From Metaphysics to Politics: A Materialist Feminist Critique of Enactive Ethics

The enactive approach’s radical and unorthodox conception of cognition as interactive, intersubjective, deeply affective, and non-representational allows it to open up new avenues for investigating many intractable philosophical questions, including questions usually related to ethics. The overarching goal of this thesis is to situate enactive ethics within a materialist feminist analysis and interrogate whether enactive ethics is living up to its ambitions in practice.

In the first chapter, I trace the commitments of cognitivist approaches to cognition with liberal feminist political goals and practices, and contrast these with embodied and enactive approaches to cognition with materialist feminist political goals and practices. I articulate these affinities to show the ways that our metaphysics of mind should (and indeed already does) inflect our political methodologies. In the second chapter, I offer up work in implicit bias studies as a means of putting meat on the bones of this claim. From here, I argue that although enactive ethics’ focus on interactivity, affectivity, and intersubjectivity has many positive dimensions, there are significant consequences to this focus that have not yet been seriously considered. For example, in the third chapter, I show that enactive ethics’ focus on interaction runs the risk of reifying interaction at the cost of the safety and flourishing of the marginalized. In the fourth and fifth chapters, I problematize the implicit pacifism that runs through enactive ethics; if enactive ethics is a legitimate bedfellow of materialist feminist political organizing, and hopes to be useful in helping secure feminist, anti-racist, decolonial social transformation, it must neither ignore nor foreclose the sometimes unsavory political tactics used by marginalized groups. I show that in its current formulation, enactive ethics cannot appropriately appraise political violence, and that this should be considered problematic. Finally, I offer up potential problems of the organism-based politics of enactive ethics and point to future directions of research where this may be taken up, including environmental ethics and digital ethics.