Oa HavIins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish

TIe ElIics oJ Wasle Hov We BeIale lo BuIIisI I Oa HavIins,

Beviev I Bevieved I ZevM.TvacIlenIevg
ElIics, VoI. 117, No. 3, Snposiun on Bvian Bavv's ilaIic`WI SociaI Juslice
Mallevs/ilaIic` |ApviI 2007), pp. 560-563
FuIIisIed I TIe Univevsil oJ CIicago Fvess
SlaIIe UBL http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/513574 .
Accessed 26/09/2014 1101
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethics.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 129.215.5.253 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 11:01:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
560 Ethics April 2007
guided this ambitious expedition to success. But instead Fried chose a contrary
approach, 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 & Littleeld, 2006. Pp. xii154. $69.00 (cloth); $23.95
(paper).
Gay Hawkinss book will present a challenge to readers who, like myself, are
not particularly well versed in poststructuralist cultural studies. Although the
conventions 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 basic
understanding of what ethics is; confronting a radically different conception of
ethics can alert one to limitations in ones own view, or increase ones condence
in the fundamental intuitions on which ones view is based. This is not at all to
say that Hawkins has little of interest to say about the subject of waste. But, on
balance, what is most interesting about her book is what she says about the
subject of ethics.
The provocative quality of Hawkinss approach can be seen in her books
title, in particular, the specication of ethics implied by the subtitle. The ethical
aspect of waste, she suggests, is in our relation to stuffto the material we discard
as rubbish. Now I dont take it to be especially controversial that ethics has to
do with relations, though Hawkins intimates that a focus on relations is part of
what distinguishes her (poststructuralist inspired) outlook from the more or-
dinary understanding of ethics as a matter of principles or rules. What does
strike me as controversial, to say the least, is the notion that our relations to
things as things has ethical signicance. Obviously, our relations with things spill
over into (or just are) relations with people; these are the paradigms of the
ethically signicant. And of course it is not simply relations with people that are
ethically signicant; 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 human
beings. But it does seem to me that the basic Kantian intuition that there is a
decisive ethical difference between people and things lies very close to the core
of the conventional ethical view. The most fundamental way of grasping what
it means to treat (i.e., relate to) a person immorally is to see that it involves
treating (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 enter
relations with them. The things whose agency she seeks to highlight are those
that have been discarded. Waste makes claims on us. Reducing waste is not
simply a matter of the moral reform of the human. It is also about acknowledging
This content downloaded from 129.215.5.253 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 11:01:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Book Review 561
that waste has a kind of agency; that it shares in some of the agency we ascribe
only to ourselves (85). The failure to acknowledge agency in things is part of
a more generalized disenchantment by which human beings are alienated
from the natural world, having lost their connection to the physical environment
on which their very survival depends (8). Entering into a relation with the
material stuff of rubbish can promote a reenchantment and can serve as the
rst step toward an alternative (and presumably preferable) ethics of waste in
which 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 eye
to 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 theory
she invokes on its behalf.
What then is Hawkinss general view of ethics? Hawkins contrasts ethics
with morality, which she characterizes as a code of imperatives. Morality, she
suggests, inevitably turns into moralizing and prompts resentment and resistance
in response. Ethics, on the other hand, is particularized rather than universal
and is rooted in relationships rather than constituted by commands. Hawkins
broadly follows Foucault and Deleuze in holding that ethics revolve around
embodied practices and micropolitics of the self (15). Thus, in speaking of
ethics generally she refers to the cultivation of an identity for oneself in terms
of a set of norms through the activities of daily life. However, the activities of
daily life can be categorized. Particular categories of activities are thus particular
ethical domains, to be understood in terms of the particularized practices found
there. 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 rather
to identify the ways in which our practices of classifying and then disposing of
certain materials as waste contribute to our self-maintenance. The ethics of
waste should thus be understood as an ethic: it is an aspect of life picked out
from 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 bathroom
is made possible by a massive public structurethe sewage systemof which
ones own toilet is a single node (56). It is no doubt true that, for members of
industrialized societies which have systems of indoor plumbing, the sense of
decency (which as thinkers from Adam Smith on have recognized as a condition
of membership in society) involves the kind of cleanliness that access to a bath-
room facilitates. There is, therefore, plenty of room for detailed examination
of how that intimate aspect of peoples sense of self has a history and has changed
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 is
critical of the conventional ethics of the bathroom she describes; she celebrates
efforts to bring forth a revised ethics in this domain. Her critical stance is
puzzling, however: what is the status of the grounds of her critique? She refers
This content downloaded from 129.215.5.253 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 11:01:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
562 Ethics April 2007
in broad ways to the unsustainability of the proigate use of water that modern
bathrooms encourage. But because her conception of ethics is, nally, descriptive
rather than normative (granting that it involves descriptions of norms), and
because 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 regarding
the bathroom but across domains of life, display her belief that they would be
better in some way than the conventional ethics they would replace. But I do
not see how her conception of ethics gives her the resources for that kind of
evaluation.
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 waste
management are prime examples of collective action problems, and concepts
in the eld of collective action such as the tragedy of the commons and the
notion of externalities are ready to hand to articulate our ethical intuitions.
These conceptual tools are standardly deployed to justify public institutions
designed to manage waste. But, as Hawkins observes, the presence of advertising
campaigns and even regulations designed to increase participation in a public
program by no means guarantees compliance. In particular, standard moral
appeals run the risk that they come off as moralizing, generating resentment
and lessening compliance, as her example of opposition to mandates for low-
ow toilets (60) demonstrates. But for collective action programs to succeed
they must incorporate a nuanced understanding of how the norms they seek
to instill can in fact be internalized, given the complex psychological resistance
they are likely to face. Although the details of Hawkinss account of responses
to recycling programs in chapter 5 were not entirely persuasive to me, her focus
on the individualized experience of waste management practices (what she calls
their micro-politics) exemplies a way to enrich our understanding of collec-
tive action. Collective action occurs within the matrix of culture; the motivations
of the individuals who act collectively are shaped by that matrix. To the extent
that collective action theory gives shape to an outlook on ethics it ought to be
open 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 waste
in particular. I will conclude with a comment on the books limitation regarding
that 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 connotation
of the term, and one that I take to have equal if not greater ethical signicance,
does not tie the concept of waste to material: we speak readily and with normative
force about wasting energy, wasting time, wasting opportunities. Thus, to focus
on waste as stuff, while obviously important, seems not to engage the full range
of ethically relevant cases of waste. A complete treatment of the subject might
perhaps look at waste in less material and more functional terms. An obvious
touchstone for such an approach is Lockes theory of property, in which the
concept of waste plays an essential role. Locke does dene waste in terms of
function: something is wasted if it does not fulll its divinely appointed role of
This content downloaded from 129.215.5.253 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 11:01:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Book Reviews 563
contributing to human well-being. In Lockes argument that property is a natural
right (in chap. 5 of the Second Treatise of Government), the prohibition on waste
serves to justify the accumulation of imperishable goods, that is, capital. Further,
propertyless people are implicitly condemned for having, in effect, wasted their
time and labor power by not producing goods. Waste, that is, is a central ethical
category for Locke. Given Hawkinss interest in the concept of value, which she
considers throughout the book, it was surprising that she did not address Lockes
theory.
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 excellent
guide to Spinozas magnum opus and a substantial contribution to Spinoza
scholarship. This is precisely the kind of book that Spinoza scholarship inEnglish
has needed for a very long time. Spinoza scholars looking for a clear, compre-
hensive, and up-to-date introduction to the Ethics have had to settle for second-
best solutions. Henry Allisons Benedict de Spinoza: An Introduction (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1987) and Frederick Pollocks Spinoza: His Life and
Philosophy (1899; reissued by American Scholar Publications, New York, 1966)
are quite helpful, but both are out of date and out of print. The eld of Spinoza
scholarship has changed dramatically over the past thirty to forty years, changes
that were largely instigated by the publication of Edwin Curleys groundbreaking
work Spinozas Metaphysics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).
These developments have partly reected deep changes in the face of Anglo-
American philosophy (particularly, the emergence of a new openness to the
history of philosophy, even when philosophers of the past advocated positions
counter to common sensewhatever common sense means) and in part
formed a critical reaction to the enormous interest in Spinoza that emerged in
Europeprimarily France, Italy, and Spainin the last quarter of the twentieth
century.
Nadler rightly characterizes the Ethics as an extraordinarily difcult 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 Ethics is a dense text. It appears short, but were its demonstrations
to be explicated it would spread over a fair number of volumes. The Ethics is a
conceptual labyrinth, and Nadlers guide to this labyrinth is very helpful. His
eloquent style, clear presentation, excellent mapping of problems and possible
solutions, and impressive command of Spinozas early texts and correspondence
result in one of the best introductions to a key philosophical text. His success
in 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 the
Ethics. The rst chapter is a concise intellectual biography of Spinoza. Nadlers
masterful study of Spinozas life (Spinoza: A Life [Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
This content downloaded from 129.215.5.253 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 11:01:20 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions