considered as mere means, or we would be too quickly satisfied with a
plurality of incommensurable worlds that would lead us to abandon
forever the concern forone singlecommon world. For the moralists, we
can never call it quits. With them, the collective is always trembling
because it has left outside all that it needed to take into account to de-
fine itself as a common world. A spider, a toad, a mite, a whale’s sigh,
these are perhaps what have made us fall short of full and entire hu-
manity, unless it was some unemployed person, some teenager on a
street in Djakarta, or perhaps it was some black hole, forgotten by ev-
eryone, at the edge of the universe, or a newly discovered planetary
system.^47 Far from opposing the politicians, as the old distribution of
roles would have it, the moralist’s requirement of starting over again
is going to enter, on the contrary,into consonancewith the work of the
politicians, to keep on mending the fragile envelope that allows them
to say “us” without being unfaithful to their constituents. To every “we
want” of politics, the moralist will add, “Yes, but what dotheywant?”
Far from opposing the scientists, the moralist will add to the stabiliza-
tion of the paradigms a constant anxiety over the rejected facts, the
eliminated hypotheses, the neglected research projects—in short, ev-
erything that might make it possible to seize the opportunity to bring
new entities into the collective that are at the limit of thesensitivityof
the instruments.
It is quite clearly in the task of establishing hierarchy (no. 3) that we
can expect the most of the moralists. Left to themselves, as the old
Constitution so casually envisaged, they could not contribute to any-
thing, because they did not have to manipulate the raw material of sci-
entific arrangements, political deals, or economic descriptions. Once
they come to grips with these heterogeneous entities to be arranged in
order of importance, the moralists will add a decisive competency,
precisely that of arranging them all—however contradictory they may
be—ina single homogeneoushierarchy, rather like a team reconstituting
a puzzle, of which one member is exclusively concerned with discov-
ering whether the pieces gathered together in fact belong to one and
the same set. What appeared absurd in the ethics of foundations—on
what basis might we declare a migratory bird more important than
the time-honored customs of the hunters of the Baie de Somme?—be-
comes indispensable if we leave aside the search “for principles” to be-
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