Extraordinary Responsibility : Politics beyond the Moral Calculus

This book explores how an impoverished understanding of responsibility as quantifiable and dischargeable sustains moralistic politics.

"In Extraordinary Responsibility: Politics Beyond the Moral Calculus, Shalini Satkunanandan identifies a common tendency to view our responsibility as something that can be quantified and discharged. She shows how several key thinkers in the history of philosophy and political theory - Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Weber, and Heidegger - each suggest that this calculative or bookkeeping approach to our responsibility effaces the incalculable, un-dischargeable and more onerous dimensions of human responsibility. They also reveal how this approach to responsibility is at the heart of "moralism" - the pettifogging, mindless, legalistic, excessively judgmental, or punitive policing of our own or others'' compliance with moral duties. By elaborating each of these thinkers'' narratives of a difficult "conversion" to a more nuanced approach to responsibility, Satkunanandan explores how we might be less moralistic in our political debates (including those around global warming, the use of drones attacks on suspected terrorists, and the federal debt)"--