M oral T h eo ry and the M oral Life:
A g a in st D isso c ia tio n in P h ilo so p h ica l A c c o u n ts o f
M orality
Sarah Jane Bachelard
July 2000
D e c la r a tio n
This thesis is my own work. All sources used have been acknowledged.
A c k n o w le d g e m e n ts
For supervision o f this project, my greatest thanks are owed to D r Penelope
Deutscher. Her support and encouragement, as well as her capacity to grasp the spirit o f an idea long before it has reached coherent formulation, were crucial in the development and completion o f the thesis. I thank her for helping me to w rite the thesis I w anted to write. I give particular thanks also to D r Christopher C ordner whose philosophically and morally intelligent questions came at crucial times, and who gave o f his time and energy well beyond the call o f advisory duty. D r Natalie Stoljar supervised the project in its early stages, and D r Jeremy Shearmur in its last stages and I thank them both very much for their help and advice.
I thank my advisors, D r David Parker and Professor Michael Smith, for their assistance, and I particularly thank D r Susan Mendus and D r Karen Jones for reading full drafts o f the thesis, and for their insightful and rigorous comments upon it. I have been fortunate to have received much support from friends and colleagues in the Departments o f Philosophy and English, many o f w hom read substantial portions o f the thesis in various incarnations. For their comments and encouragement, I thank D r Jane Bennett, D r Chris Falzon, Dr Andrew Gleeson, D r Simon Haines, D r W inifred W ing Han Lamb and Dr Catherine Legg. To other colleagues and friends in postgraduate life, Louise Bassett, Richard Chadwick, Elizabeth Coleman, Tony Connolly, Jo Faulkner, Karen van den Broek, Fiona Webster, and the Friday afternoon drinks crowd, I give thanks for their companionship and conversation. Special thanks are due also to Beverley Shallcross and Reta Gear, whose care and support made life so much easier in so many ways.
A b str a ct
My central thesis is that philosophical accounts o f m orality are often insufficiently informed by the lived experience of the moral life. This results in distortions in their pictures o f morality, distortions in philosophy’s sense o f its role in moral reflection, and neglect o f the connections between morality, moral experience and the rest of human life.
I argue for this thesis in two stages. First, I examine aspects o f philosophical accounts o f morality in the light of the concept o f dissociation. I argue that m uch philosophical writing about morality tends to embody, linguistically, a dissociation from moral response which both limits its capacity to extend our moral understanding and distorts its sense o f the critical concepts to which its thought is answerable. I argue further that in dissociating their
picture o f morality from its connections to human life, philosophers tend to have a distorted sense o f what is required to justify our moral responses, and o f what underwrites the truth or objectivity o f moral judgement. In these discussions, I draw particularly upon the work o f Cora Diamond, R aim ond Gaita and Iris M urdoch. These philosophers have already developed substantial criticisms o f such dissociated discussions o f the moral realm, and o f the methodological assumptions that underpin them, but the significance and distinctiveness o f their work has, in my view, been neglected.
C o n te n ts
A cknow ledgem ents iv
Abstract v
In tr o d u c tio n 1
O n e: L an gu age and M oral R e fle c tio n 22
T w o : M oral T h o u g h t and H u m a n B ein g s 44
T h ree: M oral U n d ersta n d in g and the T ex tu re o f O u r B ein g s 81
Four: T h e o r y C riticism and M orality C riticism 120
Five: O n E u th anasia 162
C o n c lu s io n 196
In tro d u c tio n
W e are living at a time of immense ferment in moral philosophy.1 M uch o f this ferment is organised in various ways around reflection upon the moral theories that have been dominant in the modern period, namely Kantian and utilitarian theories. Taken, for a large part o f their history, to be fundamentally opposed to one another, these two accounts o f morality are now read as sharing basic features and aspirations.2 These include their commitment to impartiality, their
aspirations to provide a universalisable and rationally defensible account o f morality, and hence to generate resources for moral criticism, the normative reform o f traditional practices, and normative guidance for moral judgem ent. M uch o f the contem porary debate involves argument over the validity or desirability o f these basic features o f moral theory, and the articulation o f both their moral and hum an costs. The philosophical literature contains, in consequence, a raft o f criticisms o f Kantian and utilitarian theories o f morality and a corresponding complement o f defences or sympathetically reconstructive accounts o f them. If one thinks o f the lines o f debate in moral philosophy as currently drawn w ith Kantian and utilitarian theories on the one side, and a range o f critical responses to them on the other, then this thesis is situated on the critical side.
That necessarily crude division o f possibilities, however, does not yet take us very far and is in some ways misleading. It is a division that clusters different views in terms, broadly, o f their stance on questions o f impartiality and universalisability. In terms o f those questions, this thesis is located, as I said, on the critical side o f the divide. Positions in moral philosophy could, however, be clustered according to their stance on w hether moral goods are reducible to natural goods, or w hether they are sui generis. In that case, this thesis is closer to Kant than it is to reductivist critics o f Kant, w hether o f Humean or o f certain virtue theoretical varieties. O r again, philosophical discussions o f morality could
be distinguished, not only by their arguments about specific features o f morality, but by the sensibility that they themselves embody. They could be distinguished by the tone o f their writing, by their sense of the critical concepts to w hich philosophical thought about morality is answerable. And in that case, the line might be drawn betw een the engaged and morally vital reflections o f writers w ho will be im portant for this thesis, such as Kierkegaard, W ittgenstein and Simone W eil, on the one hand, and the vast bulk o f professional writing in moral philosophy on the other.
How, then, to characterise the location and aims o f my work here? My central thesis is that philosophical accounts o f morality are often insufficiently informed by, or are dissociated from, the lived experience o f the moral life. As a result, they give us a distorted picture o f morality, o f philosophy’s role in moral reflection and o f the relationship between morality and other matters o f hum an significance. I argue that philosophical writing about morality tends to embody, linguistically, a dissociation from our moral responsiveness which both limits its capacity to extend our moral understanding and distorts its sense of the critical concepts to which its thought is answerable. I argue further that in dissociating their picture o f morality from its connections to human life and our lived moral experience, philosophers tend to have a distorted sense o f what is required to justify our moral responses and o f what the truth or objectivity o f moral thought
consists in.
These criticisms make room, I will argue, for a different understanding o f what philosophical reflection upon morality might involve, the conceptual resources upon which it might draw, and its relationship to other forms o f moral reflection. Taken seriously, they w ould alter not only the philosophical conclusions to be drawn in relation to specific features o f morality and specific moral questions, but also philosophy’s methodological assumptions and its sense of its role in moral reflection.
Particularly in the critical phase o f this thesis, I will draw strongly upon the w ork o f Cora Diam ond and R aim ond Gaita and, to a lesser extent, the w ork o f Iris M urdoch. These are philosophers w ho have already undertaken important criticism and reflection along the lines I will endorse. They have, that is, developed substantial criticisms o f the cogency o f particular philosophical pictures o f the moral realm, as well as o f the methodological approach to moral
w ork is not only marginalised but provokes active hostility in some quarters. Part o f my task, then, is to attempt to explain its neglect and perhaps to identify misunderstandings in its reception. The clarification o f these matters may allow us to consider what the effect on moral philosophy would be, were we to take it seriously.
This introduction, then, has the following purpose. I will outline features o f the w ork o f Diamond and Gaita that I will be drawing upon and discussing in more detail. I want to forestall some o f the in-principle objections that seem often to be raised against their approach to philosophical reflection about morality, and which might prevent readers from attending to their arguments. At the same time, this defence o f Diamond and Gaita’s general approach serves to introduce the methodology adopted in this thesis and the reasons for it. I will conclude the introduction with a fuller account o f the overall structure and purpose o f the thesis, and of its organising ideas.
I
O ne o f the things that I find most striking in the writing of Gaita and Diamond, as well as in that o f M urdoch, is their style o f writing itself. Despite my sense o f its distinctiveness, however, I find it difficult to articulate in general terms just what sets it apart from standard philosophical prose in the Anglo-American tradition. It seems distinguished by no obvious rhetorical devices, no specialised vocabulary, no unusual form. It is less abstract and technical than m uch philosophical prose, but that feature alone seems insufficient to mark its difference. I think what strikes me is the immediacy o f the presence o f these authors in their texts, and the fact that that presence commands my respect. Here is someone who speaks with authority, someone I trust. This is not simply a matter o f being convinced by particular arguments or thinking them clever. It is a response to a tone in the writing, a response that recognises that here is w ork being done at the right depth, at a depth adequate to the subject at issue. Diamond herself wrote o f the pleasure o f reading “what has been written under the pressure o f content shaping form, form illuminating content” , which “has to do with one’s sense o f the soul o f the author in the text” .3 I think that I sense the soul o f these authors in their texts, and that I find them wise guides to matters o f great importance.
Clearly, however, not everyone who reads these philosophers responds as I do. W hat kind o f critical thought is then appropriate here? There are two issues to be distinguished. The first concerns the defence o f my judgem ent that this writing manifests a sensibility adequate to the matters discussed, and shows, by contrast, the superficiality o f some other philosophical writing in ethics. This judgem ent involves an assessment o f whole texts, an appreciation o f the orientation o f mind that leads a writer to connect things in just these ways, to use these examples, to judge that profound and that trivial, and so on. Because it is a judgem ent o f whole texts, it is not one that I can defend in this introduction, by way o f quotation or paraphrase. It will, I trust, be given substance by the thesis itself and by my more detailed discussion o f particular aspects o f the writing in question.
The second issue concerns the relevance o f such a judgem ent for the assessment o f this work as good philosophy. Suppose someone agrees with, or is willing to grant, my assessment o f this writing as manifesting w ith unusual clarity the admirable sensibilities o f its authors. The question remains, however, what effect that assessment should have on our judgem ent o f its philosophical merit, its contribution to a truer or more adequate philosophical account o f morality. Diamond has remarked that judgements concerning a “sense o f the soul o f the author in the text” are generally deemed “irrelevant or out o f place in the writing o f professionals for professionals” .4 Judgements o f philosophical m erit are, on the accepted view, to be made on the basis o f the cogency o f argument, not in terms o f the profundity of authorial sensibility. Thus, even if I have identified something distinctive in the style o f these writers, it is unclear how that feature o f their work is relevant to the evaluation of their philosophical contribution.
I believe that this distinction between “merely” stylistic and “strictly” philosophical assessment is put in question by D iam ond and Gaita, both implicitly by the form o f their writing and explicitly in their complex reflections on the moral and philosophical significance o f our relationship, as individuals, to language. It is p u t in question precisely by w hat is, for them , the interdependence o f individual sensibility, manifest in speech, word and deed, and the possibility o f serious moral understanding. I consider that adequate appreciation o f their w ork crucially depends upon the recognition o f the significance o f this point. At the same time, to call the distinction between
stylistic and philosophical assessment into question generates great hostility among some philosophers and could be one explanation for the neglect and marginalisation o f which I earlier complained. I take up these issues in detail in the next chapter. For now, I want briefly to indicate a little o f what is at stake
here.
The basic issue concerns the relationship between philosophical reflection
about morality and moral reflection per se. It concerns the nature o f the critical categories appropriate to each. Gaita has said that we “say o f some people that they ‘have something to say’ on moral or spiritual matters, but we do not mean that they have information to impart or a theory to propound” .* 5 W e mean, among other things, that we trust the character o f their thought because we trust them. W e judge them to have attained wisdom, to have attained a depth in their life and thought, and because o f that we judge their words on such matters to have authority. As Gaita remarks, we would not seek moral advice from someone we knew to be morally jaded, and nor would we from someone corrupt, or shallow, or naive. The point could be put the other way around. W hen we assess the quality o f someone’s moral thought, or their moral advice to us, the terms in which we make that assessment may quite legitimately include the concepts o f superficiality and depth, naivety, shrewdness, banality and so on. That seems relatively uncontroversial.
Notice, however, that as long as one possesses a critical intelligence, the capacity to follow arguments through from premises to conclusions, a quick and lively philosophical cleverness, then being jaded or corrupt, shallow or naive is not the slightest impediment to gaining a doctorate and an academic position in moral philosophy. Relatedly, one may expect, according to the canons o f criticism sanctioned by the discipline, to have one’s philosophical discussion of morality deemed inconsistent, or insufficiently rigorous, or to have neglected certain considerations, but not to be rejected as shallow or, in Anscombe’s maverick phrase, to reflect a corrupt m ind.6
W hat are we to make o f these two facts? Their juxtaposition seems at least to raise questions about the extent to which we can just assume that the critical concepts to which moral reflection is answerable are irrelevant in assessing philosophical reflection about morality. It seems at least to raise
Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (London: Macmillan, 1991), 273.
questions about the extent to which the sensibility o f a philosopher is irrelevant to her capacity to approach her subject. In short, both Diamond and Gaita are raising the extremely thorny issue o f the relationship in moral philosophy betw een philosophical and moral depth, the status o f moral philosophy as an academic discipline and its relationship to moral practices o f critical reflection.
It might be suggested that such questions would only arise in cases w here moral philosophers billed themselves as moral experts. Most moral philosophers, however, would not make such a claim and would see themselves, rather, as standing in relation to morality as philosophers o f science stand to science. They would not themselves claim to be practitioners or experts in the area they reflect upon, but, as philosophers, to be concerned only with, say, its
conceptual underpinnings, the nature o f its claims to knowledge, truth and so on. O n that view, w hether moral philosophers are capable o f depth in their understanding o f m orality at the first-order level is irrelevant to their philosophical competence, in the same way that a philosopher o f science need have no pretensions to first-order expertise in physics. Although this analogy seems to do away w ith the concerns I have attributed to Diamond and Gaita, I think that there is a question as to its validity.
If, for example, instead o f comparing the moral philosopher to the philosopher o f science, we compared her with a literary theorist, then what might we be inclined to say? It is, as for the philosopher o f science, no part of som eone’s competence as a literary theorist to be directly engaged in the field upon which she reflects, to be, for example, a poet or novelist. It is surely, however, part o f her competence to have a certain feel for literature, a sensibility which includes an ear for the rhythms o f language, a responsiveness to what constitutes maturity in writing, what profundity, what cant or mere cleverness. If a literary theorist did not possess such sensibilities, then there would be a sense in w hich a large part o f her subject would be closed to her. There would be a sense in which she could not address it. And, I take it to be obvious that such sensibilities require more from the self than academic intelligence.
on. If morality were, for these purposes, a domain more like that o f literature, then why should we assume that simple argumentative cleverness will give one anything illuminating to say about it, even at the second-order level?
It is not difficult to understand how such questions might provoke collegial hostility. They undeniably raise the spectre o f intellectual moralising, the fear that it will end in the erosion of our capacity to assess the validity o f an argument independently o f the person o f its author. Nevertheless, I will argue that such questions are serious ones, raised for cogent philosophical reasons. They cannot simply be dismissed by fiat, by an uncritical invocation o f the sanctity o f impersonal academic inquiry. One o f the things at issue seems to be precisely what impersonal academic inquiry amounts to in different domains. Further, given the significance o f its implications for the practice and assessment o f moral philosophy, I will try to show that the discipline cannot legitimately avoid grappling with the work of Gaita and Diamond on this point.
A second striking feature o f their w ork is its exploration o f the connections betw een morality and human life, between morality and hum an responsiveness to the basic conditions of existence, our human capacity to make meaning both o f those conditions and o f our individual experience. Gaita, for example, argues for the interdependence o f our sense o f the authority o f morality with the fact that human beings may mean to one another what they do, and each explores the significance for morality o f the experiences and existential conditions that are com m on to all hum an beings. They seek to reveal connections between our moral concepts, the sense o f fellowship that underpins the recognition that we may seriously wrong one another, and our com m on experience o f things such as mortality, vulnerability to fortune and the temporal shape o f human life. Again, these are matters that I will take up in detail in the thesis. For now , I will make three comments on this feature o f Gaita and Diam ond’s approach to philosophical reflection on morality.
M ethodologically the approach o f both philosophers owes m uch to W ittgenstein.7 That shows itself particularly in their attention to the phenomena o f the moral life, and their refusal to approach those phenomena with a prior
commitment to what moral life, moral thought must be like. This approach was
articulated by D iam ond w ith reference to W ittgenstein’s interest in rule following. She writes:
[T]here is on the one hand what we might lay down, in some philosophical theory, as essential to rule-follow ing, to something’s being in accordance with a rule; in contrast there is the description of the face, the physiognomy, o f what we call ‘obeying a rule’ in everyday life, o f all that belongs to that face. The philosophical theory lays down, w ithout looking, w hat must be present in following a rule, while Wittgenstein’s talk o f what is possible is entirely different. Imagine such-and-such a change, he will say; and w ith the face o f the activity thus altered, do you still want to call this following a rule? The im portant thing then is not what answer you give, but your willingness to look, i.e., your not laying dow n general philosophical conditions.8
W hat that means for philosophical reflection about morality and moral thought is that we do not begin with a laid down sense o f what can or cannot legitimately enter that thought. R ather, Gaita and Diamond say, look at the face o f our moral thinking and response, look at how responsiveness to mortality or vulnerability seems to enter our moral thought here and here and here. Having looked, now what do we want to say about it, now how do we connect these aspects with these? This is in radical contrast to an approach that begins from a particular requirement, say the requirement that we ensure that our moral thought be free from dogmatic prejudice, and which in turn imposes the form that any legitimate or genuine moral thought must take.9
O f course, the standard objection to this approach is the charge that it ends in moral conservatism. Adopting it, allegedly, we achieve no more than a philosophical map o f what we, however unjustifiably, actually do and think. W e are left with no resources for the normative reformation o f our inherited moral practices, nor for communication with those who do not share “o u r” moral responses. 10 I think, however, that reflection on what is really involved in looking at the phenomena takes the sting out o f the charges o f conservatism and
Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 21.
Murdoch too, in arguing that philosophical models of what morality must be may actually distort our understanding of what it is, urged philosophers to return to the phenomena. “Vision and Choice in Morality”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supp. 30 (July 1956): 32-58, 33.
insularity, at the same tim e as it raises questions about the project o f philosophically driven moral reformation.
The objection assumes that the phenomena in question are the problems that call for moral judgem ent or action, together w ith our so-called “pre- theoretical” intuitions concerning them. O n this picture, those problems and intuitions are the raw data o f the moral life, upon which a philosophical theory o f morality must go to work. For philosophy simply to describe or to look at those phenomena is for it to abrogate its distinctive, critical responsibility, to be led by the given rather than to reflexively justify and guide our practice.
Looking at the phenomena is, for both Diamond and Gaita however, a m uch more complicated m atter than the identification o f “pre-theoretical” intuitions about cases. And, they maintain, when we look at the phenomena we see that such so-called intuitions are a small part o f our non-philosophical moral experience, are a small part o f the data o f the moral life. For example, rather than beginning w ith our intuitions about cases, why do we not try to learn something about the nature o f moral good and harm by attending to what it can mean for an individual to do or suffer it? O r why not attend to how moral responses of, say, remorse or shame, pity or love, are related to our moral understanding, how they affect a life, its sense o f meaning and o f the reality o f other people? W hy not think about what it is that gives some people “something to say” about moral or spiritual matters?
Literature is an important resource for this looking, but not primarily because it provides enriched presentations o f dilemmas or moments o f moral deliberation. To turn to literature for that purpose is only to use it as a purveyor o f more interesting problems, more interesting pre-theoretical intuitions about cases. By contrast, stories are important, for Gaita and Diamond, because they explore how moral experience may penetrate and be penetrated by other aspects o f human life, and so extend our understanding o f what morality is, deepen our sense o f what it means. W hen Dickens suggests the connections in Scrooge between the revival o f his child self, his capacity to laugh and his moral sense, or Dostoyevsky shows how the sufferings o f remorse are, for Raskolnikov, constitutive o f his understanding o f what he has done, we learn something o f w hat m orality is, w hat m eaning and authority it may have, and w hat transforming pow er.11
W hen we attend to such connections between moral experience and its place in the lives o f individuals, we may then suspect that philosophy’s power to normatively reform our moral practice and response simply by the force o f argument has been oversimplified by some philosophers. That is, we notice that the assumption that philosophical argument alone either ought to or can be the engine that drives moral change seems a little naive, a little like whistling in the dark. W hy is that so?
For one thing, we see that there seem to be conceptual connections between our understanding something as a moral matter and it showing itself in
particular ways in the life o f an individual. W e would not call something a moral m atter if it could not intelligibly be connected to human moral responses, w hether o f shame, indignation or resentment, love or gratitude. In the same way, there are connections between our understanding something to be a serious moral wrong, and it being intelligible that someone may be seriously remorseful for committing it. That means that there seem to be conceptual limits to how far intellectual judgements o f moral good and harm can detach themselves from what may seriously claim us in moral response, without being idle talk.
I do not want to suggest, then, that our moral responses are necessarily self-authenticating, that they are immune from philosophical criticism. O n the other hand, I think that Diam ond and Gaita rightly emphasise the extent to which moral understanding is interdependent with moral response, such that it is appropriate, when we suspect that a philosophical argument for reforming our judgements might have run away with itself, at least to pose the question about how such judgements would show themselves in our lives. If we find ourselves
unable to make anything o f such judgements, if we cannot place them seriously in our lives, then we are at least entitled to raise the question o f their claim to be more than just words. Looking at the phenomena, then, raises some questions for the sanguine assumption that philosophical argument alone may rightly, or even intelligibly, drive moral reformation.
In looking at the phenomena we find, furthermore, that critical moral reflection is part o f our ordinary moral experience, is a practice that belongs to the face o f our moral lives, both as individuals and as a culture. In this respect, literature itself may belong to that face, may be understood as itself one o f our moral practices: a practice o f reflective moral thinking. 12 For example, the novel with its cast o f characters is a mode o f thought that may help us to explore our moral options, to explore how different approaches to value and different understandings o f the requirements o f morality shape human lives and their actions. It is a mode o f thought that may reflect upon the different forms that moral corruption can take. Think, for example, o f the subtle exploration o f the
varieties o f moral corruption in the characters that people George Eliot’s novels, varieties including those o f self-deception, naivety, excessive zeal, thoughtlessness and moralism. 13 Alternatively, the moral thinking o f a w ork o f literature may be evident in its formal choices, such choices being vehicles for the author’s reflective exploration o f what kinds o f conceptual and hence moral possibilities are made available by different forms and language. So, an author may explore, and be inviting us to explore, the different kinds o f m oral understanding made possible by the linguistic resources o f irony, o f aphorism or epic, proverbs or riddles.
I do not mean that literature is to be defined as or is reducible to a practice of critical moral reflection. Literature is many things. One thing that it can be is a mode of moral thought or exploration.
All this, these forms o f moral thinking, these explorations o f the place o f morality in a life, are part o f the phenomena o f the moral life, are part o f its face or physiognom y. The w orry that if philosophy takes its cue from the phenom ena, it will tend inevitably to moral conservatism neglects both the heterogeneity o f those phenomena and the extent to which critical reflection is internal to them. W hen Diamond and Gaita talk o f looking at the face o f the
m oral life, they envisage a scene that already includes that reflection and exploration. It is then radically misleading to set up a dichotomy betw een allegedly pre-reflective, untheoretical moral thought and critical philosophical reflection on morality, as if critical moral reflection were not internal to moral thought outside philosophy.
I do not think that the points I have just made answer all the worries
associated with a call to “look” at the phenomena. The issue o f how we are to think about what ought to drive moral change, the normative reformation o f what we take our moral possibilities to be, as well as questions concerning the relationship betw een experiential data and the interpretive role o f traditional concepts, are difficult. They are neither easily articulated nor solved. My intention here has been simply to head off some o f the cruder, in-principle objections to the methodological approach taken by Diamond and Gaita.
I have asked philosophers to be less sanguine about the extent to which intellectual argument alone may rightly, even intelligibly, drive moral change. I have asked that not principally from doubts about argum ent’s practical or motivational efficacy, but from doubts about the extent to which we can take moral arguments that radically disconnect us from serious moral response to be themselves anything more than words, a kind of moral glass bead game. I have also emphasised the extent to which critical moral thought and debate is part o f the physiognomy o f non-philosophical moral life. W hether appeals to the phenom ena exclude certain possibilities, beg certain questions, and so on, must be judged case by case. It is wrong to assume in advance that such a procedure will necessarily tend to moral conservatism, or to an inability to communicate beyond one’s local sphere.
o f their work. I now, secondly, draw attention to the way in w hich this approach largely seems to cut across the debate betw een proponents o f a universal ethic based on rationally defensible principles and those who insist on
the centrality o f a shared ethos or Sittlichkeit for “the conceptualization and resolution o f moral questions” . 14
That debate is, o f course, immensely complicated, and it is beyond the scope o f this thesis to engage directly in it. In claiming that the w ork o f Diam ond and Gaita cuts across it, I simply highlight the fact that they attempt to articulate, on the one hand, the connections between ethics and universal hum an experience, and at the same time recognise, in virtue o f th eir m ethodology, the culturally and linguistically contingent nature o f the meanings, and hence ethical character, that surround those experiences. That means that they provide reasons for thinking that there may be some universally shared basis for moral response, conceptions o f value and so on, and yet acknowledge the extent to which our ethical thought and response is necessarily
in medias res, necessarily mediated through particular cultures and languages. The conjunction o f these points is well expressed by Gaita, when he writes:
Great plays, poems and novels often have what is appropriately called a universal meaning (or truth) but they are not, thereby, suitable for translation into Esperanto: they are - and my point is that it is not accidental that they are - translated from one natural language into another. 15
Again, what that means for philosophical reflection on morality is that we cannot lay down in advance either that genuinely moral judgements must be wholly rationally defensible and hence universalisable, or that we are never able to comm unicate with those outside our moral community. To what extent others can find meaningful or authoritative our moral understandings, to what extent we can bring others to share our perspective on moral matters, are genuine questions. W hy should we think, as Diamond puts it, that “the only p e rm a n e n t possibilities are m oral agreem en t and lack o f m oral c o m m u n ic a tio n” . 16 The im portant thing is our willingness to look, our
Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 46.
w illingness to see concretely w hat com m unication is possible, w hat understanding and agreement we may reach. 17
Finally, I want to speculate again on the reasons for the neglect o f Diam ond and Gaita’s work. I suspect that a reason for that neglect is connected to the professional penchant for labelling arguments in terms of broad categories, and assuming that responses can be made in terms o f those categories. W e saw, for example, how a distinction among philosophical approaches to morality as tending either towards moral conservatism or towards norm ative moral
reform ation involved separating a cluster o f ideas into camps on either side o f that divide. Thus the cluster including notions such as “universalisability” , “rationally defensible principles” and “moral reform” is opposed to the cluster including “attention to phenom ena, local contingency and tradition” and “moral conservatism”. The distinction reified by those opposed clusters obscures the extent to w hich what Diam ond and Gaita actually say calls that very distinction, that very mode o f clustering, into question. The same pattem can be seen in other cases. I will try to show that the challenges to the philosophical discussion o f specific issues that are posed by the work o f Diamond and Gaita should be dealt with on their merits. Let us apply their own methodological approach to our reading, and see what we leam from looking.
II
I now turn to a brief outline o f the thesis as a whole, and o f its organising ideas. As I said earlier, my central contention is that important features o f morality and o f moral thought are distorted by standard philosophical accounts o f them. By drawing upon the work o f Diamond and Gaita, my aim is, firstly, to identify what I take to be the most significant aspects o f that distortion and to show the extent to which they falsify our understanding o f our moral experience. That identification allows us to see that certain approaches or conclusions that seem both inadequate or false, and yet argumentatively forced upon us, are not forced upon us at all. I then begin to articulate what might alter in our philosophical
17 Diamond writes: “Communication about moral things, like that about many other
things, includes exploration of what will enable the participants to reach each other ... O ur practices are exploratory, and it is indeed only through such exploration that we come to see fully what it was that we ourselves thought or wanted to say”. Ibid.,
writing about and understanding o f morality, insofar as we escape from these distortions.
I argue that three significant and related changes would follow. O ne
concerns the ways in w hich we might think about specific moral issues, including our sense o f what considerations and what modes o f thought are admissible, and hence o f what conclusions we may deem it appropriate to draw. The second concerns our sense o f philosophy’s role in moral reflection, both at the level o f its contribution to thought about specific issues and at the level o f its contribution to models o f justification and moral reform. It concerns our understanding o f the critical concepts to which our philosophical thought about morality is answerable, as well as its relationship to other forms o f moral reflection. The third and final change is to our sense o f the relationship between moral understanding and our understanding o f other matters o f deep hum an significance, matters o f meaning, of mortality, o f suffering and o f life itself.
Throughout the thesis, I draw on the concept o f dissociation, using it both to link a num ber o f different issues raised by Diamond and Gaita, and to isolate the nature o f the distortions with which certain philosophical approaches to morality are charged. I will briefly sketch what I mean by “ dissociation”, before outlining the specific issues taken up in the different chapters.
I use the concept o f dissociation in two related senses. In the first sense it refers to failures to connect thought to the world, failures to take “ the phenom ena” seriously enough in theorising. Both Diamond and Gaita argue that such failures characterise aspects o f philosophical moral theory, and lead to distortions in philosophical accounts o f morality. The remedy for dissociation in this sense is, as I have already indicated, to return to and to take seriously our experience itself. 18 The second sense in which I use the concept o f dissociation is closer to the concept’s origins in the critical thought o f T.S. Eliot. This is dissociation defined not as failure to connect thought to world, but as a division within an individual’s sensibility, a kind of immanent deformation o f mind.
Eliot introduced the concept in his essay, “The Metaphysical Poets” , advancing the bold historical claim that, in seventeenth century English poetry,
a “dissociation o f sensibility” set in, “from which we have never recovered” . 19 By “ dissociation o f sensibility” , Eliot meant a dissociation o f thought from
feeling which he found, by contrast, to be intimately entwined in the work o f earlier poets such as D onne, Marvell and King. O f such poets, he wrote, that “there is a direct sensuous apprehension o f thought, or a recreation o f thought into feeling” .20 He compared them favourably with their successors, saying that “Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour o f a rose. A thought to D onne was an experience; it modified his sensibility” .21 The loss o f that kind o f unity leads, by turn, according to Eliot, to dryness in understanding and to sentim ent undisturbed by thought, and hence to crudity in overall sensibility.22 In either direction the result is a curtailing o f the poet’s capacity to penetrate experience, to “find the verbal equivalent for states o f mind and feeling” .23
As an historical thesis and as a key critical device for the interpretation o f English poetry, Eliot’s concept has fallen into disrepute. As a concept that helps to capture a particular and very subtle way in which both thought and feeling can go wrong, it is, I think, still indispensable. It is indispensable, at any rate, for philosophy because it allows us to recognise that there are failures o f thought w hich are not argumentative mistakes, or straightforwardly inadequacies o f ratiocination, but w hich are rather failures o f sensibility, failures in ou r responsiveness o f mind. These are the kinds o f failure that are registered by critical concepts such as fatuous, banal, or romanticised and by more complex notions like ‘“righteous absurdity’, [and] ‘corrupt mind’” .24
There are, needless to say, significant connections betw een these tw o forms o f dissociation. An inability or refusal to connect o ne’s thought to experience will leave one unable even to recognise the kind o f dissociation o f sensibility that Eliot thought could afflict not just individuals, but whole cultures or facets o f culture. That is because, as Diamond has put it, recognising that form o f dissociation and the critical concepts that mark it comes “from on e’s
19 T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets” in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 59-67, 64.
20 Ibid., 63. 21 Ibid., 64.
22 Since the seventeenth century, writes Eliot, “while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country Churchyard (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the Coy Mistress. Ibid., 64-65.
23 Ibid., 65.
sense o f how one lives, what life is like” .25 Conversely, inability to name that kind o f dissociation o f sensibility, neglect of its cognitive significance, is perhaps
connected to a tendency to ignore dimensions o f experience for the purposes o f theory construction. If, for example, excellence in thought is defined for all domains in terms o f scientific rationality, then experience must enter thought in the form o f empirically verifiable facts. The idea that thought might go w rong precisely because o f its rationalistic obsession with facts, because o f its failure to register the significance o f “a responsiveness o f the whole m ind” ,26 is not one that can then easily be countenanced.27
Ill
The thesis is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter, I raise the issue o f the language required for philosophical reflection about morality and o f the critical concepts to which such reflection is answerable. I note that although, as moral philosophers, we aim to think about some o f the most richly described goods and harms in human life, about violation, murder, remorse, honour, love, justice and so on, we often find ourselves doing so in language seemingly removed from such descriptions. W e find ourselves quickly immersed in a quasi-technical vocabulary o f rationality, ends, preferences, prescription and maximisation. M uch philosophical writing about morality, in other words, seems to instantiate or to be itself in a kind o f linguistic dissociation from the vocabulary o f the moral life. The question to be considered concerns the significance o f that fact, and its effect on philosophy’s capacity to extend or deepen our understanding o f moral matters.
In C hapters Tw o and Three, I turn from the dissociations in philosophical writing to the dissociated accounts philosophy gives o f aspects o f morality. In the second chapter, I follow Diamond and Gaita in arguing that insofar as philosophers are forgetful o f the ways in w hich moral thought is connected to our responsiveness to human life, they give a distorted account o f
Ibid., 275. Ibid.
that thought, o f its authority, o f what justifies it, and o f what it is to be capable o f understanding it. In this discussion, I focus on the manifestation o f that dissociation in Kantian and utilitarian accounts o f morality.
These accounts attempt to underwrite our sense o f the authority o f morality and o f human moral significance via appeal to the human possession o f properties such as rationality and sentience. It is, on these views, in virtue o f our possession o f such morally relevant properties, that we are justified in ascribing particular moral significance to one another. I argue that neither our moral responses to one another, nor our sense o f the authority o f morality can be understood or justified except with reference to our sense o f significance in hum an life. That sense o f significance comes from w hat we mean to one another, as revealed in responses like love, grief and remorse, as well as from our imaginative responsiveness to the conditions o f life, to things like mortality, vulnerability, temporality and so on. It does not come simply from our flat possession o f properties deemed to be morally relevant, properties that would be deemed relevant by any rational agent. A consequence o f this argument is that we cannot assume that our moral responses are wholly rationalisable, that they could be justified to any rational agent regardless o f w hether it shared our sense o f significance, or our responsiveness to human life.
In the third chapter, I turn from the conceptual connections betw een moral thought and hum an life, to consider the relationship between moral thought or understanding and the biographical life o f individuals. I argue that philosophers have tended to neglect the significance o f that relationship, focusing instead on developing general tests, such as the universalisability test, that might underw rite the validity o f moral judgem ent. I argue that the attem pt to independently specify the content o f true moral understanding in this way has led to three distortions in philosophical accounts o f that understanding. First, it has led to neglect o f the epistemic significance o f critical concepts such as sentimentality, clichedness, banality and hollowness. These are concepts that reveal the connections between the state and disciplines o f the inner life and the truthfulness o f moral understanding, and hence the connections between the deepening o f moral understanding and the moral achievements o f individuals. Second, it has led to neglect o f the significance o f the way in which moral thinking is necessarily personal, and is not necessarily universalisable. And third, it has led to a false conception o f wisdom as moral expertise which has, in turn,
understanding and our capacity to respond deeply to the m eaning and conditions o f human life.
In Chapter Four, I put the arguments o f the first three chapters into
contact w ith two movements in contemporary philosophy which may also be read as objecting to dissociations in modern philosophical accounts o f morality. These m ovem ents have been labelled, respectively, “theory criticism” and “morality criticism”. They are best understood as culminations o f what are, as I noted at the beginning o f the introduction, widespread criticisms o f Kantian and utilitarian approaches to morality. The general form o f these criticisms is that the theoretical commitments to impartiality and to the universalisability o f moral judgements have led to the exclusion or devaluation of significant aspects o f human life from and by Kantian and utilitarian theories.
Initially this kind o f criticism translated into the retrieval or construction o f ethical theories that could better accommodate such concerns. It is in this context, for example, that I would interpret the rise o f neo-Aristotelianism, virtue ethics and feminist moral theory. M ore recently, the emphasis on the contextual nature o f moral deliberation and on the plurality o f human goods has led many critics to question the very viability o f the project o f systematic normative moral theorising. So-called “anti-theorists” or “theory critics” argue that morality and our moral practices are simply not the kinds o f things that may be systematised into sets o f universal or general principles with reference to w hich particular judgem ents may be justified, and from w hich further judgem ents may be derived. Thus, moral practices and judgements are not the
kinds o f things about which we may construct theories at all.
W ith regard to this movement, I argue that there is a sense in which Diam ond, Gaita and M urdoch may be considered “theory critics” , but that there are some important distinctions to be drawn. Thus, I will argue that some
than ends o f reflection. They are themselves answerable to a non-dissociated sense o f life, and to the critical concepts internal to that life. They do not automatically have authority over that sense o f life, and nor can they underwrite the wholesale reformation o f our moral response and practice. This discussion then helps to clarify my conception of philosophy’s role in moral reflection and criticism.
“M orality criticism ” is, like theory criticism, concerned about the dissociation o f philosophical accounts o f morality from lived human experience. O n this view, however, calling attention to the aspects o f life allegedly devalued
or excluded from Kantian and utilitarian theories of morality raises doubts, not about the validity o f such theories, but about our sense o f the significance o f morality itself. The critics emphasise the range and significance o f human goods that conflict with moral goods, and argue for the need to preserve them from morality’s tendency to trivialise and override them. Thus, while theory critics
argue that moral philosophers must reject the task o f theory construction in ethics, “morality critics” argue that we, philosophers and non-philosophers alike, must reconsider our sense of the place o f morality itself in our lives, must reconsider our sense both o f its authority and scope. I argue that the conception o f morality and o f its relationship to human life that informs Diamond and Gaita’s work reveals that morality critics have misconstrued the significance o f the phenomena to which they draw attention. It thus provides us with a critical perspective upon the “morality criticism” movement which is not available to Kantian and utilitarian defenders o f morality.
C H A PTER ONE
Language and Moral R eflection
I begin w ith a question. W hat language do we need in order to reflect philosophically about morality? The answer to that question will be linked to a “rough story” about what moral philosophy is, or is for. 1 And that “rough story” will be linked in turn to our picture o f the kind o f understanding we seek. So in fact I begin with a set o f questions, each implying the others.
The question o f what language we need concerns issues both o f form or style, and o f the choice and use o f words. Plainly these aspects o f the question are not fully separable, since different forms offer different linguistic resources. I think, however, that they do admit differences in emphasis. Martha Nussbaum’s well-known discussion o f these matters has, for example, tended to focus on the importance o f form. H er rough story about the purpose o f moral philosophy is that it must aim to answer the question, how to live.2 Her contention is that some answers to or ways o f thinking about that question can only be attended to by literary forms and the linguistic options available w ithin them . In particular, she thinks, only works o f literature can fully explore the ethical significance o f things such as the non-commensurability o f value, the priority o f particular perceptions in judgement, the role o f the emotions, and the relevance o f contingent or uncontrolled happenings.3 Therefore, Nussbaum argues, if the task of moral philosophy is to address the question o f how to live, and if certain important aspects o f that question can only be explored in literary works, then certain literary works must be, irreplaceably, works o f moral philosophy.4
I am going to leave that particular claim to one side, as well as any systematic concern about the formal structures w ithin which philosophical
The phrase is originally Martha Nussbaum’s. See her Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 138. It is picked up and explored by Cora Diamond, “Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is”, New Literary History 15 (August 1983): 155-169.
Nussbaum, op. cit., 25. Ibid., 36-44.
Ibid., 4, 8, 148. For important commentary and development of these ideas in Nussbaum’s work, see Cora Diamond, “Martha Nussbaum and the Need for Novels”, and Jane Adamson, “Against Tidiness: Literature and/versus Moral Philosophy”, both in Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory, eds. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman and David Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge
thought about morality most fruitfully proceeds. I want, rather, to focus more strongly than Nussbaum does on words, on the nature o f understanding internal
to words and on the relationship between words or concepts and the individuals w ho use them.
I
Telling o f his experience as a newly arrived Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz, Primo Levi discovered, he says, that “our language lacks words” to express the offence that he and his fellows suffered, the offence o f “ the demolition o f a m an” . “ N othing” , he writes, “belongs to us any more;
they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something o f us, o f us as we were, still remains.5
T he “ dem olition” involved the sufferers and doers o f evil alike, and Levi describes it thus:
The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it, under an offence received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals, the prominents, great and small, dow n to the indifferent slave Häftlinge [prisoners], all the grades o f the mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically fraternized in a uniform internal desolation.6
It is difficult to see how these descriptions of evil done and suffered could be translated w ithout parody into the terms that Kantian and utilitarian theories employ to describe the essence o f moral harm.7 H ow would that go? Is the harm suffered by Levi and his fellow prisoners to be translated as the denial o f their natures as rational beings, as setters o f ends? Is what they suffered the frustration o f their preferences and desires, the non-maximisation o f hedons? Is
Primo Levi, If This is a Man, trans. Stuart W oolf (London: Abacus, 1987), 32-33. Ibid., 127-128.
the terribleness o f being an evil-doer captured in the thought that one has betrayed one’s rational nature?8 N o one, I imagine, would be willing to endorse such translations, such substitutions. And that suggests that the terms in which moral theories have attempted to capture the essence o f moral good and ill, the moral character o f acts and agency, cannot themselves be substituted directly for the language in which, in life, we express and explore our moral experience. The
question is, what is the significance o f that?
It m ight be suggested that it is unfair to pose questions about the language o f philosophy in the light o f such an example, just because almost any description o f Levi’s experience falls short o f being adequate to it. Levi himself said that language “lacked words” to express it. The problems o f writing about the Holocaust are legion and much discussed.9 I acknowledge that, in a sense, I have chosen an “ easy” target against w hich to raise questions about the language o f Kantian and utilitarian theories, but I believe that the point can be secured more generally.
W e begin moral philosophy to think about some o f the most serious and richly described goods and harms in human life, about violation, betrayal, murder, remorse, love, sacrifice, justice, duty and so on. Yet, we find ourselves very quickly immersed in a relatively spartan set o f terms: rationality, ends, preferences, satisfactions, obligation, prescription. W hat strikes many new readers o f moral philosophy, and certainly struck me w hen I came to the subject, is the shock o f the coldness and distance o f its language, its distance or dissociation from the felt experience o f moral life. It is the shock o f the replacement o f metaphors like “demolition” and “internal desolation”, and rich descriptive terms such as betrayal, murder and dishonour, w ith notions such as “ denial o f rational nature” , “violation o f autonom y” and “frustration o f preferences” . It is the loss o f “human language for human things” , and the turn to quasi-technical terms. 10
Many philosophers seem to assume, more or less implicitly, that this
shock, if there is one, is simply a psychic jolt caused by the jettisoning o f emotional and metaphorical baggage which, though “pre-theoretically” bound
8 Cf. ibid., 33.
For a recent discussion, see Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1998).
up w ith our sense o f and exploration o f moral issues, is philosophically speaking strictly irrelevant. The assumption is that what is lost in translation, lost in the philosophical redescription o f the essence o f those offences that lacerate the soul, is incidental to philosophy’s capacity to explore and explain our moral lives, and to direct our moral understanding. That is the assumption I want now to
examine.
Here is a response that, I imagine, a moral theorist might make to what I have said thus far. “ I do not think for a m om ent that the ordinary and extraordinary moral descriptions available in life and literature could be or should be replaced by the vocabulary o f Kantian or utilitarian theory. I believe that those rich descriptions may perfectly well enter our actual m oral deliberations and, in fact, that they may be essential for moral motivation and instruction. My philosophical interest is simply to understand the moral essence embedded in those ‘thick’ descriptions. In articulating that, I hope to reveal, for
example, what the different forms o f moral harm have in common, what unifies our judgem ents o f w rongdoing, and so on. An analogy is w ith scientific redescription. Just as the technical language o f science allows us to redescribe the disparate and variously described phenomena o f the natural world in such a way as to help us to reveal its essential physical nature, so I seek to redescribe our moral experience in order to capture its basic moral nature, to distil it from, say, its emotional and psychological surrounds”.
The central point is that, given their aims, it cannot be held against such philosophical theories that they dissociate us from the language in which we actually live our moral lives, in the same way that it cannot be held against scientific theories that they prescind from poetic descriptions o f the natural world. And here, then, is one answer to the set of questions with which I began. The language we need for philosophical reflection about morality is abstract and
in turn makes perspicuous the nature o f our assured moral judgements, reveals what justifies them and hence guides us when we are less sure.
In contrast to such a view, however, Gaita has asked whether:
the contrasts betw een essence and surface, appearance and reality, as they apply in moral philosophy invite theorising o f a kind which would express its findings in a language so removed from that suited to the revelation o f the kind of seriousness w hich is peculiar to morality, that its substitutions for our untheoretical expressions should result in parody. 11
Gaita’s discussion o f this point is short and extremely dense. I will attempt to draw out what I take its significance to be, since it bears crucially on the issue o f the language required for moral philosophy, and hence on the critical concepts to which philosophical reflection about morality need be answerable.
Gaita casts doubt on w hether the “contrasts betw een essence and surface, appearance and reality” in moral philosophy “invite theorising” o f a sort that w ould express its findings in language whose substitution in ou r untheoretical expressions results in parody. W hat then does Gaita take the nature o f the contrast between essence and surface, as it applies in moral philosophy or in moral thinking, to be? If penetrating the moral apperances does no t involve the distillation and clarification o f our messy, pre-theoretical expressions, then what does it involve? O n Gaita’s view, as I read it, the relevant contrast between essence and surface is marked by the notions o f superficiality and depth, where depth is not an abstraction from the surface or superficial realm o f phenomena, but is a burrowing into, in ever richer and more complex terms, those very phenomena. That is, for Gaita, depth in moral understanding is achieved, not by distilling or by abstracting from the rich language o f moral description, but by ever more sustained, imaginative and nuanced explorations requiring just that language.
The point is well illustrated by the passage I quoted from Primo Levi. It is clear that in his w riting, Levi is struggling to achieve a deepened understanding o f the nature o f the evil he suffered, and the meaning o f that evil for victims and perpetrators alike. It is also clear that, to the extent that he does achieve such understanding, it is not because he draws upon the abstract
language o f theory, but because he has the capacity to create such sublime m etaphors as “paradoxically fraternized in a uniform internal desolation” .
Through that m etaphor we come to understand more deeply what it is to do and to suffer evil, how evil may enter and deform human lives, how it may lay waste their whole internal landscape, and hence what kind o f thing evil is. That is why Gaita writes that “our exploration o f what it is to be a m urderer, a coward, a traitor, etc, is at its deepest, in a natural language resonant w ith historical and local association” and that the meaning o f what it is to be, say, a m urderer “is only kept alive (for a culture and for individuals) through a language and art which conveys its peculiar kind of terribleness” .12
It m ight be objected that Gaita has confused two different sorts o f reflection about morality. The kind of reflection that occurs in a rich natural language, the kind answerable to categories o f superficiality and depth, is moral reflection. It is reflection that occurs w ithin the moral life, and does not necessarily seek to draw any general conclusions about morality as such. Philosophical reflection about morality, however, is different. It does not aim to replace the rich, exploratory reflection o f the moral life, but rather seeks, as we saw earlier, to explain the phenomena at a different level. It seeks to find unity behind variety, to explain, in more general and theoretical terms, the kind o f
thing morality is, and so on.
There are clearly, I think, distinctions to be drawn between reflection within the moral life and at least some forms o f philosophical reflection about morality, and I will return to that point shortly. Nevertheless, there are two aspects o f Gaita’s discussion which provide reason for thinking that this issue cannot be quite so easily set aside. I will discuss them in turn.
Gaita makes m uch o f the fact that moral matters are necessarily serious, necessarily have serious weight or make serious claims. That shows itself in a number o f ways. For example, if someone says that something is a moral matter for him, “then this is a claim on our serious regard” . As Gaita notes, w hen someone says such a thing, “or more commonly, that it is, for them, ‘a matter o f principle’ or ‘conscience’, we may not say that it is o f no importance; any more than we may say that to someone who pointed out that a proposal would put their health or even their life at risk” . 13 Similarly, if someone were to say “ ‘But that is merely evil’” , then he “ does not understand w hat it is for
Ibid., 34.
