How Risk Makes the Individual
Abstract
Jane Brownlee begins her course on the ethical instruction of children with a series of questions calibrated to clarify the relationship between the students’ minds and their bodies. [1] What begins as an inquiry into why the students must eat their own food to sustain themselves, and why nobody else can eat the students’ food for them, slides into treating considerations of why nobody can learn their lessons for them, nor do their thinking for them. The aim of this instruction is to clarify how the effort to achieve these ends must be the student’s own, and part of what it is to be the student is to expend the effort. In this way, there are certain ends and identities that cannot be alienated from the efforts expended by the affected individuals in achieving those ends and identities. Since the efforts must emerge from the individual, and the efforts are immediately connected to their end and identity, rendering the efforts a part of end and identity itself, the individuality required for the effort becomes a condition and property of achieving the end itself. For example, the effort expended by the individual in gathering resources to sustain that individual’s life becomes a quality of that individual life itself.[2] This effort develops along two distinct forms: work and risk. We have a rather robust discourse concerning an individual’s work ethic and the responsible division of work as a function of individual ethical merit, but we have a less robust account of how risk figures into the development of the concrete individual. This talk develops an account of the origin and function of risk in biological, social and political life.
Presentation Description
.
Location
Room 109
Publication Type and Release Option
Presentation (Open Access)
Recommended Citation
Osei-Frimpong, Irami, "How Risk Makes the Individual" (2022). Curriculum Studies Summer Collaborative. 18.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cssc/2022/2022/18
How Risk Makes the Individual
Room 109
Jane Brownlee begins her course on the ethical instruction of children with a series of questions calibrated to clarify the relationship between the students’ minds and their bodies. [1] What begins as an inquiry into why the students must eat their own food to sustain themselves, and why nobody else can eat the students’ food for them, slides into treating considerations of why nobody can learn their lessons for them, nor do their thinking for them. The aim of this instruction is to clarify how the effort to achieve these ends must be the student’s own, and part of what it is to be the student is to expend the effort. In this way, there are certain ends and identities that cannot be alienated from the efforts expended by the affected individuals in achieving those ends and identities. Since the efforts must emerge from the individual, and the efforts are immediately connected to their end and identity, rendering the efforts a part of end and identity itself, the individuality required for the effort becomes a condition and property of achieving the end itself. For example, the effort expended by the individual in gathering resources to sustain that individual’s life becomes a quality of that individual life itself.[2] This effort develops along two distinct forms: work and risk. We have a rather robust discourse concerning an individual’s work ethic and the responsible division of work as a function of individual ethical merit, but we have a less robust account of how risk figures into the development of the concrete individual. This talk develops an account of the origin and function of risk in biological, social and political life.
