Laura M. Bernhardt

As library collections and services have increasingly moved from print to digital, much of the work that used to be done by libraries themselves with regard to creating, maintaining, and managing the systems that hold collections and facilitate user access to them is now done primarily by vendors. This change to the information services landscape for academic libraries is the occasion not only of technical and procedural challenges, but also some internal conflicts concerning the ethical demands of the library profession. This essay examines the ways in which these conflicts become acute and obvious when attention is paid to the way in which attempts to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) are undermined by the handover of library services to vendors, even when—or perhaps especially when—those vendors use their control of content and platforms to commodify diverse content instead of making the necessary systemic changes required by truly effective EDI efforts.

The woman at the heart of Pearl Jam’s “Better Man” (Vitalogy, 1994) is trapped. She has committed herself to a relationship that makes her miserable, but she sees no viable alternative to staying in it. She mourns a past self who might have been able to leave and dreams of a dierent way things might be, but remains unable to move on. It is tempting to view her with a mixture of pity and frustration (reecting some of the personal circumstances -- Eddie Vedder’s mother’s second marriage -- informing its composition). As a moral being, she appears to be hopelessly compromised by her situation, even as she is also doing her best to survive under conditions designed to undermine her autonomy and keep her trapped (as abusive relationships do). The song is not so much critical of her choice to stay as it is confused by and resigned to it. What keeps a person where she so clearly does not want to be? The song itself was, at least early in its recorded life for Pearl Jam, similarly compromised. Vedder appears to have thought of it as too “accessible”, too much of a pop hit for the kind of musical vision he had in mind either for Vs. (for which it had originally been intended) or for Vitalogy; by this point in the band’s career, he was ever more actively resisting success, accessibility, and everything that went with the version of rock star life imposed collectively on the band and on him as an individual. The form that resistance took was an exercise of artistic and other forms of control, sometimes exercised in ways that were destructive or damaging (to the band and its internal relationships, its fame or success, its image, its artistic identity, etc.). What keeps an artist or a band where they so clearly do not want to be? In this chapter, I oer a loose exploration of some possible philosophical approaches to answering the question of what keeps us where we are, like it or not, worked out in parallel through the lyrics of “Better Man” and the circumstances of the song’s eventual arrival Vitalogy. My main interest is in examining the ethical dimensions of the question itself -- what, if anything, are we morally required or expected to do under compromised or compromising conditions? My main suggestion is that answering the question might require of us a messier, more ambivalent, and perhaps more compassionate notion of moral agency, inspired by Simone Weil’s work on affliction.

The central aim of my dissertation is to develop a whole-theory account of Kant's moral praxis, one that does not reduce it to some variation on the attempt to apply the categorical imperative as a moral rule of thumb in everyday life. What I mean by his praxis, in this case, is the result of a form of discipline involving a continuing activity of self-awareness and deliberate self-management, which I believe is absolutely vital to the kind of freedom Kant has in mind. ;In order to argue this "whole theory", I begin by exploring Kant's interest in Epicurus and the Stoics, particularly relative to his discussion of the proper relation of happiness and virtue in the summum bonum , his use of the postulates of pure practical reason, and his deployment of the concept of selbstzufriedenheit as distinct from the Hellenistic notion of ataraxia. My suggestion is that Kantian virtue takes up the Stoic view of an orderly universe, but requires the self-management and "cheerful" discipline of Epicurus in order to work well. This discipline, which I take to be the condition under which worthiness to be happy is possible for us and begins to make sense in Kant's moral thinking, is one that requires what the Kant of Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason might call a descent into "the hell of self-cognition." In order to make sense of this idea, I spend time on three discussions that might not otherwise appear related to each other: Kant's debt to Lutheran religious thinking, his account of theory and practice, and his brief remarks on ethical pedagogy and method in the second Critique