Ethics is best studied through lived practice, not moral codes alone

Evidence

I would like to pursue a somewhat diff approach to ethics here, glossed as “positive ethics” ( the skeletal structure of which was laid out in chapter 1 ) , in which the particular form that ethics takes is not a contingent but a neces.. sary aspect of understanding its substantive content. Originally grounded in the tradition of ancient Greek philosophy, and more recently expanded by Michel Foucault, ethics in this formulation is founded upon particular forms of discursive practice, instantiated through specifi sets of procedures, tech.. niques, and exercises, through which highly specifi ethical..moral subjects come to be formed (Colebrook 1998; Davidson 1 994; Foucault 1997 c; Hadot 1 995 , 2002; Martin, Gutman, and Hutton 1988). An inquiry into ethics from this perspective requires that one examine not simply the values enshrined in moral codes, but the different ways in which people live these codes-some.. thing anthropologists are uniquely situated to observe. What is consequential in this framework is not necessarily whether people follow the moral norms or not, but what relationships they establish between the various constitutive el.. ements of the self (body, reason, emotion, volition, and so on) and a particu.. lar norm. In this view, the specifi gestures, styles, and formal expressions that characterize one’s relationship to a moral code are not a contingent but a nee.. essary means to understanding the kind of relationship that is established be.. tween the self and structures of social authority, and between what one is, what one wants, and what kind ofwork one performs on oneself in order to re.. alize a particular modality of being and personhood. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 835

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘positive ethics’ as a Foucauldian framework where the form of ethical practice is constitutive of, not contingent to, its content.
• XREF: Connects to MacIntyre and the virtue-ethics tradition as well as to the practice theory of Bourdieu and Saba Mahmood’s earlier chapter 1 on Foucauldian ethics.