Extraordinary Responsibility: Politics Beyond the Moral Calculus

Careful attention to contemporary political debates, including those around global warming, the federal debt, and the use of drone strikes on suspected terrorists, reveals that we often view our responsibility as something that can be quantified and discharged. Shalini Satkunanandan shows how Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Weber, and Heidegger each suggest that this calculative or bookkeeping mindset both belongs to morality, understood as part of our ordinary approach to responsibility, and effaces the incalculable, undischargeable, and more onerous dimensions of our responsibility. These thinkers also reveal how the view of responsibility as calculable is at the heart of moralism - the pettifogging, mindless, legalistic, excessively judgmental, or punitive policing of our own or others' compliance with moral duties. By elaborating their narratives of a difficult conversion to the open-ended and relentless character of responsibility, Satkunanandan explores how we might be less moralistic and more responsible in politics. She ultimately argues for a political ethos attentive to how calculative thinking can limit our responsibility, but that still accepts a circumscribed place for calculation (and morality) in responsible politics.

Author: Shalini Satkunanandan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 09/29/2015
Pages: 263
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.78lbs
Size: 9.06h x 6.02w x 0.56d
ISBN: 9781107443136

Review Citation(s):
Choice 05/01/2016

About the Author
Satkunanandan, Shalini: - Shalini Satkunanandan has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Davis since 2011. She is a past Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago. She has published articles in Political Theory, the American Political Science Review, and Law, Culture and the Humanities.