possibility for hearing is
related to keeping silent, because silence ‘is another essential possibility for dis-
course’ (BT, 208). Indeed, Miguel de Bestegui argues, silence ‘seems to occupy a
. . . privileged position’ in Heidegger’s thought, and is regarded as a pivotal
link in the relationship between discourse and otherness.40 ‘In talking with one
another, the person who keeps silent can “make one understand” (that is he can
develop an understanding) and he can do so more authentically than the person
who is never short of words’ (BT, 208). Therefore, ‘[k]eeping silent authentically
is possible only in genuine discoursing’ because ‘[t]o be able to keep silent, Dasein
must have something to say – that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and
rich disclosure of itself’ (BT, 208). In this way, silence cannot be associated with
an inability to speak, or be considered ‘a negation nor a privation’; on the con-
trary, silence should be thought of as ‘a positive possibility, indeed speech in the
most proper sense’.41 As with hearing, with which silence is aligned, ‘silence is
essentially Mitteilung, communicating and sharing’, because ‘[i]n silence, Dasein
has an ear for the Other, it is “all ears,” as it were’.42
As a constitutive part of discourse (logos), hearing belongs to everyday com-
portment in the world; yet, through hearing, ‘Dasein is open, disclosed to itself,
to the world and to others in the most authentic way’.43 Hearing, then, ‘consti-
tutes the primary and authentic way in which Dasein is open for its ownmost
potentiality-for-Being – as in hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein
carries with-it’ (BT, 206; emphasis added). This is an extremely important passage
as it is the only one in Being and Time that makes this explicit reference to the
other-as-friend, carried within, carried as otherness in the mode of a voice, ‘a
purely phonic presence’.44 Such a ‘phonic presence’ is not uncanny or ghostlike
but ought to be understood as constitutive for Dasein as a speaking being. As
Jacques Derrida remarks, ‘[t]his voice is an essentially understandable voice, the
possibility of speech or discourse’.45
The sort of presence invoked in Heidegger’s quote is not representational in 191

the pure sense of the word. ‘Through its voice that I hear, I hear the friend itself,
beyond its voice but in that voice’; it is almost an echo of Dasein’s withness, where
‘I hear and carry the friend with me in hearing its voice . . . Dasein carries it, one
might say, in the figure of its voice, its metonymic figure (a part of the whole)’.46
It is a reminder that otherness is not external, as that from which Dasein distin-
guishes itself. Dasein has no choice with regards to its relation to otherness
because, as Being-with, Dasein carries its otherness within it. This discussion of
otherness and the facilitating role of hearing/silence oppose subjectivist under-
standings of relations as voluntary: relations can only be taken as voluntary on the
basis of an ontological account of subjectivity which denies and obliterates
Dasein’s heteronomy, its constitution by otherness, and which refutes the other’s
constitutive role in Dasein’s world.
The other-as-friend, whose voice Dasein carries within it, is the specificity of
this otherness, while at the same time it is Dasein being made aware of the inter-
nalization of otherness. ‘What defines “the voice of the friend,” then, is not a qual-
ity, the friendly characteristic, but a belonging.’47 In this regard, the belonging
says more about the constitution of Dasein, its internal relation to otherness that
is part and parcel of its thrownness, than about the friend, who is there as a voice
to be heard without choice within Dasein:
Through its voice, Dasein carries the friend with it, whether it wishes to or not, whether it
knows it or not, and whatever its resolution. In any case, what matters here is not what the
friend’s voice says, not its said, not even the saying of its said. Hardly its voice. Rather what
matters is the hearing (das Hören) of its voice.48
The ear to which the hearing refers, however, does not point to the organ ‘ear’ but
alludes instead to ‘the ear of and for one’s self’, attuned not to some inner life but
the disclosedness of Dasein as projected outward and ahead of itself, ‘its very
ek-sistence’.49 It is what renders the familiarity of one’s own ‘self’ strange. It is
significant for becoming-proper that the voice, which Dasein carries within it, is
the voice of the other-as-friend: ‘this hearing could not open Dasein “to its own-
most potentiality-for-Being,” if hearing were not first the hearing of this voice,
the exemplary metonymy of the friend that each Dasein bears close to itself (bei
sich trägt)’.50 Beistegui, too, insists that propriety and silence are related because
‘silencing reveals existence to itself, a call that can be heard only in the withdrawal
of language’.51
Derrida’s earlier claim that what is significant for the ‘conditions of audibility’
is the act of hearing, rather than the actual content of the other’s voice, touches
on two important concerns. First, it helps to dispel the assumption that listening
to the other has only positive connotations. As Heidegger explains, hearing ‘can
be done in several possible ways: following, going along with, and the privative
modes of not-hearing, resisting, defying, and turning away’ (BT, 206–7). Similar-
ly, it cannot be assumed that the voice of the other is a priori positive, as Derrida
192 confirms: ‘[t]he voice is not friendly, first because it is the voice of a friend, of

someone, of another Dasein responding to the question “who?”’.52 And yet, this
is embedded in a different kind of positivity, which pertains to all modes of
hearing. The incessant relation between discourse, hearing and otherness encom-
passes opposition, resistance and the possibility of turning away: as Derrida sug-
gests, ‘there is no essential opposition between philein and Kampf’.53 The negative
modes could still determine the hearing of the voice of the friend. To be opposed
to the friend, to turn away from it, to defy it, to not hear it, that is still to hear and
keep it, to carry with self, sich bei tragen, the voice of the friend.54
The second concern revolves around the question of how exemplary the figure
of the friend is. As Derrida notes, the crucial question is whether the friend is used
in those passages as any other interchangeable example (why not sister, brother,
father, asks Derrida) or whether the concept of the friend is in itself crucial to
audibility and propriety. Could it be possible that,
. . . exemplarity functions here in another sense, not in the sense of an example among
other possible examples but of the exemplarity that gives to be read and carries in itself all
the figures of Mitdasein [Being-with] as Aufeinander-hören [listening to one another]? All
the figures of Mitsein would be figures of the friend, even if they were secondarily
unfriendly or indifferent.55
Taking exemplarity in this exceptional way, understood not as interchangeable

but as emblematic, suggests that the existential presence of the voice of ‘the friend’
is indicative of the possibility of a transformation of Dasein’s selfhood and com-
portment to its world. This is a crucial and much-debated point which centres on
the complex issue of Dasein’s constitution as a self. As noted, the self is constituted
through and through by otherness in that its world is a web of meanings, assign-
ments and norms largely constructed by its community. It is this absorption into
the ‘they’, into otherness, which prompted Heidegger to suggest that the answer
to the question ‘who is Dasein?’ is not ‘I’ but the ‘they’ (and, as such, inauthentic).
Yet such immersion is not equivalent to openness to the other because the ‘they’
perpetuates a discourse of autonomy and sovereignty of the individual, obstruct-
ing in this way Dasein’s understanding of itself as constituted by others. Hence,
although embedded through and through in the ‘they’, Dasein considers itself
autonomous and sovereign. The example of the friend indicates that the possi-
bility for openness exists within this heteronomy; selfhood manifests itself as
heteronomous and at the same time open to the other under conditions of silence
and genuine hearing. By choosing to listen less to the idle talk of individuality sus-
tained by the ‘they’, Dasein radically questions itself, and begins to hear the voice
of heteronomy, i.e. of the other within. It is on the basis of this self-understanding that
the concrete other can also be heard. In the absence of a radical questioning about
one’s selfhood and the role of otherness within the self, any others in the world
will be heard within the contours of communal ethos, by the rules and norms of
customary practice without a question of how it is that they are implicated in our
self-constitution.56 193

In the space created by silence and hearing there is a possibility of reformulat-
ing the ethos of the ‘they’ so that it is open to otherness, to the internal and per-
manent recollection of the voice of the friend, which Dasein carries with it. ‘[B]y
developing what one could call an ontology of friendship or an ontophilology,
Heidegger seems to provide a space for a rethinking of ethics.’57 Silence ‘makes
dangerous the values by which we give ourselves common lives and establish the
rules within which we are constituted’, and instigates the questioning of moral-
ity.58 In the wider silence of Being/time Dasein’s ‘reticence [Verschwiegenheit]
makes something manifest, and does away with “idle talk”’ (BT, 208). Thus,
‘[h]earing in this silence [of Being/time] is finding oneself in the question of
ethics’.59
The above exploration suggests that the voice of the friend, exemplary of other-
ness, is carried within the self. However, the self’s flight from the most funda-
mental otherness, its own, renders it deaf to the cry of the other. The ‘conditions
of audibility’ might be enhanced when ‘idle talk’ (Gerede) is interrupted; in the
space of this suspension, there is silence, in which the voice of the other calls
Dasein into question and is heard. Heard in silence, the voice is a genuine com-
munication and enables a ‘wrenching motion’, by which Dasein recoils from its
inauthentic practices and ‘puts itself in question by the values that it holds’.60
Recovering the Ethical Self

To find oneself in the ‘question of ethics’, to use Scott’s phrase, is to attempt a
recovery of the ‘ethical’ self, which is open to itself as strange and to the voice of
the other as always within it. Therefore, calling one’s communal ethos into ques-
tion is part and parcel of the process which Heidegger calls authenticity (or more
appropriately, ‘becoming-proper’) which is tantamount to becoming-other or
strange to oneself. This estrangement leads to a self-relationship where the self
relates to itself as other, as strange; otherness is what the self becomes. Propriety
then, is not necessarily moral perfectionism but rather indicative of the struggle
with one’s self towards a modification of one’s impropriety.61 Once this process is
set into motion, the self’s heteronomy is made apparent to it, enhancing in this
way the possibility of listening to ‘the voice of the friend whom every Dasein
carries with-it’ (BT, 206). There is no choice to hear otherness once one embarks
on this process of self-estrangement.62 The process of attaining this ‘ethical’ kind
of selfhood is not universal but unique to each struggle, its achievement is never
assured or static; we cannot phenomenally speak of ‘completion’ because what is
defining of authenticity is the effort to achieve it.63 Walter Davis argues that the
struggle, the ceaseless movement towards propriety, can be thought of as ‘the
“ethical” relationship one is living toward oneself’.64 Thus, ‘the ethical’ is not uni-
versal; on the contrary, it is particularist because it refers to ‘the primary relation-
ship which underlies all the positions and attitudes one adopts toward the
194 world’.65 How one relates to others on the basis of this self-relationship is not

given in advance nor can it be collectively dictated since this would mean a fall into
the public and habitual practices that are indicative of one’s ethos. Yet, in the
absence of the relationship one resolutely assumes towards one’s own existence, it
is impossible to have any appropriate relationship towards others.
Of course, it can be argued that this self-relationship is not ethical in any com-
mon sense of the word but ontological. In the ‘Letter on Humanism’, Heidegger
refers to ethics as dwelling in the nearness of Being.66 The term ethos is modified
with propriety in mind so that it now:
. . . means abode, dwelling place. The word names the open region in which the human
being dwells. The open region of his abode allows what pertains to the essence of the
human being, and what in thus arriving resides in nearness to him, to appear.67
There might be an intimate relationship, therefore, between ‘propriety’ and

something like ‘ethicity’, which is, according to Derrida, that which makes ethics
‘ethical’.68 The movement to propriety is ‘ethical’, then, in the sense that it indi-
cates a struggle expressive of a self-relationship which brings Dasein to reside
closer to its Being. In this way, Dasein’s genuine appropriation of its hetero-
nomous existence, the relationship it sustains with itself, might be compared to
Michel Foucault’s Heidegger-inspired ethics as ‘a practice; ethos is a manner of
being’.69 The ethical self, then, would embody its propriety towards its finite
being as a techne tou biou, or a technology of the self.70 Only on the ground of such
a self-relationship can an ‘ethical’ attitude arise towards other beings.
Rethinking the Need for Rules of Proper Conduct

The previous section discussed the creation of the ‘conditions of audibility’
through the cultivation of silence and hearing. To be silent, it was suggested, is to
enable genuine discourse; it is to be able to hear the voice of otherness within.
Such an internal, ‘phonic presence’ brings to the fore the self’s heteronomy and
initiates a process of questioning, which is expressive of a one’s ethical self-
relationship. The recovery of the ‘ethical’ self, it was mentioned above, refers to
the ‘ethicity of propriety’, where propriety is the self-relationship, which enables
the self to take up its heteronomy properly, and to hear the voice of otherness that
it carries within it. How might such a recovery facilitate our discussion of global
ethics? Does it necessitate the relinquishment of the construction of ethical rules
as inauthentic, as a remnant of a subjectivist ontology? Could not the ‘ethicity of
propriety’ form the basis for minimalist ethical construction that could join with
cosmopolitan discourse in its search for global ethical norms and rules (if not
necessarily the codification of such rules in international law, as is Beck’s sugges-
tion)? This possibility of utilizing the recovery of the ‘ethical’ self as a ground for
ethical construction is examined next.
195
On the Impossibility of a Renewed Ethical

Foundationalism
It will be recalled that there is a tension between the affirmative nurturing associ-
ated with the socialization processes of a communal ethos and the impropriety of
the average intelligibility, in which these processes result, so that the voice of
the outsider and of the self’s own anxiety in the face of its own Being become
inaudible. One cannot ‘do away’ with ethos, since the averageness it generates is
constitutive of the totality of meaning in which the self orients its existence.
Socialization is intimately connected to ‘belonging’, as Jean-Luc Nancy notes,
and ‘there is nothing sentimental, domestic, or “community-oriented” about
wanting to say we. It is existence reclaiming its due or its condition: co-exis-
tence’.71 Acknowledging that universal ethical rules are embedded in a communal
ethos, Scott wonders, however, whether it would be possible to maintain ‘a
limited field of nurturance . . . a structure that shows itself differently, that shows
itself to be outside time and outside ethnic suspicions and conservative pro-
vinciality’ and, at the same time, delineate on the basis of it ‘a field of laws and
principles, that brings with it, into time, indications, more than hints, but patterns
that point to a transtemporal circumscription of the writhing, belligerent inter-
play of ethea’.72 Is it possible to call for and successfully bring into the universal
certain indications of how to interact among multiple éthea? Such a field of nur-
turing would effectively maintain the identity-giving and norm-creating charac-
teristics of the local while, at the same time, attempting to provide a minimalist
set of principles that would restrain the ethos’s resistance to otherness and render
it open to the influence and voice of alterity. Three related arguments are
examined as to the impossibility of renewing a universalism ‘grounded’ on the
recovery of the ‘ethical’ self.
A first argument would be to recall the conditions under which universal-
ism might be possible, and specifically, its connection to foundationalism. For
Hermann Philipse, such a suggestion for minimal ‘indications’ for ethical conduct
can be taken as another ‘stage in the historical development of ethical founda-
tionalism’.73 If this is indeed so, what is the ultimate ground on which these
principles would be based, and does not such a search for foundation, in and of
itself, ‘lead to an infinite regress unless there are first principles of ethics that are
so secure that further justification is not needed’?74 If one contests, therefore, the
‘idea that there is a supreme moral truth from which rules of conduct could be
deduced’, then universalism becomes untenable.75 Andrew Linklater has recently
suggested, from an ‘unshamedly’ universalist position, that ‘the possibility of
occupying an Archimedean standpoint which permits objective knowledge of
permanent moral truths which bind the whole of humanity is a claim’ that not only
has been repeatedly contested but that contemporary theorists ‘are correct to
deny’.76 Yet surely Scott’s call for the introduction of minimalist indications is not
196 a suggestion that a secure foundation exists. Could, however, the recovery of the

‘ethical’ self, which understands itself as an opening to otherness, serve as this
‘groundless’ ground? Could, in other words, the ‘ethical’ self-relationship one
discovers in silence be seen as a foundation for the universal construction of rules?
The answer is most likely negative, since it would require that the existing self be
ascribed a substantive essence, the impossibility of which is made evident when
one recalls the radical contingency of its existence and its groundlessness in the
discussions of Being-towards-death and anxiety that Heidegger undertakes in
Being and Time.77
The essence of the self’s propriety is not permanence, but an abyssal structure
which can never act as a ground. As Derrida enigmatically notes, ‘in such a struc-
ture, which is a non-fundamental one, at once superficial and bottomless, still and
always “flat,” the proper-ty (propre) is sunk’.78 The self’s groundlessness arrests the
foundationalist drive from instantiating itself in an ultimate ground: this could
only be one’s self-relationship, the content of which is that Dasein has no ground
and in becoming proper, it comes to terms with this groundlessness and into com-
munion with itself as strange. What the self has, rather, is a disposition towards
itself (it is ready for anxiety) and concern towards others. As such, it cannot form
the foundation that this kind of ethical construction requires. ‘Nothing would be
more violent or naive’, writes Derrida, ‘than to call for more frontality, more
thesis or more thematization, to suppose that one can find a standard here’.79 The
‘ethical’ self, engaged in the struggle for propriety, is not an answer in the form of
a ground, but an awareness that it is itself questionable, that its Being is a question
for it.
Finally, universalizing the insights gained in the recovery of the ‘ethical’ self is
also rendered untenable when one considers that:
. . . ontology can provide ethics . . . only with formal indications of the general
characteristics of human existence. In turn, the practical disciplines can be of help to
human action only indirectly by providing a rough outline of the practical sphere in
question that has to be interpretively concretized in the historical situation of one’s own
existence.80
The role of fundamental ontology is not to dictate explicitly how one ought to
act by constructing ethical rules, rather it ‘frees the individual for his self-
reflection’.81 When, just after the Second World War, Jean Beaufret asked
Heidegger why he had hesitated in constructing an ethics, Heidegger’s reply
could only be that ‘the question was essentially unanswerable’.82 The responsibil-
ity of philosophy was to induce thinking, but not to impose restrictions or condi-
tions, as if these were generalizable to each and every factical (particular) situation.
As Hans-Georg Gadamer notes:
. . . [h]ow can it be the task of a philosopher to construe an ethical system that proposes or
prescribes a social order or recommends a new way of molding morals or general public
convictions about concrete matters?83
Ethical judgements can only be taken on the basis of the factical situation and its 197

specificity. Moreover, as was noted with the examination of ethos, ethical norms
‘involve processes of human learning and socialization that are already under way,
forming an ethos, long before people ever confront the radical questions associated
with philosophy. “Ethics” presupposes a lived system of values’.84 Whatever
assistance on how to live one’s life ethics might desire to provide, it can never
replace reflection about and in the factical situation by which already existing rules
of conduct are interpreted. To answer the question of ethics with, even a minimal-
ist, codified morality is to ignore that codification can only be understood as
embedded and socialized into a group ethos which resists the ‘imposition of out-
side influences’ or at best interprets them on the ground of its ethos. To claim that
rule-making could lie outside one’s own ethos, outside of a historical and factical
situation, would be to assert that morality requires a kind of reasoning based on
logic of which everyone is capable.85 It is to suggest that reasoning is not embed-
ded within local practices but is universal, yet this might indicate an ethnocentric
outlook disguised as universalism.86 It is not possible to encompass universal
ethical construction in a philosophy of the limit, such as Heidegger’s phenome-
nology of Dasein, which recognizes not only the facts of cultural relativity but that
an ahistorical and foundational approach towards proper conduct cannot but fail
to do what it is intended to achieve: make the other’s voice audible and act in ways
which do not occlude the heteronomous facticity of existence.
The impossibility of a renewed universalism, however, brings into relief that
what currently exists is but ‘an urgent plea for a universal morality’.87 Yet, it is
questionable whether a set of universal principles could, indeed, bring about a
transformation of local ethe and provide a design for inter-ethical interaction.
There is no assurance that what has been inaudible in one’s ethos will not be
equally or more starkly so if voiced in ways not able to be captured or accommo-
dated by codified norms. The preceding discussion considered that the ‘ethical’
self cannot provide the new foundationalism nor can its comportment within the
factical situation be universalized. Such a refusal, however, is not tantamount to a
denial of the need or possibility of a ‘global ethics’ but a suggestion that global
ethics might lie in a disposition or sensibility towards the other, which the ‘ethical’
self can espouse. This disposition is tied to openness and audibility, as already
suggested, but it will be discussed in greater detail below.
On the Way to Global Ethics: A Different Kind of

Cosmopolitanism
While the desirability of a global ethics is easily attested to in this global era, this
article has suggested that perhaps such a global ethics might have little to do
with the universalization of rules or indications for conduct, given the difficulties
which arise from the universalism of such rules and the impossibility of a renewed
foundationalism. Nevertheless, a mediation amongst ‘belligerent ethea’, which
198 ethical construction wishes to restrain, is still desirable in a world of value plural-

ity and inter-communal conflict. As was noted, the notion of the ‘ethical’ self
proposed can be understood as an opening to alterity which constitutes the very
‘ethicity’ of any ethics. The self’s openness comes from seeing that its ground is
nothingness and that no other transcendence exists but a plunge towards the
world in which it is amid others and other-mediated meanings. Becoming-
proper is a constant recovery of its world as relational totality, within which rela-
tionships with others become re-evaluated in their own facticity and thrownness.
The recovery of silence and hearing, resulting from the questioning of communal
ethos, brings Dasein to face itself as ‘singularity of the self that knows itself as
opening to alterity’,88 a knowledge which arises from an awareness of itself as
other. ‘Singularity . . . installs relation as the withdrawal of identity, and commu-
nication as the withdrawal of communion’, insists Jean-Luc Nancy.89
The ontological disposition associated with the ‘ethical’ self suggests ‘that
human being can be thought in terms of the clearing or space it makes for Being,
for world, for the realms and regimes of “truth” or manifestness, for the plurality
of cultures’.90 Such a disposition attests to the desire for a different kind of
cosmopolitanism, one associated with openness to, and concern for, the other.
This disposition is none other than what Heidegger called ‘liberating’ concern.91
Liberating concern is, according to Heidegger, one of the two radical manifesta-
tions of concern that Dasein can have towards the other. In addition to privative
forms of concern (such as indifference, not caring, neglect), concern might take
the form of displacing the other. This is a situation when Dasein’s concern ‘take[s]
away “care” from the Other and puts itself in his position in concern: it can leap in
for him’ (BT, 158). Although expressive of care for the other, this kind of concern
does not facilitate the process by which the other uniquely appropriates its shared
world and confronts it own radical contingency and groundlessness. Liberating
concern, however, ‘pertains essentially to authentic care – that is to the existence
of the other . . . it helps the other to become transparent to himself in his care and
to become free for it’ (BT, 159). Only the concern which ‘leaps forth and liberates’
allows the other to embark on her own struggle and become-proper. Through
this proper kind of relating ‘I call the other to face his own anxious self-
responsibility’.92 It is important to note, however, that liberating concern does
not only assist the other to face her own selfhood and open up to the other but,
furthermore, it is the precondition for the other to become transparent to me as
‘for who he is’.93 John Caputo has argued that in this conception of interaction
with alterity can be found ‘an ethics of otherness’ based on humility and com-
passion.94 It is through such a liberating and disclosive concern that the self may
recognize others in their own groundlessness.
As the ‘ethical’ self’s disposition, liberating concern is able to penetrate a par-
ticular situation, even if this crosses the boundaries of another community. Simi-
larly, it allows for the other to do the same because it involves the ‘recognition of
the claim of others who, from beyond “our” horizon, call into question the
parochialism of our tradition insofar as it does not speak for them and who 199

demand that we include their perspectives in the effort to understand ourselves’.95
Such a disposition:
. . . does not involve a subordination of self and others to a common standard that would
provide a decision-procedure telling anyone what he ought to do in a particular situation;
rather, it involves an attunement to the particularity of others, to others as truly other,
stemming from an awareness of the singularity of one’s own existence.96
This is not an impersonal and anonymous perspective but an ‘interpersonal

orientation motivated by one’s desire not to incorporate others into “the univer-
sal” but, rather, to “let others be” in their freedom for their own possibilities and
to allow one’s self-understanding to be informed by theirs’.97 The ‘ethical’ self
implies the withdrawal of identity based solely on the nurturing ethos in which the
self is primarily and initially socialized and thus can sustain ‘a form of coexistence
in which one remains attentive to others as centers of transcendence and possi-
bility who are never subsumed by the public projects in which they happen to be
absorbed’.98 The ‘ethical’ self liberates the other, not by awarding him person-
hood and accompanying rights, but by calling him to face his own heteronomy
and groundlessness.
For the discipline of international relations this discussion proposes the
rethinking of cosmopolitanism from being reliant on legal instruments such as
rights and claims about the universality of human nature towards cultivating a dis-
position of openness towards the other. This is a proposal that has conceptual
merits and goes to the heart of debates about xenophobia, refugees, migration,
etc. However, it is also a proposal which relies on affective and reflective discus-
sion. In other words, it is not a direct replacement of proposals about international
institutions and the internationalization of regimes. Indeed, it is a discussion
which alerts us to the possibility of a different path towards global ethics.
Furthermore, the attention paid to the questioning of ethics and the cultivating of
a disposition towards the other through a reconsideration of how the other con-
stitutes selfhood also means that global ethics is intimately related to our own con-
tinuous self-relationship. As such it cannot be fully achieved, in the sense of being
instituted once and for all; rather, one struggles to maintain this questioning and
struggles to be ‘on the way to global ethics’.
Conclusion
In considering the possibility and need for a global ethics, this article suggested
a different path than that offered most prominently by the cosmopolitan
political project. Even ethical theorists who strive for a ‘thoroughgoing anti-
foundationalist ethics’, such as Molly Cochran, find that ‘[b]y definition, an ethic
is understood to be universalizable’99 in the sense that it is ‘interested in seeking
convergence on ethical principles’.100 While recognizing that what exists in an era
of globalization is a ‘plea for universal morality’, the article illustrated that ethics
200 is contained within a prevalent communal ethos and ethical construction arising

within particularist locations, which in the case of international relations scholar-
ship is mostly western. Seen in this light, the aspirations of universalist ethics are
disclosed as particularistic drives of socialization, which seek to spread beyond
their particularity. The linguistic trajectory of the word ethos, from which ethics
is derived, showed it to arise through processes of habituation within distinct, cus-
tomary ways of life and to be embedded within habitual and average behaviour.
Analysed through Heidegger’s discussion of average everydayness, ethics is
revealed as implicated in the processes of socialization and conformity, which are
nurturing and even constitutive for the self, yet which keep it within average
comportment. The structure of ethos, it was argued, is closed off to the other and
the articulation of global ethics might depend on calling one’s ethos into question.
The article explored Heidegger’s account of silence and hearing as the ‘conditions
of audibility’ of the other’s voice and suffering, as well as the self’s anxiety.
Through the enhancement of such conditions, an ‘ethical’ selfhood is recovered
which understands itself as opening to otherness.
In the end, however, the recovered ‘ethical’ self cannot provide a renewed
foundation to fill the space left by the unworking of modern subjectivity, nor can
its ethical self-relationship be universalized in any concrete sense. Yet this double
prohibition is not a limitation for global ethics; rather, it has directed the present
inquiry towards the articulation of a disposition or sensibility towards the other
whose possibility might as yet exceed the ‘ethicity’ of ethics. Far from limiting
the ability to respond to global concerns, the recovery of the ‘ethical’ self is but a
different, more attuned, response to the plea of audibility from the other. This,
moreover, has wide-ranging implications for the ethical discourses of IR in their
efforts to confront and respond to the limitations of universalist and foundation-
alist inspirations in the current crisis of Enlightenment thought. As Linklater has
noted in this regard, the conversation that IR ethical theories sustain with their
critics open up the very possibility of ‘a radically improved universalism’.101 The
turn to disposition, forms an affirmative path within the Enlightenment ethos, in
which most international ethical theorizing is located; it is a response which
heeds, more than ever, the desire to hear the voice of the other and witness its
suffering, and pursue no ethical project which unwittingly obscures its very object
of concern. For the ethical discourses of international relations, this could become
a path in their efforts to work within the limits (not limitations) of Enlightenment
thought, at its margins. Indeed, the turn to disposition is a response befitting an
awareness of the limit, which abides by the ‘destruction’ of the modern subject by
the phenomenological attentiveness to the facticity of existence. In this regard,
the disposition of ‘liberating’ concern towards the other is also more than an
expression of empathy for the other; it is a caring-for which calls the other to his
own anxious Being-in-the-world and lets her assume her radical groundlessness.
It is a letting be that could offer another kind of cosmopolitan attitude through
which to begin the articulation of ‘global ethics’.
201

Notes
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the European Consortium of Political
Research and 4th Pan-European IR Joint Conference, Canterbury, 8–10 Sept. 2001 and as
part of a panel on ‘“Globalization” and the Cosmopolitan Political Project: Critical
Reflections’ at the 43rd Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, New
Orleans, 24–7 March 2002. The author is grateful to Kimberly Hutchings, Fred Dallmayr,
Vivienne Jabri, Patrick Thadeus Jackson, Richard Schapcott, Chris Brown, Daniele
Archibughi, Nigel Dowder, Helen Kambouri and EJPT’s anonymous referees for their
comments and suggestions.
1. Jeremy Waldron (2000) ‘What is Cosmopolitan?’, Journal of Political Philosophy 8(2):
227–43.
2. Ulrich Beck (2000) ‘The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology of the Second Age of
Modernity’, British Journal of Sociology 51: 79–105.
3. Ibid., 83.
4. Ibid., 84.
5. Charles E. Scott (1990) The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, p. 4.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
6. In the literature of international relations this includes: David Campbell (1998) National
Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press. Vivienne Jabri (1998) ‘Restyling the Subject of Responsibility in
International Relations’, Millennium 27: 591–611. There are also a number of relevant
essays in the 1998 special issue on ethics, Millennium 27(3).
7. Martin Heidegger (1962) Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
Oxford: Blackwell. Henceforth cited in text as BT and the page number of this English
edn.
8. Scott (n. 5), 106.
9. Additionally, in a Foucauldian argument, the process of habituation can be supplemented
with the exercise of power beyond its traditional understanding as coercion, since ‘[i]n
modern societies, power operates in a much more complex manner: through
normalisation rather than prohibition’, in Andrew Schaap (2000) ‘Power and
Responsibility: Should we Spare the King’s Head?’, Politics: Surveys and Debates for
Students of Politics 20(3): 129–35, p. 129.
10. See John Haugeland (1982) ‘Heidegger on Being a Person’, Nous 16: 15–26.
11. Arguably, this is how conceptions of ‘mores’ and ‘morals’ converge. For a discussion of
codification of rules in international politics, see Michael Dillon (1998) ‘Criminalising
Social and Political Violence Internationally’, Millennium 27(3): 543–67.
12. Charles Chamberlain (1984) ‘From “Haunts” to “Character”: The Meaning of Ethos and
its Relation to Ethics’, Helios 11: 97–108, p. 97.
13. Ibid., 99.
14. Scott (n. 5), 144–5.
15. Chamberlain (n. 12), 100.
16. Ibid., 101.
17. Scott (n. 5), 143.
18. Ibid., 144.
19. Ibid., 145.
20. For the meaning and historical evolution of the term Dasein, see Theodore Kisiel (1993)
The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, pp. 116–48, and 493. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
21. For an account of the ‘they’ as shared historical practices, see Hubert L. Dreyfus (1991)
202

Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, p. 157.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. John Haugeland (1989) ‘Dasein’s Disclosedness’, Southern
Journal of Philosophy 28: 51–73 (The Spindel Supplement).
22. This is of course a misleading translation of the term das Man by Macquarrie and
Robinson, which others have translated as ‘the one’ or even ‘community’. For a
discussion of the ‘they’, see E.C. Boedeker (2001) ‘Individual and Community in Early
Heidegger: Situating Das Man, the Man-Self, and Self-Ownership in Dasein’s
Ontological Structure’, Inquiry 44: 63–100. Stephen Mulhall (1996) Heidegger and Being
and Time. London: Routledge.
23. For a discussion of average intelligibility see Richard Polt (1997) ‘Metaphysical
Liberalism in Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie’, Political Theory 25: 655–79. Hubert L.
Dreyfus (2000) ‘Could Anything Be More Intelligible than Everyday Intelligibility?
Reinterpreting Division I of Being and Time in Light of Division II’, in James E.
Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall (eds) Appropriating Heidegger, pp. 155–74. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
24. The assignment of value is but a sign of nihilism, see Martin Heidegger (1991) Nietzsche,
tr. David Farrell Krell, vol. 4, p. 44. New York: Harper & Row. Martin Heidegger
(1977) ‘The Age of the World Picture’, tr. William Lovitt, in Heidegger, The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, pp. 115–54. New York: Harper & Row.
25. For another account of the customary and the ethical see Gernot Böhme (2000) ‘Ethical
Life or “The Customary”’, tr. John Farrell, Thesis Eleven 60: 1–10.
26. Ken Booth writes, however, ‘[t]o say that human rights come somewhere – and the West
is not the only geographical expression claiming to be a parent – should never be allowed
to be the end of the story: it is only a discussion of how we should live, as humans, on a
global scale’. Ken Booth (1999) ‘Three Tyrannies’, in Timothy Dunne and Nicholas J.
Wheeler (eds) Human Rights in Global Politics, pp. 31–70, p. 53. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
27. Even Andrew Linklater’s universalist approach acknowledges this: ‘A new universality
may yet bring an end to the West’s use of universalist moral concepts to celebrate the
achievements of Western modernity and to enlarge its control of other peoples’ see
Linklater (1998) The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-
Westphalian Era, p. 24. Cambridge: Polity Press. Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that
cosmopolitan theories are idealist in nature, and Linklater’s recent formulation in The
Transformation of Political Community is a case in point. This idealism can result in a
critical perspective towards their own location of western liberalism while, at the same
time, offering a critique of non-liberal practices. Put plainly, the idealism in cosmopolitan
thinking strives for a better version of liberalism, one that wants to include the other.
Yet, their reliance on legalist instruments and their universalizing attitude often renders
them open to critiques of imperialism nonetheless.
28. Scott (n. 5), 142.
29. See also David Campbell and Michael Dillon (eds) (1993) The Political Subject of Violence.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
30. Scott (n. 5), 106.
31. Ibid., 107.
32. For a discussion of the ‘generation of ground’, see Dreyfus (n. 21), 144, 155, and 157–62
and Martin Heidegger (1998) ‘On the Essence of Ground (1929)’, in William McNeill
(ed and tr.) Martin Heidegger: Pathmarks, pp. 97–135. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
33. On suffering see Philip Allott (2000) ‘Globalization from Above: Actualising the Ideal
through Law’, Review of International Studies (special issue on global ethics) 26: 76–7. The
203

focus on suffering necessarily refers to a western conception of ethics and morality
because the unworking of modern subjectivity for the purpose of exploring the
ontological basis of coexistence is itself targeted towards the western conception of the
subject. To call the modern subject ‘western’ might be redundant. See Etienne Balibar
(1994) ‘Subjection and Subjectivation’, in Joan Copjec (ed.) Supposing the Subject, p. 14
n.12. London: Verso. Etienne Balibar (1991) ‘Citizen Subject’, in Eduardo Cadava, Peter
Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (eds) Who Comes After the Subject?, pp. 33–57. New York:
Routledge.
34. Scott (n.5), 178.
35. Of course, this is a rhetorical question given that such isolation is ontologically
impossible given that the self is shared practices in its everydayness, see Dreyfus (n. 21).
36. A fruitful term used by Mulhall (n. 22), 133.
37. Rudi Visker (1999) Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into Phenomenology, p. 31 and
footnote 14; brackets added. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. See also, Jacques
Derrida (1984) Otobiographies. Paris: Galilée.
38. Martin Heidegger (1996) Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, tr. Joan
Stambaugh, p. 153. Albany: State University of New York Press.
39. Miguel de Beistegui (1997) Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias, p. 149. London:
Routledge.
40. Ibid., 148.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 148–9.
43. Ibid., 149.
44. Ibid., 150
45. Jacques Derrida (1993) ‘Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemogy (Geschlecht IV)’, in John Sallis
(ed.) Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, p. 175. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
46. Ibid., 164.
47. Ibid., 174.
48. Ibid., 164.
49. Beistegui (n. 39), 149.
50. Derrida (n. 45), 164.
51. Beistegui (n. 39), 150.
52. Derrida (n. 45), 174.
53. Ibid., 176.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., brackets added.
56. There are still objections to this by scholars influenced by Emmanuel Levinas’s critique
of Heidegger who claim that, despite the potentials of the analysis of the existential
structures of Dasein, the ontological nature of this work prevents it from being useful to
a discussion on ethics. In other words, the discussion remains about Dasein and not really
about the other; the other is still too removed from this consideration. See, for example,
Simon Critchley (1999b) The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, 2nd edn.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Simon Critchley (1999a) Ethics – Politics –
Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought. London: Verso.
Critchley’s discussion of Nancy’s Being Singular Plural (Jean-Luc Nancy (2000) Being
Singular Plural, tr. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford
University Press) in the latter book is especially interesting as it contests Nancy’s reliance
on Dasein’s otherness. However, this article wants to contend that inasmuch this
ontological discussion has anything to say to ethics, it is through the move of
deconstructing autonomous subjectivity. At the point of deconstruction, the ethical and
204

the ontological come together and enable a consideration of concrete otherness as well as
heteronomous selfhood. This is further addressed in the following section ‘Recovering
the Ethical Self’.
57. Beistegui (n. 39), 151.
58. Scott (n.5), 111.
59. Ibid., 110; emphasis and brackets added.
60. Ibid., 217.
61. Francois Raffoul (1998) Heidegger and the Subject, tr. David Pettigrew and Gregory
Recco, p. 226. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
62. ‘Choice is at the heart of ethics, but our choices are never entirely free’, see Michael Cox,
Ken Booth and Tim Dunne (2000) ‘Editors’ Introduction to the Forum on Social Theory
of International Politics’, Review of International Studies 26: 1. The difference with the
presupposition that choice always informs ethical decisions is that the recovery of the
ethical self is not about this or that choice because these issues would be determined
within the particular context. The recovery of the ethical self involves a ‘turn away from
ethics’ in which customary moral practices are deconstructed.
63. See Walter A. Davis (1989) Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger,
Marx, and Freud, p. 142. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
64. Ibid., 113.
65. Ibid.
66. See Martin Heidegger ‘Letter on Humanism (1946)’, in William McNeill (ed) (1998)
Martin Heidegger: Pathmarks, p. 269. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Scott (n. 5),
143–7.
67. Ibid., 269.
68. Thus, ‘ethicity’ refers to ‘the essence of ethics’, see Robert Bernasconi (1997) ‘Justice
without Ethics?’, PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 6: 58–69. Jacques Derrida (1995)
‘Passions: An Oblique Offering’, tr. David Wood, in Jacques Derrida, On the Name, pp.
3–31. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
69. See Michel Foucault (1991a) ‘Ethics and Politics: An Interview’, tr. Catherine Porter, in
Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, p. 377. London: Penguin Books.
70. Michel Foucault (1991b) ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: Overview of Work in Progress’,
in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, p. 343. London: Penguin Books.
71. Jean-Luc Nancy (1996) ‘Being-With’, tr. Iain Macdonald, University of Essex, Centre for
Theoretical Studies Working Papers 11: 1.
72. Scott (n. 5), 145.
73. Herman Philipse (1999) ‘Heidegger and Ethics’, Inquiry 42: 456.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid., 468.
76. Linklater (n. 27), 48.
77. Nancy makes the connection between nothingness as the ground of Dasein and the
deconstruction of ‘certainty’ as the ground of modern subjectivity quite explicit when he
notes that ‘[a]ll of Heidegger’s research into “being-for (or toward)-death” was nothing
other than an attempt to state this: I is not – am not – a subject’. Jean-Luc Nancy (1991)
The Inoperative Community, tr. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona
Sawhney, p. 14. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Being-toward-death
suggests not a biological end of Dasein but its radical contingency and groundlessness.
‘Finitude is characterized by groundlessness (Grund-lösigkeit) or by the concealment of
the ground (Grund-verborgenheit)’, see Raffoul (n. 61), 234.
78. Jacques Derrida (1979) Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche, tr. Barbara
Harlow, English–French edn, p. 117. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
205

79. Derrida (n. 68), 11, emphasis added. Of course, the refusal of foundationalism involves its
own universal claim about the ‘universal questionability of philosophical grounds’.
Horace L. Fairlamb (1994) Critical Conditions: Postmodernity and the Question of
Foundations, p. 7. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
80. John van Buren (1992) ‘The Young Heidegger, Aristotle, Ethics’, in Arleen B. Dallery,
Charles E. Scott and P. Holley Robert (eds) Ethics and Danger: Essays on Heidegger and
Continental Thought, p. 178. Albany: State University of New York Press.
81. Martin Heidegger (1998) ‘Comments on Karl Jasper’s Psychology of Worldviews (1919/21)’,
in William McNeill (ed.) Martin Heidegger: Pathmarks, pp. 1–38. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, cited and tr. in van Buren (n. 80), 178.
82. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1992) ‘The Political Incompetence of Philosophy’, in Tom
Rockmore and Joseph Margolis (eds) The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics,
p. 366. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. See Kai Nielsen (1966) ‘Ethical Relativism and the Facts of Cultural Relativity’, Social
Research 33: 544.
86. Tzvetan Todorov (1989) On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism and Exoticism in French
Thought, p. 32. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
87. Nielsen (n. 85), 545. This notion of a plea is slowly also being heeded in international
ethical theorizing. See Ken Booth, for example, who articulates, it seems, a similar plea
for universality: ‘not because we are human, but to make us human’ in Booth (n. 26), 52.
Molly Cochran writes in a similar vein: ‘There may be a hope for a principle to have a
range of applicability, a degree of universality beyond the context of the situation from
which it arises . . .’. Molly Cochran (1999) Normative Theory in International Relations: A
Pragmatic Approach, p. 206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
88. Christopher Fynsk (1991) ‘Foreword’, in Nancy (n. 77), p. xiii.
89. Jean-Luc Nancy (1993) The Experience of Freedom, tr. Bridget McDonald, p. 68. Stanford:
Stanford University Press. This singularity is different from individuality which ‘equated
identity with sameness’, as argues Noël O’Sullivan (1997) ‘Postmodernism and the
Politics of Identity’, in Kathryn Dean (ed.) Politics and the End of Identity, p. 234.
Aldershot: Ashgate. Being singular only occurs in its concrete relation to others.
90. John D. Caputo (1993) Demythologizing Heidegger, p. 127. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
91. The earlier translation of Being and Time by Macquarrie and Robinson (n. 7) uses the
word ‘solicitude’ but the later 1996 translation by Joan Stambaugh (n. 38) rightly uses
‘concern’ for the term Fürsorge, see p. 114.
92. Lawrence Vogel (1994) The Fragile ‘We’: Ethical Implications of Heidegger’s Being and Time,
p. 75. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
93. Ibid., 82.
94. John D. Caputo (1987) Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic
Project, pp. 258–9. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
95. Vogel (n. 92), 70.
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid., 71. See also David Campbell and Michael Dillon (1993) ‘The Political and the
Ethical’, in Campbell and Dillon (n. 29), 167–8.
98. Vogel (n. 92), 71. Yet, the question remains as to how this awareness of others as ‘centers
of transcendence’ becomes manifested in actual relations with others – how is such an
attunement to be manifested in the everyday world of praxis? The debate on this
question is likely to remain important not only for scholars but increasingly with civil
206

society organizations which start to critique current institutions and policies and
continue to reflect on the difficulty and deficiency of rights-based language. For
example, in the World Summit at Johannesburg in Sept. 2002, the inability of
international institutions and western publics to listen to the voices of others whose
concerns are not expressed in the language of right and interest became more
prominently debated than it had in the past. This is a debate that will continue to seek
practical manifestations and the difficulty with providing easy answers is not a sign of its
failure but rather a sign of its complexity.
99. Cochran (n. 87), 206.
100. Ibid., 249.
101. Linklater (n. 27), 48.
207

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EPT 2/2 articles 13/3/03 10:23 am Page 183

On the Way to Global Ethics? EJPT

a b s t r a c t : In response to varied processes of globalization, the cosmopolitan

k e y w o r d s : cosmopolitanism, ethics, Heidegger, human rights

European Journal of Political Theory 2(2)

Odysseos: On the Way to Global Ethics?

European Journal of Political Theory 2(2)

Odysseos: On the Way to Global Ethics?

European Journal of Political Theory 2(2)

Turning Away from Ethics

Odysseos: On the Way to Global Ethics?

European Journal of Political Theory 2(2)

Hearing and Silence: The ‘Conditions of Audibility’

Odysseos: On the Way to Global Ethics?

European Journal of Political Theory 2(2)

Odysseos: On the Way to Global Ethics?

Taking exemplarity in this exceptional way, understood not as interchangeable

European Journal of Political Theory 2(2)

Recovering the Ethical Self

Odysseos: On the Way to Global Ethics?

There might be an intimate relationship, therefore, between ‘propriety’ and

Rethinking the Need for Rules of Proper Conduct

European Journal of Political Theory 2(2)

On the Impossibility of a Renewed Ethical

Odysseos: On the Way to Global Ethics?

European Journal of Political Theory 2(2)

On the Way to Global Ethics: A Different Kind of

Odysseos: On the Way to Global Ethics?

European Journal of Political Theory 2(2)

This is not an impersonal and anonymous perspective but an ‘interpersonal

Odysseos: On the Way to Global Ethics?

European Journal of Political Theory 2(2)

Odysseos: On the Way to Global Ethics?

European Journal of Political Theory 2(2)

Odysseos: On the Way to Global Ethics?

European Journal of Political Theory 2(2)

Odysseos: On the Way to Global Ethics?

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