The ubiquity of technology in our lives and its culmination in artificial intelligence raises questions about its role in our moral considerations. In this paper, we address a moral concern in relation to technological systems given their deep integration in our lives. Coeckelbergh develops a social-relational account, suggesting that it can point us toward a dynamic, historicised evaluation of moral concern. While agreeing with Coeckelbergh’s move away from grounding moral concern in the ontological properties of entities, we suggest that it problematically upholds moral relativism. We suggest that the role of power, as described by Arendt and Foucault, is significant in social relations and as curating moral possibilities. This produces a clearer picture of the relations at hand and opens up the possibility that relations may be deemed violent. Violence as such gives us some way of evaluating the morality of a social relation, moving away from Coeckelbergh’s seeming relativism while retaining his emphasis on social–historical moral precedent.

No abstract

I will seek to consider the simultaneous workings of race and capital in apartheid biopower. J.M. Coetzee offers a reading of apartheid racism as racial madness which is imbricated with economic reason. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed instances of the biopolitical making live and letting die. The Strandfontein homeless camp set up just outside Cape Town in 2020 is an instantiation of a particular normative order, wherein contagion was used to justify the movement of black, homeless people outside of the city's cordon sanitaire. This is resonant of apartheid racial segregation in which the fear of race mixing is sometimes described in terms of contagion where whiteness represents that which is pure while blackness that which is dirty and infectious. Despite this desire for racial separation, apartheid biopower depends on exploitable black labour to sustain white domination. The figurative work of racial contagion is then undercut when the black worker is to be present and available in white areas to work. Neoliberal modes of power inherit the dual work of race and contagion in apartheid when the poor and black are let to die.

The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa is a momentous text in the history of South Africa’s liberation from the apartheid regime. It marks a break with the old regime, which sought to protect the prosperity of the country’s white minority while oppressing the black majority. The shift posited in the Constitution was clearly legal, but it was also conceptual. It was written with the intention to change the normative structure and principles of justification. As I will argue, it puts forward a normative discourse based on humanism. Since humanism has a rocky history, rife with exclusion and subjugation, it is important to clarify the sort of humanism contained in the Constitution of South Africa as one which understands the human as a site of potential. Although the Constitution may place value on such a humanism, it is not clear that our other social discourses cohere with this apprehension of the human. Specifically, I claim that the tendency in South African discourse (in various realms) to deploy neoliberal reason is at odds with the humanism outlined in the South African Constitution and therefore also does not allow for its actualisation.