There are several things that confuses me today. First is why western academics must sustain the moral high ground? What is difficult in it for our professors admit and forgive their peers / ancestors saying “hey we are just a group of people making money by publishing papers and make mistakes like anyone else”? I think their is a fundamental systematic thing here, that western academics must be right with no choice, this is the root of the moral dilemma in nowadays circumstances when their is nothing simply right or wrong.
The second thing is about logical flaw in decoloniality that there seems to a preposition of dichotomy between oppressing and oppressed. Based on this assumption and relationship, the deduction and reasoning are full of tension because of the very first preposition. That is why relational thinking is hardly applicable in such theory. I have such feeling that I may need to read Eschoba’s book carefully, in case I am into such logic fallacy.
And the third is about agency. Human agency is under debate and there is no a simple conclusion to say we have agency or not, philosophically. If this is the case, how can we simply assume we have and we apply our assumption of agency to things. The agency of things sounds novel and interesting, but it falls into naive mind of human neglecting the fundamental discussion of our own agency. In this case, what if we never have agency and non-human thing have? Are we ruled by other non-human things? I am totally confused by Edensor’s writing because he neglect many fundamental debate of life and free will and makes default thinking to assume all this is true. Then everything we observe can be understood as life and human, then there might not be such human as we think.
The fourth is about why neoliberalism hates true, agonistic politics? Are neoliberalism are accustomed to soften capital invasion and neocoloniality that they are afraid of hardcore politics, dictatorship, feudal or religious society? Could I understand reversely that hardcore politics, dictatorship, feudal or religious society can be a good weapon to battle against the power neoliberalism?
The fifth is about the “ethical matrix”, because the ethical issues are so complex that I come up with the word and found out in google that it did have such named theory. I would say it can not only applied on issues, every human can be understood as a walking “ethical matrix” that they use themselves as an instrument to measure the world so as to understand what is happening. The “rupture” mentions happens when the ethical matrix fail to work because everything looks unethical, then we have to redesign and reorganize the factors in ethical matrix to make things to look ethical again. This is the core of paradigm change and the way we do trend research and design.
The sixth is about pragmatic ethics and consequential ethics that is promising in theory. In design we use perceived aesthetics, customer satisfaction, product value as consequential ethics, which means the design ethical matrix. We can also apply on our own daily decisions, such as I use my husband and my own happiness and wellbeing, my parents wellbeing but not happiness as my consequential ethical matrix. This ethical matrix is relatively stable in a period of time but is modified as my age grows. And these factors are not equally important and must have priority, so that I can roughly make the count and make every decision based on the count roughly.
