Morality According to Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour famously studied everything, but not directly morality. However, a philosophical approach towards morality can be found in his work. To find where morality lies in Latour's 'infra-language', we have to proceed in three steps: unmodernising, flattening and existentialising. Unmodernising. Modernity has created a thrive for absolute certainty that started with Socrates, who took away from the Athenians their morality seen as a practical know-how, to substitute it by Reason (Pandora's Hope, 1999). Since then, modern epistemology, born out of the bifurcation of Nature (Whitehead), has attached morality to Science in counter-productive relationships. “Science proposes, morality disposes,” but the latter always loses since it has no take on our common cosmology (Politics of Nature, 2004). Flattening. If the know-how of morality has been destroyed, it's because we've obscured all the practical mediations through which morality was patiently and casuistically constructed. If, in Kantian terms, we define morality as uncertainty about the proper relation between means and ends, those relations have to be accounted for. Latour does that by flattening our ontology to trace 'networks of associations of actors', whether human or nonhumans (Reassembling the Social, 2005). Indeed, object can also create 'morality' ("On Technical Mediation", 1994). Existentialising. However, we will never reach a fruitful understanding of morality if we don't switch from substance to action, from 'morality' to 'morally'. Moral beings move and act a certain way, with their own mode of existence, that of the reprise of scruples (AIME 2013). For now, economics has claimed morality under its own mode, leading to utilitarianism. In conclusion, a "Latourianised" theory of morality could lead to a new empirical turn (really!) and allow us to move away from false dichotomies that are just as many obstacles to the 'diplomatic' composition of a new collective (Facing Gaïa, 2015; I. Stengers, Cosmopolitics, 2010).