Introduction: Tracing the Limits of Theories

This chapter starts the project of tracing the limits of theory by exploring the debate around the limits of particular theories. Specifically, I suggest that an important set of arguments emerge around the accusation that post-foundational approaches to ethics encounter their limits when pushed to account for their political implications. As highlighted in the introduction, the question of foundations often becomes important in ethical thought precisely when ethics is asked to become politically useful. The question of how we might go about making ethical claims without foundational ethical theory, then, is thrown into sharp relief in debates about the relationship between ethics and politics. In fact, I will argue in this chapter that the question of the utility of non-foundational ethics for political practice has been one of the most important and influential ways in which this approach to ethics has been engaged, developed and understood. A focus on the question of political utility has meant that all parties to the debate have accepted the need to provide an account of the relationship between ethics and politics as the challenge which must be met.

My contention here is that the nature and terms of this debate reproduce a theoretical and foundational approach to ethics. As such, refiguring the ethics-politics relationship offers the possibility of thinking differently about ethics. In short, as the concept of ethics as foundational is so firmly rooted in the context of its relationship with politics, in this chapter, I propose to draw out the implications of approaching it as a product of this context.