A contribution to the critique of moral reason

Responding to Carlo Caduff’s comments on an earlier paper of mine provides me with the opportunity to refine my defense and illustration of moral anthropology. After having recalled that my personal encounter with moralities and ethics was of the kind of Monsieur Jourdain’s discovery of prose, rather than a deliberate effort to apply moral philosophy to social science, I attempt to clarify my positioning in terms of critical thinking and my reformulation of the concept of moral economies, using my research on the intolerable and on humanitarianism. My explicit intention is to go beyond or rather, more modestly, to veer away from the alternative between the Durkheim-Kant legacy and the Foucault-Aristotle tradition, and from the dialectic between morality as code and ethics as freedom. It is to explore two epistemological frontiers: one related to the place occupied by the anthropologist, which I suggest should be on the threshold of rather than inside or outside Plato’s cave; the other one linked to the separation of a moral and ethical matter from the social gangue of human lives, which I find problematic because of the loss of history and politics it implies. I contend that both frontiers engage what it means and implies to be doing social science in the contemporary world.