‘Ordinary ethics’ suggests that everyday discursive interaction – interaction mediated by actual language use – has tacit ethical dimensions. This line of inquiry is productive for the anthropology of ethics and has the potential to reframe long-standing language-based research on everything from conversational turn-taking to politeness displays, but what does it mean to speak of discursive practice as a locus for ethical life? To what extent is the ethical inscribed in the ground-rules of interaction, or conditioned from below (e.g. biologically-based cooperative predispositions) or from without (e.g. culturally-institutionalized moralities)? The presumption that ethics is immanent in practice continues to distract from the problem of how to narrate, and theorize, the entanglements of discourse and ethics.
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