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Full Description
A provocative and entirely new account of ethical reasoning that reconceives the traditional understanding of ethical action negatively
In this radical reconsideration of ethical reasoning in contemporary European philosophy, Drew M. Dalton makes the case for an absolutely grounded account of ethical normativity developed from a scientifically informed and purely materialistic metaphysics. Expanding on speculative realist arguments, Dalton argues that the limits placed on the nature of ethical judgments by Kant's critique can be overcome through a moral evaluation of the laws of nature--specifically, the entropic principle that undergirds the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. In order to extract a moral meaning from this simple material fact, Dalton scrutinizes the presumptions of classical accounts and traditional understandings of good and evil within the history of Western philosophy and ultimately asserts that ethical normativity can be reestablished absolutely without reverting to dogmatism.
By overturning our assumptions about the nature and value of reality, The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism presents a provocative new model of ethical responsibility that is both logically justifiable and scientifically sound. Dalton argues for "ethical pessimism," a position previously marginalized in the West, as a means to cultivate an account of ethical responsibility and political activism that takes seriously the unbecoming of being and the moral horror of existence.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction - The Matter of Evil
Chapter 1 - After Kant: The End of Western Metaphysics and Ethics?
Chapter 2 - Absolutes within the Bounds of Reason: Speculative Realism and the Return of the Absolute
Chapter 3 - Towards a Post-Critical Ethics: Meillassoux and Badiou on the Mathematization of Nature and the Possibility of Absolute Metaphysical and Moral Claims
Chapter 4 - The Science of Entropic Absolutes: The (Dis)Order of Nature
Chapter 5 - The Value of Science and the Science of Value: Re-Evaluating the Moral Neutrality of Material Reality
Chapter 6 - Moral Value and Absolute Necessity: Baruch Spinoza's Metaphysical Monism
Chapter 7 - The Monstrous Will of Nature: Arthur Schopenhauer's Ethical Monism
Chapter 8 - The Specter of Nihilism: Friedrich Nietzsche's Moral Naturalism
Chapter 9 - The Ethical Potency of Pessimism: Schopenhauerian Negation, Buddhist Renunciation, and the Political Activism of Philipp Mainländer
Chapter 10 - New Directions in Pessimism: Cosmic Pessimism, Afropessimism, and Extinctual Nihilism
Conclusion - From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism: The Evangel of Entropy and the Ethics of Resistance
Notes
Bibliography
Index
