Decency And Excess

Based on periodic ethnographic fieldwork over a span of fifteen years, Martinez shows how impoverished plantation dwellers find ways of coping with the alienation that would be expected while laboring to produce goods for the richer countries. Despite living in dire poverty, these workers live in a thoroughly commodified social environment. Ritual, eroticism, electronic media, household adornment, payday-weekend "binging" are ways even chronically poor plantation residents dream beyond reality. Yet plantation residents' efforts to live decently and escape from the dead hand of necessity also deepen existing divisions of ethnic identity and status. As the divide between "haves" and "have-nots" worsens as a result of neoliberal reform and the decline of sugar in international markets, this book reveals on an intensely human scale the coarsening of the social fabric of this and other communities of the world's poorer nations.

"Balancing acts," writes Adam Phillips, "are entertaining because they are risky, but there are situations in which it is more dangerous to keep your balance than to lose it." In these exhilarating and casually brilliant essays, the philosopher and psychoanalyst examines literature, fairy tales, works of art, and case studies to reveal the paradoxes inherent in our appetites and fears. How do we know when enough is enough? Are there times when too much is just right? Why is Cinderella's biggest problem not the prince but other women? What can Richard III's furious sense of his own helplessness tell us of our own desires? On Balance shows Phillips's bravura gift for linking disparate ideas and the dreamers that dreamed them into something beautiful, revelatory, and essential.

We rely on two different conceptions of morality. On the one hand, we think of morality as a correct action guide. Morality is accessed by taking up a critical, reflective point of view where our concern is with identifying the moral rules that would be the focus of the requiring activities of persons in a hypothetical social world whose participants were capable of accessing the justifications for everyone's endorsing just this set of rules. On the other hand, in doing virtually anything connected with morality--making demands, offering excuses, justifying choices, expressing moral attitudes, getting uptake on our resentments, and the like-we rely on social practices of morality and shared moral understandings that make our moral activities and attitudes intelligible to others. This second conception of morality, unlike the first, is not shaped by the aim of getting it right or the contrast between correct and merely supposed moral requirements. It is shaped by the moral aim of practicing morality with others within an actual, not merely hypothetical, scheme of social cooperation. If practices based on misguided moral norms seem not to be genuine morality under the first conception, merely hypothetical practices seem not to be the genuine article under the second conception. The premise of this book, which collects together nine previously published essay and a new introduction, is that both conceptions are indispensable. But exactly how is the moral theorist to go about working simultaneously with two such different conceptions of morality? The book's project is not to construct an overarching methodology for handling the two conceptions of morality. Instead, it is to provide case studies of that work being done.