Analyse & Kritik 30/2008 (

c Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart) p. 427–443

Gideon Calder

Ethics and Social Ontology∗

“Philosophers such as Frege and Popper, and more recently Jürgen Haber-
mas have said that we should think of reality as dividing up into three
different worlds. My own view is that we should never have started coun-
ting.” (Searle 1998, 144)

“Ethics is about human beings—but it is about what they are like, not
what they like.” (Eagleton 2004, 126–127)

Abstract: Normative theory, in various idioms, has grown wary of questions of ontology—
social and otherwise. Thus modern debates in ethics have tended to take place at some
distance from (for example) debates in social theory. One arguable casualty of this has
been due consideration of relational factors (between agents and the social structures
they inhabit) in the interrogation of ethical values. Part 1 of this paper addresses some
examples of this tendency, and some of the philosophical assumptions which might
underlie it. Parts 2 and 3 discuss two issues of growing prominence—disability, and
environmental concern—due attention to which, I argue, highlights strong reasons why
severing ethics from social ontology is neither possible nor desirable. I conclude by
recommending a qualified ethical naturalism as a promising candidate through which,
non-reductively, to reunite these two areas of theoretical focus.

0. Introduction

Much modern normative theory has tended to dismiss, quarantine or swerve

around questions of ontology. This is for a number of reasons, some of them
summed up neatly in this entry from the glossary of an excellent and unfashio-
nable book by Scott Meikle, published six years after the inception of Analyse
& Kritik :
“Ontology
The realm of being, or of what is or exists. It should be understood in
relation to epistemology (q.v.) which concerns the realm of knowled-
ge, or of what is known. The philosophical vogues of recent decades,

∗ Between the conception of this article and its completion, my father, Angus Calder, was

diagnosed with the cancer from which he died in June 2008. It is dedicated to his memory, and
however indirectly, I hope it catches something of the spirit of his own concerns. Points made
here have featured in papers given to philosophy and sociology seminars at the universities
of Lancaster, Birmingham, Lampeter and the West of England, and at conferences at King’s
College London, Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Bath, and Drexel Uni-
versity in Philadelphia. I am very grateful to those present in each setting for the wealth of
helpful criticism received. Ineptitudes remaining are nobody’s fault but mine.
428 Gideon Calder

which have influenced conceptions of methods in the social sciences,

have had for the most part a very restricted ontology which has been
fused with their atomist epistemology (q.v.). That epistemology has
set tight constraints on their preferred ontology, with the (desired)
result that non-atomistic entities (e.g. social classes) came to seem
problematical unless they could be reduced to the permitted atoms
(individual agents), or in some way construed of them alone.” (Meikle
1985, 178)

Meikle’s focus is on the explanation of social phenomena. His target is me-

thodological individualism—in Jon Elster’s words, the doctrine that “all soci-
al phenomena—their structure and their change—are in principle explicable in
ways that involve only individuals—their properties, their goals, their beliefs,
and their actions” (Elster 1985, xiii). Atomist epistemologies, says Meikle, will
admit for ontological consideration only those aspects of things which can be
atomically reduced in the way that Elster describes. My own concern in this
article is with the relation between ethics—the study of practical reasoning and
the concepts used therein—and social ontology, or as Searle puts it, “the ontology
of social reality” (Searle 1998, 143). Yet a central point I would like to develop
echoes Meikle’s. Characteristic of much recent normative philosophy has been a
tendency not to admit for consideration what we might call relational factors:
factors which pertain to the relations between (on the one hand) agents, their
properties, goals, beliefs and actions and (on the other hand) other agents, or
their situations, the social structures they inhabit, the built environments they
make their decisions in, or the non-human world more generally. Another way
of putting this is that the interrogation of norms has gone on at a deliberate
distance from the textures of the social and environmental backdrops against
which norms do whatever work they do, and with which, from the point of view
of agents, they seem inextricably enmeshed. Thus the development of normative
stances and frameworks often takes place at the expense of a lack of attention to
the relational complexity of the social world. In Searle’s terms, ethics has been
put in one ‘world’, and social ontology in another.
Another set of boundaries is worth setting alongside this one—reflecting,
this time, the academic organisation of inquiry. The student of ethics or moral
philosophy will find routine lines drawn between meta-ethics, normative ethics
and applied ethics, with these being treated as distinct aspects of the overall field.
Of course, this is helpful pedagogically, and reflects familiar enough variations
in personal orientation. One could find oneself at home in conceptual discussions
of the nature of moral disagreement, or be transfixed by the stand-off between
consequentialists and deontologists, without much being made at all itchy by
contemporary debates about abortion or torture or global justice. And vice versa,
and so on. Yet a risk of any such division is that each part might come to seem
autonomous. Applied ethics can be taught without any reference to meta-ethics
at all. Meta-ethics can (just about) be grappled with entirely in abstraction from
concrete examples or the ‘real world’. And while in many senses normative ethics
sits in between those two, the extent to which it genuinely mediates between
Ethics and Social Ontology 429

them, or integrates the insights gained from each, is by no means guaranteed

by its place in the syllabus. This is more than just an institutional matter.
The point is sometimes made that political philosophy has become less about
politics, and more of a branch of moral philosophy. (A version of this argument
has recently been put forward by Raymond Geuss, as we will see shortly.) What
this means is not that political philosophy has come to mirror the techniques
of applied ethics, but that its subject matter overlaps with that of normative
and meta-ethics. Indeed, it might be said that political philosophy has become
a branch of moral philosophy, formally at least. Thus there are generations of
students of political philosophy whose understanding of the discipline, and what
counts as doing it well, is curiously apolitical. A certain kind of fluency at the
level of conceptual fine-tuning is achieved at the expense of a lack of dexterity in
addressing current political concerns, or negotiating what one might otherwise
expect to be the kinds of questions and problems which would lead one to study
political philosophy in the first place. Deeming applied ethics a poor—somehow
less weighty or worthy—relation of its more ‘theoretical’ counterparts, or indeed
teaching it as if it were not itself entangled with ‘deeper’ theoretical issues, seems
similarly discrepant. It might be that this detachment of theory from practice,
or of concepts from their concrete application, is a curious, regrettable side-effect
of the notion that different realms of inquiry exist in separate silos, or at least,
with clear borders in between.
Whatever their formal appeal, then, and though they have their uses, it
seems to me making too much of these different divisions—let alone cementing
them into discrete ‘worlds’—is ultimately neither accurate nor helpful. They do
not reflect particularly well the kind of thing that practical reasoning is, and
neither do they help us tackle the nuances of the ‘values issues’ we confront.
This article is an attempt to defend these claims. In part 1, I explore some
possible reasons for the ethicist’s wariness of ontology, and some of the forms
it has taken. In parts 2 and 3 I discuss two examples of issues—disability, and
environmental concern—which have taken on a new and particular prominence
in ethical debates since the late 1970s, and which—as I argue—provide especially
good instances of why severing (applied) ethics from social ontology is neither
possible nor desirable. These are issues, I shall suggest, where getting to grips
with relationality is crucial to any satisfactory resolution of the particular kinds
of challenges they pose. So my purpose is to try to show both that ethics and
social ontology need to be addressed together rather than apart, and also that a
sensitivity to relationality is a crucial element of any applied ethics worthy of the
name. In the concluding sections, I draw some wider, though brief, conclusions
about the nature and scope of normative theory in an attempt to identify which
among current trends in the field of social philosophy give the most fertile ground
on which now to work. I suggest that what Andrew Sayer has called a ‘qualified
ethical naturalism’ is the best such candidate.
430 Gideon Calder

1. Normative Theory and Ontology

When it comes to claims about the social world, normative theorists are en-
couraged to be risk-averse. They will see an extravagance in making ontological
commitments which the sober-minded ethicist should avoid unless they want
trouble. This precautionary stance might stem from lesson-drawing from the
wider range of recent philosophy, much of which has been hostile to metaphy-
sics in the traditional register. ‘Metaphysics’ here refers to the ultimate nature
of reality; whether cosmological, or social. While metaphysics has a bad name,
or anyway looks a dangerous business, normative theorising remains as vital as
ever, and has fresh and pressing challenges to face. So there is a kind of re-
assurance in insisting that the latter can (and should) advance without getting
bogged down in the former. One can find examples of this resistance across a
wide range of orientations and traditions which otherwise are in different ways
at odds. One finds it in Kantianism, but just as much in emotivism. One finds
it in Rawls, but just as much in Nozick. One finds it in Habermas, but just as
much in his postmodernist critics. Indeed one finds it, as Raymond Geuss has
recently elaborated, in the whole way in which much contemporary normative
philosophy is done.
For Geuss, the problem lies in the assumption that “we start thinking about
the human social world by trying to get to what is sometimes called an ‘ideal
theory’ of ethics”. As he depicts it,
“This approach assumes that there is, or could be, such a thing as a
separate discipline called Ethics which has its own distinctive subject-
matter and forms of argument, and which prescribes how humans
should act toward one another. It further assumes that one can study
this subject-matter without constantly locating it within the rest
of human life, and without unceasingly reflecting on the relations
one’s claims have with history, sociology, ethnology, psychology and
economics. Finally, this approach proposes that the way to proceed
in ‘Ethics’ is to focus on a very few general principles such as that
humans are rational, or that they generally seek pleasure and try to
avoid pain, or that they always pursue their own ‘interests’... Usually,
some kind of individualism is also presupposed, in that the precepts
of ethics are thought to apply directly and in the first instance to
human individuals.” (Geuss 2008, 6–7)
Geuss’s characterisation of this approach is helpful for my own discussion, be-
cause it highlights two themes which will recur here too. One is what he calls an
‘epistemic abstemiousness’ about much mainstream normative theorising. The
social world is often regarded as a kind of unwelcome intrusion on the smooth-
running of the systematising of norms; a source of non-conducive clutter or
unnecessary detail. The other is that despite the urge to avoid social ontology,
it nonetheless rears its head in any case as soon as the normative show gets on
the road. The idea that we can avoid getting tangled up in ‘the rest of human
life’ by working on the basis that (for example) human beings are self-interested
Ethics and Social Ontology 431

utility maximisers is in fact, a statement which undoes itself before the sentence
is complete. For any such claim about human beings is itself an ontological com-
mitment. If the theoretical system it supports runs the more smoothly by it
being posited without reference to the messy stuff of social existence, then that,
it might seem, is so much the worse for the plausibility of that system. I will say
more about both of these themes as the article goes on.
Meanwhile it is worth addressing the kinds of assumptions which underpin
the ostensibly diverse (indeed mutually antagonistic) approaches featured in the
rather unlikely-looking gallery above. Some such operative assumptions are sha-
red across these different perspectives; others are more closely associated with
some than with others. Among the most prominent of them are these:
1. Because there is a firm and clear distinction between facts and values,
claims about what should be are entirely independent of claims about what
is. Thus no truth claim can entail a value judgement; you cannot, as for
Hume, derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ (Hume 1978, bk III, pt I). This claim
might issue in a further, influential assumption: that moral language is
essentially action-guiding, rather than being ‘about’ the world (Hare 1952;
Mackie 1997). Thus the view that euthanasia is wrong is not an appeal
to the ‘way things are’, or to properties of the world independent of the
emotional attitudes of the view-holder; it is rather an expression of those
attitudes, which swings free of any such ontological baggage.
2. Because there is no firm and clear distinction between facts and values, we
cannot expect to resolve normative disputes through an appeal to ontology.
Thus (see e.g. Putnam 2004, 28–32, 72–78) while some think that recourse
to ontology will allow for ethical convergence around particular, undisputed
factual claims, such a promise of consensus is ill-founded. Even if facts were
by their nature the kind of thing we can come to agreement on (which
itself, for Putnam, is a misleading picture), this wouldn’t help us with the
normative side of things.
3. Ontological questions are contested and divisive, and public norms, for the
sake of coherence, legitimacy and smooth-running, need to swing free of
this complexity. The most controversial values are those involving deep
ontological commitments, for example concerning religion or other non-
generalisable aspects of individuals’ diverse conceptions of themselves and
the world. We won’t find consensus here, among what Rawls calls ‘com-
prehensive doctrines’. We might, though, find more neutral, non-contested
values on which to found public deliberation about matters of right and
wrong which are “free-standing and expounded apart from, or without re-
ference to, any such wider background” (Rawls 2005, 12).
4. Mixing norms and ontology risks reification, reductionism and/or essen-
tialism. Reification here refers to “the moment that a process or relation is
generalised into an abstraction, and thereby turned into a ‘thing’ ” (Bewes
2002, 3). A typical claim in this vein will go something like this: if we ba-
se norms on ontological commitments, we thereby freeze and make static
432 Gideon Calder

aspects of human being which are dynamic and resistant to pinning-down

by single concepts. The concerns about reductionism and essentialism are
related. To prioritise certain aspects of human or social being in the de-
velopment of normative accounts, or to appeal (explicitly or implicitly) to
‘essential’ features therein will be to reduce, simplify or compress that exis-
tence in ways which exclude, silence or marginalise other aspects or forms
of existence. Versions of these concerns feature particularly in discussions
of gender, sexuality, and other aspects of difference which are taken to
be open in ways which ontology-speak closes down (see, inter alia, Butler
1990; and for commentary McLennan 1996).

These assumptions are often quite distinct, have been differently influential, and
come from quite separate theoretical directions. Even so, they converge in certain
ways, and at certain points. Two such points are these. First: it is conceptually
possible to sever normative debates from ontological questions. Second: this itself
is normatively beneficial; it is better, more authentic or more pragmatically
efficacious for us to take ‘ethics’ as something which operates in a separate
world from that with which ontology is concerned.
I want to dispute both these claims. My responses to them, in outline, are
that

1. Attempts in ethics to erase all dependence on ontological claims tend to

fail, or unravel, and so undermine the ethical project at stake.
2. There are potentially pernicious implications of denying the ethical signi-
ficance of ontological claims.

To argue for these responses requires, I think, two supplementary, supporting

claims. One is that ethics and social ontology are ‘about’ similar/overlapping
things. The other follows: that ‘doing’ ethics requires paying due attention to
the kinds of issues which for adherents to points 1–4 above are not the kinds of
places normative theory should go—or to put it another way, that the best ethical
theory is that which is happy to get its hands dirty in that respect. From this
angle, it is not whether but rather how we tackle questions of social ontology in
ethics which is crucial. Any ethical agenda entails ontological commitments. The
ways in which we might flourish or be harmed; the critique of gender hierarchy;
the adequacy of models of human rights; the possibility of an ethical relationship
with the natural environment—to approach any of these issues is to approach
complex interplay between normativity and ontology. To flesh out these claims,
I will take as examples two issues which—regardless of the general tenor of
normative theorizing, or of trends in meta-ethics—have moved from the margins
of attention to somewhere much more central in the last three decades. An
anthology of applied ethics published in 1978 might very well have gotten away
without including sections on either; indeed most of the best-known ones of that
era did. These days, none would—or at least, none should. The two issues are
disability, and environmental concern.
Ethics and Social Ontology 433

2. Example 1: Disability

Disability is a familiar part of the ‘diversity issues’ which have become stan-
dard discussion-points both in the academy, and in various kinds of institutional
setting. Use of the term ‘diversity’ typically reflects a motivation to be mo-
re sensitive to difference. This motivation is not always clearly conceptualised,
or articulated. In institutions such as universities, the significance of ‘diversi-
ty’ often becomes so elastic as to become shapeless—but nevertheless disability,
along with ethnicity, features prominently under its heading. In normative theo-
ry, there is a kind of reverse tendency. Here there are fine-grained, nuanced
considerations of ‘difference’, ‘identity’, and associated questions about justice
and social values. But disability—unlike e.g. ethnicity, gender, religious belief,
nationality, sexuality—is not a stock agenda item. In fact, it is very often not
addressed—or if so, only indirectly—even in those texts most explicitly con-
cerned with the recognition and negotiation of difference (see e.g. Young 1990;
Honneth 1995; Fraser/Honneth 2003—landmark texts about difference and soci-
al justice in which disability receives one passing mention in total).1 A question
emerges: is disability definitively different from the other forms of ‘difference’
addressed by diversity committees, and political theorists? The most compelling
answer is: yes and no. This answer tells us something about disability, but also
about difference more broadly conceived, in relation to questions of ethics and
social ontology. Rather than being marginal, discussion of disability affords us
with particularly good, generalisable ways of thinking about these things.
Disability itself is difficult to categorise in any neat way. To an extent all of
these points seem true, though perhaps in an unsettling way: There is no shared
condition called ‘disability’. There is no shared experience of ‘disability’. There
is no body of beliefs/attitudes definitive of being ‘disabled’. There is no static
or simple set of relational features (between individuals, or between individuals
and their social/built environments) definitive of being ‘disabled’.
Put these together, and the conclusion, it seems, is that there is no definitive
way of being disabled. These are fairly bland empirical observations: different
individuals and groups to whom the label ‘disabled’ is applied are not somehow
joined by a shared phenomenological orientation towards the world or others,
by a shared experience of these conditions, by attitudes or values, or indeed a
shared experience of discrimination. One could say much the same about any
social grouping, around culture or sexuality or nationality or gender or indeed
anything else. Such points are relatively easy to make: in place of essences or a
definitive ‘sharedness’, we find, at most, ‘family resemblances’. Perhaps, often,
we are struck by the absence even of these.
1 As Phillip Cole has pointed out, Rawls in A Theory of Justice explicitly sets aside the

question of disability, stating (in a footnote—Rawls 1972, 70, n. 9) that “[. . . ] it is reasonable
to assume that everyone has physical needs and physiological capacities within some normal
range”. As Cole also points out, although Rawls suggests that he may be able to “attempt to
handle these other cases later”, his theory of justice thus nonetheless “openly excludes those who
are excluded from full and active participation in society” (Cole 1998, 45). This seems to me a
particularly good (or rather, grim) example of the methodological limitations of contemporary
political philosophy decried by Geuss—see section 1, above.
434 Gideon Calder

This very point might make such bland empirical observations seem rather
point-missing (and perhaps naively atomistic). If civil rights movements depen-
ded for their coherence on the clean, clear identification of some such essence,
they would all be doomed, conceptually and pragmatically. That there is no fixed
or shared experience of ‘being a woman’ does not mean that gender oppressi-
on does not exist, or that individuals do not experience discrimination because
they are women. In this vein proponents of the social model of disability have
argued that there is a sharedness in being on the receiving end of ‘disablism’.
The social model conceives disability as arising not from physical impairment,
but from discrimination, exclusion, and other features of the social environment.
A conventional view of disability might see it as consisting in the absence of a
capacity or ability (whether physiological or psychological) considered to be part
of a normally functioning life for any individual. This serves both to individuali-
se disability and to medicalise it. Disabled individuals are regarded as patients,
with deficiencies or ailments which, in principle, are there to be made good, fi-
xed or cured. One purpose of the social model is to shift the politics of disability
away from the notion that it represents a kind of tragic personal affliction, and
towards questions of social relationality. The former is itself implicated in pat-
terns of discrimination: “for many disabled people, the tragedy view of disability
is itself disabling. It denies the experience of a disabling society, their enjoyment
of life, and even their identity and self-awareness as disabled people.” (Swain
et al. 2003, 71) Thus the sharedness underpinning the ‘disabled community’ is
located in an interest both in reforming a physical environment configured wi-
thout due regard for the needs of disabled people, and in challenging the social
construction of the disabled in mainstre am discourse and policy (Smith 2005,
554–556).
The effect here is to shift the register of disability politics from the biological
to the social. This itself is perceived as crucial in the construction of a disability
rights movement, based on a political understanding of the issues which disab-
led people face. Hence, as Tom Shakespeare sums a widely-held view within the
movement: “to mention biology, to admit pain, to confront our impairments, has
been to risk the oppressors seizing on evidence that disability is really about
physical limitation after all.” (Shakespeare 1992, 40) The shift, though, is am-
biguous. For some proponents, the social model serves as an all-encompassing,
stand-alone explanation of the causes and effects of disability. Thus Mike Oli-
ver argues that “disability is wholly and exclusively social [. . . ] disablement is
nothing to do with the body” (Oliver 1996, 41). Impairment is bodily; disability
is relational. But for others, disability is a product of the relationship between
impairment and the social environment—for example, for Vic Finkelstein (1980),
the “ensemble of capitalist social relations”.2 This second seems to me both a
richer explanation, and one with wider resonance—precisely because of its focus
on this ‘space between’.3 An appeal to the interests invoked by to shared ‘disabi-
lity rights’ seem to require, to be normatively compelling, a cashing out not just
2 See Terzi 2004 and Cole 2007 for an illuminating critical exchange on the relation between

the philosophical underpinnings of the social model and its political uses.
3 See Calder 2005 for a wider discussion of how epistemically individualist approaches will
Ethics and Social Ontology 435

of individual interests, but of interests arising from relations between features of

individuals, the environments they inhabit, and the attitudes and perceptions of
others.
The social model has been remarkably successful, having travelled relatively
swiftly from something fairly wacky-sounding to the status of institutional ‘com-
mon sense’. My own University has adopted the social model as the institutional
definition of disability; current UK equality and discrimination law has been re-
vised substantively in light of it. Publicly, the ethics of disability are couched in
its register. Disability has become a term referring to the shared interests of tho-
se with particular impairments in transforming their social environments, and
in shifting the attitudes of those, in different social contexts, with whom they
deal. But this story, though remarkable, carries with it pressing philosophical
complexities. In what do such interests consist? From whence do they derive?
Partly for reasons alluded to in the passages by Meikle and Geuss cited abo-
ve, ethical theory traditionally struggles with relationality. As mentioned in the
Introduction, two dimensions of this neglected relationality are these: relationa-
lity between subjects (or intersubjectivity); relationality between subjects and
their environments. Disability theory, via the social model and the discussions to
which it has given rise, starts with these relationalities, and won’t let them go.
What it seeks to articulate are particularities about the ways in which people
might be disabled, and their normative implications. But what it emphasises
in the process is that, given our vulnerabilities and our dependency on others,
disability is an inevitable feature of a human life. It is a matter of degree, rather
than kind: as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, “a matter of more or less, both in
respect of degree of disability and in respect of the time periods in which we are
disabled” (MacIntyre 1999, 73).
Returning to the points raised earlier about the difficulty of neatly catego-
rising ‘disability’, it seems that similar points might be made in respect of any
of the following: ‘good health’; ‘womanhood’; ‘ethnicity’. The implication might
seem, in each case, that because there is nothing definitive about any of these
categorisations, the categories themselves dissolve away—such that using them
at all is erroneous, or (worse) amounts to a kind of coercion. The fluidity of the
social construction of disability might, in a familiar sense, lead some to conclude
that it doesn’t ‘really exist’, or that it is altogether socially contingent. But this
conclusion, in my view, is misplaced. That there is nothing definitive about being
disabled in an essentialist sense, that everything significant about it is a matter
of degree and of blurred lines, is not to say that the whole condition is simply
perception-dependent. Disability is the sole product of neither the impaired bo-
dy nor the oppressive society: the ontological implications of the social model
seem rather that is a kind of emergent property of the interplay between body
and society. Thus what is ‘different’ about disability as a form of difference is
the particular way in which body and society inter-relate. Attention to the par-
ticularities of this is what ‘doing justice’ to disability consists in—descriptively
and normatively. What we find when we explore disability is a particular confi-

miss ontologically relational factors—and of examples of cases where it is those relational

factors, or this ‘space between’, which is of crucial ethical significance.
436 Gideon Calder

guration of the relationship between the individual body and its environments.
We find a particular combination of the universal condition of embodied, vulne-
rable selfhood and the contingencies of the relations into which our bodies are
immersed. That there are such relations is inevitable, as is the relevance to their
negotiation of normative questions about autonomy (dis)empowerment and re-
cognition. But how this pans out for each individual is something which cannot
be addressed without due attention to social structures, dominant perceptions,
and the rest of the foci of the disability rights movement. So we find a messy
mixture of the generalised and the ungeneralisable. Far from being particular to
disability, as a ‘diversity issue’, this messy mixture is part and parcel of each
thing which comes under that heading.
For these reasons, disability seems a particularly salient example of the kind of
issue which, to be thought about ethically, requires that we are already thinking
about social ontology. If we were not, we would simply miss the kind of issue
it is.4 If we return from here to the qualms about involving ontology in ethics
mentioned in the previous section, we will notice, I think, some of the strange,
delimiting places to which such qualms might lead us. To follow this through,
consider the following sentences, which might be based on elements of each of
the assumptions depicted there:

1. Ethical concerns about disability are not ‘about’ features of the (social)
world, but are expressions of our own emotional attitudes.

2. Even if facts about our social environment were the kind of thing we could
come to an agreement on, this wouldn’t help in resolving the kinds of
ethical concerns raised by disability.

3. We can find consensus on basic values around issues such as disability wi-
thout recourse to potentially divisive, controversial ontological discussions
about the nature of disability itself.

4. To talk about disability rights through an appeal to the ‘social reality’

of disability is itself to essentialise a particular group (‘the disabled’), to
treat their interests as somehow ‘natural’, and reduce otherwise diverse and
complexly textured aspects of human being under convenient, and thereby
false, generalisations.

Each of these positions, it seems to me, is (differently) ill-founded. I will return

to the reasons why in section 4, after looking at our second example of an ethical
issue.
4 This is not to deny, of course, that much discussion of disability among ethicists goes on in

ways avoiding issues of social ontology, explicitly or otherwise. Such discussion goes on all the
time. In fact, at conferences on ethics and disability, it’s quite likely that discussion will take
place in two quite different registers: one in which the social model is taken as a starting-point
(or at least, seriously), and one in which it is dismissed or ignored. This makes for some weird
discussions, especially when both camps are sitting round the same table, discussing the same
paper. Still, there are insights to be gained from it, especially about how not to do disability
ethics.
Ethics and Social Ontology 437

3. Example 2: Environmental Concern

Since the 1970s, debates in environmental ethics and politics have worn well-
trodden paths over a set of questions which can be summarised like this. Does
‘doing justice’ to the environment—to the particular kinds of issue raised by
environmental concerns—require a wholesale reorientation of existing normative
frameworks, categories of social justice, etc? Do we need to shift to an eco-
centric paradigm—and away from the habitual anthropocentrism of traditional
conceptions of value—in order fully to appreciate, and address, the kinds of is-
sues those are? Are notions of ‘rights’ or ‘welfare’ to any extent transferable
between humans and other species, or indeed, more holistically, to environments
and ecosystems? Or, to take climate change as an especially pressing focal point
of environmental concern: does tackling this require not just high-stakes poli-
tical initiatives and a significant injection of will among agents, but a deeper
re-jigging of the way we ‘do’ normative theory, and of our orientation towards
the non-human world? And to take liberalism as an example of a dominant, in-
place normative framework: can it bear the strain of accommodating ecological
concerns, or would it need a fundamental overhaul, or to be replaced altogether,
for such concerns to be genuinely addressed? As with the previous discussion
of disability, it seems to me that these questions are key questions both within
their particular field of application, and beyond it. Thus the kinds of questions
which confront environmental ethics even in getting started, and assume special
urgency there, are questions which apply more generally to the whole kind of
business that (applied) ethics is.
Two such questions would be these. Is the moral case for tackling climate
change dependent on, or independent of, the will of agents to do something
about it? And does this really matter, other than to meta-ethicists and others
whose job it is to worry about such things? One crucial thing to notice about
environmental ethics is that here, these questions have practical as well as intel-
lectual import. Thus our capacity to do something about climate change, and
the persuasiveness of the moral case to do so, are closely intertwined. This is not
just because, in the familiar phrase, ‘ought’ implies ‘can’—so that any obligation
to do something about climate change implies the possibility of doing that some-
thing. It is also because the very nature of the problem itself raises issues which
sit complicatedly across any divide between ‘applied’, ‘normative’ and ‘meta’
ethics. Thus notwithstanding any wider tendency to wedge these apart, environ-
mental ethics, whatever its hue has always found it necessary to keep them in
closer proximity. This is largely because tackling environmental issues requires
tackling questions about the relation between ethics and ontology head-on. These
questions are, in an upfront way, what environmental ethics is about. Thus the
range of approaches which have been taken in environmental ethics—whether
analytical, deep ecologist, eco-feminist, anthropocentric, non-anthropocentric or
otherwise—converge in tackling these questions, divergent though their different
takes on them might be.
One way of thinking about the way such debates pan out is by distinguishing
realist and constructivist approaches, both in ethics and in ontology. Constructi-
438 Gideon Calder

vists in ethics are those who believe that the realm of the normative is construc-
ted through-and-through by the volitional activity of agents (see e.g. Korsgaard
1996). For ontological constructivists (or constructionists), there is only this or
that conception of ‘x’ (‘x’ being any aspect of ‘reality’ sometimes claimed to be
conception-independent), determined by this or that culture; no sense can be
given to ‘x’ independently of the cultural process of constructing conceptions of
‘x’ (adapted from Hailwood 2007, 134). These two positions are counterposed
by two kinds of realism. Realists in ethics are those who believe that the realm
of the normative consists, at least in part, of truths which are prior to, and
independent of, our deliberations. For ontological realists, reality exists indepen-
dently of our beliefs about it; there is a ‘what the world is like’ apart from our
constructions of it. While our knowledge of reality may be inevitably value-laden
and theory-laden, reality itself is ontologically separate from such constructions.
The ‘moral’ versions of both constructivism and realism are in some respects, to
some extent, independent of their ‘ontological’ counterparts—though in practice,
it is arguable that they run more smoothly in tandem with each other. In any
case, the terrain between these four points—the two forms of constructivism,
and the two forms of realism—is that on which many of the most important and
illuminating debates in environmental ethics have played out.
Though there is a full range of available points between these coordinates, en-
vironmentalists are unlikely to be contructivist about both morality and reality.
There are well-rehearsed reservations about both, such that even the affirmedly
anthropocentric will hesitate to throw their lot in wholly with constructivism
on all counts. One obvious concern is that an account of values as necessari-
ly and exclusively constructed on the basis of the dispositions and interests of
agent a priori devalues those living things which are incapable of entering into
this process—not just animals, but other elements of the non-human environ-
ment which might arguably possess value in ways other than their instrumental
value for human agents. Some environmental ethicists will defend a version of
this—for example Mark Sagoff, for whom environmental values stem from moral
and aesthetic judgements, refined and nuanced, but inescapably human-centred
(Sagoff 1988). A different, and differently niggling allegation is that the best
constructivism can do is to generate obligations among humans with regard to
the environment. But these can always be overridden by other obligations that
humans have towards one another (De-Shalit 2000, 63–64). Thus constructivists
end up being perniciously anthropocentric—or at least, are unable to put any
obstacles in the way of pernicious anthropocentrism.
I do not want to attempt here to do justice to the full range of issues at stake
between constructivists and realists in these respects. But anyway we find here
an especially good example of how ethics, to be done, needs to get its hands
dirty in the messy stuff of social ontology. One way—significant, I think—of
summing up the undercurrent of these objections to constructivism is that it
fails to account for relationality—or at least, to account for it in a satisfactory
way. Again, relationality as used here denotes two different factors: relations
between individuals, and relations between individuals and their environment
(natural or built). It seems an ontological claim that both of these factors pre-
Ethics and Social Ontology 439

exist any given individual, and partly constitute the character and powers of
the individuals subject to the relations in question (see Collier 1999, 60). Here is
what relationality looks like, from the point of view of constructivists. Firstly, for
ontological constructivists: if it pertains, such relationality cannot be constitutive
of relations themselves, but must instead be determined by processes of discursive
construction. Secondly, for moral constructivists: deriving as it does entirely from
the volitional activity of agents, the construction of norms is not constrained
in any way to pay any attention to such relationality. Nothing other than the
recognisers of value themselves, or their mental states, can be considered as
valuable in their own right (see Fox 2006, 59ff.). This includes relations between
individuals, and between individuals and their environments.
Now climate change, if it is a harm, is a harm which cannot be accounted for
without taking relationality on board. Thus it is a harm consisting in, and affec-
ting, not simply individuals but their inter-relations, and the relations between
individuals and their environment (both natural and built): relations between
generations; relations between countries, and the inhabitants of countries; re-
lations between agents and the social structures they inhabit. To understand
the particularity of climate change as an ethical and political issue is to ap-
preciate these (potential or already-existing) effects. And full-on constructivism
runs into trouble at this point. Ontological constructivism implies a scientific
anti-realism about climate change: i.e., the ‘reality’ of the latter consists not in
mind-independent causal processes, but in its construction through culturally
dependent frameworks of thought. And ethical constructivism cannot address
climate change except in so far as it impinges upon the will of agents, i.e., it
cannot be considered as a harm outside the will of agents. It seems that whole-
sale constructivism cannot account adequately for the nature, causes and effects
of climate change as a process, because it rules out a priori the possibility of
such factors existing independently of their construal via a given set of cultural
parameters. If its harms are to any degree independent of the volitional activity
of agents, then arguably, constructivism seems to face problems in (as it were)
getting its head around the normative implications of climate change.
Maybe so—very probably, I would say. But really, for our purposes here, this
is not the crucial issue. What is most important is the register in which such
discussion—in terms of the routine ‘departments’ of ethics, encompassing the
meta-, the normative and the applied—will take place. Issues of moral status, and
the nature and source of value, arise inevitably in the practice of environmental
ethics. And these issues, in turn, reflect questions—to echo Eagleton, in the
second epigraph above—about the relationship between what human beings like,
and what they are like. Such questions sit squarely across the line between ethics
and social ontology, and their vitality comes precisely from this. And this, again,
highlights how far removed these sentences (again, reflecting the qualms about
ontology discussed in section 1 above) might seem from the specific, urgent
concerns of debates about the ethical implications of climate change.

1. Ethical concerns about climate change are not ‘about’ features of the (so-
cial) world, but are expressions of our own emotional attitudes.
440 Gideon Calder

2. Even if facts about our natural environment were the kind of thing we
could come to an agreement on, this wouldn’t help in resolving the kinds
of ethical concerns raised by the prospect of climate change.
3. We can find consensus on basic values around issues such as climate change
without recourse to potentially divisive, controversial ontological discussi-
ons about the nature of environmental degradation itself.
4. To talk about the ethical implications of climate change through an appeal
to the ‘reality’ of the impacts of environmental degradation on human
beings is itself to essentialise a particular group (‘human beings’), to treat
their interests as somehow ‘natural’, and reduce otherwise diverse and
complexly textured aspects of human being under convenient, and thereby
false, generalisations.
These points echo those in the concluding part of the previous section, though
here and there some words have been substituted. If they seem equally (though
perhaps differently) odd, this suggests that something is equally (if differently)
amiss when we articulate disability and climate change, as ethical issues, in what
seems to be the register of the ontology-wary variant of normative theorising
which seems, for many, and for whatever reasons, to have become the approach
of the canny.
For each of the four points, in both cases, come across as radically point-
missing in the different contexts in which they apply. They locate the subject-
matter of ethics at a distance from ontological questions which, while perhaps
deemed ‘safe’, seem (at best) to loosen its grip on the issues at stake, and at worst
to make it an entirely self-referential enterprise. In each case, the gap might be
bridged by allowing ontological questions to enter back in. Thus our emotional
attitudes (‘what we like’, to use Eagleton’s phrasing), are indeed a feature of
the social world, and of ‘what we are like’. The question of climate change arises
precisely because of the particular precarious balance between different aspects
of the world—human needs and ambitions, and the environment which might
enable or thwart their satisfaction or realisation. Developing an ethical response
to disability is indeed, to thrown right into controversial debates about the nature
of social being. To tac kle climate change without considering generalised human
needs and capabilities, in a way deemed ‘essentialistic’ by some, would seem to
miss the point about what gives the issue the particular kind of urgency it has:
the threat posed by environmental degradation to the scope for flourishing both
of humans, and of other life on earth.

4. Conclusion: A Qualified Ethical Naturalism

The examples just addressed are put forward not because they somehow cap-
ture the full gamut of ethical theorising, or exhaust the range of its applications,
or pick out meta-ethical issues which somehow translate, cleanly and without
adjustment, across all other areas in which ethical issues press upon us. Rat-
her, my point is that they help highlight questions which, while of clear ethical
Ethics and Social Ontology 441

significance, are difficult to address adequately without opening up ontological

issues, particularly around relationality and the inseparability of the normati-
ve from other fields and questions. It is important, too, that relationality itself
is more complex, layered, nuanced and dimensional than the ways in which it
has been invoked here might suggest. Both intersubjectively and between indi-
viduals and their non-human environments, it is (for example) to some extent
perception-relative, and so some extent not. Such relations are the product of
different forces, some natural and some cultural, and stemming both from social
structures and individual agents. Each of these exerts effects. My own position
would be that we cannot account for the way relations are purely in terms of any
one such force. But that aside, both disability and climate change are examples
of the complexity of such relations, their properties, powers and effects. If we are
thinking about ethics, we are already thinking about social ontology, and if we
are thinking about social ontology, we are already thinking about the ways in
which such forces enable and constrain agents and other beings, allow for flou-
rishing or thwart it, and encourage or stifle attention to the good, which itself is
a normative notion to be fleshed out through consideration of what constitutes
flourishing.
While many very prominent normative theorists would resist such a conclu-
sion, others—especially those working in a more or less neo-Aristotelian vein—
would embrace it. MacIntyre’s work embodies it, as does that of theorists such
as Russell Keat and John O’Neill, featured in this issue, who have done immea-
surably more than this article might muster in cashing out the implications of
this kind of claim. The work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum—among
other proponents of a ‘capabilities’ approach—provides prominent examples of
normative theory that is willing to grapple with and think through ontological
questions about what, substantively might count as and allow for deeper and
more inclusive flourishing (see, inter alia, Nussbaum 1992; Sen 1999). All of such
approaches might be described as naturalistic—and part of my own case here
is that this orientation is entirely apt. Ethics is best understood as naturalistic
in the following, qualified senses. It should recognise (i) that the ‘stuff’ of mo-
rality (for instance, the significance of certain human needs) is not reducible to
its cultural construction, apperception or construal; and (ii) that moral discour-
se inevitably ranges beyond itself, in the direction of substantive, content-ful
claims about the way things are (a ‘way’ which includes the natural elements
of our, and the world’s existence). From this angle, again, ethics is inseparable
from questions of social ontology. As Andrew Sayer puts it, “the very meaning
of good or bad cannot be determined without reference to the nature of human
social being” (Sayer 2004, 102). It is such a project which is denied by those for
whom ontological questions are inconvenient or out of bounds.
Sayer’s work is significant because a central critical focus in recent texts has
been the tendency of social scientists to drive a wedge between the positive and
the normative, and so to remove the place of normativity—of evaluation—in the
minutiae and the broader sweep of social life (Sayer 2006, 240; see also Sayer
2005). Sayer’s critique of dualisms of fact and value is directed towards social
scientists whose self-image places them in a kind of comfort zone on the ‘facts’
442 Gideon Calder

side of the dichotomy, where facts are deemed ‘non-valuey’. My own concern
here has been with the tendency of normative theorists to view themselves as
similarly insulated, but on the other side—a place where values are ‘non-factsy’.
As I hope to have shown, neither place is stable, nor as desirable a location as
convention might have it. To say that we can, and do, travel between them is
not to say that ethical claims or positions can simply be ‘read off’ ontological
ones, or that the former follow cleanly from the latter. Neither does it mean that
the appraisal of ethical values is exactly the same kind of business as appraising
claims about the chemical composition of floorboards. The two are quite distinct
aspects of a complexly textured reality; distinct enough to be reducible one to the
other only by an extravagantly imperialistic gesture. Notions of needs, e.g., will
cover both ‘natural’ and ‘social’ elements. Like our vulnerabilities—as is borne
out in the debates on the ethics of disability and environmental concern—they
are complexly textured, reflecting potentials and constraints which are modified
by both natural and social processes. For my money, the most robust currents
of thinking in the past three decades have been those which, in Geuss’s terms,
have located ethics not beyond, or above, but within the rest of human life.

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