Introducing Levinas to Undergraduate Philosophers (University of Evansville)

more to come.

Posted at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is another brief essay for my Ethics class. Since most of the class (including the professor) aren't familiar with IP issues, I've included more background than usual here.

I've elected to ask my own questions in order to work through some thoughts related to my project: How can Levinas' thought be applied to issues related to Intellectual Property? What specific concepts are useful? Which are problematic?

Throughout our study of Ethics this semester, I've been looking for ways to apply our readings to my research project. For the past year or so, I've explored various theoretical underpinnings for the Commons*, focusing primarily on its history and pertinent constructions of authorship. Many advocates of Creative Commons and Copyleft (two alternatives to traditional copyright) argue that we have a moral obligation to contribute to the Commons. Regardless of what aspect of my research I focus on, I keep running into these questions of moral obligation: Are creators/authors/scholars/programmers morally obligated to care about the Commons? If so, then what is the ethical obligation to contribute to it? How can we construct a theoretical foundation for this obligation?

Up until now, I've been thinking that Aristotle's notions of The Good and the Moral Citizen might be helpful in considering these questions, but now I think that Levinas' notions concerning responsibility may also provide a useful framework to work within. First, two caveats:

• Our readings for this week constitute my only exposure to Levinas, so my knowledge is necessarily limited. I focus here on the chapter entitled Responsibility for the Other, which is a very brief chapter indeed.
• A thorough consideration of this chapter would involve an explication of his concept of The Face, which is beyond the scope of this post. Instead, I focus on his definition of responsibility and how it might be applied to my topic.

Levinas claims that responsibility is:

• inherent in all relationships (96)
• undependent on proximity (96 - 97)
• undependent on reciprocity (98 - 99)
• an act of support (100)
• incumbent, nontransferable, and noninterchangeable (100 - 101)
• human (101)

As I read it, Levinas claims that all humans are inherently and irrevocably obligated to support other humans, regardless of whether they know each other or not. Taken as a whole, these aspects of responsibility work very well when applied to the problem of obligation to the Commons. It suggests that as authors and creators we have an essential moral and ethical obligation to support others by contributing to the Public Domain and by authorizing derivative works. Offering our own work as building blocks for future works is perhaps the most sincere gesture of support we can offer within this context. I find his definitions of responsibility very helpful.

Traditional copyright is concerned with ownership and compensation. The 'copyright clause' of the U.S. Constitution is explicit about this: "The Congress shall have power ... To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Ties to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" (Article 1, Title 17). In other words, copyright exists in the hope that if people can own their intellectual property and be compensated for it, they'll be motivated to create more works and thus create progress. The capitalist structure of U.S. society constitutes a panoptic reinforcement of this notion. Creative Commons licenses attempt to create a middle ground in intellectual property law by allowing the creator to specify nonprofit use only, use with attribution, etc. Levinas argues that we should give support with no thought of recompense: "In this sense, I am responsible for the other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it" (98). Following this line of thought, one might conclude that all scholarship should go directly to the Public Domain (which is not the same as the Commons, although the two are often confused. The Public Domain assumes no ownership, while the Commons assumed limited ownership in addition to encompassing works in the Public Domain.) After all, scholarship is ultimately for the benefit of others, as are works of art and literature. Why not make all works as available as possible?

One reason is because Authors have to eat. Also, Authors have to pay their mortgages and student loans. As far as I can tell from my limited reading, following Levinas' thought to its logical conclusion brings us to an impractically utopian place. (I gather this is not an uncommon conclusion - googling 'Levinas utopian' garners 989 results.) Later in Ethics and Infinity, we see that Levinas finally reaches the inevitable conclusion that humans have no right essential to live (120 - 121). Is such an extreme conclusion helpful in our considerations of responsibility? Most likely not. (Can one use the word 'conclusion' more times in one paragraph? Most likely not.)

So, to return to my original question: Is Levinas applicable to issues of Intellectual Property? Yes. Sort of. Not all of his conclusions are helpful, but his framework of inherent responsibility may be useful when considering the moral obligation to contribute. I am intrigued enough to read more.

Continue reading "Notes on Levinas and the Commons" »

Posted at 6:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Much of the difficulty of Levinas' writing derives from the complexity of his prose and the deceptive familiarity of his key terms. He is best known both in France and internationally as a philosopher of ethics, and the problems of comprehension that his writing raises cluster in particular around the significance of ethics in his thought. Ethics, in his use of the term, is neither a code of rules nor the study of reasoning about how we ought to act. The first use of the word éthique in the original preface to the 1961 edition of Totality and Infinity informs us, in a pronouncement that is as enigmatic as it is axiomatic, that 'ethics is an optics' (TI, 8/23). The context tells us more about what this does not mean than what it does; and the later qualification that 'Ethics is the spiritual optics' (TI, 76/78) might be thought to confuse the issue even further. Whatever ethics might be, it also entails a disturbance of the very language in which ethical inquiry will be pursued.

The first use of the word éthique in the main text of Totality and Infinity is perhaps the most quoted passage of the book, and one which reveals a great deal about Levinas' approach:

A calling into question [mise en question] of the Same - which cannot occur [se faire] within the egoistic spontaneity of the Same - is brought about [se fait] by the Other [l'Autre]. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other [Autrui] ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I [Moi], to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished [s'accomplit] as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics. Metaphysics, transcendence, the welcoming of the Other by the Same, of the Other by Me, is concretely produced [se produit] as the calling into question of the Same by the Other, that is, as the ethics that accomplishes [accomplit] the critical essence of knowledge. (TI, 33/43)

Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction, 35-36

Posted at 4:39 PM | Permalink