Research Interests

1. Understanding the social construction of the future

In Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics,

Barbara Adam and I argue that we still do not understand what an ethics of the future might mean, an ethics of the kind which Hans Jonas in his Imperative of Responsibility (1984/1976) argued is essential to a technological society, in which the power to change the conditions under which future people will live goes unaccompanied by the power to take responsibility for what it unleashes. We propose there two questions, which continue to be at the heart of my research:

1. What might such an ethics require of us, in terms of an understanding of what we're obligated and permitted to do, and prohibited from doing?
2. What institutional and cultural factors prevent us from developing such an understanding?

If the first is a philosophical question, about the meaning and limits of ex ante responsibility, then the second is sociological. One could answer it in terms of e.g. the psychometric paradigm in decision theory - what inbuilt cognitive biases do we have which prevent us taking note of the "long view". But considering the individual level only gets us to a superficial understanding, one which fails to take into how the future is socially constructed, as an object which can be feared, propitiated, insured against, subjected to economic planning, and so on. Nearly thirty years ago, Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas produced a cultural account of risk perception, one that argued group factors could account for how different people found some risks and not others salient. But this is too narrow a focus. Risk is a small region of the vast territory of uncertainty. To continue to exist, societies require that the future be made understandable - and then, regular, predictable, secure. The social construction of the future names the ways in which different societies, and groups, institutions, individuals within those societies, interpret the not-yet as knowable, susceptible (or not) to influence, and as a sourceof normative demands - all ethics (and politics) being about the future, as Nicolai Hartmann once pointed out.

Societies achieve this structuring of the future through action, knowledge and ethical life through imaginaries, background practices, habitus - but in doing so, they reproduce a kind of non-representational consistency within their dealings with reality, manifested in projected horizons of expectation (a concept drawn from the German theorist Reinhart Koselleck), which grants them a specific form of future orientation, and gives their futures a kind of weight, a quality of insistence (the future insisting, the past persisting). The question then is, how at variance with the timeprint of a society's activities are its horizons of expectation? How do they interact and what are the effects (for example, what are the cultural, political and ethical consequences of a society's obsession with short-term economic growth leading to the production of high-level nuclear waste)? And how do they reveal and conceal aspects of that society's relationship both with its own future and with that of its ecological context?

2. Attachment, stability and uncertainty

Peter Marris argued that attachment and how it is lived form the texture of human dealings with uncertainty. Psychologists like Daniel Stern and psychoanalytic theorists like Jessica Benjamin have argued that the infant is not isolated and narcissistic from the beginning, but a socialised body, connected to those around it through rhythms of sustenance and need. Humans are attached and interdependent; how these attachments and dependencies are dealt with over time by family, group and individual affects the ethos of the individual and the group. Attachment - to place, non-humans and other humans, objects, institutions and later, ideals - brings meaning and significance to the individual life and the group, but as all objects of attachment are singular, non-replaceable values, it also brings vulnerability, and exposure to loss and grief. And anxiety; Marris argues that dealing with anxiety and uncertainty about the future of attachment takes us either towards ideals of autonomy and a quest for the power we require in order to keep our options open, or towards care for others and the development of forms of solidarity that enable us to maintain attachment in the face of uncertainty.

The competitive, autonomous mode of dealing with uncertainty (which tends to valorize separation and negative liberty over attachment) can only be sustained by shifting uncertainty onto others. Ulrich Beck has suggested that debates over the just distribution of risks get us to a uniquely contemporary form of politics; rather than the distribution of risks, however, I would suggest that perhaps it is how societies channel and pool uncertainty that gives them their ethics and politics, and which creates specific forms of injustice - in Iris Marion Young's terms, it is the imposition of uncertainty which creates oppression and domination, by eroding the capacity of people to exercise their capacities fully. Such a theoretical argument is perhaps supported by the work of social psychologists like Kai Erikson and Michael Edelstein on the effects of toxic contamination on the cohesion of communities and the well-being of individuals.

3. Uncertainty, risk and technology

If uncertainty is broader than risk, then the social contract between technoscience and society is the place where just how much uncertainty is socially acceptable in the pursuit of certain ends (and what those ends of technology should be) should get worked out. However, in societies which increasingly rely on strategic science, and the weaving of different kinds of scientific evidence into political life, the construction of futures is based more and more on promises, which rely on wishful (and desire-laden) assumptions about what progress, and indeed technology itself, are, and what action in the present can achieve in the future. Here, the project I introduced above abuts onto the philosophy of technology, and particularly the work of people like Alfred Nordmann, Langdon Winner, Herbert Marcuse and Andrew Feenberg. Characterising the kinds of uncertainty which surround emerging radical technologies (like nanotech and synthetic biology), understanding the forms of future orientation which characterise the institutions through which they are developed, and arguing the need for institutions which recognise the irreducible ethical and political components of technologies (what can and should they do, and who decides?) are also therefore continuing foci for my work.