The question of ethical depth arises out of the deep structure that’s distributed, embodied and temporal, and is rooted in the typicality of situations. We speak face to face, in general. The manner in which our memories work is part of what embodiment accomplishes. One can see how this typicality of situations makes the deep context essentially metaphoric. That is to say, it is not objects to which meanings are attached – they are there already, sometimes taken advantage of, sometimes not. Take, for example, an extended idea of a bedroom. It would have a bed, a side table, a window, a cupboard and possibly a way of getting to the toilet. Whereas, if one steps back, one realises, as novelists, poets, artists do, that it involves sleeping, dreaming, motifs of death, illness, sexuality or rebirth, and that one is automatically implicated in a deep thematic context

One of the things that Joyce captures so well is the degree to which people are both saints and sinners, the way they are both helpful and unhelpful, the way they take one’s deepest beliefs and use them in humour, the way one uses humour to understand one’s own deepest beliefs. The capacity for deceit, for violence was always operating in that kind of broader social spectrum. And similarly, there is a spectrum of conflict that goes from conflict through negotiation to accommodation to collaboration. That is to say, it’s within those kinds of spectra that something like memory percolates as a set of possibilities, as a set of likelihoods.

A culture's more deeply held beliefs can be commemorated in what archeolologists and art historians regularly call monument, even if that term doesn’t arise until what many people see as the anxiety of history of the 18th century Enlightenment; namely, the idea that we don’t have a deep temporality to which we can refer, that all we have is constant change. Joyce has many little 'monuments' - such as a knife which reminds Dedalus of the Roman Empire - and Dublin's major monuments are demoted in importance. In any event, a monument's capacity to signify anything depends much less upon the object than upon the existing topography and praxis of memory.

What is currently called sustainability has a long background. If one looks at most ancient cosmologies, for example, one sees that the fundamental order is natural and human history is secondary to that. We’re rediscovering our obligations to nature, and I would distinguish between morals and ethics. To me, ethics pertains to understanding the larger whole of which we’re part, to the deepest obligation to the fundamental natural conditions. Morals pertain to our practical life. They’re made up of particular judgements by particular people, in particular circumstances in history. There will never be a match between morals and ethics: morals is always an interpretive phenomenon.

We find ourselves implicated in a matrix of affordances and claims, whose metaphoric involvements mean that our moral judgements are always interpretations of our ethical understanding. Understanding a city as a matrix for practical judgements is recognising that our practical judgements are always an indirect and partial interpretation of our ethical understanding.