The Natural Contract - Michel Serres

French philosopher of technology Michel Serres examines how humans have become a global force on the level of the ice caps or the atmosphere. Serres writes that this "equipotency" demands that our moral world now extend beyond the social sphere to the world of things. Given our still-evolving relationship to the sciences we exist in a world that is at once more known to us and more widely understood to possibly be contrary, because of our doing, to the continuance of the human prospect. With this in mind, what are the steps to take to re-imagine a relationship to the natural world that is not premised upon "mastery and possession?" By retracing the manner in which the social sphere has come together and is premised around contestations of law and knowledge, and the differing legacies antecedent to modernity, The Natural Contract is a short volume focusing on redrawing a world in which non-humans have a voice.
For Serres, this future is one that must be understood in the light of our relationships to reason and its extension, scientific knowledge. Of primary concern is the development of an objective morality in which the natural sciences claim total authority to speak within the realms of rights and morals. Tracing the historical relationships between emergent knowledges and civil society, Serres tells us that a tension between orthodoxy (law) and heterodoxy (novel knowledge) has and always will be a realm of judgment. This is a crucial notion because it allows us to understand that there is not now, nor can ever be, a complete settled-ness to the manner in which we construct the world. Rather, knowledge and law will continue to ebb and flow in relation to one another. Further, rather than casting these two as incommensurable opposites, Serres explores how reason, which, once again, is the backbone of science, rests on exactly the same foundation as law - that of judgment. When we see these two can operate in concert, a new pathway opens up for human society to explore a future in which judgment (the realm of the social) interacts with the natural world (the realm of knowledge). Clear and very concise, The Natural Contract is highly recommended for anyone who wishes to think more deeply concerning our relationships between one another and the world around us.