Mind, Objects, Ethics

I am in fact a panpsychist. But not because I can't allow beings to be respected unless they have a mind. I am one for ontological reasons. 

There is this charge that OOO "doesn't have a politics" or ethics. In some sense this just ignores the way in which I've argued that OOO implicitly puts "anarchism" (too totalizing a word) as the basic political quality of all beings (such that other political forms are distortions of reality). And any number of other positions us lot have argued for a while.

But in another sense--this is my inner Derridean speaking--why must "having a politics" be something that is easy to see or something one must rush into? Why can't hesitation about politics also be a kind of politics? And wouldn't such a hesitation, in the face of the sudden recognition by lots of humans of the poverty of anthropocentrism, be a good idea?

And why--this my inner Graham--should an ontology have an easy to recognize, snap-on ethics or politics, so we don't have to be freaked out?

This idea (the "show us your papers" kind of threat one sometimes hears about OOO), expresses its inverse, unconscious side implicitly.

The inverse idea is that ethics presumes some kind of ontology--despite how taboo the idea of ontology at all has become.

So for instance, consider this argument for all things having minds:

"If it doesn't have a mind, how can we respect it?" (or recognize it has rights or whatever). 

Well, let's think about it the other way. Instead of proving that everything has a mind, what happens when some things don't?  

I think there is an implicit ontology in the assertion that beings without minds can't be said to have rights (or whatever). 

The ontology is that a thing is basically a lump of whatever. Since I can do what I like with it, it might as well be a kind of Play Doh. 

This ontology is, as I've argued, the Easy Think Substance implicit in agrilogistical space--and of course in Aristotle, and most forms of materialism. 

Such an ontology is absolutely the inverse of OOO. In OOO, everything is vivid and "lively" to the extent that its appearance is inseparably glued to its essence. (Too short a space to explain this.) 

Having to give things rights because we can prove they have a mind/emotion etc is the way vivisection arguments proceed. If it doesn't have a mind, you can experiment on "it" as you wish. 

Having a mind as a precondition for avoiding inevitable ("necessary") violence. Violence I am permitted (even encouraged) to act out if it's demonstrated that a being is without a mind.  

So if we're going to say that all beings have minds, we shouldn't say that this is what grants them our special favor (us benevolent, condescending humans, sole dispensers of ethics and justice and "rights"). 

We need to peel ontology away from ethics, to some extent, precisely because there are pretty awful default ontologies out there (implicit and taboo even to speak aloud--we are "beyond" ontology etc), ontologies that underwrite ethics and politics--ontologies that are contemporary, by which I mean the present moment of 10 000 years extent, in other words, the ecological catastrophe we are inside. 
If we are going to think beyond that, we had better start elsewhere. This would be why it's best to assume the OOO view, in my opinion. On this view, even if a thing doesn't have a mind (whatever that is), we have no reason to treat it as the blank screen for our (sadistic) fantasy. 

Then we can go about finding out what "mind" might be like under those conditions.