Moral Thought Outside Moral Theory (Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory) [1 ed.] 1032542012, 9781032542010

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement Page
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Moral Thought and Moral Judgement
Notes
Chapter 2: Moral Particularity
Notes
Chapter 3: Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory
Notes
Chapter 4: Conceptions of Value
Notes
Chapter 5: Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought
Notes
Chapter 6: Impartial versus Public Reasons
Notes
Chapter 7: A Moral Life
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

‘This is a tremendously interesting, bold, ambitious, and original contribution to contemporary ethics.’ Sophie Grace Chappell, Open University, UK ‘This wonderful book is always in touch with the real complexities of moral life. The personal character of moral responsiveness is brought out sharply by Taylor in insightful case studies of literary works. The book is a truly important contribution to philosophical ethics: to what it can be.’ Cora Diamond, University of Virginia, USA

Moral Thought Outside Moral Theory

This book argues there can be no theory of ethics and that any attempt at such a theory ends up distorting the moral phenomena that it is supposed to explain. It presents clear examples of moral thought outside moral theorising through literature and Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. The book’s precise target is moral theory understood as a theory of right action. The author begins by arguing against the assumption central to moral theory that moral judgments are universalizable; that what it is right for one agent to do in a given situation is what is right for any agent in that same situation. Rather, moral judgements are essentially first personal. The author's specific contention here is that our understanding of moral thought in literature provides grounds for rejecting the assumption that moral judgements are universalizable. The author then goes on to argue that there is some determinate and objective content to ethics connected to recognising another human being as a limit to our will. He presents several literary examples that have influenced his thinking about the nature of moral value. He combines these readings with insights from Wittgenstein’s later writings to demonstrate the ways in which moral theorising fails to capture important aspects of moral thought. Moral Thought Outside Moral Theory will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in ethics and moral theory, literature and philosophy, and Wittgenstein. Craig Taylor is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Flinders University. He is the author of Moralism: A Study of a Vice (2012) and Sympathy: A Philosophical Analysis (2002); and a co-editor of Hume and The Enlightenment (2011), A Sense for Humanity: The Ethical Thought of Raimond Gaita (2014) and Morality in a Realistic Spirit: Essays for Cora Diamond (2020).

Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory

The Guise of the Good A Philosophical History Francesco Orsi The Making of the Good Person Self-Help, Ethics and Philosophy Nora Hämäläinen Moral Teleology A Theory of Progress Hanno Sauer Agent Relative Ethics Steven J. Jensen Moral Injury and the Humanities Interdisciplinary Perspectives Edited by Andrew I. Cohen and Kathryn McClymond Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy Edited by Hugo Viciana, Antonio Gaitán, and Fernando Aguiar Risk and Responsibility in Context Edited by Adriana Placani and Stearns Broadhead Moral Thought Outside Moral Theory Craig Taylor For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Ethics-and-Moral-Theory/book-series/SE0423

Moral Thought Outside Moral Theory Craig Taylor

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Craig Taylor The right of Craig Taylor to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-54201-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-54202-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-41566-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003415664 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

For Melinda

Contents

Acknowledgements x Introduction 1 1 Moral Thought and Moral Judgement

9

2 Moral Particularity

22

3 Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory

38

4 Conceptions of Value

59

5 Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought

73

6 Impartial versus Public Reasons

95

7 A Moral Life

115

Bibliography 136 Index 141

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to a number of people and institutions for help in writing this book. Several chapters were presented to members of the Centre for Ethics as Study of Human Value at the University of Pardubice, Czechia. I would like to thank members of the Centre for their many helpful comments on the manuscript as well as the Centre itself for providing me with generous funding to visit there. In my final preparation of this monograph, I benefited greatly from teaching buyout provided to me by the Australian Research Council as part of an ongoing research project I am on entitled Indigenist Archaeology: New Ways of Knowing the Past and Present (ID: IN220100079). I would also especially like to thank Andrew Gleeson and Cora Diamond, who both read drafts of whole manuscript. Andrew, in particular, spent many hours with me, as usual, commenting on a great many aspects of the book. I am very grateful to David Cockburn who helped me avoid a number of subtle but important mistakes in earlier drafts of Chapter 3. I have been promising this book as a research outcome in return for periods of study leave from Flinders for quite a while now. So, thank you Flinders, and here it finally is! I was very fortunate to have two very helpful and supportive anonymous reviewers from Routledge. One remains anonymous; however, the other, Sophie Grace Chappell, has revealed her identity to me. I am very grateful to both her and second anonymous reviewer. Finally, I would like to thank my partner Melinda Graefe, who has discussed the various stages of this book with me over many years. Melinda not only pointed me towards many of the works of literature discussed here, but also provided enormous editing and proof-reading support at the very end of the project. Anyone who had read any of my draft work before knows how shocking my spelling and grammar is, and thus just how indebted to Melinda in this respect I am. This book is for the most part entirely new work. However, I have drawn on small sections of my ‘Literature and Moral Thought’ published in British Journal of Aesthetics, in Chapter 1;

Acknowledgements  xi a very early paper by me ‘Moral Cognitivism and Character’ published in Philosophical Investigations in Chapter 2; and ‘Our Fellow Creatures’ published in the Routledge collection Ethics in the Wake of Wittgenstein in Chapter 3. In addition, I have made reference to some of the literary works discussed in the book in various other places.

Introduction

… Spinoza maintained (in my opinion with some justice) that ‘knowledge of good and evil’, expressed in a purely general way, is a confused form of awareness. In his view I can attain clarity only through a sharpening of my perception of the particular circumstances which characterize my individual presence in the world, a sharpening of perception which is at the same time a purification of my practical involvement. Since the most important aspect of this practical involvement is involvement with other human beings, what is required is an account of our knowledge and understanding of other human beings which will make it possible to see how such knowledge and understanding can of itself impose moral bounds on our will. An account that would achieve this is one which makes recognition of such moral bounds on the will a criterion for the knowledge and understanding of human beings that is in question. (Winch 1987, p. 173)

The thought expressed by Peter Winch in the above quotation captures much of the essence of the argument of this book. Whether or not this is an accurate representation of Spinoza’s thought will not concern me. It certainly indicates an approach to the subject of moral philosophy that Winch endorsed and explored in his philosophy, and Winch has, along with various other likeminded thinkers (as will become clear), greatly influenced my own thoughts on the subject. The central argument of this book is that there can be no theory of ethics that is able to capture all aspects of our moral understanding, including most importantly our moral understanding of other human beings. That is to say, there can be no general theory of morality. Whatever differences there may be in such theorising, or in resulting theories, they are, all the same, concerned to some extent with ‘“knowledge of good and evil”, expressed in a purely general way’. Moral theory is, of course, a very broad term, and the more precise target of this book is moral theory understood as a theory of right action. A more minimal conception of moral theory might simply be to propose an ideal by which one might live. But it is compatible with that thought that DOI: 10.4324/9781003415664-1

2 Introduction different people might have different relevant ideals and there is nothing in this minimal conception that requires us to make all such ideals consistent within some general theory of right action. That there should be some such demand for consistency for moral theory is hardly surprising since it is part of the point and usefulness of such theories that a general thought or principle can be applied by just anyone in a particular situation in order for us to determine what we ought to do. This book proceeds by questioning some of the central assumptions that underlie moral theory, some of which may go unnoticed. So, even contemporary moral particularists – in many ways critical of the claims of moral theory and the general principles it provides – have at least one foundational moral principle. To explain, they will hold that moral situations may be radically particular even to the extent that a given consideration may count in favour of an action in one situation while it counts against it in another. But they still claim that with respect to any given situation, any agent who finds themselves in that situation ought to act in the same way. That, though they may object to the term, is their principle. Like the moral theorists they may criticise, they claim that moral judgements are universalizable. Of course, one might reply that the reason the demand that moral judgements be universalizable goes unnoticed is that it is obviously true. I will argue, however, that this is indeed an assumption and one that helps to define the moral for us in ways that make certain ideas or phenomena within the moral, and more broadly the evaluative realm, difficult to see and so understand properly. My arguments against universalizability are in fact woven throughout the chapters of this book and connected to the assumptions of moral theorising that, as noted above, I will question. Briefly, those assumptions are: that the objects of moral thought and understanding are conceived as separable from what I will call our primitive responsiveness to those very objects (which I discuss in Chapter 1 and at a more fundamental level in Chapter 3); that moral address or judgement is conceived of in ways that are essentially impersonal (discussed in Chapter 2); that moral theorising typically employs just one particular conception of value, that is value understood as something to be promoted (discussed in Chapter 4); and what really follows from all of this, that any consensus with genuine moral authority entails what I will call strong impartiality (discussed in Chapter 6). In order to see why one might doubt even the universalizabilty principle, one needs an account of not just what is involved in ‘my perception of the particular circumstances which characterise my individual presence in the world’, but also what ‘my practical involvement’ in the world amounts to. It is clear that for Winch at least such practical involvement leads to the denial of the universalizability of moral judgements, as is clear from his discussion in the paper from which I have just quoted (but even earlier in Winch 1972), and the argument of this book leads me to the same

Introduction  3 conclusion. Moral judgement, I claim, is first personal in this sense. The position is a radical one, but not unprecedented; Bernard Williams held an in some ways comparable view in his various criticisms of what he called the ‘morality system’ (Williams 1985). Thinking of Williams’ fairly devastating critique of the morality system, though, may lead in the end to scepticism about whether there can be, as Winch still wants to say, knowledge and understanding of other human beings that can impose moral bounds on our will. While I will not argue the point here, it seems to me that ­Williams never really provided a clear positive answer to that question. For him truth in ethics could only be, in ways I will explore in Chapter 6, a culturally specific affair. What I will argue, however, is that there is some determinate and indeed (in a sense I will outline and pace Williams) objective content to such knowledge and understanding connected to recognising another human being as a limit to our will. This book, as its title makes plain, concerns the possibilities of moral thought and understanding outside moral theorising. And the way in which I will proceed is, in large part, through a careful attention to various works of literature which I will argue present clear illustrations of moral thought that standard moral theorising fails to capture. Perhaps the most significant philosophical influence on my thinking here is Iris Murdoch. Murdoch is often presented as a kind of moral particularist of the kind I have just mentioned. But here again, and as I will argue, many of those who hold this view fail to see just how radical her own particularism is; for instance, Murdoch too denies the univeralizabilty of moral judgements. But while much of my thought owes a great deal to Murdoch it is not reducible to it. My own particular exploration of the possibilities of moral thought beyond moral theory owes as much, if not more to my reading of Wittgenstein’s later writings along with my readings of a number of contemporary philosophical commentators who have explored the ways in which Wittgenstein’s thought may bear on moral philosophy. The most significant of those commentators for this book are Cora Diamond and Raimond Gaita, and I will have occasion to refer to them both at some length. To return to my use of literature, I do not aim as many other philosophers have done to merely present literary examples as perspicuous illustrations of some general philosophical point, for of course that would be simply to argue that literature may be an aid to moral thought and not a distinctive constitutive of it, one that might expose, as I say, certain deficits in the practice of moral theorising. My method, then, requires some explaining. I have not chosen the particular literary works I discuss in this book on the basis of what I already think about the nature of moral thought. Rather, in my thinking I have been guided by the literature itself; the particular moral thought and understanding in evidence in these works – what they reveal about moral value and its relation to the realm of value

4 Introduction generally – has shown me the ways in which moral theorising fails to capture important aspects of moral thought and understanding quite generally. An initial query to raise with respect to moral theory, one which I will examine at length later, is what Murdoch has called ‘the initial delineation of the field of study’ in moral philosophy. What we take to be of moral interest in the first place, the particular phenomena we focus on, will suggest a particular set of theoretical apparatus as appropriate to those very phenomena. To quote Murdoch, … it is especially important to attend to the initial delineation of the field of study. … A narrow or partial selection of phenomena may suggest certain particular techniques which will in turn seem to lend support to that particular selection; and then a circle is formed out of which it may be hard to break. It is therefore advisable to return frequently to an initial survey of ‘the moral’ so as to reconsider, in the light of a primary apprehension of what morality is, what our technical devices actually do for us. (Murdoch 1956, p. 33) Throughout this book I will consider a range of phenomena that I take to be of moral significance, but which standard moral theorising tends to ignore. But while the phenomena I have in mind do not feature in such theorising they do all the same commonly feature in various works of literature that touch on moral ideas and themes. Moral philosophers, obviously, are not the only people who think in a focused and reflective way about moral value or about how one should live, and while literature as literature need not be concerned with ethics it sometimes is very much concerned with questions of moral value and agency. A writer that has been much discussed, including in moral philosophy, in this respect is Jane Austen, and in the first chapter I will examine her novel Emma in this connection. But by way of introducing not just the argument of that chapter but also of this book as a whole, I want to consider now not what a philosopher has to say on this topic with respect to Austen but what another writer has to say. In an essay on Austen, Virginia Woolf suggests: Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of an unerring heart … an almost stern morality, that she shows up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in English literature. She depicts a Mary Crawford in her mixture of good and bad entirely by this means. She lets her rattle on against the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage and ten thousand a year, with all the ease and

Introduction  5 spirit possible; but now and again she strikes one note of her own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and at once all Mary Crawford’s chatter… rings flat. Hence the depth, the beauty, the complexity of her scenes. From such contrasts there comes a beauty, a solemnity even, which are not only as remarkable as her wit, but an inseparable part of it. (Woolf 1957, pp. 177–178) In what follows I will consider at length the idea that Austen’s wit, indeed the manner of her presentation of all the human dealings she relates, is inseparable from the moral contents and contrasts she reveals to us. Though even this summary statement, inextricably linking style and content in moral thought, suggests a challenge to moral theory. But something more particular that I want to highlight here, and which Woolf goes on to discuss, is what Austen sees as of moral interest in the first place; I want to consider her singular capacity to draw from the most seemingly insignificant of human affairs something full of moral significance and meaning. As Woolf goes on to say, … it is midday in Northamptonshire; a dull young man is talking to rather a weakly young woman on the stairs as they go up to dress for dinner, with housemaids passing. But, from triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable in their lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep, trembling, serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this drop, in which all the happiness of life has collected, gently subsides again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence. (Woolf 1957, p. 178) The scene, like the reference to Mary Crawford above, comes from Mansfield Park. The young man, Edmund, is about to enter the clergy and he confides to the young woman, Fanny, his doubts about Mary with whom he is in love; Mary is shallow and dismissive of the clergy, taunting Edmund that she will never dance with a clergyman. Fanny, originally from an impoverished home, lives with her aunt’s family at Mansfield Park and is treated badly by everyone except her cousin Edmund, with whom she is in love. This moment on the stairs gives Fanny hope and opens a possible shared future for these two young people. So it is against this backdrop that the significance of the scene emerges. Woolf’s interest in the scene, and what I want to draw attention to, is the moral interest that Austen finds in ‘this drop’, a mere moment ‘in which all the happiness of life has collected’, a moment extracted from the ‘ebb and flow of ordinary existence’. That kind of interest in human life, which is a kind of moral interest, I will

6 Introduction argue, cannot be captured within the purview of moral theorising; there is no moral decision to be made here on the stairs, there is no moral judgement here in view. Yet, as Woolf says, the scene is full of moral meaning. What we are to make of such meaning and the place such meaning may have in our moral thought and reflection is what I want to consider in the chapters that follow, and that I will now briefly outline. In the first chapter, I will begin a detailed exploration of the idea flagged at the end of the last paragraph via a discussion of Jane Austen’s novel Emma. Austen’s novels, as many others have noted, are, first, clearly concerned with moral themes and, second, in them we can see how in this connection thought and feeling are inextricable linked. My own more specific purpose in this chapter is to consider the ways in which moral thought and understanding are grounded in various forms of responsiveness – such as compassion – directed towards others, and then how serious judgement of someone else in relation to their behaviour towards others always involves an appeal that is, to some extent, a personal one. I argue that serious moral judgement here must be addressed to them in particular and connected with this must display a responsiveness to the way in which they may account in turn for their actions. In the chapter that follows I expand on the second claim above arguing that the essentially personal nature of moral judgement presents a challenge to moral theorising. Specifically in this chapter I claim that our judgement of others must take account of their particular moral identity in so far as such particular identities may require different moral decisions of different agents who may find themselves in morally comparable or even identical stations. The challenge here to moral theorists of almost any variety involves denying that moral judgements are universalizable. I take my lead in part from Stanley Cavell’s distinction between the moralist and the moraliser and my own earlier work on moralism understood to be a kind of vice that involves the distortion of moral reflection and judgement. The argument of the first two chapters relies heavily on the idea that moral thought and understanding essentially involves certain forms of responsiveness towards others. However, one may question whether, as I claim, such responsiveness is itself essential to and indeed constitutive of our moral understanding of other human beings and the situations they find themselves in. So, it may be argued, while such responses may accompany our moral understanding, they are not a form of understanding; it may be claimed that they are not internal to our moral recognition of another person and their situation. In Chapter 3 I address this challenge to my argument by drawing on a recurring thought in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy concerning how the grammar of our talk with respect to certain concepts – including morally laden concepts – through which we understand other human beings, may suggest certain pictures, pictures that

Introduction  7 supposedly represent the grammar of the given concept, but which on further reflection are apt to mislead us. The particular concept I focus on from Wittgenstein is the concept of pain and Wittgenstein’s (to many puzzling) claim that there can be no such thing as a picture of pain. While Wittgenstein did not discuss ethics at any significant length, indeed eschewing the subject in his Tractatus entirely, I will argue that the ideas expressed in the Philosophical Investigations concerning what he calls our attitudes to other human beings support the idea that our understanding of other human beings is partially constituted by various forms of responsiveness to them. Specifically, I will argue that our responses to other human beings, and indeed other animals, form the conceptual foundations through which it becomes possible for us to think of them in moral ways at all. What follows from all this, as I suggest in this chapter and then in Chapter 4, is that our moral thought about other creatures cannot be reduced to some list of things that we think about them, some list, as some would say, of morally relevant properties they possess. But it is precisely that thought that lies at the heart of moral theory; for the moral theorist, moral value is basically about some thing (for example, some property) that is to be preserved or promoted. This conception of value is, one may say, tailor-made for moral theory. However, in Chapter 4 I will argue that this conception of value excludes another important understanding of moral value; value, on this distinct conception, is rather something that must be understood as connected to one’s understanding of the value of the world as a whole, a way of thinking that cannot be reduced to a list of valuable things that it contains. A central feature of this chapter will be examining Cora Diamond’s defence of Michael Sandel’s argument for the moral value of the unbidden, an argument he developed in posing certain moral objections to genetic enhancement. It may be thought, given the outline of the previous chapters and my claim that value is connected to one’s understanding of the world as a whole, that I am in the end proposing some form of moral subjectivism. After all, I have suggested that different people will have different moral understandings. Against this suggestion, in Chapter 5 I will defend a version of realism in ethics. However, as will become clear, what realism amounts to for me is very different from standard approaches to this topic. I return to my initial quotation from Murdoch, but now in connection to what we really want from the idea of realism in ethics. For Murdoch, the basic problem of realism is not the question of whether values are real (this she takes for granted), but the insurmountable difficulty of facing this reality. The challenge of realism for Murdoch was that of combating the natural human tendency to avoid pain, and in particular the suffering caused by the disappointment of our hopes and desires, by retreating into what she calls ‘consoling fantasy’. I largely accept Murdoch’s diagnosis of our

8 Introduction situation, and in Chapter five I will consider the ways in which, through the exercise of imagination, one may be able to return to face what is often a very painful reality. Such vulnerabilities, as Murdoch too would say, are unavoidable; nevertheless, in this chapter I will consider more specifically how others who are willing to engage in such an imaginative process with us may help us to face such difficult realities and through this come to understand ourselves more fully. This book concerns the limitations of, and distortions caused by, moral theory with respect to our understanding of morality and the realm of value more generally. But my criticisms of moral theory might seem to undermine a central and crucial feature of morality and of moral reasoning and judgement; that such reasons and judgements must be impartial. Impartialism is like moral theory itself a broad term. But, as I will argue in Chapter 6, in the strong sense in which it is defended within moral theory we can and should dispense with it in favour of ordinary public reasons, reasons that may be accepted by all those actual human beings that are a party to the actions that lie within their scope. Again, of course, this might seem to raise the spectre of my endorsing some kind of moral subjectivism or relativism. Against this suggestion, however, I defend a conception of truth in ethics which I derive from Cora Diamond’s proposal – which she in turn develops from David Wiggins’ defence of what he calls a qualified moral cognitivism – according to which certain sentences can be taken as guides to thinking well, guides to keeping thought, or getting it back, on track where it may go astray such that thought itself fails. The putative example of such a statement from Wiggins that I, following Diamond, consider is that eventually we may be able to say that ‘there is nothing else to think that slavery is unjust and insupportable’. In the final chapter of the book, I consider the example of a particular moral life that shows the ways in which, as I have argued, moral theory fails to provide us with an adequate account of morality, and particularly what a moral life actually looks like. Here, finally, I will stress that there is nothing in the argument of this book to suggest that the question ‘what is it to live a moral life’ is not a real and important question. I am just suggesting that the answer to that question cannot be found via a moral theory. But as I said at the outset, if you think of moral theory as just recommending a given ideal to us, then of course in that sense it can provide an answer to that question. There are ideals that are worthy of directing the course of a moral life, as I noted above. At the same time, it may be that at some points particular social arrangements or ways of living may be morally insupportable. But these are much more modest claims about the nature of moral thought and understanding than those entertained by moral theory.

1 Moral Thought and Moral Judgement

This book is concerned with the ways in which moral thought involves more, including ending in more, than moral judgement as that is usually understood within standard moral theorising. What this claim entails, which I hope will become clear, is that moral thought and understanding are much more demanding of us, and in more varied ways, than moral theorists generally suppose. So, for example, it requires more than an intellectual grasp of moral concepts and principles, what follows from them, how they are to be ordered, integrated (or rendered consistent) and applied to specific situations and so on; though I recognise that there are undoubtedly many complex issues and problems that fall under this general heading. In defending this claim, I will at various points make specific reference to literature. I do this as it seems plain that at least some literature is concerned with and involves moral thought, even though such literature is far from what we would generally call moral philosophy, at least as it is understood by moral theorists. I am aware of course that some moral philosophers, Martha Nussbaum most prominently (Nussbaum 1990), have claimed that literature can be moral philosophy. However, I shall argue that such an assimilation stands in danger of missing the particular contribution that literature might make to moral thought beyond moral theorising, though that argument will only become clear as I discuss the particular ways in which moral theorising is insufficient for, and potentially distorts, serious moral thought. This chapter makes a start on that project by reflecting on a work of literature and a writer who has very commonly been taken, including by philosophers, to be engaging in moral thinking and judging in their work. I am alluding here to Jane Austen, and the work of literature I will consider is her novel Emma. In particular, I will consider how the manner in which Austen writes about her various characters, and most importantly about Emma herself, enables us to see these characters as of moral interest and concern. Here I make two points: First, from the way in which Austen writes about her characters it becomes clear that this interest is not merely a matter of discovering various facts about these DOI: 10.4324/9781003415664-2

10  Moral Thought and Moral Judgement characters; rather these characters become objects of moral interest and concern for us through our moral responsiveness to these characters. Second, and more generally, Austen’s treatment of her characters shows how moral address to others is essentially personal in the sense that one must be able to address one’s moral judgements about them to them. What, in brief, moral thought requires of us then is a particular quality of attention, what Iris Murdoch calls ‘a just and loving gaze directed at a particular reality’ (Murdoch 1970, p. 34). As Alice Crary has noted in her Beyond Moral Judgment (Crary 2007), Gilbert Ryle (back in 1966) argued that Jane Austen’s novels were concerned with moral questions or themes, that they contained moral thought or reflection. Specifically for Ryle, this thought was of an Aristotelian kind in so far as Austen was concerned not with overall black and white moral judgements (according to him, the Calvinist kind separating people into the saved and the damned or, on a secular level, the guilty and the innocent) but with the many degrees in which people vary in relation to a host of more everyday character traits. This indeed, Ryle suggests, is evident even from the title of several of Austen’s novels. As Crary quotes Ryle: Sense and Sensibility really is about the relations between Sense and Sensibility or, as we might put it, between Head and Heart, Thought and Feeling, Judgment and Emotion, or Sensibleness and Sensitiveness. Pride and Prejudice really is about pride and misjudgments that stem from baseless pride, excessive pride, deficient pride, pride in trivial objects, and so on. Persuasion really is or rather does set out to be about persuadability, unpersuadability and over-persuadability. (Crary 2007, 140) At the same time, and in a similar Aristotelian vein, Ryle seems to hold that for Austen, like for Shaftsbury who he argues indirectly influenced her, moral thought and understanding involve a conjunction of intellect and feeling. As Ryle puts the point, thinking of the way in which both use the word ‘Mind’, this is taken ‘to stand not just for intellect or intelligence, but for the whole complex unity of a conscious, thinking, feeling and acting person’ (Ryle 1971, p. 290). As Crary puts Ryle’s point, ‘Austen’s moral vocabulary reflects a conception of human cognitive capacities and capacities for feeling as essentially tied together’ (Crary 2007, pp. 138–139). For her purposes, Crary’s interest in this is that Ryle’s argument concerning Austen might now be stated as follows: We can recognise that her novels impart ‘moral instruction in large part by eliciting moral thought that does not take the form of moral judgements’ (Crary 2007, p. 143). While I am in sympathy with Crary’s particular argument concerning moral thought that extends beyond moral judgement, my concern is to elaborate in more

Moral Thought and Moral Judgement  11 detail how moral thought, including moral judgement, depends on certain kinds of responsiveness to and engagement with particular others, and their lives, actions and judgements. To begin, I need to provide some background and context for the particular passage from Emma I want to consider. Emma, the central character of the novel, is a young woman of twenty years, the younger of two daughters of a doting and well-to-do widower father. Her older sister, ­Isabella, is happily married to John Knightley, and as they reside in London Emma has lived alone for some time with her father effectively as the mistress of Hartfield, her father’s estate. As Austen puts it at the beginning of the novel: Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. (Austen 1816/2005, p. 1) Emma’s chief faults lie in a tendency to meddle in the affairs of others, in particular in the field of matchmaking, along with a misplaced self-conceit in her own powers of understanding others, a fault that renders her attempted matchmaking disastrous both to the parties involved and, ultimately, to herself. As clever and happily disposed as she is, Emma does not know her own heart and mind, let alone the hearts and minds of those around her. The central drama of the novel is Emma’s journey to a greater state of self-awareness. A moment of epiphany comes for Emma with her friend Harriet Smith’s confession of romantic interest in Mr Knightley (John’s brother) and the distressing (for Emma) thought that these feelings may after all be shared on Mr Knightley’s side as well. Emma has known Mr Knightley, who is sixteen years her senior, all of her life and they are exceedingly close, Mr Knightley visiting Hartfield almost every day. Emma’s distress, she discovers in a sudden rush of selfknowledge, is founded on the thought that Mr Knightley should marry nobody but her. This much of the story it is necessary to relate in order to indicate the close connection, involving a great deal of genuine respect and intimacy along with a deal of good-natured argument, between Emma and Mr Knightley. The particular passage that concerns me, then, deals with a visit by Emma, Mr Knightley and others to the popular picnic spot of Box Hill before Emma’s epiphany described above. During this visit, Emma mocks their mutual friend Miss Bates for one (of many) passing silly remarks. Miss Bates is an incessant chatterer, often quite ridiculous in her pronouncements, but humble and extremely kind and attentive to others. At the end of the excursion Mr Knightley catches up

12  Moral Thought and Moral Judgement with Emma as she is about to enter her carriage. I quote from Emma at some length: ‘Emma, I must once more speak to you as I have been used to do: a privilege rather endured than allowed, perhaps, but I must still use it. I cannot see you acting wrong, without a remonstrance. How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation? – Emma, I had not thought it possible.’ Emma recollected, blushed, was sorry, but tried to laugh it off. ‘Nay, how could I help saying what I did? – Nobody could have helped it. It was not so very bad. I dare say she did not understand me.’ ‘I assure you she did. She felt your full meaning. She has talked of it since. I wish you could have heard how she talked of it – with what candour and generosity. I wish you could have heard her honouring your forbearance, in being able to pay her such attentions, as she was for ever receiving from yourself and your father, when her society must be so irksome.’ ‘Oh!’ cried Emma, ‘I know there is not a better creature in the world: but you must allow, that what is good and what is ridiculous are most unfortunately blended in her.’ ‘They are blended,’ said he, ‘I acknowledge; and were she prosperous, I could allow much for the occasional prevalence of the ridiculous over the good. Were she a woman of fortune, I would leave every harmless absurdity to take its chance, I would not quarrel with you for any liberties of manner. Were she your equal in situation – but, Emma, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed! – You, whom she has known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour, to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her – and before her niece, too – and before others, many of whom (certainly some,) would be entirely guided by your treatment of her. – This is not pleasant to you, Emma – and it is very far from pleasant to me; but I must, I will, – I will tell you truths while I can, satisfied with proving myself your friend by very faithful counsel, and trusting that you will some time or other do me greater justice than you can do now’. (Austen 1816/2005, pp. 407–408) There is, I think, a lot going on in the above passage. Two things though that I will focus on are, first, the manner of Mr Knightley’s appeal to and

Moral Thought and Moral Judgement  13 judgement on Emma, and second, that it is he in particular who makes this appeal and judgement. It is hard not to see how those two things are not crucial to what is conveyed here, to the truth that is conveyed as Mr Knightley puts it. But, at the same time, from the perspective of a standard account of moral judgement those things would appear not to be the crucial things at all. Consider Mr Knightley’s remark, ‘It was badly done, indeed!’ That seems a distillation of his remonstration of Emma, but what is it to understand, what is involved in understanding, what that means? What is missing, Mr Knightley suggests, in Emma’s treatment of her friend Miss Bates on this occasion is compassion given the vast difference in their situations. What is missing, in other words, is a want of feeling towards Miss Bates that it is to be hoped would moderate her sense of that woman being slightly ridiculous. Of course, he also says at the outset that Emma is in the wrong, but in merely saying that, the propositional content of the claim as we might say, hardly captures the harm done. The thought, then, is that compassion or sympathy for Miss Bates through which Emma may register the vast difference in their situations is internal to understanding what is morally at issue. Mr Knightley is straightforwardly appealing to Emma’s capacity, and he does take her to have this capacity, for this kind of responsiveness to others; the thought is that in eliciting such a response from Emma she will through that very responsiveness come to understand how ‘badly done’ was her exchange with Miss Bates. But at the same time, Mr Knightley’s remonstration of Emma is shot through with concern for her, for Emma. Mr Knightley is not simply making a moral judgement of Emma but is expressing his concern that her behaviour is not worthy of her, and is even a kind of harm to her. It is, as he says, ‘not pleasant’ to Emma. Mr Knightley’s remonstration hits its mark with Emma; she is so mortified by the truth of it that tears stream down her face ‘unchecked’ throughout her ride home. But Emma comes to recognise what was missing, or what was wrong in her actions towards Miss Bates, in part through Mr Knightley’s compassionate regard for Miss Bates, and in part also through Mr Knightley’s concern for her (Emma), a quality of concern that expresses his thinking that such behaviour is beneath her. Feeling, as it is involved here, is no mere added extra to moral thought and judgement; rather, it is internal to that understanding that is necessary for judging rightly on such occasions. As Mr Knightley says of Miss Bates, ‘She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more.’ Of course, Emma knows all that, but what she does not understand for a moment is the moral significance of it in her relations with Miss Bates. What it is to recognise that, I contend, is to see Miss Bates as the appropriate object of the sort of compassionate regard that is appropriate to Emma’s nature and capacity for understanding and which should have been forthcoming on this occasion and, further,

14  Moral Thought and Moral Judgement on account of which she would have thought and acted differently. But, as I say, Mr Knightley helps Emma to recognise this not by judging her but by appealing to her, appealing to a kind of capacity for understanding of which he holds her capable. Mr Knightley’s appeal then has a double nature; it is an appeal on behalf of Miss Bates, but it is also an appeal on behalf of Emma, on behalf of the young woman he so clearly respects as someone better than her behaviour suggests her to be at Box Hill. To consider, briefly, the second feature of the exchange that I indicated above, that Mr Knightley’s appeal to Emma is as a particular other and, I would now suggest, that the nature of this address is personal. It is in part in virtue of Mr Knightley’s relationship with and deep regard (really it is love) for Emma that his words can carry the import that they do for her. Not just anyone is in a position to say to Emma what Mr Knightley says. As Mr Knightley suggests, his warrant for saying all this is that of a close friend, someone whose knowledge of and relationship with Emma enables him to convey a very particular, personal and difficult truth to Emma in a manner that she might accept without, say, offence, resentment or (further) protest. Of course, we might judge Emma’s behaviour towards Miss Bates as poor or tawdry independent of any such relationship. But that is not really to make the same judgement as Mr Knightley, which is shown in how differently Emma would or rather could take such a judgement by, say, a stranger or mere acquaintance. What would be missing would be any sense that Emma is better than this (something that only someone like Mr Knightley is in a position to know and to say) as well as the kind of personal concern for Emma expressed in his judgement and through which Emma comes to see how such behaviour shames and even harms her. It is one thing to judge someone, as one might say, in the abstract, and quite another to be able to address this to them. Serious moral judgement of another, I contend, is not just being able to produce a judgement about them: it involves also the possibility that I might seriously say in the sense of mean it to the person so judged.1 To pass judgement on someone in this sense is to address oneself to them, which is not just to judge an action but to judge a situated whole person, which includes also the way in which you are situated towards them. Of course, I am not denying that in some cases we might judge a total stranger, especially where the suggested wrongdoing is patently obvious and perhaps also extreme. Nevertheless, even in this case, and in the most general sense, I think that the conditions for our judgement to carry meaning include the possibility that one accepts that the person judged might answer the judgement upon them, even if that is just to express remorse or perhaps offer some excuse or mitigating circumstances. Otherwise, they are reduced to a kind of emblem or exemplar of vice, standing

Moral Thought and Moral Judgement  15 perhaps merely as a cautionary example to others.2 But to return to Emma, to the extent that we do understand what has happened with Emma at Box Hill – and so might concur with Mr Knightley – it is only because of what Mr Knightley has said to her, his personal address to Emma, is essential to understanding the difficult truth that we, like Emma, are now able to see. As I say, at this point I can only touch on these ideas, but I will have more to say on the personal nature of moral judgement that connects to and expands on these remarks in later chapters. What is crucial for both of the above points, however, and for the very possibility of such a remonstration, is the notion of trust. In discussing the way in which seeking moral advice is different from seeking advice where what is at issue is a matter of empirical fact, Raimond Gaita makes the following point: To have something to say [on matters of value] is to be ‘present’ in what we say and to those to whom we are speaking, and that means that what we say must, at the crux, be taken on trust. It must be taken on trust, not because, contingently, there are no means of checking it, but because what is said is not extractable from the manner of its disclosure. In matters of value we often learn by being moved, and our being moved is not merely a dramatic occasion of our introduction to a proposition which can be assessed according to critical categories whose grammar excluded our being moved because it is extraneous to the cognitive content. None of which means that we must surrender critical judgement. Trust is not surrender. To trust is both to judge something worthy of our trust and ourselves to be worthily trusting. (Gaita 2004, pp. 268–269) The facts of the case described above are clear, but what it is to understand, to learn as Gaita puts it, on such an occasion is in part also to be moved in certain ways and on trust. But to expand on the point about trust, what one must trust on such occasions is, as Stephen Mulhall has said in a discussion very much related to my concerns here, is the testimony of another. Mulhall has been discussing what is at issue in our recognising the moral standing of and our fellowship with other human beings, including severely mentally disabled human beings. The target of Mulhall’s critique is Moral Individualism.3 Moral Individualists claim that the moral standing of any individual (and by this he does not mean just human beings) depends on their possession of relevant morally significant properties that warrant that standing. Against this, Mulhall defends certain anti-moral individualist philosophers (including Raimond Gaita, Cora Diamond and Alice Crary) by attending to the structure of their arguments, a structure that Moral

16  Moral Thought and Moral Judgement Individualists, he argues, fail to appreciate. But the substance of his argument applies, I think, also to the discussion above. Mulhall notes that examples presented by way of argument by anti-Individualists share a triangular structure: in every case, the philosophical critic’s relation to the person or persons whose moral standing is at issue is mediated by a third person. … In each instance, a person’s moral status is disclosed, not directly, but by another person’s individuating responsiveness to them, which the philosopher regards as morally authoritative; the text through which that responsiveness is evoked is thus a declaration on the part of the philosopher that he or she does so regard that other person – it is, in short, an act of testifying or bearing witness to that authority. (Mulhall 2021, pp. 190–191) And, as Mulhall goes on to say, given this structure, we can see why this group of philosophical critics tend to evoke literary or fictional examples as readily as real ones … for literary texts live or die on the authority that its authors are able to claim in relation to their readers. (Mulhall 2021, p. 192) This then leads us to what we, Austen’s readers, might understand from her novels. Here again such moral understanding as we glean from a book like Emma is founded on certain of our responses to the novel and which are tied again to the manner in which Austen treats her characters and their various flaws – and Austen’s characters are flawed, including her heroine Emma. Austen’s authority, then, as a writer who attempts to bear witness to what human life – flawed, imperfect – is like is tied to the quality of her moral vision and to her capacity to find the right words to express this. The way in which Austen treats of her characters, much like Mr Knightley’s appeal to Emma, invites (and, since she is such a very good writer, very often succeeds in eliciting) a certain kind of responsiveness from us. So, while Austen does not shy away from the various pretensions, self-deceptions, jealousies and so on of her characters these too are shot through with a compassionate and forbearing gaze. As Virginia Woolf has nicely put it, in Austen ‘[n]o touch of pettiness, no hint of spite, rouse us from our contemplation. Delight strangely mingles with our amusement. Beauty illumines these fools’ (Woolf 1957, p. 177). Part of this affect is of course, and as Woolf suggests, explained by Austen’s satirical eye so essential to the manner in which we come to know her characters in all her novels. As Ryle says, Austen’s moral viewpoint is not of the saved and the damned, or the guilty and the innocent, but of ordinary flawed humanity.

Moral Thought and Moral Judgement  17 There are a few cads of course; in Emma there is Mr Frank Churchill, in Pride and Prejudice Mr Wickham and in Persuasion Mr Eliot. But it is noteworthy that Austen is prepared to marry off even these characters, perhaps not resulting in the most perfect of marriages or in the best of situations, but, we suspect, not completely disastrous for all that either. One cannot even say that they get what they deserve, for often, with Frank Churchill for example, they get more than they deserve.4 Again there is a wide gulf between moral judgement in the narrow sense and moral thought and understanding in the wider sense I am considering. The following passage from Emma may be representative of Austen’s feeling for her characters generally. Before her epiphany about her true feelings for Mr Knightley, Emma had always maintained that Mr Knightley should not marry, her reason being that her little nephew Henry, the son of Mr John Knightley, would be put out of his inheritance of the family estate of Donwell Abbey. We assume that, as Mr Knightley is the older brother, he has inherited the property, while his brother John took up a career in the Law. But should the older brother remain unmarried and without an heir, Henry would then inherit Donwell Abbey. At the end of the novel, however, we read this: It is remarkable, that Emma, in many, very many, points of view in which she was now beginning to consider Donwell Abbey, was never struck with any sense of injury to her nephew Henry, whose rights as heir expectant had formerly been so tenaciously regarded. Think she must of the possible difference to the poor little boy; and yet she only gave herself a saucy conscious smile about it, and found amusement in detecting the real cause of that violent dislike of Mr Knightley’s marrying Jane Fairfax, or any body else, which at the time she had wholly imputed to the amiable solicitude of the sister and the aunt. (Austen 1816/2005, p. 490) While this is not exactly to the credit of Emma, the thing could easily have come off with another less compassionate bearing (and, yes, in the hands of a less satirical writer and stylist), as cold and judgemental or maybe merely narky or sarcastic. Which is to say, there are many ways it – the assessment of Emma – could have been ‘badly done, indeed!’ Emma, we recognise, is self-deceived and (connected with this) is overly sure of herself in relation to her understanding of others. There is no doubting that she has caused Harriet Smith needless grief when meddling in her romantic life. But that we see Emma as something more, see something more in her, than an immature and foolish meddler is internally connected, I am suggesting, to the fact that Austen cares about her, a concern that involves but is not restricted to Mr Knightley’s attention to Emma. Austen’s (and in that

18  Moral Thought and Moral Judgement Mr Knightley’s) compassionate interest in Emma makes her someone, and partly this is to say that it makes her more than a moral exemplar, a type (the meddling and immature type) of girl of a certain class. To be someone in this sense is to be of interest to others in something other than a merely intellectual sense; more precisely it is to be recognised as being the appropriate object of interest and concern by others. We recognise this in part through accepting Mr Knightley’s interest and concerns for Emma as appropriate despite her flaws, and in part also through our accepting our own interest in Emma as likewise appropriate. Paying attention to another person in the sense that I am interested in here is not like attending to or focussing one’s mind on a very difficult equation in physics or mathematics. Such attention to others makes different demands on us than just getting the facts clear in our head. The sense of attention I am concerned with is essentially that sense that Iris Murdoch discusses in her famous example of the Mother M and her daughter-in-law D.5 This example concerns how an effort to see another justly is itself a moral achievement, independently of any outward action. In this example, M, who while perfectly polite and correct to D, initially thinks that her son has married beneath him, finding D ‘lacking in dignity and refinement. … pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile’. But M is a thoughtful person and is aware, amongst other things, that she may be jealous of D. So, M looks again at D and while her actions towards D do not change in any way, her vision of D alters finding her now ‘not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful’ (Murdoch 1970, pp. 17–18). As Murdoch describes it, this is ‘the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’ (Murdoch 1970, p. 34). The notion that justice might necessarily be connected with love in the broad sense that Murdoch seems to mean I will consider in the illustration below. To introduce that illustration, consider the following kind of case. In various situations we may invite someone to pay this kind of attention to some other person and their situation – as we might say, for example, ‘be kind!’ – but merely get back from them, by way of affirming they have understood the situation, a mere record of the facts. In such cases I would suggest one might reasonably have the sense that something is being missed and has not been understood. To turn to my illustration, elsewhere (Taylor 2014) I have examined Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot, and in particular the central character of the novel called simply ‘the prince’. The prince is a person whom I find lacking in just the kind of capacity of attention that concerns me here. In the novel, the prince and a distant relative, a young woman called Aglaya, are in love. At one point, the prince informs Aglaya that the teenage boy Ippolit has tried to kill himself. Ippolit has read a written

Moral Thought and Moral Judgement  19 ‘confession’ to the prince and a group of his friends and associates before trying unsuccessfully to shoot himself, a confession that he wants delivered to Aglaya with whom he is infatuated. As the prince relates it, Ippolit ‘probably wanted us all to surround him and tell him that we love and respect him very much, and wanted us all to implore him to remain alive’ (Dostoyevsky 1868/2004, p. 497). When Aglaya says that she understands what Ippolit had in mind, that when she was younger she had thought of poisoning herself, writing a letter about it, and imagining her parents weeping over her coffin, the prince smiles, and then laughs. To which Aglaya replies: ‘I really don’t feel like joking with you … I will see Ippolit; please let him know. But as for you, I think you behave very badly, because it’s very ill-mannered to examine and judge a man’s soul in the way that you judge Ippolit. You have no tenderness: only truth, and so you’re not fair’. (Dostoyevsky 1868/2004, pp. 497–498) The prince sees the truth of the situation clearly enough, but still Aglaya says he is unfair – this could (and also has in other editions) been translated as unjust – to Ippolit. And, indeed, he is. Attention to this situation requires more than truth in the narrow intellectual sense indicated; it requires, as Aglaya says, tenderness. Aglaya says she understands, and she wants the prince to understand how it is with Ippolit. Aglaya’s words about Ippolit here to the prince are an attempt to engage the prince’s capacity for tenderness, but we might as well say sympathy or compassion, for this poor and foolish young boy. Her attempt fails; he has not understood poor Ippolit at all, not in the way that Aglaya has. To put the point another way, the prince has no interest in Ippolit by which I mean the poor boy and his foolish actions do not engage or move the prince at all. That the prince should have failed to be moved – to tenderness, sympathy or something of the like – is, I am suggesting, what it is to fail to understand Ippolit and so to be unfair or unjust to him. Of course, often a particular character in a novel (as with people we meet in life) will fail to engage us in the manner I have been suggesting. There can be any number of reasons for this. It may be that a writer has failed to imbue a character with the requisite qualities that might engender in us the relevant interest. It appears from Dostoyevsky’s notebooks when thinking of The Idiot that he came to see the prince as a failure in just this kind of way.6 But it may also be that a given writer or some character of theirs does not speak, as we might say, to us. Here again the issue of trust that I noted earlier is relevant. We come to trust some writers or particular characters, to accept what they reveal to us about life, or more specifically

20  Moral Thought and Moral Judgement about a particular human life. So, for example, when we are moved as we might be moved to forbearance and compassion towards Emma, or for that matter towards the youth Ippolit, we accept that our response here is appropriate, that it is a response that involves the recognition of something real and something, that is, that merits this response. At other times this trust is absent. As I noted above, the failure here may rest with the writer, but it may also be that a writer or some character leaves me or some other particular person cold. It is common enough to find ourselves unmoved by a writer who has moved others, including people we greatly respect, and move them in ways that reveal so they may claim, and so we might even accept, significant moral insight. Again, what is at issue in such exchanges has nothing to do with the facts so far as they can be laid down, say, in a series of propositions. As I say, we need not deny, yet often do, that there is something to see or understand in such cases. Rather, we are prepared to content ourselves with the thought that we (ourselves and some other person) see things differently where that does not suppose error of some sort. This again indicates the way in which, as I will argue at length later, moral thought and judgement may be essentially personal. At this point though, I want to suggest this much: insofar as our seeing involves our capacities of emotional response to others, that vision is limited. Where my attention is in the sense indicated above, using Murdoch’s words, ‘directed upon an individual reality’, or a particular person, then it cannot at the same time be directed upon another person, let alone every other, individual reality. At the same time, this kind of attention can be demanding, just because it involves the exercise of these emotional capacities. It is, I think, less so in attending to literary characters as distinct from real human beings because, unlike real human beings, characters cannot appeal to us for this kind of attention. Nevertheless, this sort of engagement, just because it involves us not merely as intellectual but also as embodied beings – beings that do not merely in some narrow sense think but also desire, suffer, love and feel in so many other ways – cannot help at times but confront us with our own human vulnerabilities. This all requires more explaining and I hope to begin to do so in the next chapter, but the general thought that our capacity to care about and for particular others is limited is surely obvious. Notes 1 What I have in mind here bears relation to Avner Baz’s recent interpretation of Stanley Cavell’s idea of occupying a ‘moral position’ and his distinction between the moralist and the moraliser. I will discuss this idea at greater length in the next chapter. 2 I have explored this idea elsewhere in a discussion of how Hester Prynne in the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is treated by the townsfolk of the early Boston colony. As Hawthorne writes, ‘If she [Hester] entered a church, trusting

Moral Thought and Moral Judgement  21 to share the Sabbath smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of the discourse’ (quoted in Taylor 2012). 3 I will have more to say on Moral Individualism in Chapter 3. 4 Frank Churchill, the son of family friends of the Woodhouses, arrives in Highbury, the village to which Hartfield belongs, and proceeds to flirt with Emma. Unbeknownst to all, he has secretly married Miss Bates’ niece Jane Fairfax, who is poor but accomplished and beautiful. Frank’s flirtation with Emma, hurtful to Jane, is a calculated subterfuge by him to keep the people of Highbury in the dark about his relationship with Jane Fairfax. It is clear that he is not worthy of Jane, though there is hope she will improve him. 5 In turn, Murdoch gets the idea of attention from Simone Weil. 6 So, for example, in his notebooks Dostoyevsky writes: We recognise that nothing different could have happened to the Idiot. Let us bring to an end the story of a person who has perhaps not been worthy of so much of the reader’s attention – we agree as to that. (Dostoyevsky 1967, p. 244)

2 Moral Particularity

In Chapter 1, in discussing Mr Knightley’s remonstration of Emma regarding her behaviour towards Miss Bates at Box Hill, I suggested that it is essential for understanding the moral import of this exchange that this is a judgement made by one very particular person to another and that the nature of Mr Knightley’s address is essentially personal. In this chapter I want to expand on this idea and thus indicate the challenge it poses to contemporary moral theorising. There are two aspects to this challenge as I understand it. First, in the case of Mr Knightley’s remonstration of Emma I suggested that his words carry the moral import that they do in virtue of his personal relationship with and deep regard (really it is love) for Emma. Mr Knightley’s remonstration indicates to Emma that her behaviour at Box Hill is beneath her but his ability to say this depends on his understanding of the particular young woman that in truth she is, which in this context is to indicate her particular moral identity. This indicates one aspect of moral judgement as personal. But, second, once we attend to the way in which such moral address is essentially personal, that it must be addressed to a particular other, to their particular moral identity as I just indicated, one may come to see that different agents may properly reach different decisions about what is morally required of them in the same situation simply because their particular moral identities may differ in important respects. That is to say, and contrary to moral theorists of various stripes, such moral judgements are not universalizable. In connection with both these points, I will consider Stanley Cavell’s discussion of them in Part Three of his The Claim of Reason. Crucial to the argument he develops is the notion of a person’s holding a particular moral position and the connected idea that in doing so we are not in the position of just anybody faced with the same decision where there is one unique choice that is the right choice. One way in which Cavell makes his point is with the analogy between games and morality. To quote Cavell: In games, what the other person is doing, the goal he aims for, his way, is clear; what it is you tell him to do is defined; what alternatives he can DOI: 10.4324/9781003415664-3

Moral Particularity  23 take are fixed; what it would mean to say, the grounds upon which you say, that one course is better than another are part of the game; whether he has done it is settled. In morality none of this is so. Our way is neither clear nor simple; we are often lost. What you are said to do can have the most various descriptions; under some you will know that you are doing it, under others you will not, under some your act will seem unjust to you, under others not. What alternatives we can and must take are not fixed, but chosen; and thereby fix us. What is better than what else is not given, but must be created in what we care about. Whether we have done what we have undertaken is a matter of how far we can see our responsibilities, and see them through. … What we are responsible for doing, is, ineluctably, what in fact happens. But that will be described in as many ways as our actions themselves. And such total responsibility is bearable only because of the significance of elaboratives [excuses, defenses and justifications] … The absence of elaboratives in games is the complement of the fact that in games our actions are defined and our commitments fixed. Mistakes here are not personal, and failures are merely ‘errors’ to be scored. (Cavell 1979, pp. 324–325) Deciding what one morally ought or must do then, as Cavell goes on to say, is deciding ‘which values we are to honor and create, and which responsibilities we must accept, and which we have, in our conduct, and by our position, incurred’ (Cavell 1979, p. 325). Given all this, the crucial point in our moral judgement of others, in our confronting them, as Cavell puts it, … is not your liking him or her but your being willing … to take his or her position into account, and bear the consequences. If the moralist is the human being who best grasps the human position … then our first task in subjecting ourselves to judgment is to tell the moralist from the moralizer. When Auden heard ‘the preacher’s loose, immodest tone’, he heard the tone of one speaking in the name of a position one does not occupy, confronting others in positions of which one will not imagine the acknowledgement. (Cavell 1979, p. 326) Elsewhere I have explored at length the distinction as I see it between the moralist and the moraliser; the distinction between genuine moral thought and mere moralism which I have called a kind of vice. The moraliser’s judgements I there claim are a distortion of, and parasitic upon, serious moral judgement (Taylor 2012). In the present chapter I will need to touch on these matters again, in part in order to contrast my argument with a

24  Moral Particularity recent explication of this distinction by Avner Baz (Baz 2021) that draws directly on Cavell’s discussion of these matters as summarised above. According to Baz, moral theorising becomes moralised when philosophers rely on the ordinary meanings of certain philosophically significant words, even as their philosophical project … pushes them to attempt to use those words apart from any of the conditions under which they ordinarily do their work for us. (Baz 2021, p. 550) Baz’s Cavellian argument then is that in the case of words and phrases such as ‘ought’ … as used in morally confronting or advising another person, those conditions importantly include acknowledgement of that person’s moral position as well as one’s own; and that means that when moral philosophers attempt to use such words (or to have the protagonists of their examples use them) apart from those conditions, they are reflecting … the moralizer’s use of them. In both cases, the words are lacking in sense, and depend for their apparent sense – and for whatever psychological force they may still be found to have – on the moralist’s use of them. (Baz 2021, p. 550) Baz is not saying here that the moraliser’s use of moral words is literally senseless. As Baz says, for example, it is clear enough that the moralizer’s words are meant to manipulate his audience’s feelings, attitudes, and conduct … and that they sometimes succeed in doing that. But so too a punch to someone’s stomach could be used to make that person’s appetite for an apple go away, without manifesting an understanding of their request, and without making any sense. (Baz 2021, p. 559) An apparent difference between Baz’s and my account of moralism in Taylor (2006) is, as Baz puts it, that while I take moralizing to be problematic at the level of ‘pragmatics’, but (in principle) fine at the level of ‘semantics’, [Baz’s] proposal, following Cavell, is that the ‘semantics’ of moral modals … is not separable from their ‘pragmatics’, and that the moralizer’s ‘pragmatic’ or moral failure is at once a ‘semantic’ failure – a failure at making sense with his words. (Baz 2021, p. 559, fn. 12)

Moral Particularity  25 I am sympathetic to the claim that sometimes the moraliser’s pragmatic moral failure is also a semantic one. Further, I agree with Baz’s diagnosis that the way in which moral philosophers use of the same morally significant words resembles the moraliser’s use of them. But in this chapter, I will be concerned with a different kind of case, one where a person has actually internalised the moraliser’s judgement of them so that the semantic sense that those words carry is part and parcel of the damage they do to the person being judged. In this kind of case the force of the moraliser’s words is not merely, as Baz puts it, psychological. That is to say, in developing my account of the way in which moral judgement is personal, I will examine an illustration that, all too tragically, brings this point out. I now turn to Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea (Rattigan 1953/1999). The action of this play occurs over a single day in the sitting room of a dingy London flat in a boarding house. The play begins on a Monday morning when, after smelling gas, residents of another flat, married couple Philip and Ann Welch, and Mrs Elton, the caretaker-housekeeper, enter the flat. Lying on the floor of the flat next to the gas heater is Hester, who has tried to commit suicide by gassing herself after taking some aspirin tablets. She has left a note addressed to ‘Freddie’ whom we suppose is her husband. Hester has failed to kill herself, since she has forgotten to put money in the gas meter and it has automatically switched off. Mr Miller, another upstairs resident, not a doctor he insists but clearly medically trained, is called on to assist Hester, who quickly regains consciousness. Attempted suicide, Ann informs us, is a crime and it is decided for that reason not to call the police. No one knows how to get hold of Freddie, however, and Philip questions Mrs Elton about who else they might contact, to which Mrs Elton lets slip ‘There is her husband, of course –’ (Rattigan 1953/1999, p. 11). So it becomes clear that this is not Hester Page, the wife of Freddie Page, ex-RAF and test pilot, but Hester Collyer, the wife of Sir William Collyer, a judge. As there is no one else to call, Collyer is contacted and says he will be there directly. What has brought Hester to this state, briefly, is this. She has met and fallen in love with Freddie, a good-looking but basically good-fornothing young man, on a summer holiday and left her husband, following Freddie first to Canada, where he worked as a test pilot, and then back to London, where he is now unemployed. Freddie, we come to see, is everything to Hester. She loves him with her whole being, but she also knows that Freddie has never really loved her, even cannot love her, in that way in return. Freddie has in fact forgotten her birthday of yesterday and is away playing golf for the weekend with his friends, which is the immediate cause of Hester’s suicide attempt.

26  Moral Particularity When her husband arrives, Hester explains the state of mind that led her here as follows: HESTER: Oh dear, oh dear, I don’t know. A great tidal wave of illogical emotions. COLLYER: Can you give a name to those emotions? HESTER: Yes, I suppose so. Anger, hatred and shame – in about equal parts I think. COLLYER: Anger – at Page? HESTER: Yes. COLLYER: And hatred –? HESTER: Of myself, of course. (Pause.) Shame at being alive. (Rattigan 1953/1999, pp. 25–26) Hester even admits to Collyer that she has always known that Freddie does not love her as she loves him, to which he replies: COLLYER: But how, in the name of reason, could you have gone on loving a man who, by your own confession, can give you nothing in return? HESTER: Oh, but he can give me something in return, and even does, from time to time. COLLYER: What? HESTER: Himself. COLLYER: stares at her. There is a pause. (Rattigan 1953/1999, p. 28) Collyer, a judge, is a reasonable man, but his conception of reason does not extend to understanding Hester’s love for Freddie. When he returns to the flat later in the day, Collyer suggests to Hester that she should admit that it was, after all, just lust. COLLYER: In sober truth, Hester, isn’t it [lust]? HESTER:  (angrily). Oh, God, Bill, do you really think I can tell you the sober truth about what I feel for Freddie? I’ve got quite a clear mind – too clear, I’ve just been told – and if it were only my mind that were involved … But in sober truth, Bill – in sober truth neither you nor I nor anyone else can explain what I feel for Freddie. It’s all far too big and confusing to be tied up in such a neat little parcel and labelled lust. Lust isn’t the whole of life – and Freddie is, you see, to me. The whole of life – and of death, too, it seems. Put a label on that, if you can …. (Rattigan 1953/1999, p. 54)

Moral Particularity  27 As I will argue in the second half of this chapter, Hester is not simply irrational; her love for Freddie shows us something about the possibilities of human value, though in order to see that one needs to consider the place particular values might occupy in particular lives. But for now, I want to turn to her state of mind leading to her suicide attempt, her anger, hatred and shame, but particularly the shame, which is of course a moral emotion. Hester in this respect bears some comparison with another adulteress of the same name – and this can hardly be a coincidence I think – Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, who is condemned by the townsfolk in the Puritan Colony of Boston to wear a scarlet letter ‘A’ on her breast for all her days.1 Here too, as I have discussed at length (Taylor 2006, 2012), are the accents of moralising but whereas Hester Prynne has the sting of the moraliser’s words thrust upon her, Hester Collyer, the daughter of a clergyman, has really internalised them; she judges herself as the moraliser would judge her. Yet another, more hopeful, difference lies in the way in which Hester Collyer is able to cast off this judgement – as I will now explain. But in order to do so, I need to relate two further developments in the play throughout the day. The first is that Freddie, arriving home early from his golf trip, just after Collyer has left, discovers – through an unhappy accident – Hester’s suicide note. Freddie, being incapable of dealing with the emotions of other people and being constitutionally incapable of taking responsibility for his own emotions and behaviour, can think only that if Hester had succeeded, he would be given the blame; as he says, ‘I’d have been looked on as a ruddy murderer’ (Rattigan 1953/1999, p. 40). Freddie is so lacking in this respect that he decides over the course of the day to leave Hester and return to his life as a test pilot, taking an offer he has received that day for a job in South America. So, in the evening, a little drunk and in the face of her desperate pleadings, he informs Hester of his decision to leave that very night, saying he will arrange for his belongings to be forwarded later (as it transpires, he sends Philip, who he has met while out drinking, to fetch him an overnight bag with his wash things later in the evening). The second is that during the course of the day, sensing with respect to Mr Miller what she calls ‘fellow-feeling’ (Rattigan 1953/1999, p. 69), Hester remarks to Mrs Elton ‘He is a doctor, of course, isn’t he?’ (Rattigan 1953/1999, p. 69). To which Mrs Elton replies that he once was; that he had been in bad trouble once and was struck off the medical register and spent a period in jail. While what happened is never plainly stated – the play, remember, was written in the 1950s – it becomes clear that the reason for Mr Miller’s fall from grace is that he is homosexual. As Mrs Elton confides to Hester, ‘Poor Mr Miller! I’m sorry for him. So ashamed of people knowing –.’ (Rattigan 1953/1999, p. 69). It is, importantly, then, as a kind of fellow moral outcast from society that Mr Miller confronts Hester that

28  Moral Particularity night when she once again tries to take her life, this time having remembered to put money in the meter. Seeing the lights on in Hester’s flat, Mr Miller has noticed a rug placed against the front door of the flat and knocks. After admitting him, Hester informs Miller that she was just going to bed taking the two sleeping pills he had given her earlier. Hester then asks if they will be strong enough and if Miller might not give her ‘two or three [more] in case they don’t work’, to which Miller replies ‘no’ (Rattigan 1953/1999, p. 84) while holding out his hand for Hester to return the pills she already has. Hester asks hysterically the reason why Miller is ‘spying’ on her: MILLER: I’m not trying to decide for you whether you live or die. That choice is yours and you have quite enough courage to make it yourself– HESTER: (with a despairing cry). Courage! MILLER: Oh yes. It takes courage to condemn yourself to death. Most suicides die to escape. You’re dying because you feel unworthy to live. Isn’t that true? (Rattigan 1953/1999, p. 84) As he departs, Hester wishes Miller good night as a friend, to which he replies that he hopes he ‘may be given a proof’ of that in the morning. The conversation continues: HESTER: Are you asking me to make my choice in order to help you? MILLER:  (smiling). Surely I have a right to feel sad if I lose a newfound friend – especially one whom I so much like and respect. HESTER: (bitterly). Respect? MILLER: Yes, respect. HESTER: Please, don’t be too kind to me. He approaches her quickly and takes her shoulders. MILLER: Listen to me. To see yourself as the world sees you may be very brave, but it can also be very foolish. Why should you accept the world’s view of you as a weak-willed neurotic – better dead than alive? What right have they to judge? To judge you they must have the capacity to feel as you feel. And who has? One in a thousand. You alone know how you have felt. And you alone know how unequal the battle has always been that your will has had to fight. HESTER: ‘I tried to be good and failed.’ Isn’t that the excuse that all criminals make?

Moral Particularity  29 MILLER: When they make it justly, it’s a just excuse. HESTER: Does that let them escape the sentence? MILLER: Yes, if the judge is fair – and not blind with hatred for the criminal – as you are for yourself. (Rattigan 1953/1999, pp. 86–87) Hester has internalised society’s judgement (as she sees it) upon her; she has accepted that judgement, its meaning as a moral judgement, and that is what has led her to try to end her life. The challenge she faces, and that Miller tries to help her with, is to recognise the injustice, the unfairness, of it. It is one thing to characterise in schematic terms the distinction between the moralist and the moraliser. But in order to see what that might come to one needs to consider what can and cannot be said in particular cases, such as the one that I have related above. It seems to me the above exchange gives substance to that distinction and what it is in Cavell’s words ‘to take [another’s] position into account, and bear the consequences’. That appeal is, as the above exchange makes plain, personal – Miller speaks to her, as he says, as a friend – further, it depends both on morally speaking for oneself and on confronting others in terms of a position one does occupy or acknowledge. Miller is confronting Hester from a position he does occupy; he is himself a social outcast but has learned to accept who he is without shame, despite society’s judgement upon him. So, in this case, unlike the case of Hester Prynne, Miller is in this able to speak to Hester of a position that she might occupy and take responsibility for, and one that he in his turn can acknowledge. Like Miller, she need not accept what she takes to be society’s judgement upon her. But the exchange between Hester and Miller brings out that the challenge here is not merely to counter the psychological force of some moralisers’ view of Hester, but to counter also its cognitive content. The case, then, is distinct in my estimation from the kind of case with which Baz is concerned. Miller is addressing himself to precisely the moralised and moralising conception of Hester that she herself has internalised, and for his reply to be a genuine communication it must be addressed to (the sense of) how she has come, with hatred and shame, to understand herself. Of course, Miller is saying to Hester that the world has no right to judge her, and that certainly sounds as if he takes it that those who judge her, quoting Cavell, are ‘speaking in the name of a position he does not occupy, confronting others in positions of which one will not imagine the acknowledgement’. But Miller is not merely saying that others don’t have the right to judge but also, it seems to me, that their judgement is not right. That is to say, Miller is trying to counter not merely the psychological force of the moraliser’s words but also their cognitive content; the problem here is in part that Hester has come to believe the moraliser’s words and Miller’s exchange with Hester involves also

30  Moral Particularity countering those (false, misguided) beliefs. The cognitive dimension of this exchange seems crucial, so Miller says Hester is blind with hatred, hatred for herself. As it turns out, Miller’s words have their effect and Hester finds at least enough of a sense of herself and her position as worthy of moral respect that she is able to contemplate a life without Freddie. Directly after the dialogue quoted above, Hester asks of Miller, ‘If you could find me one extenuating circumstance – one single reason why I should respect myself – even a little’ (ibid., 87), when the door abruptly opens and Freddie appears. Freddie has, after all, decided to collect his wash things himself, though he is too late as Philip has already taken them. In this final meeting there is no pleading from Hester for Freddie to stay, not even as Freddie, weak as he is, hesitates to leave on the threshold of the flat. Hester has found her circumstance, and herself. In the end Hester does not take her own life. It may seem tempting to say then that she has come to her senses, has come to see reason. One might then go on to argue in this vein that there is nothing essentially personal in Miller’s confrontation with Hester. Rather, Miller speaks from a more enlightened but also universal morality, not from what Cavell calls a particular moral position. On such a view, that Hester’s society may condemn her merely shows that this is a particularly moralistic society. It is not that no one who does not or cannot occupy or acknowledge her position can be in a position to judge. On the contrary, just anyone who really understands her particular circumstances and so does not succumb to moralism might judge her – and forgive, excuse or whatever is appropriate according to universal moral precepts. I will argue that to think so would be to make a mistake about the nature of moral thought and the nature of the values that it might reveal. Which brings me to the second way in which I want to argue that moral judgement may be essentially personal. Here I want to consider what particular values might come to in a particular life and what actions they might reasonably require of an agent. The point is not simply that different agents may have different interests, cares and commitments: it is, more radically, that the cares and commitments of particular agents and what they may do in their name may itself be internal to their understanding of the content of those values or what, as I say, they may amount to in a particular life. In such a case, an agent A may recognise that the content of certain values as they are revealed in the life of another agent, B, has reasonably required B to act as they have. But at the same time A, imagining themselves in the same situation, may reasonably conclude they would see no such requirement to act in the same way simply because of their, A’s, different understanding of those same values. All this sounds rather abstract, so it is a help here to turn to another example. Perhaps no value can be more challenging to universalizing reason than the love that one person may feel for another.2 Hester, as seems clear from

Moral Particularity  31 what she says, or rather from what she cannot say, struggles to put into words what Freddie means to her. As I acknowledge above, one might then simply say that Hester is being irrational; that that explains her failure here and indeed her suicide attempt. That this is not so can be illustrated by the fact that in a case like this it is possible for a person to learn something positive about the nature/content of a value such as this, and what it might amount to, in virtue of what another does, as we might say in this case, out of love. To explain what I mean here I will examine another literary work in which one might be tempted to think that what an agent does out of love is simply irrational. Let’s consider James Joyce’s short story The Dead.3 In this story, Gabriel Conroy, a college teacher in Dublin, describes the night of the annual Christmas dance at the house of his elderly aunts, the Misses Morkan. At the end of the evening, as he and his wife Gretta are just about to leave, and looking up the staircase from the hall, Gabriel notices his wife straining to listen to something: The song seemed to be in the old Irish tonality … The voice, made plaintive by distance and by the singer’s hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of the air with words expressing grief: O, the rain falls on my heavy locks And the dew wets my skin, My babe lies cold… (Joyce 1914/1996, p. 210) When the song finishes and Gretta comes downstairs, ‘there was colour in her cheeks and … her eyes were shining’, and she asks the singer, a Mr D’Arcy, its name, which is The Lass of Aughrim. Back at their hotel and thinking of Gretta’s passionate response to this song, Gabriel is moved with passionate love for her, but her mind is elsewhere. As she tells him, she is thinking of the song, The Lass of Aughrim, and a boy who used to sing it: – Someone you were in love with? he asked ironically. – It was a young boy I used to know, she answered, named Michael

Furey. … He was very delicate. Gabriel was silent. He did not wish her to think that he was interested in this delicate boy. – I can see him so plainly she said after a moment. Such eyes as he had: big dark eyes! And such an expression in them – an expression! – O then, you are in love with him? said Gabriel. – I used to go out walking with him, she said, when I was in Galway. (Joyce 1914/1996, p. 219)

32  Moral Particularity But, as Gretta tells Gabriel, Michael is dead: – He is dead, she said at length. He died when he was only seventeen. Isn't it a terrible thing to die so young as that? – What was he? asked Gabriel, still ironically. – He was in the gasworks, she said. Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. … Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead. He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation but his voice when he spoke was humble and indifferent. – I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta, he said. – I was great with him at that time, she said. Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly: – And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it? – I think he died for me, she answered. A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world. … – It was in the winter, she said, about the beginning of the winter when I was going to leave my grandmother's and come up here to the convent. And he was ill at the time in his lodgings in Galway and wouldn't be let out and his people in Oughterard were written to. He was in decline, they said, or something like that. I never knew rightly. … – And then when it came to the time for me to leave Galway and come up to the convent he was much worse and I wouldn't be let see him so I wrote him a letter saying I was going up to Dublin and would be back in the summer and hoping he would be better then.

Moral Particularity  33 She paused for a moment to get her voice under control, and then went on: – Then the night before I left I was in my grandmother's house in Nuns' Island, packing up, and I heard gravel thrown up against the window. The window was so wet I couldn't see so I ran downstairs as I was and slipped out the back into the garden and there was the poor fellow at the end of the garden, shivering. – And did you not tell him to go back? asked Gabriel. – I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain. But he said he did not want to live. … – And did he go home? asked Gabriel. – Yes, he went home. And when I was only a week in the convent he died and he was buried in Oughterard where his people came from. O, the day I heard that, that he was dead! (Joyce 1914/1996, pp. 219–221) As I say, it is perhaps tempting to see Michael as an irrational youth, but that is not how Gabriel sees him, as is clear from his response to this revelation: Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew such a feeling must be love. (Joyce 1914/1996, p. 223) In short, Gabriel recognises he does not know what it is to love or be loved like this. Yet he recognises in Michael’s response that this is indeed love. To put the point otherwise, he comes to see that love can be like that; that though seriously ill one might stand shivering in the rain because of it as Michael did. To add ‘foolishly stand in the rain’ I suggest would be to fail to appreciate what Gabriel comes to understand here, which is what love might demand of one. To say that what love is, all that it is, is just there for anyone to recognise (and so perhaps to say that Michael’s response is clearly unreasonable) is to fail to attend to the way in which, as Gabriel makes plain, one might only recognise the kind of value that love might be through what others make of it in their lives. Gabriel loves his wife, but he is shamed by the comparison with Michael’s love. Michael is not for him a mere foolish boy from the gasworks, and the failure of his irony attests to that. Michael, and the meaning of his life, cannot be dismissed in this way. I have focussed above on the example of love, but the point I want to make is more general; that we come to understand important values in part through what others make of them in their lives. That more general point

34  Moral Particularity comes out in another passage in The Dead. After Gabriel arrives at the party he finds himself partnered in a dance with a Miss Ivors, also a teacher, whom he has known from their days together at university. Miss Ivors takes issue with Gabriel for his contribution of literary reviews to The Daily Express, a paper opposed to the Irish national struggle: – Why should I be ashamed of myself?, asked Gabriel, blinking his eyes and trying to smile. – Well, I’m ashamed of you, said Miss Ivors frankly. To say you’d write for a rag like that. I didn’t think you were a West Briton. A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriel’s face. It was true that he wrote for a literary column every Wednesday in The Daily Express, for which he was paid fifteen shillings. But that did not make him a West Briton surely. The books he received for review were almost more welcome than the paltry cheque. He loved to feel the covers and turn over the pages of newly printed books. … He did not know how to meet her charge. He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years’ standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. (Joyce 1914/1996, p. 188) Miss Ivors goes on to invite Gabriel for an excursion to the Aran Isles off the West Coast of Ireland that summer. Gabriel declines the invitation saying that he and Gretta usually go to the Continent during the summer – to which Miss Ivors replies, – And why do you go to France and Belgium, said Miss Ivors, instead of visiting your own land? – Well, said Gabriel, it’s partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change. – And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with – Irish? asked Miss Ivors. – Well, said Gabriel, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language. … – And haven’t you your own land to visit, continued Miss Ivors, that you know nothing of, your own people, and your own country? – O, to tell you the truth, retorted Gabriel suddenly, I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!

Moral Particularity  35 – Why? asked Miss Ivors.

… They had to go visiting together and, as he had not answered her, Miss Ivors said warmly: – Of course, you’ve no answer.

(Joyce 1914/1996, pp. 189–190)

The exchange between Miss Ivors and Gabriel is an exchange between a person deeply committed to the cause of nationalism in her country and someone whose commitments are more broadly to European culture, and especially to literature. Hence, we are told, Gabriel wanted to say that ‘literature was above politics’. My point now is that whether or not a person sees things as Gabriel does will depend on the commitments that determine their individual lives; Gabriel and Miss Ivors clearly do not share the same level of commitment to literature, on the one hand, and national politics, on the other. Here, as in the case of love I would suggest, the commitments that inform a particular life determines their particular understanding of various values and how they think and act in response to such values. Indeed, it seems to me that Joyce himself intends us to draw a certain parallel between the two scenes I have discussed. To explain, one thing that strikes us about Gabriel throughout the story is his sense of difference from those around him. What stands out about Gabriel’s character is, as Richard Ellman puts it, ‘his sense of the importance of civilized thinking, of continental tastes, of all those tepid but nice distinctions on which he has prided himself’ (Ellmann 1958, p. 519). The people around Gabriel remind him of a kind of life, and an aspect of his country, that he has rejected. Miss Ivors’ invitation to the Aran Isles is an offer to go to the west of Ireland, a land that Gabriel views, to quote Ellmann, as ‘primitive untutored impulsive’ (Ellmann 1958, p. 519). Gabriel does not want to get to know the people there. The west is Michael’s country; it is wild and passionate. But Gabriel is reticent and careful, and he feels more at home in the east – where, as Ellmann notes, people wear galoshes (Ellmann 1958, p. 518). In both scenes – dancing with Miss Ivors and in his hotel room with Gretta – it is this same sense of difference that conditions his understanding of the values involved in his interpretation of these events. So, in the present case we might say that Gabriel does not understand the political values associated with Irish nationalism as Miss Ivors does. Just as we might say, conversely, that Miss Ivors does not understand the value of literature quite as Gabriel does. In the case of the difference between Gabriel and Miss Ivors – for anyone who is remotely familiar with the history of Ireland – we can see how one’s particular position here might lead to different moral judgements about

36  Moral Particularity how to act. These really are then different moral positions. In such contexts, and following Cavell, the idea that there is something that we might call the ‘moral point of view’ that all reasonable people converge on is an illusion. Granted there is no such point of view, in defending one’s moral decision and actions what can and can’t be reasonably said in the context of an ethical discussion with another cannot be stated in advance. What can be said, I think, as Cavell says, is that we need to be prepared to listen to and take seriously another person’s moral position and the cares and commitments that that entails. Gabriel, I am suggesting, at two different points on that Christmas Eve is challenged to do just that. To think in such a way is, of course, to suggest a very different conception of practical reason than is defended by moral theorists of various stripes. As Peter Winch has said, also drawing on Cavell: One way in which a man may exhibit reason in the context of moral disputes is through understanding the moral positions of others opposed to his own, seeing the difficulties in them to be sure, but equally allowing them to highlight difficulties in his own position. There is absolutely no ground a priori for expecting that it will be possible to arrive at some position free of difficulties which everyone will be able to accept. Choice, will and responsibility come into the matter because in taking up a position one ipso facto assumes responsibility for the difficulties in which that may involve one…. (Winch 1987, p. 178) In different ways, in the case of both Michael and Miss Ivors, Gabriel is aware of those difficulties – on both sides. The life Gabriel has chosen – with its distinctive cares and commitments – is not without its difficulties, or, as we might also say, its costs. Gabriel is in a way shown up by Michael’s love for Gretta, which is not just foolish but is, in its own way, a lucid and powerful witness to what love might be. Similarly, there are costs for Gabriel in choosing Europe, all those ‘continental tastes’, over the struggle for Irish Independence as Miss Ivors has done. One might say, and even fairly, that in both cases Gabriel’s horizons are larger than either Michael’s or Miss Ivors’. But that is not to say that the smaller worlds that Michael or Miss Ivors inhabit do not have their own distinctive values, values Gabriel, with his eye on wider European culture, does not really recognise in his case as providing the reasons for action, including moral action that so inform the lives of Michael and Miss Ivors. That there is not one position here that we are supposed to endorse becomes clear I think when we consider that Joyce, writing this story in exile in Trieste and as a citizen of Europe, is himself bearing witness to a world and its values that he has left behind.4

Moral Particularity  37 Notes 1 I am not the only one to make this connection; see, for example, Smith-Di Biasio 2015 on the 2011 film version of the play by Terence Davies. More generally, the theme of moral judgement, or moralising judgement, runs through this play as obviously as it does through The Scarlet Letter. 2 On this point, see in particular Bernard Williams. Williams quotes D. A. J. Richards’ principle of mutual love according to which ‘people should not show affection or love to others on the basis of physical characteristics alone, but rather on the basis of traits of personality and character related to acting morally’ – which would rule out loving Freddie we suppose. Williams then replies: ‘This righteous absurdity is no doubt to be traced to a feeling that love, even love based on “arbitrary physical characteristics,” is something which has enough power and even authority to conflict badly with morality unless it can be brought within it from the beginning’ (Williams 1981, p. 16). 3 I have discussed this example in a related context in Taylor 2005. 4 A related issue, that may be thought of as particularly relevant for the quote from Winch, concerns the moral importance of integrity. So, taking up and standing for a particular moral position may be thought of as a requirement of personal integrity. The issue of integrity and its relation to the non-universalizability of moral judgements is a large one that I cannot discuss in detail here. Clearly, as I have just noted, there is an important overlapping of these issues. But I don’t think that all first-person moral judgements that have concerned me will present as matters of integrity. Michael Furey’s decision to risk his life by standing in the rain in the garden of his sweetheart is a case in point.

3 Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory

I have argued that moral thought can be flawed in ways moral theorising fails to capture, and specifically that the manner in which one morally judges people and their situations is internal to our moral understanding of such people and their situations. This failure, I am suggesting, is a genuine failure of moral thought, one that stymies serious moral understanding in moral judgement and tends to produce a caricature of it. What I have suggested is required of us is not merely moral judgement narrowly construed; for example, thinking of the discussion in Chapter 1, in judging simply that Emma Woodhouse was in the wrong in her treatment of Miss Bates at Box Hill. Beyond that, what is required of us are certain responses to those judged that accompany such narrow judgements, responses that are internal to a more complete moral understanding of people and the situations they face, an understanding that beyond judging their actions does justice to them. I have suggested that such responses include, for example, sympathy. This claim goes to the heart of my critique of moral theory. But there is an obvious objection to it; that while such responses may accompany our understanding, these responses add nothing to such understanding; that such responsiveness cannot itself be a form of, thus internal to our, moral recognition of another person and their situation. The question I now need to address is how such moral responsiveness can be at the same time a kind of recognition of the moral dimensions of such situations and what they may require of us beyond moral judgement, as I put it above, narrowly construed. In answering this question, I draw specifically on the latter Wittgenstein. As already noted, Wittgenstein does not talk about morality at any significant length; indeed in his earlier work, the Tractatus, he specifically says this cannot be meaningfully done (even while suggesting that the point of the book is an ethical one). Nevertheless, in his later work he does talk about theory and what he says on that score applies, in ways I will explain, also to moral theory or theorising. A recurring theme in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy concerns how the natural language through which we talk using certain important concepts, DOI: 10.4324/9781003415664-4

Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory  39 what Wittgenstein calls our ‘language-games’ with the relevant concepts, suggests to us a certain picture within which the thing that our concept stands for or designates is given. However, when we attend to that grammar, which determines our concept, we find that any such picture may mislead us. For our grammar may suggest, in the different ways we talk with our concept, different and inconsistent pictures. This tendency applies as much in moral theorising as it does in any other kind of theorising, such as in the theory of mind, where we take it that the thing, mental item, property, relation and so on, that a given concept identifies or names is just given to us. In the case of moral theorising the most important concept is that of a human being understood as a being of moral significance, a significance that is to be fleshed out, such theorists suppose, in terms of that being’s possession of certain relevant moral properties. Again, Wittgenstein does not talk about morality or moral theory but he does talk about other concepts that come to bear in important ways on our conception of a human being, including a human being understood as having moral significance. The concept I will now consider is that of pain and, as Wittgenstein would say, our language-game with that concept. Wittgenstein’s discussion of pain occurs, amongst other places, in the section of his Investigations that has become known as the Private Language Argument. Wittgenstein objects to the idea that pain is, as one might think, some private inner thing, something that I alone, the person in pain, is in a position to identify and describe. So, consider the following central passage from the argument: If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word ‘pain’ means – must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly? … Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a ‘beetle’. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. … But suppose the word ‘beetle’ had a use in these people’s language? – If so it would be not used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. … That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and designation’ the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. (Wittgenstein 1958, §293) It is, of course, that kind of remark that has led some to suggest Wittgenstein was at bottom a behaviourist. He was aware of the potential charge, but to think he was really a behaviourist is to miss the point of this and

40  Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory adjacent passages. What Wittgenstein was trying to draw out is how the grammar of mental concepts invites certain pictures; that we can have a pictorial representation of the grammar here. As Wittgenstein says: ‘When we look into ourselves as we do in philosophy, we often get to see just such a picture. A full-blown pictorial representation of our grammar’ (Wittgenstein 1958, §295). That is what the picture of the beetle in the box is; a kind of picture of our grammar with ‘pain’. One can see the attraction of the picture; surely, it may be said, we stand in a special relation to our own pains as compared to others. But the picture all the same misleads as the above quotation makes plain. Wittgenstein’s interlocutor, however, is not happy with this response since it seems to him that Wittgenstein is denying something, denying something of unique importance, which surely pain is; it is not nothing. So, Wittgenstein’s interlocutor reaches for another aspect of our grammar with pain: Yes, but there is something there all the same accompanying my cry of pain. And it is account of that that I utter it. And this something is what is important – and frightful …. (Wittgenstein 1958, §296) Fair enough, but this aspect of our grammar is apt to invite another picture as Wittgenstein goes on to make plain: Of course, if water boils in a pot, steam comes out of the pot and also pictured steam comes out of the pictured pot. But what if one insisted on saying that there must also be something boiling in the picture of the pot. (Wittgenstein 1958, §297) The point to notice here is how very different our grammar with pain is on this picture, the one suggested by the interlocutor’s remarks about crying out because of the pain. Here we are to see the pain as causing someone to cry out; like boiling water causes steam to come out of the pot. But, again, this picture fails to satisfy. For if that was an adequate picture to cover our talk about pain then there would be nothing for someone to insist upon here. On this picture there is the pain and you crying out because of it, or a picture of you wincing or with a voice bubble enclosing, say, the word ‘ouch!’. That is to say, your insistence that something is there adds nothing. The reason that this picture will not satisfy, of course, is that when we are in pain and cry out, we want what we say – what we want to communicate to another, on such occasions, that there is something there accompanying our cries – to make a difference. What we want is that our report should make a difference; as we might say, for example, ‘no, really, it is

Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory  41 terrible!’ In other words, we want another to pay attention to us, to what we have to say and not just to consult this picture. But if the above is an adequate picture of our grammar, then what we have to say, our report of our pain, cannot matter; as I say, it adds nothing. So, one might imagine that people could have a digital display on their foreheads that broadcasts their changing sensations according to brain activity, and on the proposed picture of our grammar with pain (indicated with the boiling pot) what we would pay attention to now would be the changing digital display; the sufferer can talk on if they like but the display tells us all about the thing, the pain; what we won’t now be doing is looking into their eyes or at their face but at the display on their forehead.1 Well, maybe we could do this, but that is not, obviously, to capture what is, for us, the grammar with our talk of pain, what we mean by it. This is not to say that either of the two pictures noted above are of no value. They each capture an aspect of our grammar with pain, but as a ‘full-blown pictorial representation of our grammar’ they fail; these different pictures come into conflict with each other in relation to our talk about pain; the ‘thing’ pictured on the first representation does not correspond to the ‘thing’ pictured on the second representation. Think of it this way. Take an engineer’s drawing of a particular part to be manufactured on a metal lathe. In order for the machine operator to make the three-dimensional part the drawing will need to include (two-dimensional) representations of the part across different axes and this will result in different pictures of the same part. Such pictures are a way of representing a three-dimensional object in all its detail within a series of two-dimensional planes. In the drawing, there will be a symbol or key (see Figure 3.1) which, together with the rules for Orthographic Projection, will give the mode of projection. (Figure 3.1 is a third-angle projection which indicates the view of the object is displayed from the side it is seen from.) The individual two-dimensional pictures of the object together with the mode of projections give you the three-dimensional object. (See Figure 3.2) Here the different pictures do correspond to the same object (the part) because the mode of projection is understood; we understand that it is the

Figure 3.1 Third Angle Projection.

42  Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory

Figure 3.2 (2D pictures (planes) + Mode of projection/representation gives 3D object.)

same object but looked at from this angle, and then that. My point then is that the different pictures of our grammar with pain discussed above are not like that; there is no understood mode of projection according to which this is the same thing (pain) looked at this way and then that. There is no key such as that above according to which we can see that it is the same thing pictured in different ways. Here it won’t do to reply that the two pictures of pain (the beetle in the box and the boiling pot) indicate two different representational systems. For there would still need to be a method of transforming/translating the one into the other; that is, you would still need a kind of key like the one indicated above.2 And that is what we do not have in the case of these pictures; there is no way of, no key for, understanding how these two pictures are different ways of representing the same thing, pain. So here we have: Beetle in box

Boiling pot

Mode of projection?

Thing (Pain)?

In saying this, of course, I am well aware that there are philosophers who merely see the above remark as a sort of challenge, a challenge to find the key; specifically, thinking of physicalists, to explain the mental in terms of the physical without remainder.3 But how does one even begin to set about finding that? As Wittgenstein says: We talk of [mental] processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them – we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better … And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. (Wittgenstein 1958, §308)

Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory  43 We talk of mental processes but do not, as we usually do with the concept of a process, know what it would be to know that process better. For someone who wants to see my remarks above as an invitation to a particular research project, the question, following Wittgenstein, is: What process are you investigating here, and in what medium? Still, some will want to insist that something here is being left out. Someone might then grant that what Wittgenstein has shown is that there is more to our concept of pain than some hidden object on account of which we cry out (more than our pain behaviour), but that somehow pain is at least that inner thing (for example, some neurological process). As Cavell has put it, we are again ‘on the brink of an old misunderstanding, taking the “pain itself” and “mere behavior” as two distinct things’ (Cavell 1979, p. 339). But as he goes on to say, ‘The brink of misunderstanding is here because the brink of emptiness is here: we do not know to whom such words are being said; who could be informed by them. We do not know why we want to say them, what lack they fill’ (Cavell 1979, p. 339). But the idea that there is a lack here is hard to displace. As Wittgenstein goes on to say in response to this: It is – we should like to say – not merely the picture of the behaviour that plays a part in the language-game with the words ‘he is in pain’, but also the picture of the pain. … – It is a misunderstanding to say ‘The picture of pain enters into the language-game with the word “pain”.’ The image of pain is not a picture and this image is not replaceable in the languagegame by anything that we should call a picture. – The image of pain certainly enters into the language-game in a sense; only not as a picture. (Wittgenstein 1958, § 300) As Cavell goes on to say, what one thinks is being ruled out in discussing this passage is something beyond or behind the behaviour, a something left over, of which there could be a picture. … As though a picture of suffering, say Grünewald’s Crucifixion, is a perfect picture of a man suffering on a cross but (necessarily) an imperfect or indirect picture of suffering. (It is a sort of picture of a picture of suffering). (Cavell 1979, p. 339) Of course, Grünewald’s Crucifixion is just the sort of thing we might call an outstanding or extraordinary image of human suffering. But again, is that simply to say that this image of human suffering is nothing more than this picture of pain behaviour? What is the distinction supposed to be here between an image and a picture? As Wittgenstein goes on to say about that distinction, ‘An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it’

44  Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory (Wittgenstein 1958, § 301). So how does it come about that such a picture, say Grünewald’s Crucifixion, corresponds to the image of suffering? It is not because in this picture of Christ on the Cross there is something apart from Christ racked with pain (the pictured behaviour) that we can call the picture of the pain. What then? Consider those that surround him on the cross in various states of lamentation and despair; consider how what is conveyed in this picture about Christ’s suffering depends also on their expressive behaviour, behaviour that is also part of what is pictured here. So, we might say the whole picture is an image or representation of human suffering, that this picture corresponds to the image of pain, but pain is not something within this that is pictured. To begin to explain what I mean just above, the question that is at issue here as I have noted, and as Wittgenstein’s interlocutor puts it, is: ‘Are you not really a behaviourist in disguise?’ (Wittgenstein 1958, §307) since it looks like we can’t talk about the pain, that thing, really at all; that pain behaviour is all there is. Wittgenstein responds in this way: I tell someone I am in pain. His attitude to me will then be that of belief; disbelief, suspicion; and so on. Let us assume he says: ‘It’s not so bad.’ – Doesn’t that prove that he believes in something behind the outward expression of pain? – His attitude is a proof of his attitude. Imagine not merely the words ‘I am in pain’ but also the answer ‘It’s not so bad’ replaced by instinctive noises and gestures. (Wittgenstein 1958, §310) Wittgenstein’s point, I take it here, is to show us another way that language functions, one that enables a distinction between pain and pain behaviour but one in which language does not convey a thought about a thing, a thing we will call the pain. On this account, belief itself is an attitude given in a kind of response to a person; a belief in another’s pain can be an expressive response to their expression of pain. Think again of Grünewald’s Crucifixion, and those around Christ responding with despair. There is a distinction between pain and pain behaviour, but not one that is founded on our having anything we might call a picture of the pain. As Cavell puts the point, in the language-game with the words ‘he is in pain’, what is at issue is my response to an expression or scene of pain; the image of pain is part of the expression of my response to a being in pain. It is I who give expression to that response. Whereas a picture is just something else to which I have, or lack, a response. (Cavell 1979, p. 339) The point with respect to Grünewald’s Crucifixion is that this is such a powerful image, or pictorial representation, of human suffering just

Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory  45 because it is such a powerful expression of it. As Cavell notes, Grunewald’s picture is really his (Grunewald’s) response to the suffering Christ; his picture gives expression to that response. His picture corresponds to the image of suffering because that picture is, to use Cavell’s words, ‘part of the expression of [his, Grunewald’s] response’ to the suffering Christ. Likewise, this picture is such a clear image of Christ in his suffering for us in virtue of our response to it. Of course, thinking of this picture of human suffering, it may be that a particular person may not respond at all. But it is not as if there is anything we could point such a person to in the picture that we might call the pain. For anything we might point to, anything at all, is just something else to which we might or might not respond. It is not on account of anything we might point to (as the pain) that we respond as we do, since identifying any such thing is something else apart from responding to this picture, when it is our response that is the important thing. To further explain the point it is important, as Wittgenstein also says, that our responses to another in such cases can be immediate, unthinking, pre-reflective; we are not conveying or expressing some thought about some inner thing, something behind their expression of pain. As Wittgenstein says in a similar vein in Zettel: It is a help here to remember that it is a primitive reaction to tend, to treat, the part that hurts when someone else is in pain; and not merely when oneself is – and so to pay attention to other people’s pain-behaviour … But what is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here? Presumably that this sort of behaviour is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought. … My relation to the appearances here is part of my concept. (Wittgenstein 1967, §540–541; 543) The point of the last sentence of §310 and the quote above from Zettel is then to remind us of how the meaning of our verbal expression of pain and our belief, disbelief and so on in another’s pain is connected to, and dependent upon, certain instinctive noises and gestures, noises and gestures which can in certain cases replace those verbal expressions. The supposed paradox is that Wittgenstein is claiming that while pain ‘is not a something… it is not a nothing either!’ And Wittgenstein’s resolution to that is as follows: The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts – which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or anything you please. (Wittgenstein 1958, §304)

46  Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory The instinctive reactions that Wittgenstein alludes to, reactions that occur prior to any thoughts we might have about mental content, provide for us a kind of framework for our thought in this area; in Wittgenstein’s words, we can think of this as a ‘prototype of a way of thinking’. This is not to deny that we can have all sorts of thoughts about another’s pain, or our own. Rather, it is to point out the structure that underlies this, that which is not the result of thought or reflection about mental content but which determines the way, the lines along which, our thought here proceeds. In part two of the Investigations, Wittgenstein further outlines the idea as follows: ‘I believe that he is suffering.’ – Do I also believe that he isn’t an automaton? It would go against the grain to use the word in both connexions. (Or is it like this: I believe that he is suffering, but I am certain that he is not an automaton? Nonsense!) Suppose I say of a friend: ‘He isn’t an automaton’. – What information is conveyed by this, and to whom would it be information? To a human being who meets him in ordinary circumstances? What information could it give him? (At the very most that this man always behaves like a human being, and not occasionally like a machine.) ‘I believe he is not an automation’ just like that, so far makes no sense. My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. (Wittgenstein 1958, II, iv) Insofar as we do not make the radical break with the way language works that Wittgenstein suggests, it looks as if it really does make sense to say, ‘I believe he is not an automaton’. The sense there would then be perfectly clear; that he has a soul, a mind, that we can ascribe mental contents to him. But in ordinary circumstances, in all but the most extraordinary circumstances (e.g., sci-fi films with life-like androids), that a person has a mind is never something we might speculate about. It would be misleading also to say that we take it as given that another person has a mind, for that makes it look like some kind of background assumption that others have minds, when in truth that another person has a mind is never subject to any thought at all. As I indicated, thought about other human beings is

Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory  47 structured by those instinctive, immediate and unthinking reactions through which we express and respond to pain and other mental items, those items that give substance to the idea of human beings as minded. The importance of this for the project of this book is that we do not respond to other human beings based on some theory of mind, and, more specifically, that our moral relations to other human beings, and indeed other animals, is likewise not based on some moral theory that articulates their moral standing independently of the kind of primitive responses I have been discussing. I will expand on this point below by addressing the very common view, a kind of general theory, about what justifies or requires certain kind of actions towards, or treatment of, other human beings and certain animals. As I say, the ideas indicated above from Wittgenstein are, I think, of fundamental importance in understanding our moral relations with each other, which is to say morality as a field of philosophical study itself. The reason for this is that while the kind of primitive responses I have noted above are extremely varied, they include responses such as pity, sympathy, shame and so on so that such behaviour is also part of what Wittgenstein calls a prototype of thought; it provides a prototype for moral thought itself. To expand on that thought, one kind of primitive response that grounds, or provides the foundation for, our moral relations with other human beings is what I have elsewhere called a certain kind of moral incapacity (Taylor 1995, 2001). An illustration of such an incapacity I have considered (Taylor 2001) is given in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. In the story, the young boy Huck escapes from his demonic father in the American South up the Mississippi River with a runaway slave called Jim. Jim belongs to Miss Watson, the sister of Widow Douglas, who had earlier taken Huck in. Towards Cairo, where Jim is to escape to the free states, Huck starts to think about what he has done. Huck’s conscience condemns him for helping Jim escape from his rightful owner Miss Watson, whom Huck believes he has wronged. Huck concludes that it is not yet too late to do the right thing and decides to paddle ashore and inform on Jim. But when it comes to it, Huck finds he cannot go through with it, he cannot turn Jim in. Huck’s incapacity to turn Jim in is an example of what I mean by a primitive moral incapacity. Huck’s response to Jim is an immediate one that is not based on his reflections about Jim or slavery or on any reasons for action that this might provide. The important point here is that Huck, brought up into a moral worldview corrupted by the institution of slavery, sees himself as morally weak, and he thinks he morally should turn Jim in. As Jonathan Bennett has noted about this case ‘[t]he crucial point concerns reasons, which all occur on one side of the conflict’ (Bennett 1974, p. 127). Another similar response is given by George Orwell in his

48  Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory essay Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War. Orwell is in Spain to fight the fascists, but on one occasion he finds he can’t do this: We were in a ditch, but behind us were two hundred yards of flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We were still trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was an uproar and a blowing of whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment a man, presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. … I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn't a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at him. (Orwell 1943/1994, p. 220) Orwell sees the poor man holding up his trousers not as a fascist but as a fellow creature, a fellow human being. This response too is an instance of the kind of primitive responses we might have to other human beings and, in particular, to other human beings who are suffering, vulnerable and in distress. Think of how we might find it impossible to walk past someone lying in a ditch after a fall. Think, that is, of how another human being might, in an immediately primitive way, stop us in our tracks. Such responses, responses I am suggesting that indicate an incapacity to act towards another human being in certain ways, ground the very idea that another human being may, as I noted in the introduction quoting Winch, present as a limit to our will. Our moral thought about other human beings is, in important ways, structured around that idea; the idea that another is a limit to my will. But that idea is not itself grounded on more basic moral ideas or reflections. On the contrary, Orwell was there to shoot fascists, but he can’t shoot this man, and Huck believes he should turn Jim in, but he finds he can’t do this. In contrast to the account of moral thought I present above, moral theorising can be seen to be in the grip of the idea of how language, including moral language, works that Wittgenstein is questioning. An example will make the point somewhat clearer, and here I turn to our moral relations also with other animals. A very widely held idea central to moral theorising is that our treatment of any individual, where that is to be understood as not restricted to human beings, should be based on their possession of certain relevant moral properties. So, for example, if our interests or capacity for suffering, or some other property of properties, is what makes us

Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory  49 an object of moral concern, then insofar as a non-human animal can be said to have interests or the capacity to suffer, or whatever, then they too must be thought of as an object of moral concern. To think otherwise, as Singer has famously put the point, is to be guilty of speciesism; a moral failing along the same lines as racism or sexism, in that the moral consideration we apply to our own species is not extended to other individuals despite the fact they also have a valid claim to that consideration. The basic point here has also been called moral individualism and is not restricted to those who defend the theory of utilitarianism but extends to moral theory much more generally. As Jeff McMahan has put the general point, … if we think it is permissible to treat an animal in a certain way because it lacks certain properties, it should also be permissible, if other things are equal, to treat a human being in the same way if that human being also lacks those properties. (McMahan 2005, pp. 354–355) But what looks on first blush to be an enlightened extension of the sphere of individuals owed moral consideration, on further reflection now expels others from that sphere. I am referring, of course, to those human beings whose severe level of mental disability deprives them of the very properties that one identifies as admitting them to the moral universe as we might put it, or at least lowers their status within that community.4 So, if your severely disabled child possesses the relevant properties at the level of my pet dog, then they have the same moral standing. McMahan does, of course, qualify the claim with the remark ‘other things being equal’, and he envisages cases where they may not be. For example, McMahan accepts that special relations, such as being a parent, can generate agent-relative reasons. Thus, you may have an agent-relative reason to care for your severely disabled child and there may then be an agent-neutral reason for me to respect your reasons of care. But that doesn’t get us very far, since it looks like I have the same sort of reason to respect your reasons of care for your child as you have to respect my reasons of care for my dog. There is no agent-neutral reason that severely mentally disabled people get this level of care, but there is an agent-neutral reason to respect your reasons. On such an account I might reasonably say ‘I will show your disabled child the respect owed to ordinary human beings, but as a courtesy to (or out of respect for) you.’ Many people, I expect, will think that something has been missed here, that we have failed, thinking of what I said at the start of this chapter, to do justice to severely mentally disabled people. So, at this point I want to consider how it may be that our primitive responses not just to other human beings but also to other animals grounds our moral relations with them.

50  Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory I have been discussing our primitive responses to other human beings, but turning now to other animals, we respond in similar ways to them as well. While I am working in my study, I see an injured bird outside my window trying to get up on a low wall. I stop my typing. I am gripped for that moment with the bird’s struggle. How I want it to succeed! All my attention is now focussed on this little creature whose cares are for this moment my cares. This event did occur and the above is, as I reflect, an accurate account of my response. But nothing in that response so much as suggests that it was based on any thoughts I had about the cognitive capacities of birds, or what the bird may be feeling – what on earth would that be like? On the contrary, my response to the bird, and indeed my words now, are themselves expressions of a kind of fellowship I share with this creature. But this is not a fellowship based on my recognition that I and the bird share certain properties in common, say the capacity to suffer, which then determines my responses. Things are the other way about; my responses give content to this very sense of fellowship. Cora Diamond had explained the idea of fellowship I mean here in discussing a poem by Walter de la Mare called Titmouse (Diamond 1995).5 In that poem, de la Mare describes the titmouse as ‘This tiny son of life’, and speaks of it going ‘into Time’s enormous Nought’. Our sense of fellowship with this tiny creature, or the bird outside my window, involves the idea that we are each ‘a son of life’ and we will all go into ‘Time’s enormous Nought.’ In other words, we share a certain sort of mortal fate subject to struggle and suffering. My point is though that I arrive at that sense of fellowship by the sorts of primitive responses I have just described; they are not themselves based on any prior thoughts I might have about birds or titmouses. Further, in trying to convey that sense of fellowship to you I am not appealing to you to recognise any properties we have in common with these other creatures (which supposedly provide you with reason to accept this sense of fellowship) but to illicit the same response in you. Insofar as you may respond in similar ways to other creatures and recognise those responses as appropriate to their object you will come to share this sense of fellowship, to understand what it means to be a ‘son of life’ that will go into ‘Time’s enormous Nought.’ I said just now in italics that one might ‘recognise those responses as appropriate to their object’. And that again will invite the thought that this recognition must involve consulting some theory indicating the morally relevant properties I/we and the bird have in common. That is not what I mean; what I mean might be expressed by my saying that I accept those responses as appropriate to their object, and what I accept here is a way of thinking about what it is to share a kind of mortal creaturely existence in common with other animals. At the same time, this kind of understanding of our fellowship with other creatures clearly has a moral dimension. To talk in this way about our common fate with other creatures

Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory  51 is not a mere description of the cycle of life. In fact, one cannot even talk about the cycle of life without at the same time conjuring up the struggles and cares of creatures, both human and animal; it is not that we have (that our thoughts about animals provides) a reason to think this way about the cycle of life; it is more appropriate to say that we can’t really help thinking in this way. It strikes us as so. Why else, since in broad outline we know all the facts, would we be continually captivated by nature programmes about the lives of other animals? Of course, the lives of other animals are interesting in part because they can be so different from ours, yet it remains true that our interest is engaged also by our recognition that their lives and ours are, in the deep ways I have just described, so similar. So, that we might, without any prior thoughts about the cognitive capacities of some animal, feel sympathy for its struggle to survive is not something that itself needs to be justified, rather, and as with our primitive responses to other human beings, such responses provide the structure within which our thoughts about other animals take place. But as I say, it cannot be denied that the lives of other animals also strike us as very different from our own. Even in the case of domestic pets that can become in so many ways part of the family – joining us in play, even offering up sympathy to us when we are unhappy – this is clearly so. So we may be struck by how other, how alien, their lives are. Raimond Gaita has made this point beautifully in writing of his dog Gypsy: In all sorts of ways she is part of the family, participating intelligently and with complex feeling in our lives. But then she does something – chase a cat, for example, her killer instinct aroused – whose nature is so deeply instinctual that she appears wholly animal in a way that invites a capital ‘A’. Human beings kill too, of course, and in ways worse than animals do … But it is the apparent absence of a psychological dimension in Gypsy’s drive to kill that is so disturbing and makes her seem so other to us, so much a different kind of being. (Gaita 2002, pp. 63–64) Moments such as Gaita describes marks in part the different sense of fellowship we share with other animals as distinct from that fellowship we share with other human beings. While it can be shocking and genuinely distressing to witness a predator devour their prey (as I once felt while visiting a wildlife reserve in South Africa), the moral dimension of our fellowship with other animals clearly gives out here; it could only be a kind of philosopher’s quixotic dream to attempt to bring about a world in which the lion lays down with the lamb. To consider a different point though, our own relations with other animals – different kinds of animals – can seem muddled, even in a sense schizophrenic. Consider the care we lavish on

52  Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory pets while we buy the meat of other animals that are slaughtered on an industrial scale and which involve extreme suffering for the animals. It is here, of course, where an appeal to morally relevant properties has its great appeal; is a pig any less sentient or capable of suffering than a dog? The reality of factory farming of animals for meat and the suffering this involves can, and does, strike many as obscene, a profound wrong we perpetuate on our fellow creatures. Nevertheless, to turn, in an attempt to answer it, to some idea of moral properties we share in common with such animals is, I would suggest, to misunderstand ourselves, our relations with other animals and the very sense of horror that we may feel.6 The first thing to notice about factory farming is that no one could really be unaware of the suffering involved for the animals. Yet the sense of horror or profound moral wrong that strikes some people so deeply barely registers with many other people. Not just any other people, often people with whom those so struck with horror live, work and share their lives. How can it be that the facts that are so damning to some, are so easily dismissed or ignored by others? This is not the sort of case where one group just denies the facts; say those Republican voters in the USA who continue to believe, despite all countervailing evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen for Joe Biden. How can it be, rather, that the very same fact that counts so much for some counts for almost nothing to so many others? Again, I think we misunderstand what is going on here if we insist on construing this as an issue about the facts, such as the fact that the suffering of pigs is on a level with our pet dogs and cats. It is not wrong to say that the sense of horror some feel at our treatment of animals bred for meat is not founded on anything we share in common. Only that is not a matter of shared properties. Rather, it is a matter of sharing a certain kind of bodily existence, where the registering of what that amounts to, what that means, is again given in certain bodily reactions and responses in the face of our shared vulnerability to suffering and death. This I will now explain. To expand on the idea of bodily existence as I have just referred to it, consider Diamond’s discussion of the character of Elizabeth Costello in J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, originally his Tanner Lectures. Costello is haunted by the reality of the cruelty involved in our industrialscale slaughter of animals for food. Faced with the reality of our treatment of animals, Diamond says, ‘[w]e see [Costello] as wounded by this knowledge, this horror, and by the knowledge of how unhaunted others are’ (Diamond 2008, p. 46). The central concern of Diamond’s discussion of Costello is then to contrast, on the one hand, the sense in which Costello presents as a woman wounded by her experience of the horror of our treatment of animals and her knowledge that it is not so experienced by others – a woundedness that isolates her from those around her – with, on the

Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory  53 other hand, the way in which the various commentators on these lectures, including notably Peter Singer, treat the lectures, which is to see them as presenting in fictionalised form a range of ideas and arguments relevant for the resolution of ethical issues related to our treatment of animals. But in intellectualising the experience of Costello, as Coetzee portrays it to us, as a philosophical argument about our treatment of animals, as an answer to a philosophical problem, these commentators deflect from the reality, from the truth, that Costello so struggles to encompass in her thought. The term ‘deflection’ Diamond takes from Stanley Cavell and his discussion of a comparable difficulty of reality, that difficulty of reality given in our feeling of separateness from other human beings, a feeling the appreciation of which is then deflected into philosophical scepticism. As Diamond puts Cavell’s point, … we may be filled with a sense of the facts, the ineluctable facts of our capacity to miss the suffering of others and of the possibility of our own suffering being unknown and uncared about; we may be filled with a sense of these facts, of our distance from each other, and our appreciation be deflected, the problem itself be deflected, into one or another of the forms given in philosophical scepticism. (Diamond 2008, p. 68) In order to get clear about what such a deflection amounts to in relation to the question of our treatment of animals, consider Diamond’s treatment of another idea of Cavell’s presented in the same discussion, that of exposure. One aspect of that idea, so Diamond suggests, is given in a remark by Costello in the first of Coetzee’s lectures. To quote Diamond: Elizabeth Costello, in Coetzee’s first lecture, speaks of her knowledge of her own death … ‘For an instant at a time,’ she says, ‘I know what it is like to be a corpse. The knowledge repels me. It fills me with terror; I shy away from it, refuse to entertain it.’ She [Costello] goes on to say that we all have such moments, and that the knowledge we then have is not abstract but embodied. (Diamond 2008, p. 73) As Costello says of such knowledge, and as Diamond quotes: ‘“What I know is what a corpse cannot know: that it is extinct, that it knows nothing and will never know anything anymore. For an instant, before my whole structure of knowledge collapses in panic, I am alive inside that contradiction, dead and alive at the same time”’ (Coetzee 1999, p. 32). The particular awareness that is at issue here, Diamond suggests, is the ‘awareness we each have of being a living body … [which] carries with it

54  Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory exposure to the bodily sense of vulnerability to death, sheer animal vulnerability, the vulnerability we share with [other animals]’ (Diamond 2008, p. 74). The problem with moral individualism and arguments against speciesism is that they turn suffering into a fact that is relevant for moral consideration in the way we treat other animals. But here the facts stand in the way of our facing what we share in common with animals, which is a ‘sheer animal vulnerability’; our appreciation of this reality is deflected too into a philosophical argument, in this case about our treatment of animals. But it is precisely this reality – Costello’s sense of our shared bodily existence and the sense of sheer animal vulnerability that comes with that – that overthrows Costello. It is this reality that she cannot communicate adequately to others who see no such horror. The facts of factory farming are clear, but it is not that that she in her lectures (and Coetzee in his) is trying to convey to their audience. So, the philosophical replies to Coetzee’s lectures – that can only see Coetzee as presenting a sort of conventional argument giving reasons (about how we ought to treat animals) based on facts – miss the point of these lectures, what Coetzee is trying to achieve in them. This, I think, provides us with an answer to the question of how the facts about the treatment of animals in factory farming that so haunts some of us, like it haunts Costello, can matter so little to so many others. That is, it is not the fact at all (about factory farming, that the animals involved are sentient and suffer) that makes the difference here, but being struck, being wounded as Costello is, by the reality of this horror, a reality that is founded in our sheer animal vulnerability and which is otherwise deflected for many into a kind of abstract problem: What are the properties relevant to moral concern? To what extent do animals possess these properties too? And so on. The facts, I would further suggest, are also a kind of protection from our sense of our bodily existence and all that entails. My point here is to draw attention to a need for such a protection from, or denial of, this sense of bodily vulnerability. I am not suggesting such a need will be experienced by everyone. One possibility is that a person may without evasion or deceit accept the reality of this shared animal vulnerability, perhaps as part of the struggle just to survive; surely many people at many times had neither our options, nor the possibility of distancing that factory farming provides. But for many of us, facts and abstraction create a kind of distance between us and other animals, a comfortable (for us) distance in which their lives and suffering are an object for our reflection within that other kind of life that is uniquely ours; a life in which the facts, our knowledge not just of animals but of all of the natural world, allow us to bracket our animal existence within this world at the same time as it promises us mastery of it. (I will have more to say on this idea of mastery in the next chapter.)

Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory  55 I have been proposing a morally significant sense of shared creaturely fellowship with other animals that is given through our natural primitive responses to other animals and not established by any kind of moral theory of such significance. Moral theory as such can achieve little if one does not acknowledge this prior sense of a shared life with, and responsiveness to, other animals and one focuses merely on, say, the facts of factory farming. In that case, that we are or should be motivated at all by such suffering can look puzzling. Consider the problem here for many philosophers for combining moral cognitivism, this idea that there are moral facts, with internalism about practical reasons, the idea that an agent’s knowing the truth of some practical judgement implies some (not-indefeasible) motive for them to act on it. How is it, such philosophers might think, that one’s belief in a matter of fact itself might motivate? Some philosophers, including notably John Stuart Mill, are prepared to accept externalism and then encourage us to acquire the motivations or sensibilities that would then provide the motivation to back up (in Mill’s case utilitarian) moral judgements. Bernard Williams, on the other hand, with Hume, accepts internalism while denying cognitivism and is prepared to concede that if an agent has nothing in what he calls their ‘motivational set’ that provides them with a practical reason to be concerned about other animals (including perhaps other human beings) then that agent has no reason to act accordingly. For many modern theorists of a Kantian and sometimes utilitarian persuasion there is the recourse to reason. For example, Singer has defended what he calls the Impartiality Principle as following from practical reason itself (Singer 2011), though it should be noted that his views on our reasons to be moral have varied over the years. So, it has been claimed that speciesism is ruled out on pain of irrationality, that Moral Individualism is a simple requirement of reason. More subtly, the modern Kantian Christine ­Korsgaard has claimed that there may be certain practical (moral) reasons in the motivational set, or reachable via deliberation from that set, of every human being just because they are rational beings (Korsgaard 1996). But I would suggest, along with thinkers as different as Bernard Williams and John McDowell, that all such appeals to the power of reason amount to plain bluff, or a kind of promissory note on which no one has ever made good.7 But what, in any event, is such a conception of rationality supposed to achieve? If someone does not care about the lives and suffering of other animals, does that mean we cannot communicate with them? Are they labouring under illusions that render conversation and argument with them difficult or even impossible? What, in other words, is it they are supposed to lack on such an account except this conception of reason? One might just as well say they are not irrational per se but merely callous or uncaring. Such people lack something and as reflective beings we should try to

56  Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory figure out what. But simply saying they are irrational is no answer. But, one might say, ‘your suffering is not different to the suffering of many other creatures’, and argue that that is where the irrationality lies, in not treating like cases alike. ‘Well’, one might reply, ‘it is different, it is mine.’ This leads to the question that so puzzled Schopenhauer; that is, ‘[h]ow is it possible for another’s weal and woe [joy and suffering] to move my will immediately, that is to say, in exactly the same way in which it is usually moved by my own weal and woe?’ (Schopenhauer 1840/1995, p. 143). As he goes on to say, for that to be the case, I would have to feel his suffering as his, to be inside his skin, which, of course, is nonsensical. Thinking in such a way, there is an obvious sense in which my reason for being moved by my own suffering is nothing like any reason I might have for being moved by the suffering of another, so that there is nothing irrational here since the cases are clearly not alike. The so-called requirements of practical reason get us nowhere. As I have argued extensively elsewhere (Taylor 2002), but have merely noted here, to understand what ‘the same’ could possibly mean in connection to suffering we need to attend to our shared natural responsiveness, not just to our own suffering but also to the suffering of others. But this is not at all a question of recognising some requirement of practical reason; indeed, practical reasons only make sense against this sort of background of shared responsiveness to others. I asked about whether the fact that someone does not care about the lives and suffering of other animals means we cannot communicate with them. Thought of merely as rational beings, the answer must be: no. But according to the alternative conception I have outlined there is a sense in which at some point the answer will be: yes. It is here that we might gain a sense of what it is that such people lack. Thought of merely as rational beings we can say that human life could have gone on, could in the future go on, very differently. So, consider the following suggestion from Wittgenstein: Imagine that the people of a tribe were brought up from early youth to give no expression of feeling of any kind. They find it childish, something to be got rid of. … ‘Pain’ is not spoken of … If anyone complains, he is ridiculed or punished. … … here life would run on differently. – What interests us would not interest them. … ‘These men would have nothing human about them.’ Why? – We could not possibly make ourselves understood to them … We could not find our feet with them. (Wittgenstein 1967, §383, 388 and 390)

Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory  57 Here communication may break down, but if it does so that is not because these people are irrational, but because the natural ways in which we respond to pain, both our own and that of others, is absent with them.8 Life could go like this, much as life could go on, in my previous example, so that when someone is in pain we look at the digital display on their forehead and not into their eyes or at their face. But that is not what we would call human life; we could not, as Wittgenstein says, ‘find our feet with them’. Again, I am really just pointing to all those natural ways in which we act and respond to, and with, each other that we take for granted, that are never subject to thought and deliberation. We simply don’t ask: why should things be like this? Of course, an obvious reply is that some people, some philosophers, Singer for example, do ask such questions. One might even say that it is a mark of moral thought and moral theory as a reflective enterprise as distinct from a purely conventional one that we are prepared to do so. In reply, there are two points that need to be disentangled. First, of course, moral thought is a reflective enterprise, and I am not suggesting that we simply endorse any and all of the natural pre-reflective ways we act and respond to each other. Further, many of our natural responses to others detract from our understanding or fellowship with them. Nevertheless, and second, we need to attend to the ways in which such reactions and responses in total structure our thought in this area. To briefly summarise the argument of this chapter and its relevance to the project of this book, I have made the following three points. First, in our talk about mental contents, and particularly relevant to this project our talk about pain or suffering, certain pictures suggest themselves to us that appear to capture elements of the grammar of our talk with those concepts. But on closer inspection the different pictures that are here suggested to us cannot be made to cohere with each other. Second, against the idea that there could be, as Wittgenstein puts it, ‘a full-blown pictorial representation of our grammar’, with mental concepts like pain, I have, following him, considered the way in which our talk with, and understanding of the meaning of, such concepts is grounded in our natural expression of, and expressive responses to, this mental/experiential aspect of our lives. Following Wittgenstein, then, I have been suggesting that another is a fellow human being or simply a fellow creature means what it means, including what it morally means, in virtue of those natural ways we express our natures and respond to such expressions in the case of others. And finally, third, I have suggested that to hold that all such expressions and responses require some kind (but what kind?) of rational justification is to risk depriving oneself, as I have outlined, of a sense of such beings as potentially having any moral significance at all. Such expressions and responsiveness amount to the way in which we (can

58  Moral Concepts and the Limits of Moral Theory even) think about, including morally think about, other beings and this cannot simply be reduced to some sort of list of things we think about such beings, the sort of list that may then form the basis of some moral theory of our relation to them. Notes 1 I owe this example to Jim Hopkins, at least as I remember it (I hope I have not got him wrong). It was how he made the point to me when discussing this part of the Investigations during my PhD candidature at King’s College London. 2 At this point it might be argued that I have been too quick to dismiss the picture of the boiling pot as providing an adequate picture of pain. So, according to physicalism, there need not be a translation of the one representational system to the other. On such a view one might say that the boiling pot does provide an adequate picture of pain; pain is the physical process going on in the brain when we are in pain; like the water boiling in the pot. So, as Fodor has suggested, one can be a physicalist yet deny that the special sciences (psychology, for example) reduce to physics and still identify pain with a physical (neurological) process. In such a case there need be no reduction of psychological theory to physical theory. According to one view, what Jerry Fodor calls ‘type physicalism’ ‘every property mentioned in the laws of any science is a physical property’ (Fodor 1974, p. 100). Against this, Fodor defends a weaker thesis, what he calls ‘token physicalism,’ that is, ‘the claim that all the events that the sciences talk about are physical events’ (Fodor 1974, p. 100). Now, since even on this weaker thesis the claim is that any event as talked about in (say) psychology is a physical event, it must be that we can identify (e.g. there must be bridging rules, what I am calling a key, for identifying) the same thing, the same token, across the different explanatory domains, and that is what I am questioning. 3 An example perhaps is philosophers attempting to answer what has been called the ‘Hard Problem of Consciousness’. 4 My suggestion here, as will become clear, is that appeal to any sort of property misses the point about what I and other likeminded thinkers (see Diamond 1995 and Mulhall 2009) have called our fellowship both with other human beings and other animals. I discuss this point at length in Taylor 2019. 5 My views on our relations with other animals owe a great deal to Diamond’s work here and in other places. 6 I am not, of course, saying that there is no point to thought and reflection on the lives of other animals. The kind of muddle in our thinking I have highlighted here is obviously a case in point. 7 This book is in large part an argument against the common ideas that a certain conception of moral impartiality as well as universalizability in morality amount to something like rules of reason. In the particular case of Singer, I will briefly discuss and question his argument for his Impartiality Principle in Chapter 6. 8 I say ‘may break down’ because I do not think, which should be clear from the overall project of this book, that one can say in advance what communication would be or would not be possible with such people. To think that would be to provide the beginnings of an outline of a theory of moral thought.

4 Conceptions of Value

At the end of the last chapter, I suggested that the kinds of expressions of, and responses to, animals and other fellow creatures that I considered determine the way in which we (can even) think about, including morally think about, other beings. And further, that this cannot simply be reduced to some sort of list of things we think about such beings. But what such thoughts indicate is a way of thinking about value that is invisible to moral theorists of various stripes. For such moral theorists, value is something, perhaps some property of some thing, that we can define and then identify and that which provides us with a reason to act so as to promote or preserve it. One can easily see how this account of value fits moral individualism as I discussed it in the last chapter. But that is not the only way we might think about moral value. In this chapter I want to consider another. In a discussion of Michael Sandel’s The Case Against Perfection1 and Guy Kahane’s critical response to it, Cora Diamond has suggested that Kahane fails to understand Sandel’s account of the value of openness to what is unbidden.2 Sandel makes his point in relation to genetic enhancement and specifically in choosing through this what abilities etc. your child will have. Sandel’s point is that such an attempt – what he calls an attempt at a certain kind of mastery over the world in this area – undermines the value of such openness, which involves being open to the child one is given, and in relation to this the idea of a child as a gift. Against this Kahane argues that openness to the unbidden cannot in itself be valuable since, if it were, it should be so in all sorts of other situations when things come to us unbidden, thus ‘it should have a hold in all corners of life’ (Kahane 2011, p. 357). Kahane interprets Sandel as saying that there is value in ‘just letting things happen’ (Kahane 2011, p. 360). But this, according to Diamond, is not what Sandel means; he is not saying that we ‘be open to whatever comes unbidden’; for example, as she puts it, that we be open to chickweed growing in the garden. As Diamond says: Chickweed arguments reflect a conception of value tied directly to the role that values can have within moral theory. Values here are thought DOI: 10.4324/9781003415664-5

60  Conceptions of Value of as what can be realized to a greater or lesser extent through our actions. When it is open to us to act in one way or another way, we will usually have some idea how the different things we might do are likely, each of them, to affect this realization of different values. If we want the concepts we have of values to fit into theorizing about such choices, that will determine how we want to shape our ideas about what it is for something to be of value. (Diamond 2021, p. 16) Diamond’s point then is that the way in which Sandel is speaking of the value of the unbidden in the specific case of our attitude to having a child is not an instance of this idea of ‘what it is for something to be of value’, but a radically different one. But what idea of value is this then? To begin to answer that, let us consider the following opening lines from an untitled poem by e. e. cummings: from spiralling ecstatically this proud nowhere of earth’s most prodigious night blossoms a newborn babe: around him, eyes —gifted with every keener appetite than mere unmiracle can quite appease— humbly in their imagined bodies kneel (over time space doom dream while floats the whole perhapsless mystery of paradise). (Cummings 1977, p. 104) The above lines help to articulate a sense of value not as some distinct thing to be preserved or promoted but something that might be thought of as part of a certain attitude to the world; here that a new-born child is a kind of miracle. To expand, consider Diamond’s own example of a passage in Pablo Casals’ autobiographical reflections in which he writes about beginning every day by playing two preludes and fugues of Bach, and about what this means to him. Doing it is, he says, ‘a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part.’ He says it fills him ‘with awareness of the wonder of life’. (Diamond 2021, pp. 17–18) What is of value here is not some definite thing to be promoted – Casals is not saying that there should be more Bach playing in the world. He is not saying that there is some thing here that there should be more of. Rather, the value here, what is wonderful, or in Cummings’ terms miraculous, is revealed in a certain responsiveness to the world.

Conceptions of Value  61 To draw out the above point, and again as Diamond notes, Sandel also talks of the concept of giftedness in relation to designer children. Initially, he means by this, as Diamond reports, ‘appreciating human powers and achievements as gifts’, but meaning also the ‘giftedness of life’ (Diamond 2021, pp. 25–26), and as she goes on to say, ‘the notion of giftedness goes with a range of verbs, including on the one hand appreciate and on the other acknowledge, recognize and accept’ (Diamond 2021, p. 26). Other concepts I would add here in this connection are humility (‘humbly in their imagined bodies kneel’) and gratitude. Such concepts concern the reception of something as a gift. That something is taken to be a gift then is internally connected with the mode of its reception; that it is accepted, accepted perhaps with humility and/or gratitude. Often when explaining these ideas to my students they find it difficult to see the point I am trying to make. Here is an example I use to help. I ask them to suppose at the end of the semester they were to decide to thank me by buying me a nice bottle of wine (given some of the examples I use, they cannot help knowing I like wine!). So, I go on with them, suppose they go to a quality wine merchant to seek advice and buy a bottle in their price range and present it to me. Then I ask them to consider my making this response: ‘Thank you for this, you are very thoughtful. Do you have the receipt?’ I further suggest they will want to ask me why. Then I ask them to consider the following kind of answer I might make: ‘Because, knowing wines as I do, I believe I can get a better bottle of wine for the same price.’ They then conceded, reasonably enough (since they are not yet philosophers), that such a response to their gift is in a way offensive or rude. Clearly, there is a value here that they can see I have failed to recognise and respect. I am not denying, of course, that the wine itself is something of value. Indeed, that something presented as a gift has value seems a condition of something being a gift. My point is just that that is not the only value at stake. To begin to explain what is at issue here, as I suggested in the last chapter, it is not as if, in relation to value, I always first identify something of value – say a property like pleasure that our moral actions are supposed to realise – and then act so as to promote or preserve it. What is of value in certain contexts – as this example again makes clear – is given in a whole range of my expressive responses to aspects of the world (to nature, to other human beings and other creatures) as well as my expressive responses to similar expressive responses of other people.3 What I am suggesting then is that we come to understand the idea of a gift and in particular the giftedness of life through our mode of acceptance of it, for example with humility, at the same time as we understand humility through a conception of the giftedness of life, in our acceptance of the child that comes to us as opposed to the child we planned.4 Concepts such as these can only be understood in relation to each other and exist in a kind of web of meaning. Of course, that will not

62  Conceptions of Value satisfy moral philosophers of the kind I have been considering, such as Kahane. Such explanations are likely to seem to such philosophers to amount, as Michael Clark said about my discussion of what I have termed primitive moral incapacities, to ‘elucidating the obscurum per obscurus’.5 What I think such philosophers expect is that a relatively complex idea like humility will be explained in terms of more simple ideas that are already and independently understood by those to whom one is offering an explanation. The point I am pursuing though is that such ideas or concepts cannot be understood like that and to attempt to do so is likely to produce crude absurdities, the kind of crude absurdity that Elizabeth Anscombe attributes to Sidgwick who, she says, thinks that ‘humility consists in underestimating your own merits – i.e, in a species of untruthfulness’.6 Thinking of the interconnectedness of such concepts, Sandel’s worry with what he calls a failure to be open to the unbidden is connected with the drive for mastery, which in the specific case he is considering ‘lies in the hubris of the designing parents, in their drive to master the mystery of birth’ (Sandel 2004, p. 57). If someone were to now say that there is no mystery of birth, that there is an explanation for all that occurs here, then that would again be to miss Sandel’s point, which is to highlight a particular way of looking at birth, and looking at it in a way that no ‘mere unmiracle can quite appease’. While that does not promote any value in the world, it, in a different way, suggests an important way of thinking of the value of the world, a way of thinking that may make sense of the value of ways of living and acting that are invisible to moral theorising. I recognise, of course, that moral theorists have in a narrow sense argued moral value, even what is of ultimate moral value, does not depend on bringing about some positive change in the world. Obviously, there is Kant and his claim that the only thing that is good without qualification is the good will. The good will is not good as Kant goes on to say because of what it effects or accomplishes, or because of any change it brings about in the world, since its ability to do so depends upon contingent matters that lie outside of that will. We see the operation of this will, he thinks, insofar as we can understand the formal principle underlying the idea of duty. And finally, given that duty as a formal principle is nothing other than to act out of reverence for the moral law itself, our capacity to act so places us in a sense outside of the contingencies of the natural world so that, roughly speaking, there is in us something of unconditional value and so worthy of a kind of unconditional respect. So, in broad summary, goes Kant’s ethics. But on this point, I suggest two things. First, Kantian moral theorists, while they may remain true to Kant – though perhaps not to his particular metaphysics of value – do want to go on from this to defend a particular account of the duties we owe to other human beings on the basis of respect for the moral law. Thus, for example, Thomas Nagel suggests another

Conceptions of Value  63 person’s interests, to the extent that they can be recognised as valuable from the impartial point of view, provide us with agent-neutral (moral) reasons to act so as to promote those interests. Second, the Kantian idea of an unqualified good is a very thin one – it is in the end just a very specific kind of motive – and can hardly be said to include the sense of value that I have been concerned to outline. To return to the main argument then, and to further explain what moral theorising misses about moral value, I will consider what will seem at first blush an extreme and indeed challenging literary illustration of what I mean. The reason I do so is to draw out in the clearest possible terms what in my view is at issue here. I turn now to the central theme of Yaşar Kemal’s novella The Birds Have Also Gone. The story revolves around three homeless young boys living on the outskirts of Istanbul – Semih, Hayri and Süleyman – who try to revive the ancient tradition (azat buzat) in which small birds are captured specifically so that, for a small sum, a person might release them and thus earn a place in Paradise, a tradition called ‘fly and be free’. The tradition, as Kemal informs us, dates back to ancient Byzantium and is not restricted to the Muslim faith, the children who catch the birds for this purpose traditionally setting up in front of mosques, synagogues, and churches. In modern Istanbul, however, the tradition has lapsed and indeed the plains on which the small birds – goldfinches, blue tits, coal titmice, chaffinches – have for so long paused on their migration are being covered with ugly new suburbs of the growing metropolis. Attempting to help the boys in their endeavour, the narrator enlists the help of Mahmut, a man in his sixties who remembers a time in his childhood when the tradition was still strong and he sold birds for this same purpose. At one point in their meeting, Mahmut ‘launched on the subjects of birds’: Ever since ancient Byzantium, and even further back … In those days, the land stretching beyond the Old Walls of the city up to Florya Plain was all woods and fields and thistle shrubs, with not a single house in sight. The little autumn birds would come not like this, not like now, but in hordes, clouding the sky, like swarms of butterflies … If you happened to be sitting by one of the thistle shrubs and you rose suddenly, you would find yourself engulfed by hundreds of those tiny birds, their wings brushing your face and hands. It was like standing under a shower of birds. There was a blue bird then, it doesn’t come anymore, the species must have died out. So tiny it was … this bird was a rich blue, with large black eyes and a lovely graceful bill, a shimmering blue, flawless, that flooded a man’s face, his very soul, in a torrent of light. The whole world was drowned in this rich blueness. Why, those birds even made the night blue, and the moonlight too … They would perch on your

64  Conceptions of Value shoulders, your head, your arms, so many of them you looked like you had turned into a blue statue. ‘In all the years of my life, I’ve never come across a bird so close to people, so warm, so trusting, more human than a human being.’ (Kemal 1989, pp. 53–54) As Mahmut relates, he did not have the heart to catch this bird, explaining that the ones I caught for “fly and be free” were chaffinches, the coal titmice, the goldfinches … They’re small too, yes, but sturdy, whereas the blue bird is frail, light as a feather, as if like a butterfly it might dissolve into dust at a touch. (Kemal 1989, p. 54) Then Mahmut recites the common prayer that is offered by those that pay to release the birds, as he remembers it: ‘Fly little bird, free as the air, and meet me at the gates of Paradise’ (Kemal 1989, p. 55). The homeless boys’ venture is an almost total failure; very few people can see the point of paying to release a small bird that has been captured for that very purpose. In their venture of selling the birds for ‘fly and be free’, Mahmut and the boys set off first for the squatters’ neighbourhood of Kazliçeçme. It is not a success: ‘You mean I’m to give you two and a half liras for a bird that I’ll throw away at once, is that it?’ a long-faced woman … inquired. ‘Well, yes,’ Süleyman said. ‘And why should I do that, I’d like to know?’ ‘Why? For a good deed! To do a good deed so that…’ ‘That’s a good one!’ a short yellow-haired youth chimed in. ‘So you go catching birds and, doing so, you commit a sin, and we save them and do a good deed, eh?’ (Kemal 1989, p. 95) Barely escaping from an angry crowd, the party try their luck setting up in various places in central Istanbul. Initially, against the odds, a few people do pay for their birds (an old man remembers the tradition). But it is not long before the group is ignored; again, almost no one can see the point. And what is the point? An ethical theorist, and perhaps (or including) the reader as well, will consider the whole practice, as the people of Kazliçeçme did, pointless, even perverse. The birds were free, now they are free again, and a small amount of money has been transferred from one person to another. If one person has done a good deed it is only because another person has

Conceptions of Value  65 earlier committed a sin. What can be the point in that? This tradition, of course, flies in the face of that conception of value according to which value is some thing in the world to be promoted or preserved. On that conception of value, the boys should have preserved the freedom of the birds and not set out on the venture at all. It is, perhaps, difficult to see it in any other way. Even the boys do not quite see the point of the tradition and have been quite naive; when asked what are surely quite predictable questions such as the ones noted above, they don’t really know how to answer. Clearly, they struggle with the meaning of the practice; they catch too many birds, overfilling the cages and distressing the birds, and are forced to return dejected to their campsite. Worse, at the end of the novella, from sheer hunger they eat all of the birds. But the tradition has a point: while it is not a matter of promoting anything, there is a value that is being honoured here. But it is not the sense of value that can be captured in the terms that moral theory or just the sort of practical, pragmatic, thinking that we see with questions given by crowds in Istanbul. What the boys cannot explain and cannot show us, Kemal, I would argue, does succeed in showing us – if we are prepared to hear him. Consider the long paragraph I quoted above in which Mahmut relates his experience of the tradition of ‘fly and be free’. What a purely, as I would put it, transactional account of the tradition misses is the relationship internal to it between human beings and the birds. Mahmut speaks in tones of wonder at these tiny creatures in their millions pausing in their migration on the Florya Plain, and of the connection, as he sees it, between human beings and these birds; ‘more human than a human being’ as Mahmut says. Think also of the prayer recited on the release of the birds, that the birds are to meet us at the gates of Paradise. Here again, thinking back to Titmouse, the de la Mare poem cited by Diamond, what is being expressed is our common fate with these tiny birds. It is difficult, of course, to see this if one just focusses on the facts of the tradition. Consider the following contemporary, ‘deep ecological’ criticism of the novella: This tradition that has been applied for centuries has nothing to do with nature but it is completely anthropocentric activity serving only on behalf of human needs … The tradition has been seemingly practised as an indication of compassion and respect for the sacred but it is essentially a commercial activity corresponding to survival instinct of human beings. … Through ecological lenses … this tradition which is read [sic] human interference in nature ignores the intrinsic value of non-human life. (Akyol 2018, p. 283) Contrary to the above suggestion, that one can see this tradition as nothing other than a commercial activity first, speaks to the waning of any meaningful sense of the sacred, and in this I mean that sense of the sacred according

66  Conceptions of Value to which the natural world can be considered something worthy of awe and reverence at all; and, second, in talking about our ‘interference in nature’ we speak of the loss of our sense of ourselves as part of nature. The value that is expressed in this tradition, I suggest, can really only be understood as part of a wider worldview in which it was imbedded, a worldview in which the life of Istanbul and its citizens is interwoven with the natural world and, in particular, with the life of birds. So, to consider another aspect of that world, bird houses have been part of Turkish culture since the fifteenth century and developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into elaborate bird palaces that were incorporated into the architecture of Ottoman palaces and mosques.7 Or, somewhat more problematic, the old Ottoman tradition in Istanbul (now illegal) of bird cafés where men would bring captured male birds, their cages covered and thus concealed from the female during the mating season, so that they produce a more sorrowful, even sublime, song.8 I am not saying that this tradition should be made legal, or that this or any other traditions of the kind I have mentioned should be promoted. That, obviously, is to appeal to the conception of value that I am trying to contrast with the value that we may find in such traditions. It is not, as I flagged earlier, a value in the world that might reasonably be promoted; rather it is a value connected to a certain way of thinking of the natural world, of the wonder of life and our participation in and celebration of life. It is a world in which people honour the natural world and our place in it by paying, in a small act of charity, for a tiny, captured bird to fly free. But it is a way of thinking about and being in the world that is passing, and Kemal’s novella is a kind of lament for that fact, and in this Kemal succeeds in being elegiac without being simply nostalgic. The traditional relationship with the natural world – of which people’s relationship with birds was so much a part – and with it the worldview of Mahmut and the many generations that preceded him is rapidly disappearing. Discussing with the narrator a place in Istanbul where there might remain any hope of success for ‘fly and be free’, the narrator asks Mahmut, ‘So charity is dead, is it?’ ‘Dead?’ Mahmut said. ‘No, not dead, but in trouble, stranded somewhere or other.’ ‘Is that what you think? Where then?’ A bright smile lit up Mahmut’s face and I thought, perhaps that’s where charity is now, right there in Mahmut’s genial laughter, in the fullness of his heart. Who knows, maybe… ‘The birds, too, have gone away,’ Mahmut said suddenly. We fell silent. The birds are gone now. And with the birds … It’s no use … Even the birds are gone. (Kemal 1989, pp. 56–57)

Conceptions of Value  67 The birds are gone because the plains on which they paused in their migration to eat the seeds of the thistle shrubs are also gone, being covered over with new housing estates; and as the birds are gone, so with their loss a particular world of value and meaning also passes. Here is the unnamed narrator (blending into Mahmut) remembering what will soon be lost: In his youth, a long time ago, Mahmut has sold as many as six hundred birds in a few hours … he had watched them soar into the sky, drowning Eminönü Square and indeed the whole city in a glow of joy and love. The happiness of freeing a bird, of saving a living creature … Mahmut can never forget the childish pleasure, the bliss, the beauty on the faces of those who had just let loose a bird and, their hands empty now, followed it as it winged away until it had quite vanished from sight. He had seen old men, their backs bent with age, clap their hands and even skip with joy like children as the birds flew out of their hands. And shout with laughter too, jubilant, unrestrained. But, today, where is the man in this town who can still laugh like that, with all his heart, at the sight of something that brings beauty, and goodness, and cheer? ‘Stop Mahmut, you’re talking like them [the boys] now …’ Well, all right, there are some people still like that, of course there are, it’s impossible they should all have disappeared. In all this large humanity … …. Maybe at the time the city was founded all this area where the wood is now, and Yeşilköy, Şenlikköy, Bakirköy, Florya Plain, was just one vast stretch of thistles which the millions of birds born on that far-off plain would overrun in a shower of colour and light. … Children, from Oriental Rome onwards, through Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire, would set snares and baits to capture these birds, and ever since that time the birds would be there, waiting to be freed in front of churches, mosques and synagogues. … With the passing of years, the thistle fields diminished gradually. New settlements sprang up and expanded … Ugly concrete apartment blocks began to crowd the lovely dale of Florya … And now only this small tract of land between Menekşe and Basinköy, between the sea and the wood, is left for the birds. Here, there are still some thistle shrubs, and this is where the birds return every year for their beloved thistle seeds. But last year, the owner of the land parcelled it out and sold the plots to new-rich buyers … And next year, in place of this copper-hued thistle field, there will be a mass of concrete, villas, apartment buildings … And maybe the birds, impelled by some ancient, deep-rooted instinct, will come again to the sky over where the lofty plain tree is now … They

68  Conceptions of Value will pause a moment, searching for something, vaguely remembering. They will flutter in little groups over the concrete agglomeration of houses, and finding nowhere to alight will take themselves off like some remote sorrow. (Kemal 1989, pp. 83–85) Kemal’s articulation of what will be lost cannot be captured in paraphrase that appeals only – as with my example of humility – to more simple ideas that can be understood independently of recourse to worldview, the world of value, that Kemal brings to life and whose waning he is lamenting. Alienated from that world, the residents of Istanbul simply can’t see the point of releasing a tiny bird that has been captured for that very purpose. Put just like that, the practice cannot help but appear pointless, even perverse. Indeed, the reader, despite what Kemal attempts to articulate about that world of value, may agree with Özlem Akyol, whom I quoted above. But regardless of what one thinks of the illustration I have given, the general point that ethical theorists of various stripes in their focus on value as something to be promoted risk obscuring that other sense of value that I have, following Diamond, tried to defend. So, I want to conclude this chapter with another example, and a particularly pointed one for those who study and teach in universities, and particularly those in the liberal arts. In this case, too, we are facing the prospect of the general loss of a particular world of value. Several years ago, I had the pleasure of convening a conference in honour of my good friend the moral philosopher Raimond Gaita at Flinders University. At the end of the conference Gaita gave a public talk on the state of universities entitled ‘To Civilise the City?’, a later version of which was published in the Australian literary journal Meanjin. In his abstract to the original talk, Gaita began by claiming that ‘The concept of the university is defunct.’ What he meant by that was in part that at some point, maybe in the space of his own lifetime, it became impossible for those who teach and research within universities to defend the real intrinsic worth of what they were doing; that at some point to talk of the ‘life of the mind’ had come to look self-indulgent. That is to say, that all that could be seen to be meant by ‘intrinsic value’, thinking of J.S. Mill, was some kind of ‘higher pleasure’. But, of course, thought of in that way there is surely no reason for the state to fund such activity. Finding themselves in this situation, Gaita observes, correctly I think, academics have tended to provide extrinsic justifications for their work. In professional disciplines there is, of course, no problem with that, but for the liberal arts, and to a great extent also the pure sciences, things are much more problematic. So, while, say, a philosopher or a literature scholar may talk of the instrumental value of their disciplines to students for developing their clear thinking and communications skills, this will not provide a

Conceptions of Value  69 justification for the great expense of a degree in philosophy or literature. As Gaita observes: A British minister of education said a few years ago that although he had nothing against people who wanted to study classics, he did not see why the state should pay for them to do it. … He thought that none of the instrumental benefits of a classics education could justify its expense, and that the state should not pay academics to enjoy its intrinsic worth. (Gaita 2012, pp. 73–74) The connection of what Gaita says above with the two conceptions of value I have been considering should be obvious. In brief, in terms of value as something to be promoted or preserved, one might ask: what value or values does the study of philosophy or literature promote? Neither their intrinsic value as a higher pleasure, nor their instrumental benefits, could possibly justify their cost to the state. The reason that academics came to find it impossible as I say to defend the intrinsic value of their work is connected, Gaita suggests, to the rise of ‘managerial newspeak’ according to which he says, ‘you describe what students and their teachers achieve in a university as a product, students as customers’ (Gaita 2012, p. 64). One reason, as Gaita goes on, that academics went along with this is that ‘they believed that they could forever keep an ironic distance from the managerial redescriptions of what they and their students did and of the relations between’ (Gaita 2012, p. 66). If Gaita is right in this, the attempt at maintaining an ironic distance has clearly failed. As Gaita says: It is no small matter, the ubiquitous success of managerial newspeak in the characterisation of university life. Students who learn to speak it, confident in no other language with which to express what it can mean to be a student, will not have the words with which to identify the deepest values of their education and thereby to claim its treasures as their inheritance. (Gaita 2012, p. 66) What is required, then, is a conception of the intrinsic worth of what such students are doing that involves, Gaita suggests in the case of philosophy, the ‘continuing, ever-deepening exploration of what it can mean to do philosophy for the love of it, and of the joys and the obligation that love imposes’ (Gaita 2012, p. 67). And, as he goes on, ‘the limited family of concepts to which that of a customer or a provider of goods and services belong will not take us far in the direction of understanding what is at issue here’ (Gaita 2012, p. 67). If all of this is in danger of sounding like highminded and obscurantist rhetoric, then one might reasonably reply with

70  Conceptions of Value Gaita that that itself speaks to a general loss of concepts through which the intrinsic worth of such study may be articulated: The reason we find it difficult to argue persuasively for a more serious conception of the intrinsic value of study is not because philistines dominate our audience. … [Rather, the] concepts we need are beyond our reach in the way that we capture when we say that a form of speaking has gone dead on us. The spread of managerial newspeak was facilitated by the replacement of the idea of academic life as a vocation with the idea of it as a profession. At a certain point the concept of a vocation became as anachronistic as the concept of chastity. When that happened our sense of the value of truth and its place in the characterisation of academic life changed. What one makes of talk of the love of truth, of truth as a need of the soul, of the need to be concerned with truth over vanity, wealth, status and so on, will be different according to whether one’s conception of academic life and its responsibilities is structured by the concept of a vocation or by that of a profession. (Gaita 2012, p. 75. My emphasis) Gaita speaks of the value, indeed love, of truth, and here we can see exactly the kind of blindness philosophers can have – ultimately to their own detriment! – to the conception of value I have been defending. To explain, another example given by Diamond in trying to make proper sense of Sandel’s argument is Jane Heal’s argument ‘against the idea many people have … that truth is something of value’ (Diamond 2021, p. 12).9 Heal’s argument works by first setting out what kinds of thing can be described as true, and then looking at what could be meant, in each case, by taking the pursuit or promotion of truth thus understood to be of value. (Diamond 2021, p. 13) Of course, thinking of the value of truth in that way, it is not the case that the ‘promotion of truth is something it is even remotely reasonable to regard as, in general, good’ (Diamond 2021, p. 13). As Diamond continues, While particular true beliefs will in particular circumstances be worth having, the mere getting hold of more true beliefs – for example, by counting the parked cars on one street after another – cannot as such be taken to be of any value. (Diamond 2021, p. 13) Truth, then, has only extrinsic or instrumental value in certain circumstances: If I want to get to town for a show, a true belief about when the

Conceptions of Value  71 train leaves to get to town will be of value insofar as it advances that purpose. Likewise, if you want to get on in the world, you will need to think clearly and know how to communicate. But this is obviously not what Gaita wants to articulate when he talks of the intrinsic value of academic life as a vocation and of the value of truth. But if the language through which we may talk without irony of the study of the liberal arts as a treasured inheritance ‘has gone dead on us’, then all that is left to ask is: how useful is any of this, and what value in the world does it really promote? I do not want to claim, as I have already conceded, that there are not answers of some sort to that question. Another answer, of course, is that such study promotes ‘civil society’. But it is not at all clear how that might be – recent history surely shows – if we become alienated from such ideas as truth, including, as Bernard Williams says, truthfulness, being of value in itself.10 My claim is just that no account of the instrumental uses of, say, literature or philosophy can really account for their worth in the particular kind of life Gaita and still some others describe, a kind of life, I at least hope, I can still bequeath to the students I teach. Notes 1 This book developed out of an earlier article in 2002, ‘The Case Against Perfection: What’s wrong with designer children, bionic athletes, and genetic engineering,’ Atlantic Monthly, vol. 93, no. 3, pp. 50–62. 2 For further responses to Sandel, see McConnell 2011 and Hauskeller 2011, neither of whom really consider the point Diamond is making on Sandel’s behalf. For further philosophical discussion on the ethics of genetic enhancement see Savulescu and Bostrom 2009. 3 In the case of a gift, it is not just how one receives a gift, it is also the spirit in which a gift is given. There are, of course, all kinds of ways in which this kind of practice can become debased or in the end be nothing more than an empty ritual. So, consider the store ‘gift card.’ Or to consider another example where gift giving is emptied of meaning in this way, a friend of my partner’s has been brought up in a culture where on visiting someone it is expected they bring a gift. As this person relates it, people quickly acquire a lot of ‘stuff, mere clutter,’ things for the most part they neither need nor want. Their response is, pragmatically enough, to recycle the gifts. For an interesting discussion on the idea of a gift in relation to Sandel’s discussion, see Hauskeller 2011. 4 I say ‘planned’ here rather than ‘designed’ to record the fact that a lack of openness to the unbidden does not depend on the possibilities of genetic engineering. Just as parents might want to determine to some extent the particular child they are to have (its sex, height and so on), parents may want to determine the time at which they will have a child. And here, of course, such plans can all too easily go awry. My own parents, really my father, wanted to wait to start a family until they had saved more money. Then too soon I came along. I am happy to report that my parents accepted what had come to them unbidden with just the kind of sentiments that Cummings expresses. That I know this at all is down to my mother finding it amusing that my coming to be messed up my father’s plans.

72  Conceptions of Value 5 Michael Clark (Clark 1999, p. 163) responding to me (Taylor 1995). 6 Anscombe (1958, p. 9). If the reader is inclined to think that this is an unfair historical example, I can only say that some years ago I attended a conference on the virtues in which a presenter proposed precisely this explanation as one of a number of potential explanations of the virtue humility – somehow forgetting that this would turn the virtue into a vice. 7 For a discussion of this practice, see Erman 2014. 8 See The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/mar/24/ photography-istanbul-bird-cafes-cemre-yesil-maria-sturm-for-birds-sake. 9 Diamond is referring to Heal (1987–1988). 10 See Williams’ defence of truth as a cultural value in Williams 2002.

5 Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought

In the last chapter I considered how a certain conception of moral value may be invisible to moral theorists, and that the way moral value features in their theories closes off their possible consideration of the conception of value I considered. Here and elsewhere in the book I have taken it that in thinking about moral value there is the possibility of coming to genuinely understand something that is a real feature of the world. My treatment of realism – as we might call it – in ethics though has not engaged with various contemporary debates about moral realism and moral cognitivism. Such debates commonly focus on the semantic function of moral utterances or on their epistemological status; whether moral judgements, say, indicate beliefs about matters of fact, where the idea of a fact and of truth in ethics is then generally modelled on the sciences.1 But on that way of thinking about moral value, to say as I did in the previous chapter, our recognition of certain values as itself internal to one’s whole attitude to the world just looks like a kind of basic subjectivism; that we are merely, as Hume would say, ‘gilding and staining’ the world in accordance with our own interests in it. I want to hold onto the idea of realism in relation to moral value and ethics. But my interest in realism here is very different to the interest of many contemporary moral cognitivists/non-cognitivists or realists/anti-realists. The difference is a function of what I want to do with that notion as distinct from such theorists; I am interested in what role this notion plays in morality as distinct from science. Here, as will become clear, I am indebted to Iris Murdoch’s discussion of this idea. To begin to explain what I mean, consider the following passage from Murdoch concerning what morality is: … it is especially important to attend to the initial delineation of the field of study. … A narrow or partial selection of phenomena may suggest certain particular techniques which will in turn seem to lend support to that particular selection; and then a circle is formed out of which it may be hard to break. It is therefore advisable to return frequently to DOI: 10.4324/9781003415664-6

74  Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought an initial survey of ‘the moral’ so as to reconsider, in the light of a primary apprehension of what morality is, what our technical devices actually do for us. (Murdoch 1956, p. 33) So, I will be concerned with what we do with the notion of realism in ethics; what purpose does it serve for us? It is a striking feature of Murdoch’s thought, and one that sets her apart from so many other thinkers concerned with realism in ethics, that for her the basic problem is not whether moral values are real; this she assumes to be the case. Rather, it is the almost insurmountable difficulty, given our nature and situation, of facing this reality. As she says in The Sovereignty of Good, these are the most basic facts about our nature and situation: I assume that human beings are naturally selfish and that human life has no external point or [telos] … The psyche is a historically determined individual relentlessly looking after itself. In some ways it resembles a machine; in order to operate it needs sources of energy, and it is predisposed to certain patterns of activity. The area of its vaunted freedom of choice is not usually very great. One of its main pastimes is daydreaming. It is reluctant to face unpleasant realities. Its consciousness is not normally a transparent glass through which it views the world, but a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain. It constantly seeks consolation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature. Even its loving is more often than not an assertion of self. (Murdoch 1970, pp. 78–79) In short, given our nature and the pointlessness of life our tendency is to turn from facing reality to the consolations of fantasy. But while Murdoch talks here of imagination and fictions, she does not think that imagination’s most basic role is negative. On the contrary, she thinks that our moral thought, including imaginative thought, purified of what she calls ‘the fat relentless ego’ (Murdoch 1970, p. 52) plays an essential part in our recognising, in her terminology, the reality of the Good. The role of imagination in helping us to face difficult truths is the subject of this chapter. And here, perhaps going beyond Murdoch, I want to consider the essential role of fantasy in helping us to recognise those truths about ourselves and our lives that we find most difficult to recognise. But first, what is the role of imagination in moral thought for Murdoch? Here is one way Murdoch gives us to think of it. Noting R.M. Hare’s distinction between, on the one hand, the general and specific, and, on the

Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought  75 other, the universal and particular she says: ‘Accepting this distinction, one may say that a moral agent may explore a situation imaginatively and in detail and frame a highly specific maxim to cover it, which may nevertheless be offered as a universal rule’ (Murdoch 1956, p. 46). However, as she goes on to say, there are more radical conceptions of morality according to which morality is not understood as involving a system of universal rules. And here the imagination plays a more radical role in our moral thinking: I have in mind moral attitudes which emphasise the inexhaustible detail of the world, the endlessness of the task of understanding, the importance of not assuming that one has got individuals and situations ‘taped’, the connection of knowledge with love and of spiritual insight with apprehension of the unique. … There are people whose fundamental moral belief is that we all live in the same empirical and rationally comprehensible world and that morality is the adoption of universal and openly defensible rules of conduct. There are other people whose fundamental belief is that we live in a world whose mystery transcends us and that morality is the exploration of that mystery in so far as it concerns each individual. (Murdoch 1956, pp. 46–47) To contrast my own reading of Murdoch with various others, many of those who are sympathetic to Murdoch really don’t go beyond the first kind of use of imagination in moral thought suggested by Murdoch as quoted above, reading her to be a kind of moral particularist. Thus, for example, Julia Driver has argued that Murdoch’s ‘methodological particularism’, as she calls it, emphasises that ‘exhaustive detail is relevant [and] crucially important to arriving at a reliable or true judgement’ (Driver 2012, p. 305) at the same time as an individual ‘cannot articulate all that [they] do know’, and that all this is not ‘codifiable’ (Driver 2012, p. 304). In this, Driver follows Elijah Millgram, who suggests that Murdoch took it that seeing what’s really in front of you will lead to ever greater conceptual idiosyncrasy, because your concepts have to be tailored to the particularities and foibles of the different people you are trying to perceive clearly. (Millgram 2005, p. 512) The attraction of modern particularism lies in its denial that moral judgement can be codified into a system of general rules or principles and in the observation that a given consideration can in one situation be a reason in favour of some act while in another be a reason against so acting.2 But, while one can see how particularists might see a fellow traveller in what

76  Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought Murdoch says above, her view is more radical than they seem to notice. As Mark Hopwood has nicely put the point, while ‘contemporary particularists are primarily concerned with questions about generality, Murdoch is concerned with questions about universality’ (Hopwood 2017, p. 250). Of course, while particularists such as Dancy (2000, 2004) question the generality of moral judgements, they do not question, as Murdoch does, the universalizability of moral judgements; for them, if in a given situation a consideration counts in favour of some act it counts in favour of that act for any individual in that situation. But, as I say, Murdoch’s position is more radical than this. In the same paper I quoted above she is particularly concerned to spell out how different agents have different moral visions. As she says: When we apprehend and assess other people we do not consider only their solutions to specifiable practical problems, we consider something more elusive which may be called their total vision of life, as shown in their mode of speech or silence, their choice of words, their assessments of others, their conception of their own lives, what they think attractive or praise-worthy, what they think funny: in short, the configurations of their thought which show continually in their reactions and conversation. These things, which may be overtly and comprehensively displayed or inwardly elaborated and guessed at, constitute what, making different points in the two metaphors, one may call the texture of a man’s being or the nature of his personal vision. (Murdoch 1956, p. 39) That an agent may have personal moral vision and that as such moral judgement may be essentially personal I have discussed at some length in Chapter 2. In this chapter, however, I want to consider another way in which our moral thought and deliberations may be personal. Thinking of Murdoch’s remarks about the difficulty of facing the real and the idea that different people have different personal moral visions of life I want to suggest in what follows that the struggle to see things, other people, even ourselves, as they, and we, really are, is itself an essentially personal struggle. It is a struggle where the obstacles to seeing clearly depend on the details and the situatedness of our particular lives. So, thinking of Murdoch’s words above, the pain from which the psyche seeks to protect us can be both very deep and very personal, so that the fantasies we invent to protect us and the particular forms of blindness that this leads to are peculiarly our own. In explaining what I mean here I turn again to the field of art, and specifically literature, where, according to Murdoch, the struggle to see and represent the world as it is and not resort to consoling fantasy is the artist’s central task.

Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought  77 I will now consider two very recent novels: first, a novel by Ayşegül Savaş, entitled Walking on the Ceiling (Savaş 2019), and then, second, Alex Miller’s novel A Brief Affair (Miller 2022). Savaş’ novel concerns a young woman called Nunu, short for Nurunisa, who has moved to Paris, ostensibly to study literature (she enrols in a programme to obtain a visa but never attends class), having left her childhood home, Istanbul, following the death of her mother. She knows no one in Paris and rents a studio apartment alone above a café, the Café du Coin. Earlier, she had graduated from university in England and had lived with her then boyfriend Luke in London where she was, she says, ‘putting together my life piece by piece’ (Savaş 2019, p. 3). In Paris, having left Luke, and after nursing her dying mother, Nunu is again trying to put her life together, but she has no connections with anyone in Paris, no one to help her in this task. By chance, after she notices an advertisement in a bookshop window announcing he is to speak, she meets an Anglo-Irish writer M. who has written several books about Istanbul. Nunu has read and admired M.’s books and, after an initial conversation at the bookshop, she and M. become friends. The novel, then, is both Nunu’s attempt to make a record, she calls it an 'inventory’, of their brief friendship and a record of Nunu’s struggle against painful memories in order to tell a truthful story about her mother. Nunu records this difficulty in Chapter 61 of the novel, which consists simply in these two sentences: ‘I’m trying to say that I’ve tried to tell a story about her many times. But none have resembled my mother’ (Savaş 2019, p. 180). Nunu’s inability to portray her mother as she was, to portray her truthfully, is, as I understand the novel, traceable to Nunu’s inability to face truthfully an aspect of herself. Nunu’s struggle to achieve clarity is really the core of the novel and her friendship with M. is central to that struggle in that, in truthfully recording the details of that friendship, she may begin to see something about herself through understanding how he, M., sees her. Nunu has a single photograph of M. which she has taken, and she wonders about the meaning of the surprised expression on his face looking into the camera lens. Years after their friendship has ended, she writes: Today, what I see is neither bewilderment nor annoyance, but expectation. M. is looking at me with anticipation. If only I were to focus, I might be able to see what M. saw when he looked at me. (Savaş 2019, p. 157) The pain at the heart of Nunu’s story could be described as a private shame to do with her parents: with her father mainly shame, with her mother perhaps both anger and shame. Her father, we discover, started out as a poet but produced just two thin volumes before his life fell apart; Nunu knows him as a broken man who mumbles to himself in a chair in his study. Nunu’s mother is trapped and unable to help her husband, and in

78  Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought the end he kills himself when Nunu is still a child by jumping off their apartment balcony. This leads to a shame that they share: When strangers asked about my father, my mother told them he had been a poet. I pretended not to listen so she wouldn’t be embarrassed. ‘And your husband, what did he do?’ ‘He was a poet.’ She said it without flinching. It was the simplest story to tell about my father, and as I grew up I began to yearn for this poet with his vivid imagination. Even if all that remained of him were two slim collections he’d written long before, which I never read. Even if, for as long as I can remember, he had no way of expressing himself, except for those moments of clarity when he came into my room and spelled my name. ‘N, U, R, U, N, I, S, A.’ … ‘I gave you this name,’ he told me. ‘It’s a present.’ Some nights he could not spell correctly and I had to help him with the letters. THE MOMENTARY SILENCE THAT FOLLOWED MY MOTHER’S WORDS, when she told strangers the simple story of my father, was our own secret – our shame.3 (Savaş 2019, pp. 79–80) Nunu’s mother is unable to shield her daughter from this shame. Her mother has herself sunk into a painful solitude where neither mother nor daughter can reach each other. This distance between mother and daughter is painfully illustrated through a childhood game that Nunu plays. It is a game which involves ‘collecting points’ by avoiding her mother, ostensibly because she (Nunu) wants to be alone but really for the sake of her mother’s desire for peace and solitude. It was a game, ‘the silence game’, mercifully, that Nunu mostly wins: The trick was to ease her into our routine, without her having to tell me. Otherwise the game would be over. As far as I can remember, it had happened only once or twice that I lost so suddenly, when my mother asked me directly if I would please leave her alone. (Savaş 2019, p. 44) Nunu’s mother is unable to fulfil any kind of maternal role, and Nunu’s only real connection with women is with her aunts, the sisters of her

Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought  79 maternal grandmother. It hardly stands as contentious that for a child to be so severed from the life and the love of their parents can lead to a pain that is both deep and personal. This, we see, is the case with Nunu, and throughout her life she has attempted to protect herself from it. At university, Nunu shared a room with an English girl called Molly – a girl who, clearly unlike Nunu herself, ‘was thoroughly acquainted with herself; fully and without flinching, and she did not resist any part of this self-knowledge’ (Savaş 2019, p. 103). Nunu tells Molly fanciful stories about her exotic life in Istanbul, and her inventive mother: ‘You’re so inventive,’ she [Molly] said. ‘How’re you so inventive?’ I told Molly that my mother was this way, even though I didn’t say that her originality was of a different kind. In answering Molly’s questions, I created a parallel life that seemed like something from a book or film. I told her that I had never really known my father. He’d died when I was little, I said, and I could barely remember him. I told Molly that my mother had always treated me as an adult and that I had grown up doing things that would have been unusual for other children. (Later, to Luke, I told another story altogether.) ‘How exotic,’ Molly said. (Savaş 2019, p. 104) The stories Nunu tells Molly are ‘like something from a book or a film’, and Nunu here attempts to fabricate, thinking of Murdoch, a particular texture to the events of her life, but, of course, it is all false. The different, but equally false story she tells Luke goes like this: I told Luke that I had not had an easy childhood, aware that this sounded dark and exotic. My father had been a poet but had died at an early age, when I was very young. I still remembered what it was like to live with a creative mind, I said, how it hovered above us. In reality, I had never seen my father write. He’d given it up before I could remember. I’d seen only how he retreated within himself. I also told Luke that my mother hadn’t been able to see my father for who he was. She’d wanted him to be like everyone else, I said. She rejected his creative world, so harshly that it shattered him. That was the language Luke and I spoke. Perhaps I even felt that these words didn’t quite belong to me, and so I could say anything at all. But I was aware of the itch, quietly insistent; I tried to get at it with my words. I told Luke that I’d grown up in the shadow of my mother’s unhappiness. My childhood, I said coolly, had been washed away by her own sad story.

80  Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought But I had come to terms with this, I said, and to support my point I used words like self-worth and compassion. … Luke listened gravely, nodding his head and reaching out to squeeze my shoulder from time to time. Those were exciting moments, those indulgences. I thought I could tell him anything at all. (Savaş 2019, pp. 22–23) Of course, Nunu’s last remark about being able to tell Luke ‘anything at all’ is ambiguous, in meaning that she is able to be completely open about her life and (which is really the case) in meaning that she is able to say anything no matter how false and fanciful about her life to him. There is though, and as Nunu says, below the fantasy, an itch; amidst the pain and the consoling fantasies of her family that she has created in amelioration, Nunu wants to tell the truth about her mother. She struggles, however, to put together the different pieces of her life, her life in Paris after her mother’s death together with her life in Istanbul before. The disconnection comes out in very simple ways. So, after moving into her Paris apartment, Nunu attempts to make it homey. Placing small familiar objects from home around her apartment, she tries to build a narrative of her life, but it all seems to her too insignificant: I had brought photographs, a small vase, and two porcelain statues from Istanbul and I put them around the room for decoration when I arrived. They seemed tiny and pathetic, and after several days, I put them back in my suitcase. (Savaş 2019, p. 7) At one point Nunu tells us that ‘Luke would say that people lived their whole lives telling stories, and by story he meant something like delusion’ (Savaş 2019, p. 22). But Walking on the Ceiling is a novel about the struggle to tell a truthful story; to know and to take ownership, or perhaps better to accept ownership, of your own story is no easy thing to do. As Nunu later says in the single sentence, placed within parentheses, of Chapter 28: (What Luke didn’t say, whenever he pointed out that everyone had a story to tell, was that it is a privilege to have a story, to know your own narrative as surely as you know your name.) (Savaş 2019, p. 88) Nunu does not know her own story, does not know her own narrative, and in its place (though differently) to Molly and to Luke she has produced mere fantasy. As I have already suggested, Nunu’s friendship with M. can

Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought  81 be seen as connected to her attempt at such a narrative, her own narrative, and with it the possibility of coming to see her mother as she really was. Writing, by which I mean the imaginative process that is at the same time an attempt to portray the world as it really is, is at the heart of this friendship. The difficulty, though, for Nunu is that this requires her to face an aspect of herself: During my friendship with M., I began to remember something about myself I had been looking away from. A wordless, soundless knowledge. I realized that I could look at it directly and it would have a surprising shape, neither ugly nor shameful. But this was only a glimpse. I told myself I would allow it to emerge, when the time was right. But that is no different from keeping it at bay. (Savaş 2019, p. 97) As it happens, Nunu’s evasions persist in her friendship with M. M. is writing another novel about Istanbul and Nunu tells him (actually invents) that she is writing a novel also, about Akif amca,4 a man who befriended her mother when she was a child in Aldere outside of Istanbul: I told him that I was tracing the course of Akif amca’s life from Istanbul to Paris and from there back to Aldere, using his poems and the fragments from his journals. … He asked me to tell him more about my novel, if I didn’t mind. … I was grateful to him for including me so swiftly into his community of writers, and all the sensitivities of his profession of which I was mostly unaware. I told M. that my novel was, like his own book, a reconstruction of a vanished world. Even if the statement was new to me, I can’t say that it was a lie. What I would have liked to say was that I could write this novel with M. as my audience. That would have been the truth. Perhaps I told him I was writing a novel about Akif amca out of pride, to make something more of my days, which by then were shaped largely around our conversations. … … The poems [Akif amca’s] were full of nostalgia for Istanbul. I found them amateurish and even didactic … But I didn’t share my observation with M. I pretended that Akif amca had been a great poet, and that now I had the responsibility of bringing his work to light. (Savaş 2019, pp. 75–77)

82  Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought M. is also interested to hear about the details of Nunu’s days in Paris: M. told me that the simplest routines of my day were poetic. And with his observation I tried to add more poetry to my days. (It pains me a little to remember this now, I can’t say why, but I had bought a bowl for the studio. A deep, dark blue bowl that I filled with fruits. A poetic sight, perhaps only so that I could write about it to M.) (Savaş 2019, p. 77) Again, with the dark blue bowl Nunu is attempting to construct a kind of narrative of her life, in this case for M., but it is really a sort of false narrative about the poetry of her everyday life. Nevertheless, in their conversations, both on their walks together but also via email, there is a kind of truthfulness; through their interest in each other, their sincere desire to know each other, they develop a genuine shared understanding: I told him about a poem [of Akif amca’s] whose title, ‘The Invention of Midnight,’ intrigued me. … ‘I’m sorry for my clumsy curiosity,’ he wrote. ‘But I would be grateful if you translated this poem.’ The poem did not live up to its title and I never translated it. It was not about a fantastical night as its name suggested, but about the literal setting of the Turkish Republic’s public clocks, with the switch to the Western calendar. But with time, the title of the poem became a code word for us, entirely different from the poem itself, and we would say the word midnight always with a shared understanding. This is what I mean when I say that I was not lying. It seems that with M. as my audience, an entire landscape of words and images emerged harmoniously, with its own particular meaning. (Savaş 2019, pp. 77–78) Nunu’s friendship with M. could be described as a small and entirely enclosed world, ‘The Invention of Midnight’ being just one item in their particular lexicon, as Nunu puts it, their particular world of meaning. As Nunu goes on, the café Au Petit became ‘our bistro’, the Luxembourg metro exit became ‘the spot’: There was ‘Sir Winston,’ the old waiter at our bistro … ‘The philosopher’ was the sulky waiter who served the tables outside. We referred to anyone with spiritual inclinations as ‘crystal hunters.’ Those who approached life with the insincere compassion of self-help books we called

Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought  83 ‘dictators.’ … ‘Apollodorus’ … was shorthand for forgotten writers, but also for the rapid passing of time. … ‘The Apollodoruses of the world,’ we might have said, or ‘in the tyrannical reign of Apollodorus,’ by which we would have meant that life was too short. (Savaş 2019, p. 95) I suggested that writing is central to the novel. While Nunu never attends her literature classes, in a way she is learning much more through her conversations with M. than she would have from such classes. In fact, M.’s life away from Nunu during their time in Paris involves teaching creative writing. While Nunu mimics M.’s style, something about which she is embarrassed, she is also learning different ways to see the world. So, when walking in front of Notre-Dame, M. steered us away from the plaza … to look at the cathedral from a distance. There was such harmony in the arrangement, he said. The craftsmen had never lost track of what they were doing. He pointed from left to right at the prophets, the kings, the apostles, the life of the Virgin. Until then, I had only seen the front of Notre-Dame from close up and looked at the hundreds of stone faces, which seemed cluttered and without much order. I went back the following day and examined the façade carefully. The next time that we walked in front of the cathedral, I pointed out a cluster of leaves, St. Anne’s sturdy hands, the marble book with blank pages, a wreath of acorns. … But I didn’t tell him then, nor on any other occasion, that he had taught me something new about seeing the world. (Savaş 2019, pp. 137–138) One senses, or at least I sense, in reading the novel that Nunu’s small steps in her attempts to tell the truth about M., herself and her mother are connected to the fact that the world she shares with M. is for her a safe world from which she attempts to write truthfully about life. It is important to note that the rules of their friendship, as Nunu puts it, exclude everything outside of it. So, she does not even tell M. that she had read his novels before their friendship began: As I said, I felt that all the rules of our friendship were settled unspoken, and I realize now that they were peculiarly similar to what I would have wanted them to be had we determined them outright. In my childhood

84  Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought and even later, I had dreamed of having such a friend with who I could exchange endlessly on strange topics of my choosing, without the worry of stepping into uncomfortable territory. (Savaş 2019, p. 60) But Nunu is conscious, painfully conscious really, that M. inhabits worlds other than the one they share together and in the end a wider reality encroaches upon their world. One day Nunu meets M. outside the university where he teaches, as they had arranged to go on a midnight picnic. She is wearing her new green dress and is pleased with the way she looks; she had earlier put it on and gone downstairs to the café below her flat just so that someone could see her. He is coming down the stairs from the building with another writer, a more famous writer who was the main speaker at the bookshop where Nunu first met M: When they crossed the street, he held me by the shoulders and kissed me on both cheeks, so unlike the way he usually greeted me. I had become accustomed to the abrupt wave of his hand and I thought it had its own special meaning. ‘Look at you,’ he said. ‘What a sight of spring.’ He introduced me to the writer as his guide. … ‘It’s lucky you found a guide,’ the writer said. ‘Do you guide tours in other landscapes, too?’ M. laughed. … It wasn’t only M.’s introduction that upset me, but his cheerfulness as well. It made me lonely. (Savaş 2019, p. 175) After the second writer leaves them and as they walk on M. confides in Nunu about his day and a student he has been teaching: That afternoon, one of his students had turned in a story about his family written with such bitterness that it had been uncomfortable to discuss in class. I asked him why this was. ‘At the heart of it, there is shame,’ M. said. ‘But it’s hidden under so much anger. How do you teach them to tell the story as it is, when they are blind to the very feeling with which they are telling the story?’ I walked silently, looking ahead.

Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought  85 ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I wonder if I’m capable of teaching them the joy of plain, simple storytelling. The way you and I tell each other.’ I had stopped walking. I was looking down at the hem of my green dress. ‘I don’t think you should try and teach anyone how to talk about their family,’ I said. ‘It’s arrogant.’ We continued walking. ‘Nurunisa,’ M. said, ‘is something the matter?’ I shook my head. But when we reached the American Church, I told him I was not feeling too well. ‘What can we do about that?’ he asked. I said I wanted to go home. I had an urge to be reckless. To cause damage in one sweep. But I was also trying to stop myself and shake off this feeling before it overcame me. … As we changed courses and continued walking, I decided that if he said something else, anything at all, I would tell him that I wasn’t feeling that bad after all, and that I would still like to have our picnic. I pleaded with him silently until we reached the metro. ‘I hope you feel better,’ M. said, and waved. (Savaş 2019, pp. 176–177) Nunu marks this time as the one when things became different between her and M. such that their friendship comes to an end. There are two reasons for this suggested in the above passage. First, M. has greeted Nunu not as the person she knows from their private world together, but as a distinguished writer introducing an attractive female friend to another distinguished writer. Second, there is M.’s confiding in Nunu about one of his students and their story about their family, about how that student was blind to the shame that was at the heart of it. How could Nunu not see the connection with her own life. She does not want the friendship to end, indeed she wants to tell M. the truth about why she was upset that day. But she needs for M. to ask her: I had made up my mind that once he asked me directly why I was upset, I would tell him a true story, something simple and direct. This was the condition I had set and waited impatiently for him to understand, to want to know and admit he cared. I don’t even know what I would have told him if he asked. But the question itself would have assured me that M. was the person I thought I knew. After a while, though, M. stopped writing to me. (Savaş 2019, p. 182)

86  Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought M. has failed to understand. When Nunu sees him for the last time it is in another talk at the same bookshop. Nunu is standing at the back of the room and thinks that M. glances in this direction as he talks about how he comes to stories: ‘But there are many which escape my grasp,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s because I haven’t been gentle enough, and they shy back to their own worlds …’ ‘And at other times,’ he continued, ‘I’m simply too deaf to hear them.’ (Savaş 2019, pp. 195–196) Nunu’s story has, in a sense, escaped M.’s grasp, but of course he could not have understood what he had said to upset her at their meeting before the abandoned picnic. And Nunu has missed her opportunity to make herself understood; as she says, she needed him to ask. But that is not to say they have not shared a unique kind of truth and understanding. When M.’s novel comes out she recognises in it his way of recalling their time together: The book’s short title is M.’s special way of greeting me, raising his hand for just a moment before putting it back into the pocket of his green jacket. He wants me to understand, even if I don’t have the heart to read it, that this is his way of telling the story, his own invention of Midnight. (Savaş 2019, p. 199) Turning now to A Brief Affair, Miller’s novel is in a different, though related way about the struggle for truthfulness about oneself and one’s life. The central figure in the novel is Dr Frances (Fran) Egan, an academic, and Head of the School of Management at a university in Melbourne. Fran has what seems like a perfect life; in her early forties, she has already moved quickly into a senior position at her university, has a loving and supportive husband (Tom) and lives with him and their two children on an idyllic old dairy farm in rural Victoria from which she commutes to the university’s new campus, an imposing renovated Victorian pile that was once an insane asylum, on the outer northern outskirts of Melbourne. Her life changes, however, when she visits China as part of a delegation to drum up business for the university’s new, short business courses for international students. In brief, she meets a man on a bus who, it turns out, is going to the same conference that she is attending, a man with whom she has a passionate one-night affair. The affair changes Fran’s life, making her question herself and her life. The night they spend together takes on the quality of something perfect, pure, even sacred for Fran:

Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought  87 Lying together in the purity of their nakedness, she had known her life that night to be a mystical journey of recognition, an existence without questions and without answers, but her own in a simple way that nothing was ever simply her own – not Tom, not the children, not the farm and definitely not her job. None of it was just hers. Words could not speak of this other thing. … The sacred music at the point of her own beginning. … She felt beautiful. … Beautiful and happy, for the moment she rose above her doubts. The girl she had once been had survived within her. That was it. The perfect world of her dreams was still real. (Miller 2022, p. 25) It would be easy to see Fran’s reveries as a kind of fantastical illusion, as an escape from reality – she calls her lover her Mongolian warrior. But in truth this affair has opened up for her another way of thinking about her life and her career, a career which she has increasingly come to doubt. Partly that is doubt about her life ambition, which to this point has been to become a respected professor. But more than that, she speaks, as we will see below, of her vision for the university, which suggests something more than just the job it has become. More than questioning her ambition, she has come to doubt also a sense of university teaching as something like a vocation: She looked at her diary for the following day: 8 am staff meeting. … Matters to be discussed: induction of new faculty member; cooperative education, a new model needed; discounts for staff to allow for research, admin, grant writing, supervision; course leadership; codes of conduct; quality assurance; prepare for enrolment sessions; timetabling; conference funding policy; overseas travel to offshore campuses. How many times had they met over these issues? How much talk had there been? How many plans and expressions of hopes? The steady erosion of her vision. And after it all, here they were, covering the same issues yet again. Nothing done. No one cared. No one really cared. The culture of the university decayed and no one objected. Not seriously. Everyone complained. Complaint was the only thing they had left in common. (Miller 2022, pp. 39–40) But it is not merely the affair that opens Fran to other imaginative possibilities and here we need to consider the way Fran’s story is also woven into the story of another woman, Valerie Sommers, the occupant, as it turns out, of Fran’s office or cell when it was an asylum. The lives of these two women are connected by Valerie’s diary. Joseph, the university caretaker, had discovered the diary during renovations hidden behind a

88  Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought cupboard in Fran’s office, and he gives it to Fran. Valerie entitles the diary with these underlined words ‘The hopelessness and necessity of my illusions.’ The diary concerns her love for another woman, Jessie, who is also an inmate at the asylum. From the diary we learn that her affair with Jessie had been discovered, at which point Jessie had been removed to another institution. But not only that; we also learn that one of the nuns at the asylum informs Valerie that Jessie subsequently killed herself. Valerie then keeps Jessie alive in her diary; indeed, it becomes for her ‘my supplementary reality’ (Miller 2022, p. 246). It is for Valerie an escape from the reality of her life at the asylum, which is for her unbearable. The ‘beautiful, pained world of reflection and love, of suffering and torture’ (Miller 2022, p. 246) that Fran discovers in Valerie’s diary, her imaginative inner life dedicated to her lover Jessie, helps Fran to see her life for what it has really become. So, this is how Fran comes to think of her colleagues and their lives, her life: They’d become shrivelled caricatures of their old selves … her hopes and expectations for them in ruins. She thought of Claire Pollard’s nastiness. Claire used to be such an open happy person. … The place had shrunk her. … Fran felt only revulsion at the idea of going in there every day; the idea of becoming herself yet another professor was repulsive to her. Surely she had seen in Valerie’s diary the truth that what Tom called her career was a trap … For years she had fallen for that delusion … it would suffocate her. She felt it whenever she saw Skänder [the Dean of Studies] or the ghastly Eric Thornton [a senior professor] … They were blind to the things that Valerie had valued, the things she herself loved. … Those people weren’t interested in educating the young. They had no interest in education. To become one of them would kill her hopes of ever achieving anything beautiful or true in her own life. (Miller 2022, pp. 156–157) Anyone with recent experience at a modern university will recognise the picture of academic life that Fran presents. But if it is a trap, it is one that Fran finds it difficult to escape from. It is only the imaginative world that opens up for her first with her lover and then with Valerie’s diary which provides Fran with a space, as it is with Nunu, from which it is possible for her to face the reality of her own life, the failure of her plans for a life in academia. The parallel between Nunu and Valerie with her diary is perhaps even more striking in so far as Valerie’s diary like Nunu’s private world with M. provide an imaginative space from which to deal with similar kinds of deep personal pain. But, of course, there are differences here. I am not suggesting, for example, that Fran’s career disillusionment is on a par with Nunu’s deep pain concerning her mother and her father or

Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought  89 Valerie’s dual loss of her freedom and her lover. My point is just that here, too, there is a deep personal difficulty in facing a particular reality. In the last chapter with my discussion of Gaita I talked briefly about the way in which the very idea of the university has been degraded, how it has become difficult to defend this institution in terms of the values that were historically internal to its purpose. Many young academics, like Fran, continue to enter the academy with a commitment to those values only to be quickly disillusioned, sometimes ultimately crushed, by the discovery that in modern universities there is really no place for such values. But there are other similarities between Fran and Nunu. Like Nunu’s relationship with M., Fran sees her affair and the diary as something that is hers alone. As is clear from what she says, part of her struggle with coming to envision and to be herself is to see herself as something other than Tom’s wife, a mother of two children, the rising academic star. This does not, as it turns out, mean that she abandons her husband and family; she loves them all and that part of her life at least continues. It is rather that the affair and the diary bring back to her, force her to really see, those things in herself that have been buried by her career and the logic of what might seem a successful life. One might say that in the cases of both Nunu and Fran they reach truth through fantasy; not mere illusion but rather truth that we might only reach through a kind of personal exercise of creative imagination. To explain what I mean above in more detail, I turn to the end of A Brief Affair. As it happens, Valerie is still alive, and Fran and her meet. We then discover that Valerie has recorded the whole of her life in a series of diaries, all of which are addressed to Jessie. But Valerie had only started them after Jessie killed herself and they are what has prevented Valerie from long ago taking her own life. Valerie explains it in the following terms: I began to write after I became a patient in the nut house. It was then that I discovered that facts are not the only truth. Our own private truth is elusive and hides from us. It is the truth the poets seek. Remembering at night alone in that cell saved me, and I began to live a life of the memory. I learned to cultivate my memory, to attend to it with love … The more deeply I entered into my memories the more memory opened to me. Memories I had not known I possessed. Secret, dark places in which small clues had lain buried for years. Searching the landscapes of memory became for me a journey of discovery. (Miller 2022, pp. 246–247) Murdoch writes about how difficult it can be to face the real, about how the psyche seeks to protect itself from the pain that this would bring in its wake through consoling fantasies. But talking in this connection of the ‘fat relentless ego’, while not wrong, can obscure the sheer enormity of our

90  Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought human vulnerability to a kind of pain that goes both deep and is intensely personal. Murdoch is right that we (so often) fail to see others as they really are, but to understand why that is so, to understand what it is here, and inevitably, to be human with all the vulnerability that entails, requires a particular kind of courage mixed with compassion; courage to face ourselves and compassion for those who have caused us pain. I suggested that Nunu’s struggle for realism against consoling fantasy, like Fran’s struggle, is an essentially personal one. Nevertheless, in reading Walking on the Ceiling or A Brief Affair one can recognise – indeed if one is open to what the stories have to relate one can hardly fail to recognise – something of our own vulnerabilities and the fantasies and evasions we erect against them. Realism, truthfulness in life, where it really (and morally) matters, most obviously in our relations with other human beings, is hard, and it can seem at times impossibly hard. This is the main point I take from Murdoch; any serious interest in realism in relation to morality needs to begin from the acknowledgment of this fact. To expand on why it is hard, we need to consider how different our inquiries about ourselves and human beings are as compared with other empirical inquiries and especially scientific inquiry. I have suggested inquiries into the meaning of our own lives and concerning other human beings exposes us as vulnerable because of the way the outcomes of those inquiries matter to us. Of course, the outcome of a scientist’s inquiry matters to the scientist; they may have invested much of their working life in advancing a particular theory so that if it turns out to be incorrect, they may feel defeated and many other things besides. But they need not just for these reasons think, as Fran comes to think, that the kind of inquiry to which they have devoted their lives lacks meaning, and was not a worthy kind of activity. Moreover, and here there is a crucial difference between science and the humanities, where our inquiries are inquiries into other human beings our discoveries matter in a quite different way, for, of course, the object of our inquiries may themselves be inquiring into us. Part of what we discover about them is what they may discover about us. We can, of course, doubt this, think that they do not really know us. But with those who we care about and who, in their turn, care about us, care enough to find out how it is with us, such doubts can ring hollow. Thinking again of Emma, the reason why Mr Knightley’s criticism of her cuts so deeply is that he does care in this way about her as she cares about him. In short, those that may help us to self-knowledge are also those that are in a position to make us vulnerable for that very reason. So Nunu’s friendship with M., though it is as I say a safe place for her, also leaves her exposed in ways because of her regard and respect for him, and because his interest in her is important to her; she is, as I have noted, on the verge of coming to see and to accept something about herself by seeing what he sees in her. It is no

Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought  91 surprise that she is hurt about what M. says about his student since, as I noted above, she is acutely aware that her own attempt to write about her mother is itself marred by feelings of anger and shame. So, at an early meeting, M. wonders to Nunu whether he was just teaching his students ‘the illusory mechanics of craft, by which they could conceal the absence at the heart of their writing, trying to make up for all the things they were not able to confront’ (Savaş 2019, p. 163). As Nunu then says, ‘I wondered, feeling uneasy and embarrassed, whether M. was trying to tell me something in his particular way’ (Savaş 2019, p. 163). But there are other differences between on the one hand our empirical inquiries, and on the other our inquiries into human beings where moral judgements are at stake. To explain, in the case of a scientist who is, say, strongly emotionally invested in a particular research project, the investment may lead them to errors in their scientific reasoning or in the application of relevant scientific method. Here there is a psychological obstacle to clarity of thought that leads the scientist astray. But the obstacles to clarity of moral thought are not merely psychological. Here one is not misapplying some established method of ethical thought. Indeed, the argument of this book is that there is no established publicly agreed-upon method of ethics. What occurs in the kinds of cases I have been considering is not that a person’s pain, fear or bitterness is the cause of their failure to see another clearly (the cause of a mere mistake in their reasoning); rather, these emotional responses are the way in which their thought fails. Raimond Gaita makes the same point when he talks about how sentimentality may lead someone astray, on the one hand, in scientific inquiry, and on the other, in moral understanding: Suppose a biologist who is accused… of being sentimental in his description of the behaviour of certain animals. In such a case we can often assess what he said without reference to the concept of sentimentality. We simply check whether what he said is true or false … In this case we do have a ‘cognitive content’ extractable from the style of its expression and to which the style is irrelevant… Contrast that with the judgement that it is sentimental to think that it can be expressive of something deep in our feelings for a dead dog to light a candle for it on each anniversary of its death. Now sentimentality is not being cited as the cause of what is primarily wrong with such a thought: it is what is primarily wrong with it. (Gaita 2004, p. 269) Thinking of Nunu and looking back at what she had told Luke about her mother it is clear to her that talking in this connection to Luke about ‘selfworth’ and ‘compassion’ rang false; her thought about her mother goes

92  Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought wrong in using these words in this connection. Indeed, the gap between her story of her mother to Luke and the truth about her mother was at this point so large that Nunu now concedes her mother would not even understand her. So convinced by her own story is Nunu that she tells her mother from London that she will never come back to Istanbul ‘because I’m learning to forgive and forget’ (Savaş 2019, p. 154). As she now says, however, ‘I was so wrapped up in the story I’d been telling Luke, coloring my own memories, that my mother may not even have understood what I was talking about’ (Savaş 2019, p. 154). Of course, philosophers do have their methods of ethical thought, but, as I have argued in the last chapter, and flagged again in my quote from Murdoch at the start of this chapter, these methods are fixed by their usefulness in particular ethical theories. So, a conception of value is assumed for the role it plays in a particular theory so that other conceptions of value appear invisible and are simply left out. Or, as Murdoch says, we select certain phenomena for which certain techniques of inquiry suggest themselves which, in turn, lends support to that very selection so that ‘a circle is formed out of which it may be hard to break’. I am not suggesting, of course, that certain techniques or methods cannot be useful for ethical thought. My point is just that such techniques or methods can leave much that is of moral interest in our lives, including many of the ways in which we think about other human beings, inexplicable or obscure. I have looked in detail at Walking on the Ceiling and at A Brief Affair because they offer such a truthful, and at times painful, representation of the struggle for realism about ourselves and in our relations with other human beings and in particular those others that mean most to us. And here again, I suggest, that understanding what that difficulty amounts to, understanding the difficulty of our task, is inseparable from the way in which this narrative engages us. So, our engagement with Nunu’s and Fran’s struggles is internal to our recognition of our shared sense of the kind of vulnerability I just alluded to. I am not suggesting that this will necessarily occur for all readers, but to the extent that it does it can reveal something about the difficulty of facing reality in this connection.5 But more positively the novels also indicate how we might face this difficulty. Murdoch is right that human beings cannot handle too much pain, but one way in which the pain I am concerned with here may be ameliorated without resort to selfdeception and fantasy is through the use of imagination. Nunu’s imaginative world with M., like Fran’s affair and Valerie’s diaries, are enclosed worlds quite apart from the rest of their lives and all the pain and disappointment that that entails, and in these worlds these women are beginning to think of themselves in a different way. To focus finally on just Savaş’s novel, early on Nunu says that in London with Luke she was ‘putting together my life piece by piece’, but in truth with Luke she was constructing a fantasy of her life in which it was impossible to see and to confront her

Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought  93 past with her mother and indeed herself. Through the imaginative world Nunu and M. occupy together, Nunu begins to honestly confront her pain in relation to her mother so as to really see her. From the safety of her friendship with M. and his interest in her, Nunu is able to re-imagine her life with her mother in a more honest way. For example, Nunu had told Luke that her mother would not speak to her for days and added: ‘Imagine doing that to a child’ (Savaş 2019, p. 155). But as she now confides, … what I didn’t tell him was something far simpler. I would go to my mother’s bedroom and call to her from the door. The room would be very dark and my mother would be in terrible pain from one of her headaches. (Savaş 2019, p. 156) It is a work of imagination to learn to see differently, and in particular to see beyond shame, anger and – as she finally says at the end of the novel – bitterness. In the end, Nunu remembers her friendship with M. in this way: We passed our stories back and forth until they merged. And with each pass, we lightened our own burden. At that time, brief though it was, we shared a single imagination. … What mattered most was that memory was stripped of bitterness and retold with joy. And once it took root, it grew bigger, this story of how things had been. It was a voice speaking through us, inexhaustible, it seemed, past resentment and sorrow. Past all that could not be resurrected. (Savaş 2019, p. 207) So it is that imagination or, as Nunu also says, ‘pure, untainted, invention’ (Savaş 2019, p. 207), can be the path to facing reality. It would be a mistake to think that invention in this context is something false or deceptive; it seems rather to indicate simply a new way of thinking about and being in the world, one that is not deformed from the start with the history of pain. It is a kind of leap of imagination, imagination understood as invention without external end or agenda, to pass beyond the pain, resentment and sorrow, past the self-protective ego to the reality of ourselves and of other human beings. Notes 1 The most significant exception is McDowell. See McDowell 1998, Part II.

94  Imagination and Truth in Moral Thought 2 To give an example from Jonathan Dancy, who really launched the recent interest in particularism: ‘That one candidate wants the job very much indeed is sometimes a reason for giving it to her and sometimes for doing the opposite’ (Dancy 2000, pp 132–133). 3 The capitalising is Savaş’. 4 ‘Amca’ is Turkish for uncle, though Akif is not in fact an uncle. 5 In a related discussion Cora Diamond also talks of a kind of difficulty of reality, a phrase she gets from John Updike. This difficulty is (to quote Diamond), … in the apparent resistance by reality to one’s ordinary mode of life, including one’s ordinary modes of thinking: to appreciate the difficulty is to feel oneself being shouldered out of how one thinks, how one is apparently supposed to think, or to have a sense of the inability of thought to encompass what it is attempting to reach. (Diamond 2008, p. 58) While Diamond too is concerned here with our human vulnerability, she is concerned more precisely with our sheer animal vulnerability and the difficulties associated with the recognition of all that that entails. I have discussed these points in Taylor 2021 and 2020.

6 Impartial versus Public Reasons

I have been exploring the ways in which moral theory limits and even distorts our understanding of the realm of value generally. In this chapter I want to consider the ways in which my argument challenges a central element of most moral theorising, the requirement of moral impartiality. Of course, the place of impartiality in moral theories of different stripes varies greatly. At one end of the spectrum, impartiality is the foundational or defining feature of morality. For example, thinking of Peter Singer, whom I will discuss later, partiality in the form of our personal relationships and projects cannot be allowed to override the demands of what he calls the Equality Principle. On less extreme versions, our personal relationships and projects may be held permissible from the impartial point of view even if they conflict with the demands of equality in Singer’s sense. I have argued that this too distorts our understanding of the realm of value.1 But my criticism of moral theory may be seen to be too extreme and invite the objection that there are moral demands on us by just anyone, that the interests of others provide me with reasons for action, as we might say, unconditionally. One way that this has been expressed is via the thought that we are each one of us just one person among many; who I am, or my distinctive life history and character, does not feature on such a conception and, so conceived, morality must make impartial moral demands on us. Maybe, it might be conceded, there is more to say, even more morally to say, about values and reasons but this much at least is true. Even someone who is receptive to the arguments I have made thus far will want to point out that there is at least a tension between morality and its demands on us and our partial relations and projects. I concede that there is tension in this general area, but it is not between personal relationships and projects and impartial morality, a conception of morality I reject, but between the reasons that such personal relationships and projects generate and what I will call public reasons. Here I will draw on a recent argument by Chappell, who recognises the tension I have noted, but who does not quite give up on impartial morality – even though it seems to me that DOI: 10.4324/9781003415664-7

96  Impartial versus Public Reasons the way in which she deals with that tension provides the basis for the reconfiguration of the tension at which I just gestured. A crucial question raised by contemporary moral theory, Chappell says, is ‘how partial love is to be justified by the standards of impartial benevolence’ (Chappell 2014, pp. 80–81). As Chappell notes, an important distinction is as follows. Benevolence is ‘simply a matter of wishing [another] well (bene velle): it is a matter of wanting or choosing or willing [another’s] well-being’ (Chappell 2014, p. 85). So, as Chappell goes on, ‘it cannot matter that it is me that brings about [their] well-being’ (Chappell 2014, p. 86). By contrast, ‘[l]oving someone means wanting to be constitutively involved in his well-being: it means wanting to be, myself, part of what makes life go well for him’ (Chappell 2014, p. 86). At the same time, as Chappell suggests, while we welcome both love and benevolence in our lives, ‘we typically want others’ love for its own sake; but that is not typically why we want benevolence’ (Chappell 2014, p. 89). Benevolence, so Chappell suggests, is then merely wanted as evidence of love or because it involves wishing good things on me that I want. The upshot of all this for Chappell is simply to point out the central importance of love in human life and thus in human well-being so that impartial benevolence must make a space for it simply because it is so central to our well-being. Chappell then endorses what he thinks of as a compromise position according to which, ‘[p]artial love and impartial benevolence both have the right, each of them, to act as a limit and a constraint on the other’ (Chappell 2014, p. 96). One might, of course, then ask; where in the sense of the limit is the line to be drawn between the demands of impartial benevolence and partial love? That is a question I myself will need to address. But what I want to consider first is what Chappell goes on to discuss; another side to the issue of partiality and moral demandingness, specifically ‘the difference between second-personal and third-personal reasons’ (Chappell 2014, p. 96). While Chappell initially discusses this difference in the case of political reasoning, she clearly thinks that it applies to practical, including moral, deliberation more generally. A key difference is between ‘a concrete and socially real justification [and] an abstract socially invisible justification’ (Chappell 2014, p. 97). While a ‘third-personal picture of political justification’ (Chappell 2014, p. 97) corresponds with the latter, a second-­ personal picture of political justification corresponds to the former. As Chappell puts the point, to succeed in a third-personal justification … of some social arrangement is to succeed in setting up an objectively correct account of the benefits of that arrangement; the correctness of this account has nothing constitutive to do with whether anyone ever hears or accepts that account. By contrast, to succeed in a second-personal justification … of

Impartial versus Public Reasons  97 some arrangement is to offer that … to actual and concrete others in an actual and concrete social setting, and actually have them accept it through a process of shared deliberation and reflection. (Chappell 2014, p. 98) The interesting point that Chappell then makes in relation to this distinction is that both political, moral and other public actions are flawed insofar as they lack such a second personal justification. To illustrate the point, Chappell asks us to imagine a case where we are in a railway carriage that is too hot with the sun blazing in. Things will be better in the objective third-personal sense if one pulls down the blind. However, to do so without asking the other passengers is to act ‘as if they weren’t there at all’ (Chappell 2014, p. 101). As she then goes on to point out, it may be that one of the other passengers might reasonably want the blind not drawn. Maybe once the other passengers are all consulted it will be that the reasons that such a person gives will be overridden. The point, however, is that they ought to be included in the deliberations; that as Chappell puts it, ‘it is simply wrong to act as if it were “just the world and me”’ (Chappell 2014, p. 102). The point is not just supposed to be about courtesy to the other passengers, to get them to confirm what is objectively for the best. This is brought out in the fact the decision we reach in the shared deliberation might not be objectively the best outcome since it may be that various parties in that deliberation might make reasonable submissions about leaving the blinds up. Perhaps, as Chappell notes, one of the passengers ‘is a bird-watcher hoping to see a hoopoe in the trackside undergrowth’ (Chappell 2014, p. 103). Perhaps there may need to be a compromise; leaving the blinds half-down perhaps. The point is that recognising others as co-deliberators means that there will be cases ‘where getting a solution that everyone accepts is more important than getting “what’s best”’ (Chappell 2014, p. 104). I find Chappell’s argument outlined above compelling, so compelling in fact that it provides a basis for rejecting impartialist moral reasoning altogether. Chappell argues that the ‘question of the costs and benefits arising from a public choice only comes up once we have already acknowledged that we need to make the choice together: that we need to be dialogical, second-personal, in our approach to our public decision-problem’ (Chappell 2014, p. 102). I agree. But in that case why do we need impartial moral reasons at all? If justification in the public sphere depends ultimately on justification to concrete others, then why isn’t second-personal justification within the realm of public reasons not a sufficient counter to partial reasons? One can even retain the thought, if one likes, that so conceived we are, each of us, merely one person among many, given only that we understand that as one concrete person among many concrete persons that we

98  Impartial versus Public Reasons need to reach, in a second-personal way, agreement with on what moral demands each of us might reasonably make on each other, including merely as human beings. This chapter defends an account of public reasons as providing justification in the public sphere that is not, as we will see, merely socially relative but in a sense to be outlined objective. I am not denying that impartial moral theorising is compatible with second-person justification in some sense. As Chappell notes, there is a continuum between the two extremes of justifications alluded to above. So, we might argue that those involved in such theorising do address their arguments and theories to others, concrete individuals even if you will. My broader argument against impartial moral theorising, however, is that it imposes a particular form on moral thought and argument. Two different, though related aspects of such a conception of moral thought that I have already considered are as follows. First, while we might envisage impartialist justifications as justifications to concrete human beings they are, in an important sense, justifications to just anyone – even if that be, thinking of Chappell’s train carriage example, just anyone with certain interests and so on. To put the point another way, such justifications fail to capture the way in which, as I have argued, moral thought and deliberation are essentially personal. So, one constraint all impartialist theorising imposes on moral thought and argument is that moral judgements must be universalizable; on such a constraint, different agents in the same situation must reach the same judgement about how they ought to act on pain of moral error or irrationality. As I reject this constraint (I do not think moral judgements are universalizable) there are limits to second-person justifications and the kind of consensus or agreement that might arise from such justifications. Second, and relatedly, on such a conception of moral thought the reasons that determine judgements about what someone (which will be just anyone) ought to do in any specific situation are extractable from, and can be understood as the practical reasons they are independently of, the particular concrete situations and distinctive lives of the person deliberating about how they ought to act. That assumption, it seems to me, must be true for impartialist moral theorising if it is to have any definite content. But, again, I have argued against this assumption. To return to Chappell and to an obvious objection to the idea of a maximally concrete and socially real justification, one might say this makes the justification a totally socially relative phenomenon. Chappell is aware of this danger, the danger for a ‘maximally socially real’ justification when she states that ‘the more a justification is apt to be actually articulated and grasped in a given social milieu, the harder it is to be sure that that justification is not a mere accidental ideology’ (Chappell 2014, p. 97). Whether that outcome is inevitable depends, however, on the scope and status of the

Impartial versus Public Reasons  99 possible agreement reached by a second-personal dialogical approach to public decisions. Such a dialogical approach need not, I wish to argue, be restricted to just our social milieu, but may extend outwards from that in an open-ended way and even provide substance to the idea of objective reasons and ethical truths. In order to make good on the above suggestion I will consider Cora Diamond’s recent discussion of a debate between David Wiggins and Bernard Williams about the prospects for truth in ethics. As Diamond notes, Wiggins argues using an example of what he calls a vindicatory, as distinct from an empirical, explanation. Wiggins’ formula for such an explanation is this: ‘there is nothing else to think but p’. While this formula can be applied to different subject matters – mathematics, for example, where we may say, and this is Wiggins’ own example, ‘there is nothing else to think that 5 plus 7 comes to 12’ – it can importantly be applied also in ethics. His example is that … by drawing upon the full riches of our intersubjectivity and our shared understanding, such a wealth of considerations can now be produced, all bearing in some way or other upon the question of slavery, that, at some point in rehearsing these considerations, it will become apparent that there is nothing else to think but that slavery is unjust and insupportable. (Wiggins 1990, p. 70) As Diamond notes, Williams does not think that Wiggins is going to be able to come up with cases in ethics, where there is going to be ‘nothing else … to think but that such-and-such’ (Diamond 2019, p. 273). Williams’ argument against Wiggins though is, as Diamond highlights, suspicious in the first instance for the way he reframes the issue around what Williams has called thick ethical concepts. Thick ethical concepts, such as courageous, cowardly or cruel, have both descriptive and evaluative elements for those who use them, whereas thin ethical concepts, such as good, bad, right and wrong, appear to be purely evaluative. The significance of this distinction for the debate between Wiggins and Williams, then, is that while it may be true for those who use a thick ethical concept such as cruel, that there is nothing else to think that a given action is cruel, this will only be so for someone whose concept that is. Williams’ example in response to Wiggins is of young boys torturing a cat, the thought being that for these boys there is something else to think but this is cruel, that is, that it is fun; cruelty, the thought seems to be, is not one of their concepts. Generalising the point, Williams suggests ‘that the question of what your repertoire of thick [ethical] concepts is reveals your own or your society’s ethical attitude’ (Williams 1985, p. 29). The substance of Williams’ argument against

100  Impartial versus Public Reasons Wiggins then, as Diamond notes, is ‘that there is no set of thick concepts that we all share’ (Diamond 2019, p. 276). Williams’ reframing of the debate in such terms obscures the point that Wiggins is making. First, as Diamond points out, because the concept at the centre of Wiggins’ formula is not a thick ethical concept like cruel but, both he and Williams would agree, the intermediate, by which I mean neither a thick nor a thin concept of justice. It is with respect to this concept that Wiggins’ formula is supposed to apply. Diamond’s point then is that while slavery as practiced in the southern United States was certainly cruel and thought to be so by those opposed to it, what was particularly abominable above that was, as she says, the idea of ‘property in human beings’ (Diamond 2019, p. 278). As Diamond goes on to say, many ‘anti-slavery thinkers did make use of the concept of natural rights, which some pro-slavery thinkers rejected. But violation of natural right would not be an example of what Williams thinks of as a “thick concept.” It is much more like unjust than like cruel or deceitful’ (Diamond 2019, p. 279). Wiggins’ point then, so Diamond argues, is that ‘if you refuse to subsume the institution of slavery under the concepts it is subsumed under in the argument for its injustice and insupportably, you are at risk of depriving yourself, at the same time, of any workable scheme of moral ideas’ (Diamond 2019, p. 280). Your difficulty, as Diamond goes on to suggest, is coming up with ‘a workable system of moral ideas that dispensed … with ideas like justice, slavery, and using human beings as means, not ends’ (Diamond 2019, p. 280). Of course, the obvious reply to this thought would simply be to say that you do not need to dispense with the idea of justice if you are pro-slavery. Diamond herself points out how pro-slavery thinkers drew on Aristotle’s argument that some human beings were natural slaves, and that it would be beneficial for people of that nature to be slaves. According to that way of thinking, slavery would seem to be perfectly just – for some people at least. At this point, though, Diamond asks us to consider what sort of disagreement there is between the relevant pro-slavery and anti-slavery thinkers and makes the following distinction: There are disagreements about ethics where one group of people thinks that the other side has got things wrong, but there are also, I think, disagreements in which people take some way that other people are thinking about ethics not just to be wrong, not just to be something they disagree with – but to be a case of the other people’s thinking having gone off the rails. (Diamond 2019, p. 287) Diamond thinks the disagreement at issue between pro- and anti-slavery is of the second kind. So, to think that a group of people are natural slaves is

Impartial versus Public Reasons  101 not merely mistaken but a case of thinking itself going astray. As Diamond goes on to say, continuing the metaphor, ‘[s]igns ought to be put up saying: “Don’t go down that road.” And indeed there was such a sign that was put up, the statement that men are by nature equal, or the statement all men are created equal’ (Diamond 2019, p. 287). Such a statement, Diamond suggests, means in part something like the following: There are all kinds of differences and inequalities of talents and intelligence and reasonableness and character between human beings, but none of these can be taken to indicate an inbuilt natural distinction in virtue of which some people may be justly owned by others, and may justly be treated as means by which others make their wills effective. (Diamond 2019, p. 288) Such Diamond thinks is the structure of this disagreement, but she is not at this point saying that is an end to the matter, that here we have dispatched the argument of pro-slavery thinkers. That would be too easy a victory since, as Diamond immediately points out, the pro-slavery thinkers, given this structure of this disagreement, may in the same way claim that ‘antislavery thinking has gone off the rails’ (Diamond 2019, p. 289) Diamond suggests that one main strand in pro-slavery thinking argues that thinking in… abstract terms about slavery [in terms of respect for humanity, not treating another as a mere means and so on] is thinking that has gone astray. It’s thinking about social and political life that in a way that utterly ignores our nature and capacities. (Diamond 2019, p. 289) A point that Diamond had been circling around from the beginning with Williams’ objections to Wiggins is a certain idea of symmetry, what Wiggins calls the ‘insidious presumption of symmetry’ (Wiggins 1990, p. 78). While for Williams the idea of symmetry is fleshed out in terms of alternative and contrary sets of thick ethical concepts, at this point each side of the argument about the ethics of slavery can – thinking in asymmetrical terms that there is only one position on slavery that it makes sense to think – say of the other that its thinking has gone off the rails. As Diamond says, the ‘view that there is no symmetry, and that there is only one sustainable view, can be symmetrically held’ (Diamond 2019, p. 296). At this point I can well imagine the reader being frustrated with Diamond’s argument, or at least with my presentation of it: is she or isn’t she saying with Wiggins ‘there is nothing else to think that slavery is unjust and insupportable’? Well, according to Diamond, ‘if you believe [thinking

102  Impartial versus Public Reasons in the sort of way Wiggins does] that there is a miscarriage of thinking in the ideas of those who disagree with you, that needs to be shown’ (Diamond 2019, p. 292). What Diamond then offers is an account of what is at issue or what kind of issue this really is, and, finally, a way to think about how one might move forward to get to something we might call the truth of the matter about the justice, or not, of slavery. What we can say is something about what the difference in moral point of view between the proslavery thinker and the anti-slavery thinker involves, which, as Diamond says, indicates a dispute about ‘what the moral point of view is’ (Diamond 2019, p. 295). Immediately after the statement that I began with, ‘that there is nothing else to think but …’ Wiggins goes on to suggest, as Diamond notes, that ‘the price of thinking anything at variance with the insupportability of slavery is to have opted out altogether from the point of view that shall be common between one person and another’ (Wiggins 1990, p. 70). Now, as Diamond says, in practice the idea of some people as being ‘natural slaves’ and of slaves as being a kind of property… is not a point of view that can be shared ‘between one person and another,’ but a point of view that can be shared only between some persons and others, not including slaves. Slaves have no point of view that need be taken into account; they have no voice that need be heard. (Diamond 2019, p. 294) We can then say, to use Wiggins’ term, that pro-slavery thinkers have ‘opted out’ of that conception of the moral point of view. Which is not to deny that the pro-slavery thinkers will have what they claim is a moral point of view. However, the question is: given they have ‘opted out of the point of view that shall be common between one person and another’, do they have a sustainable view? One way to proceed in answering that question is to remember Wiggins’ initial analogy between the mathematical case ‘there is nothing else to think that 7 plus 5 comes to 12’, and the moral case of slavery. And at this point Diamond refers us to an earlier discussion of Wiggins’ concerning the ‘connection between the kind of objectivity there can be in ethics and objectivity in mathematics’ (Diamond 300) which draws on Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. The passage from Wiggins that Diamond quotes is as follows: … for someone who wanted to combine objectivity with a doctrine of qualified cognitivism or of underdetermination, there might be no better model than Wittgenstein’s normative conception of the objectivity of mathematics; and no better exemplar than Wittgenstein’s extended description of how a continuing cumulative process of making or

Impartial versus Public Reasons  103 constructing can amount to the creation of a shared form of life that is constitutive of rationality itself, furnishing proofs that are not compulsions but procedures to guide our conceptions, explaining, without explaining away, our sense that sometimes we have no alternative but to infer this from that. (Wiggins 1987, p. 128) While Diamond thinks that Wiggins’ use of Wittgenstein’s model of mathematics has its limitations in connection to moral cognitivism – as she says, ‘where … disagreements even include disagreements about what color skin you had to have, to have a voice in the disagreement… Wittgenstein on forms of life provides no answers’ (Diamond 2019, p. 302) – there is something important here for both mathematics and ethics in the idea of ‘procedures to guide our conceptions’, what Diamond now calls ‘guides to thinking’. Of course, as Diamond admits, it may be that both the pro- and anti-slavery thinkers might avail themselves of this idea, the former guiding us away from ‘paths of thought that introduce notions as natural equality’ (Diamond 2019, p. 301), the latter guiding us away from ‘paths of thought that allow for there being people whose nature makes it just and proper to use them as slaves’ (Diamond 2019, p. 301). However, as Diamond says, we can at this point ask whether in each case thought is going well or badly. And here at the crux of the issue Diamond develops what she calls an ‘Anscombean view about propositions that guide thinking’ in which ‘truth is the business of everything intellectual’: Doing well and doing badly in thinking are truth and falsehood, whether we are concerned with purely theoretical thinking or practical thought. … I want to go on from what [Anscombe says] to ask whether we might take it to be part of the business of thinking, part of its job, to guide, or to help put back on track, the business of thinking. If you held that that was part of the business of thinking – if you held that part of the business of thinking is to help along the business of thinking – and if you worked with the Aristotelian idea that truth is what you have when the business of thinking is done well – then statements that guide thinking, or that put thinking back on track, that help it to be done well, could themselves be described as true, if they are indeed doing their guidingjob well, if they get right how to guide thought well. (Diamond 2019, p. 303) If all this were so, then with respect to the pro- and anti-slavery thinkers ‘there are not two opposed thoughts, p and not-p, but failed thought, on the one hand, and what we hope is a kind of thinking that guides thought well, on the other hand’ (Diamond 2019, p. 304). Here then we have an

104  Impartial versus Public Reasons answer to the problem of symmetry that has been standing in the way of the idea of truth in ethics. It is not so much that two sides disagree with each other, which encourages the idea that there is after all something that one might think on both sides. Rather, there is on the one side, a ‘response [that] has its sense, its point, from being a response to thought [on the other side] that has failed. We get it, we get what it means, in seeing it as pointful response to something we take to be meant as proper thought, but which is not that’ (Diamond 2019, p. 304). But what Diamond also takes from Wiggins’ Wittgenstein is the idea ‘of there being a kind of cumulative process, as we shape what thinking is, what counts as thinking, by working our way to this or that thought-guide, and recognizing its usefulness’ (Diamond 2019, p. 304). To give an example of how this way of thinking of truth, as opposed to that which applied in empirical inquiry might play out in mathematics, Diamond notes a point from Wittgenstein in his 1939 lectures on the foundations of mathematics. Wittgenstein, she says, suggests … that the correspondence to reality of mathematical propositions is much more like the correspondence to reality of a word, say the word ‘and,’ than it is like the correspondence to reality of an experiential proposition. Just as you have the word ‘and,’ and then you can go on and do all sorts of things with it as you use language, so too, you have ‘12 × 12 = 144’; and this is an important and enormously useful tool that we have available in language. It corresponds to reality, in this sense, then, that there are all sorts of things about us and our world, because of which ‘12 × 12 = 144’ has an enormously important range of uses with in our lives. (Diamond 2019, p. 211) The thought would then be, in the moral case, that the idea of natural equality of human beings would correspond to reality ‘in the sense … that there are all sorts of things about us and our world, because of which [there is natural equality between human beings] has an enormously important range of uses in our lives’. At this point I need to consider an objection to Diamond from Oskari Kuusela. Referring especially to the quote from Diamond above, Kuusela has suggested that the idea of a useful tool here is not entirely helpful in explaining the role of thinking guides in connection with truth. As Kuusela says, ‘we presumably would not accept as stating anything true or as corresponding to anything in reality … the concept of a witch’ (Kuusela 2019, p. 163). Yet, ‘[t]his concept may have been important and useful for the medieval representatives of Christianity for the purpose of controlling European populations, and cementing the power of the church’ (Kuusela

Impartial versus Public Reasons  105 2019, p. 163). Further, as Kuusela goes on to say, the concept of usefulness here would seem to invite the thought that Diamond is in the end offering a pragmatic account of truth – Kuusela cites Carnap’s pragmatic account of logic – so that one may think that in the end Diamond’s account is a kind of conventionalism, in which case we can again imagine different cultures having differing conventions so that their local concepts serve the local purposes and no more. Kuusela in the end offers a revised account of how we might understand Diamond’s thinking guides according to which grammatical statements that count as thinking guides are non-temporal. I do not have the space in which to examine Kuusela’s account here. However, his own conclusions would seem to suggest a way in which we might defend Diamond’s account of thinking guides – indeed he concedes she might accept his account as what she had in mind. As Kuusela goes on to note, and I can see no reason why Diamond would disagree with this, ‘[a]s Wittgenstein emphasizes, concepts reflect our interests as the kind of beings we are, and they are molded in various ways by facts about humans and their environment’ (Kuusela 2019, p. 172, my emphasis). So, even if Wiggins’ statement about the justification of slavery is a kind of conceptual clarification, this need not make this justification merely conventional. As Kuusela puts the point, ‘though a grammatical statement is the correct way to express the necessity expressed by Wiggins’ slavery-statement – that ownership of humans is not compatible with the full recognition of their humanity – this does not mean that the source of this necessity is grammar, concepts, or conventions’ (Kuusela 2019, p. 172).2 With all this I am in furious agreement, but surely Diamond can also avail herself of the same thought; thinking of the Diamond quote above she might say that there ‘are all sorts of things about us’, in the sense of the kind of beings we are and the natural facts about us, that make Wiggins’ statement something more than just local or conventional. The above claim, of course, invites the question: what natural facts about us makes this so? Well, here I would include what Raimond Gaita has called ‘the big facts of life, birth death, sexuality, our vulnerability to misfortune’. Concerning sexuality, for example, consider an important discussion of slavery as it occurred in the American South by Stanley Cavell. Cavell has pointed to a phenomenon he describes as ‘soul blindness’ by which he means that slave-owners were blind to a dimension or aspect of their slave’s humanity. On the slave-owner’s attitude towards his slaves, Cavell says: He means, and can mean, nothing definite … He means, indefinitely, that they are not purely human … [so that] if the justification for [this form of slavery] was pushed to its final ground – that the slave is not a full human being – then that human misery represented an awful

106  Impartial versus Public Reasons form of human progress; for that ground cannot in the long run be maintained. (Cavell 1979, pp. 376–377) So why does the slave-owner mean ‘nothing definite’; why can’t the ground here be maintained in the long run? As Cavell says: When [the slave-owner] rapes a slave or takes her as a concubine, he does not feel that he has, by that fact itself, embraced sodomy. … Everything in his relation to his slaves shows that he treats them as more or less human – his humiliations of them, his disappointments, his jealousies, his fears, his punishments, his attachments … (Cavell 1979, p. 376) The responses of the slave-owner to which Cavell refers are examples of what I have called in Chapter 3 primitive responses to other human beings. Such responses are, as I indicated, primitive in the sense that they are not mediated by our specific thoughts and reflections about those to whom we are responding. It follows from this, I contend, that such responses will come into conflict with certain ideas someone might entertain about certain others; for example, that slaves are not fully human. Take the slaveowner’s relation to the slave girl he rapes or takes as a concubine. Part of what it means to say that she is not fully human, as Cavell, Gaita and others have noted, is that sexuality does not go deep with her, so that she will not suffer because of this as a white woman would. Yet the slave-owner’s jealousy, say, of this girl’s relation with her black husband, and the attachment that this reveals in his relation to her, are apt to belie this claim; if sexuality does not go deep with her then why this jealousy? To generalise, the big facts I just noted have a place in our lives with others and in determining various concepts in terms of which we understand each other that is founded on these natural ways we respond to other human beings; potentially any other human being is within the scope of such responses just because such responses are not mediated by our thoughts or reflections about any particular group (race, class) of human beings. Attention to such facts, then, provides a plausible reason why it was that slavery as practiced in the American South could not be maintained; because this practice was necessarily in tension with the way in which we respond to other human beings without thinking, despite the various things we might (for a time) think about them, for example that slavery is a natural or proper state for some people. Returning to Diamond, on this picture and thinking of Wiggins’ argument about slavery, we can say that given the ‘cumulative process within which we have shaped a form of life constitutive of moral rationality … we

Impartial versus Public Reasons  107 can see to be blocked off, as failed thought, any conception of justice that excludes from justice-thought some group of human beings’ (Diamond 2019, pp. 304–305). And there is no recourse in defence of symmetry to appeal back to Aristotle’s argument about natural slaves since that ‘involves failing to see [as this Wigginsian/Wittgensteinian account suggests] that thought has a teleology, and that, although what belongs to that teleology is shaped by us, we may get the job of such shaping done well or badly’ (Diamond 2019, p. 305). With respect to Aristotle’s defence of slavery we can say ‘that it can become clear (though it may not always have been clear) that there is only one thing to think here’ (Diamond 2019, p. 305). We might add, thinking of Kuusela’s argument, that the teleology of thought is connected to what it is to do well as a human being in the sense of navigating the human world we share with other human beings. At this point though the argument above may seem to be in tension with my earlier claim that moral judgements are not universalizable, and that they have, as I have outlined, an essentially personal character. I see the tension, but do not think it is fatal to my argument. It is important to note that the argument Wiggins presents is that the claim that ‘there is nothing else to think but that slavery is unjust and insupportable’ is a candidate for plain truth. He does not say that this can be established in advance of ‘drawing upon the full riches of our intersubjectivity and our shared understanding’ and the various considerations that that involves. That is to say that truth is to be established through an intersubjective process from which it may emerge that ‘there is nothing else to think but that slavery is unjust and insupportable’. That claim, I suggest, is not best understood as a universal moral claim but as a claim about the limits of moral thought within which the whole practice of making any moral judgements then takes place. That is a point I wanted to stress in Chapter 3 where I discussed how the notion of another person as a limit to our will could become part of the way in which moral thought generally is structured for us. That to my mind is all that one could expect, and indeed all that one should expect, from the idea of moral objectivity, given how, as I have argued, what one can and cannot say in judgement of another or in defence of some putative moral claim depends on what one can and cannot reasonably say in a serious and essentially open-ended discussion to a particular human being, say to them, that is, without denying or falsifying the moral meaning they have made of their life. The point from Diamond, then, is that, at the end of the process that Wiggins envisages, if someone in the pro-slavery camp still wants to defend slavery, then their thought would fail as thought. Diamond’s point is that we might reach a point – remember that Wiggins’ claim is still just a candidate for plain truth – at which the position advanced by anyone in the pro-slavery camp cannot seriously be meant, that they have in continuing to press the argument severed

108  Impartial versus Public Reasons themselves from the possibility of serious communicative engagement on questions of justice with others that are so engaged. To be clear, in claiming that we must attend to what a particular human being has made of certain values within their life, and then that on the basis of this we must accept they may reach a different moral judgement to us in certain situations, I have not suggested that another can make just anything they like of those values. It remains the case, of course, that the values and concepts involved here are shared. In the case of the pro-slavery camp the thought then is that ‘drawing upon the full riches of our intersubjectivity and our shared understanding’ one can no longer claim, given our shared conception of justice, that one human being may justly own another. In other words, the idea is that we may reach a point where, in ‘drawing upon the full riches of our intersubjectivity and our shared understanding’ of what we have collectively made of the conception of justice, this conception is no longer compatible with the practice of slavery. On such a picture, then, we have a way of thinking about ethics that is not merely conventional and according to which we might come to see an ethical claim (here, the example is that slavery is unjust and unsupportable) that is simply true. However, in so doing no appeal is made to anything that we think of as the view of impartial morality, as the view does not attempt to transcend but actually gets its credentials and claim to truth from the way in which an actual ethical debate is fleshed out merely in terms of public uses of reason. To explain the difference, the impartial point of view, however it is understood in its detail, is at least a point of view that abstracts from any particular agent and their moral thought and deliberation, and in so doing it imposes a specific form on moral deliberation; even where it involves engaging with concrete individuals it is still, as I have noted, directed at just anyone. The moral significance of this, as Chappell and many others note, is that it is detached from the biases and prejudices of our particular social situation and our particular lives. Sometimes, of course, the issue here is reframed in terms of an ideal observer, an observer and agent who, as Roderick Firth says, and as Williams cites (ironically), is ‘omniscient, disinterested, dispassionate, but otherwise normal’ (Williams 2006 p. 145). Of course, in our moral reasoning we should attempt to overcome our biases, prejudices and special pleading by individuals. But abstracting both from our particular social situations and our particular lives makes justification, in Chappell’s words, ‘justification period’ (Chappell 2014, p. 98). This is not then the kind of justification that is envisaged by Wiggins that ‘[b]y drawing upon the full riches of our intersubjectivity and our shared understanding… it will become apparent that there is nothing else to think but that slavery is unjust and insupportable’. Our intersubjective and shared understanding necessarily refers to us as socially situated agents and as concrete individuals and interlocutors

Impartial versus Public Reasons  109 with our own lives and, in ways that will become clear in the next chapter, our own distinctive moral voice to contribute to our shared moral deliberations. This is not to say that such an understanding is merely relative, but to say that it is through the – of course – socially situated cumulative process of clarification of our concepts and the way they can feature in genuine as opposed to failed thought that we come to recognise that there is nothing else to think but that slavery is unjust and insupportable. While such a thought may emerge from our social situation, the explanation of how that thought comes about is not reducible to that situation and the merely historical descriptive process through which – according to that different kind of explanation – our social situation came about. In making the above points I do not suggest that there cannot be any acceptable sense of moral impartiality, merely to reject impartial moral theorising, theorising that abstracts from any particular social situation and, as I suggested, imposes a specific form on moral thought and deliberation. So, to consider a conception of impartiality compatible with all I have said, I want to look at Anne Maclean’s argument against Peter Singer’s Equality Principle. Any system of ethics, Singer thinks, that is not merely customary requires this principle. Maclean outlines Singer’s argument in the following four steps: 1. A system of morality (or ethics) involves moral or ethical judgements, judgements about what ought or ought not to be done. 2. A moral judgement requires a standard (or reason) by reference to which it can be supported. 3. Moral standards (or principles of justification) must be ‘disinterested’ or ‘impartial’ in the sense described above. (Singer uses these two expressions interchangeably). 4. Impartiality requires equality – it requires that equal weight be given to the interests of all those an action is likely to affect. As Singer puts it: ‘Taking the impartial element in ethical reasoning to its logical conclusion means… accepting that we ought to have equal concern for all human beings.’ (Maclean 1983, pp. 45–46) Maclean’s argument then is that ‘the move to step (4) … is fallacious; Singer has failed to see that he has shifted from one sense of ‘impartiality in step (3) to another different sense in step (4)’ (Maclean 1983, p. 46). To explain, Singer himself does not think that it follows from his principle that every member of a given group ought to be treated exactly the same way. Singer’s example here is of a warrior who with respect to the distribution of his group’s nuts ‘may say … that my prowess as a warrior entitles me to a bigger share of the nuts. This justification is impartial in the sense

110  Impartial versus Public Reasons that it entails that anyone who equals my prowess as a warrior should get as many nuts’ (Maclean 1983, p. 46, her emphasis). Of course, as Singer is aware, the mere appeal to prowess on its own does not validate the warrior’s claim. However, it may do if being a warrior is such a strenuous occupation that one requires extra food over and above that required in the case of those with less strenuous jobs. So far so good. But now Maclean asks us to imagine another scenario. Suppose a particular warrior gives some of his nuts to two weak and elderly members of the group (to avoid complications, we shall suppose that he keeps enough of the nuts to maintain his prowess as a warrior; perhaps he has an especially strong constitution). When asked to justify giving his surplus nuts to these two people (rather than to others equally weak and elderly) he replies that they are his parents. (Maclean 1983, p. 47) Now, as Maclean goes on to say, if the warrior’s justification is to count as a moral one, then, according to Singer, it must be impartial or disinterested; it must be a justification ‘that can be accepted by the group as a whole.’ [But is] there any reason at all why this justification could not be accepted by the group as a whole? I suggest there is not. (Maclean 1983, p. 47) It is not at all implausible that the group might decide that any warrior with elderly parents might in the same situation give up some of his nuts to them. Such a position is entirely compatible with impartiality and disinterestedness as characterised in Singer’s step (3). Singer, as Maclean points out, needs, but does not seem to have, an argument as to why the Equality Principle is itself ‘the standpoint of reason’. The ’standpoint of reason’ is what Singer and other impartialist moral theorists are really after in appealing to the impartial point of view; thinking of Chappell’s helpful thought, they want ‘a justification period [not] justification to’. But the conception of impartiality represented in step (3) does not lead without further assumptions to step (4), where those further assumptions, as Maclean goes on to argue, will indicate a particular conception of morality, not one that is derived from ‘the standpoint of reason’ alone. Now I too accept the conception of impartiality and disinterestedness represented in Singer’s step (3). But as this example makes plain, while a group may accept that a warrior may morally give his extra nuts to his weak and elderly parents, it is a matter for the group to decide; it does not follow from the ‘standpoint of reason’ that they must reach this agreement. But given the

Impartial versus Public Reasons  111 importance of family in the group of that kind of value – and, yes, of the love between parents and children – they may reach such a judgement. Clearly the modest conception of impartiality I have just outlined is not what many impartial moral theorists have in mind. If some do, then fine by me, but that is a conception of impartiality that is grounded in the social situations, including the values, of real people deciding together what they morally ought to do. I suggested earlier a different conception of impartiality than that offered by, for example, Singer. But the most significant objections to impartial morality have been largely directed at impartiality in this strong sense I reject. So, for example, Bernard Williams’ claim that impartial morality does not leave room for personal relationships and projects, including those projects that give us reason to go on in life at all, is targeted precisely at utilitarian and Kantian moral theorists that defend impartialism in the strong sense I am questioning. But Williams’ point about the possibility of conflict between impartial morality and the demands of personal relationships and projects is not, as he says, ‘only in the outcome’. He goes on to say that there ‘can also be conflict with moral demands on how the outcome is arrived at: the situation may not have been subjected to an impartial process of resolution, and this fact itself may cause unease to the impartial moral consciousness’ (Williams 1981, p. 17). Here, Williams cites Charles Fried’s thought that if a man is in a position to save only one of two people in equal peril where one of whom is his wife it may be permissible from the point of view of impartial morality to save his wife. Against this, Williams famously claims that ‘this construction provides the agent with one thought too many: it may have been hoped by some (for instance, by his wife) that his motivating thought, fully spelled out, would be the thought that it was his wife, not that it was his wife and that in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one’s wife’ (Williams 1981, p. 18). But as Alasdair MacIntyre points out: This kind of problem only arises for Fried, and for a variety of utilitarian and Kantian writers, because they liquidate the requirements of justice within the household or family, the requirements of justice within the political community, and the requirements of justice in a variety of other particular spheres (church and school, for instance) into some conception of the requirements of justice, as such, the imposition of which makes all or almost all social particularity irrelevant. Thus it is not impersonality and impartiality as such that create those problems [suggested by the kind of impartial reasoning in evidence with for example Fried] which Williams rightly stigmatizes as false problems. It is rather an impersonality and an impartiality required to hold between all persons whatsoever equally, a socially contextless impersonality and

112  Impartial versus Public Reasons impartiality which is the source of those problems. … [Williams] accepts too readily the accounts of impersonality and impartiality advanced by Kantians and utilitarians as more or less adequate accounts of what morality requires and then has to counterpose the kind of allegiance required by ground projects and deep personal relationships to the kind of allegiance required by morality. In consequence he does not consider the kind of impersonality and impartiality which is legitimately and morally required of us by certain types of project and certain types of relationship. (MacIntrye 1983, p. 123) MacIntyre puts his concern with Williams this way: [W]hen he asserts that if I save my wife from drowning at the expense of someone else’s life, no further justification is required over and above the appeal to the fact that she is after all my wife. … Does Williams want to attend to the word ‘my’ or the word ‘wife’? (MacIntrye 1983, p. 122) If it is the word ‘wife’ that we attend to, then one might perfectly well say that justice requires that I save my wife (and, you know, depending on the state of my marriage, it may even be that I might really prefer to save the other person). But if it is the word ‘my’ that we attend to, what, one might ask – if it is not that I, like any other husband seeing his wife drowning, ­really should save her – is the force or significance of the word ‘my’? Thus, MacIntyre suggests that Williams is ‘to some degree at least a victim of what Godwin calls the magic in the pronoun “my”’ (MacIntrye 1983, p. 123).3 I have some sympathy with MacIntyre’s criticism of Williams; there may indeed be demands, even impartial ones in the sense I have already acknowledged, internal to certain personal relationships and projects. Nevertheless, my argument has been that we need not see these demands, including what we take to be moral demands, as fixed while other relevant demands on us may not be impartial in any sense. To make two different points with respect to those last two claims; such demands depend on what particular groups of people might agree on, and this of course might change; but it may also be that different people among them in the same situation – in the same type of relationship or engaged in the same type of project – may recognise differing moral demands and thus requirements on them. Further, that last point need not be to fall back onto the bare fact that this is my relationship or my project. Rather, it is to indicate an account of what I, in my own particular and unique life, have made of that relationship or project and, in particular, made of the values internal to them, an account that explains and

Impartial versus Public Reasons  113 justifies what I take to be demanded of me in particular. There is, I suggest, no ‘magic’ in this kind of claim. To return to my main discussion, there is an important distinction between public moral reasons leading to moral judgement and impartial reasoning and the impartial point of view as defended by utilitarians and Kantians alike. Specifically, that unlike the impartial point of view, one cannot say in advance of any actual socially situated and shared process of deliberation what truth in ethics amounts to. From the point of view of impartial moral theorists this will seem to be a fatal flaw to the position I have outlined. However, the way in which Diamond develops Wiggins’ account of truth in ethics, one might now say that the impartialist moral theorist’s appeal to practical reason takes a too easy route to the same destination and in so doing – think, for example, of Maclean’s criticism of Singer’s Equality Principle – does not establish the objective warrant that their theories claim. Of course, one further criticism for impartialists’ concerns the problem I foreshadowed for Chappell in her suggestion that ‘[p] artial love and impartial benevolence both have the right, each of them, to act as a limit and a constraint on each other’. I have earlier suggested that impartialist moral theories distort our understanding of the realm of value generally, but how, one might now object, are we to determine the authority of specific values in various situations where such values come into conflict if not by appeal to something like the impartial point of view? It is a function of the kind of view I have put forward that I cannot say, and do not think it can be said, in advance where the demands of a stranger should give way to the demands of friendship, love, or those projects that give my life its distinctive meaning and character, or vice versa. What such values amount to is itself to be determined by what individuals make and are seen by others to make of those values in the context of particular lives. This is a point I will explore further in the next chapter. The last point above should help to clarify that in appealing to public reason as I have done, my position does not reduce to some version of contractualism. The socially situated deliberation I have in mind is not merely, as Scanlon might say, about what we owe to each other on the basis of some shared understanding of human value but rather a deliberation about the place, importance and indeed our very understanding of various values in our lives.4 To put the point crudely, we are not as I understand our situation in a position where we can agree, again in advance, what we are contracting over. Notes 1 Taylor 2012, Chapter 4.

114  Impartial versus Public Reasons 2 Kuusela gives as a comparison our practices related to food. As he notes, different cultures have different kinds of food, where one culture’s food may seem disgusting to another culture. Food is nevertheless essentially connected with human nourishment so that no culture counts pebbles and sticks as food. 3 MacIntyre is referring to the following famous passage from William Godwin:  the illustrious archbishop of Cambray was of more worth than his valet, … and there are few of us that would hesitate to pronounce, if his palace were in flames, and the life of only one of them could be preserved, which of the two ought to be preferred. … Suppose I had been myself the valet … Suppose the valet had been my brother, my father or my benefactor. This would not alter the truth of the proposition. … What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’, that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth? (Godwin 1798/1976, pp. 169–170) 4 Scanlon 2000.

7 A Moral Life

At the end of the last chapter, I suggested that the solution to practical problems where moral values are in conflict cannot always be determined in advance of what individual people make of those values in the context of their particular lives. So, while I have suggested, following Diamond, and via her Wiggins, there may be a kind of convergence that can indicate certain moral facts, as for example that there is nothing else to think but that slavery is morally unjust and insupportable, such convergence will be more modest than moral theorists typically hope to achieve. As I have argued throughout this book, doing justice to the particular moral lives of different people involves conceding that moral judgements cannot be universalized. In this last chapter I want to defend this claim by attending to a particular life that illustrates and commends this point to us. The life I want to consider is that of Absalom Sydenstricker as given by his daughter Pearl Buck in her memoir Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Soul. Absalom, or Andrew as he is called in the memoir, was a Southern Presbyterian missionary who travelled to China in 1880 and spent most of the rest of his life there until his death in 1931. It is an extraordinary memoir of a most uncompromising and impracticable man, one that does not shy away from his peculiar flaws and blindnesses, but which is imbued by Buck with such a spirit of love – one might better say alluding to Simone Weil, loving attention – that we come to see that Andrew’s life as the particular moral being he was and, given the circumstances he found himself in, could not have unfolded in any other way. It is a life with a most singular moral purpose and one that teaches us, despite all that we might question in it, what a particular kind of value through one’s commitment to it might amount to. At the beginning of her memoir, Buck relates that she had suggested to Andrew that he write down the story of his life: He had had adventures enough to fill books and had been in danger of his life again and again. He had seen the Chinese people as few white men ever have – in the most intimate moments of their own lives, in DOI: 10.4324/9781003415664-8

116  A Moral Life their homes, at marriage feasts, in sickness and in death. He had seen them as a nation in the cycle of their times – he had seen the reign of emperors and the fall of empire, revolution and the rise of a republic and revolution again. … But when it was finished the story of all his years made only twentyfive pages. Into twenty-five pages he had put all that seemed important to him of his life. … It was the story of his soul, his unchanging soul. Once he mentioned the fact of his marriage to Carie, his wife. Once he listed the children he had had with her, but in the listing he forgot entirely a little son who lived to be five years old and who was Carie’s favourite child, and he made no comment on any of them. (Buck 1937, pp. 2–3) I have entitled this chapter ‘A moral life’, but that last, hardly complimentary, paragraph above perhaps suggests something far from such a life. And, indeed, Buck admits to her pain at recognising that ‘there was no fatherhood in him’: Else how explain … when having discovered to his horror the minimum cost of a college education, he decided he would not rob the New Testament [Andrew’s proposed Chinese translation] and so wrote to a certain rich man of his acquaintance to ask if did not want to educate the incipient missionary? … That daughter [clearly Buck herself], hearing, was struck to the heart. … ‘He needn’t bother about me,’ she said, strangling with pride and hurt. ‘I can look out for myself. I’ll leave college this very day and go and get a job at the ten cent store…’ … In after years she grew closer to him, as close as any human could, and came to understand and value him, to know why he was as he was, both great and small. But all that later knowledge cannot quite wipe away the bereavement of that hour. For Andrew’s children were bereaved in what they never had, in what he could not give them, because he had given everything in him to God. (Buck 1937, pp. 187–188) As Buck says, she does come to understand, value and respect Andrew. Buck’s portrait of her father is in the end a loving one of a man of singleminded moral purpose, a man who could be no other than he was. To see Andrew’s life as the particular moral life that it was, one needs to see it in the light of Buck’s love for her father, her loving attention to the details of his life, some of which I will now relate.

A Moral Life  117 One of the most striking things about Andrew Buck relates, given the many dangers and hardships he had to endure, was that ‘for fifty years the pattern [of his life] is one of simple happiness’: Andrew was the happiest person I have ever known and he never struggled. He went his way, serene and confident, secure in the knowledge of his own rightness. … He took his own way with proud tranquillity. There was a greatness in his clear determination. (Buck 1937, p. 43) Yet, as Buck goes on to say, it was not his religion that gave him this sense of determination, it was rather a quality internal to him: Had he been a lesser mind he would have chosen a lesser god, had he been born for to-day he would have chosen another god, but whatever he chose would have been as much god to him. Whatever he did he would have done with that sword-like singleness of heart. (Buck 1937, p. 43) It was part of that singleness of mind with which he served his god that Andrew could not serve any institution, including the missionary authorities who employed him (I won’t say he worked for them because he clearly only worked for God). This is illustrated, Buck notes, by his attitude towards the Chinese people: He grew to love greatly the Chinese. It was a complaint against him that if the choice were given him to believe a Chinese or a white man, he always believed the Chinese. ‘I’ve learned bitterly that I can trust them more,’ he used to retort, grimly. He was rewarded by their devotion to him, and this did not make him better loved by his fellows. The truth was that Andrew was completely intolerant of the policies of the missions. It was the policy of the missionaries to stand together at all costs against the ‘natives.’ … But Andrew would sweep such talk aside with a gesture of his great hand. … He had no reverence for any human authority whatever. … Yes, they wanted to be rid of Andrew’s intolerance of race superiority and priestly authorities. ‘A prince of the church!’ he used to say. ‘Oh, pshaw – there’s no such thing possible!’ (Buck 1937, pp. 112–113)

118  A Moral Life They wanted to be rid of Andrew for other reasons as well, including for his childlike lack of worldliness. So, for example, given the piracy of the Chinese boatmen who demanded more money than agreed for Andrew’s tours into the interior, Andrew alights upon the idea of buying his own boat: … and he happened to have a sum of money for it. A man in America had given it to him to build a chapel in memory of his dead wife, but Andrew decided it would be more useful to God to buy a boat with the money. (Buck 1937, pp. 191–192) Unsurprisingly this rich American was furious with Andrew – as it turns out ‘his wife was always seasick and particularly hated boats’ (Buck 1937, p. 192) – and demanded his money back. This is astonishing to Andrew: ‘How can he ask for the money back when he knows it is spent? Besides, I told him very clearly [after the fact of course] that a boat would be more useful now to me than a chapel’ (Buck 1937, p. 192). Of course, Andrew is asked by the mission board to account for the money but the board member who writes to him demanding this makes the mistake of adding that ‘Mr Shipley is one of our wealthiest donors and it is most unwise to offend him in any way’ (Buck 1937, p. 194). Reading this, a ‘glitter of ice shone in Andrew’s eyes’, and so in reply he wrote what his children called one of his God-almighty letters, inquiring of the board in simple, brief phrases what they meant by bowing their heads to Mammon … As for him, he would not listen to any rich man or to them, but only to God. (Buck 1937, pp. 194–195) At the same time, of course, it cannot be denied that the whole missionary endeavour in China of which Andrew was a part was an exercise in imperialism, and one which many Chinese, especially and most violently during the communist revolution under Mao, resisted. Buck reflects on this also: The mind can acknowledge the force of the Chinese right to refuse foreigners upon their soil, it can acknowledge the unwarranted imperialism of such men as Andrew, righteous though they were, and honourable in intent and of good meaning … But the heart shudders. For those who were martyred were the good and the innocent, none the less good and innocent because they were blind. … There is no reconciling these two, the mind and the heart. The mind may say a thousand times, and rightly, ‘They had no right to be there.

A Moral Life  119 They provoked what they received.’ But the heart answers, ‘They were innocent, for they believed what they did was of God.’ (Buck 1937, pp. 144–145) It is tempting, I recognise, to suggest the two can in fact be reconciled, that the heart should yield to the mind, to reason as one might otherwise say. Yet the testimony of Andrew’s life remains. As blind as he was in his life, and in his unswerving dedication to a particular conception of the good, a conception of the good that could not be given life independently of the manner in which Andrew lived it, Andrew shows us something about the possibilities of moral value that we need to consider or as some might rather say, confront. At least, Andrew was aware of the danger he was courting: ‘Were you afraid?’ we asked Andrew when he was an old man, remembering. He considered. ‘There have been times in my life when I have been afraid. But it was always over small matters.’ He meant thieves, noises in the night… ‘But I never was afraid when I was on God’s business,’ he said. ‘Yet some were killed,’ we murmured. ‘It is not death one fears,’ he said. It was one of the simplicities to which there was no answer. (Buck 1937, p. 146) One can, of course, confront Andrew’s conception of the good, which is really, and crucially for the point of this book, to confront Andrew. The question I would pose, and have posed in different ways throughout this book, is whether there is anyway as we might say to ‘place him’, accommodate him within moral theory that does not discount the reality of his life and the values it embodies. In other words, can moral theory really account for the moral meaning and significance of Andrew’s life. As confounding as it may be for those people, to quote Murdoch, ‘whose fundamental moral belief is that we live in the same empirical and rationally comprehensible world and that morality is the adoption of universal and openly defensible rules of conduct’ (Murdoch 1956, p. 47), people like Andrew show us something of what moral value might amount to, and many people I contend will be glad that the world has such people in it. I suggested above that to confront the conception of the good that Andrew’s life expresses is really also to confront Andrew, but that remark, of course, needs some explaining. I have noted Murdoch’s claim with respect to morality that ‘it is especially important to attend to the initial delineation of the field of study, observing where and in what way moral

120  A Moral Life judgments may be involved’ (Murdoch 1956, p. 33. My emphasis). As I have argued in this book, moral judgements, or at least choices, are involved in our delineation of the field of study. So, as I have argued with respect to moral theorising: 1) the objects of moral thought and understanding are conceived as something separable from our responsiveness to those very objects (Chapter 1); 2) moral address or judgement is conceived of in ways that are essentially impersonal so that moral judgements are always universalizable (Chapter 2); 3) a certain conception of value is defended that is fitted to play or a role in moral theorising (Chapter 4); and 4) any moral consensus with genuine authority such as we might achieve requires a conception of what I called strong moral impartiality that entails all of this (Chapter 6). But none of these claims, I have argued, are morally neutral; they are all chosen. It is a moral choice to suppose that our whole scheme of emotional responsiveness to others and the world requires some independent rational justification. It is a moral choice to claim that moral judgement ought to be impersonal and so that likewise moral judgements are always universalizable. To hold one conception of moral value as the right conception when there are clearly other available conceptions is a moral choice. To claim then that the whole of morality requires a conception of impartiality that entails all of this is also a moral choice. The crucial terms I have emphasised above are all moral terms, and, more specifically, it is as moral terms that they do the work they do in each of these claims. So, to return now to my discussion of Andrew, I want to suggest a different ‘initial delineation of the field of study’. At the very beginning of this book, I noted Winch’s endorsement of Spinoza’s suggestion, as Winch sees it, that ‘“knowledge of good and evil” expressed in a purely general way is a confused form of awareness’. One way to flesh out that thought is to say that while one can, obviously enough, talk of good and evil in an entirely general way, in the end, or in another sense at the very beginning, to morally judge is to judge someone, a particular human being. At this point, as I have suggested in this book, generality falls away and our question is: what can we say to this other person? Here I suggest two things, and I acknowledge that this too involves a moral choice on my part. First, that whatever moral theoretical devices – to use Murdoch’s terminology – we might wish to deploy here, they are not going to excuse us from morally attending to the reality of the person and the life that confronts us or from their capacity of moral address and judgement directed at us. And second, that we cannot simply assume that there is in terms of such moral theoretical devices everything that we might require to reply to any possible moral challenge they and their life might present to us and our own moral understanding of human life. I, myself, am inclined to think that any conception of morality that is not at bottom simply conventional must admit of the possibility of moral surprise or revelation in the face of the presence and

A Moral Life  121 life of another. So that, at the very least, even if one chooses to frame moral thought in terms of the possibilities of distinct moral theories, one must concede that in virtue of this basic moral reality such theories will remain incomplete. Of course, at this point some might argue that there is plenty we might say to Andrew. For example, that despite whatever good he did in China – which, they may add, is debatable – he was on Buck’s account a pretty bad father as well as blind to some important values. But consider the points I made above. Consider point 2. Importantly Buck does not say that Andrew was a bad father (only that there was no fatherhood in him) so thinking of the discussion of Chapter 2 and what I there suggested was the personal nature of moral address, who then is in a position to say this? Similarly, while it is true to some extent that Andrew’s commitment to his god closed him off from the recognition of much else that was of value, I have questioned, again in Chapter 2, the idea that there is some universal moral position according to which all values can be recognised and given their proper place. We occupy different moral positions and value features in those different positions in very different ways. Thinking of my discussion of Gabriel and Miss Ivors, what one person makes of the value of national identity obscures the value of a certain more cosmopolitan way of living, and vice versa. Or consider point 3. It may be debatable how much good Andrew did, but that of course assumes a conception of value according to which ‘good’ simply refers to something that is to be promoted. Against this I have suggested in Chapter 4 that there are other conceptions of value. The value of Andrew’s life then cannot be captured in terms of the good he brought about; Andrew’s life exemplified a particular orientation to the world, the value of which (the single-minded commitment to a particular ideal) cannot simply be considered in terms of the good consequences of his actions. Thinking of my discussion of Gaita, if I was called to account for my own life as a salaried philosopher in those terms, I could not do it. Of course, a moral theorist might be unimpressed by any of this, unimpressed by the example of Andrew and his life. And they can point to Andrew’s many flaws and blindnesses, suggesting perhaps that he could have done so much better than he did. Buck herself, with the rest of her family, expresses frustration at Andrew’s faults. Reproaching Andrew over the issue with the boat, his wife Carie protests but immediately sees the pointlessness in protesting: ‘“If you wouldn’t be so headstrong!” she said mournfully, and quite hopelessly. Andrew not headstrong would not be Andrew’ (Buck 1937, p. 194). Thinking of that last remark from Buck, my reply to the above complaint is to say that one cannot simply pick out and somehow separate a list of all the morally problematic qualities from those qualities that are admirable in a given person and suggest thinking of them

122  A Moral Life sans their moral flaws that, ideally, they could have been like that. As Buck says, ‘Andrew not headstrong would not be Andrew.’ So, without being headstrong who would he be? My objection is that our complainant has not really described anyone, any real person. Real people are flawed, and like Andrew their flaws are at least sometimes inseparable from the moral qualities that we see as exemplified in their lives, and this is true of even those that seem to us to exemplify the highest values in our nature. In the end what confronts us, what is for us an object of moral reflection and judgement, is actual human beings. Which is not to say, and to repeat, that we cannot criticise someone like Andrew, as Buck herself does, but merely to say that in the most fundamental respects Andrew’s life could not be, being the person he is, different than it was. There is, of course, an obvious line of objection to my criticism of universalism, or universalization, in ethics that goes like this. Think of a different person, like Andrew committed to his god, but in their case prepared to put on a vest filled with explosives so as to blow up themselves and as many unbelievers as possible in the name of their god. The general thought is that the position I have presented puts the life and moral judgements of someone like Andrew beyond criticism. More precisely they might think I put myself in a position where I am unable to determine, in a given case, whether the judgement of someone like Andrew is to be accepted or rejected. The above counterexample I will call the example of the fanatic. In his ground-breaking argument against the universalizability of moral judgements, Winch anticipated this objection offering three sorts of circumstances where we might reject such an agent’s judgement, or, as Winch puts it, their utterance that ‘I acted rightly’ (Winch 1972). First, where the ‘circumstances surrounding the utterance and the action to which it refers are such as to make us want to say that the agent is not really bothered about moral questions at all’ (Winch 1972, p. 166). Second, where an agent’s ‘ideas of right and wrong differ so profoundly from our own, that we are unwilling to accept his claim that he acted rightly’ (Winch 1972, p. 166). And third, where an agent’s ‘demeanour and accompanying conduct, show that he is being insincere’ (Winch 1972, p. 166). The fanatic of my example, of course, is very bothered about moral questions and they are also sincere. But consider Winch’s second point. There are two different things we might say here. We might accept, as Winch suggests, that a person’s conception of right and wrong differs so profoundly from ours that we will not accept their judgement. I considered a case rather like this with my discussion of Wittgenstein’s example of the tribe that were brought up from early youth to give no expression of feeling of any kind. They find it childish, something to be got rid of … ‘Pain’ is not spoken of … If anyone complains he is ridiculed or punished.

A Moral Life  123 Here it may be that we do not share enough in common with such people for it to make any sense to say we are in genuine disagreement. Disagreement between people depends on sufficient background of shared concepts, and those very distant from us temporarily but also in cultural and in other ways may not share this background. An important question here concerns what, given their moral conceptual scheme, the moral possibilities are for a given agent. So, as Bernard Williams says in this connection, ‘it was historically impossible that Alexander the Great should think of cancelling the expedition to the East in order to give the money to the poor. Such a project was not, for cultural reasons, on his moral map’ (Williams 1993, p. 60). But second, someone might claim that there are those among us who do share our conceptual scheme but deploy values within that scheme to justify demands and actions we would condemn. Any reply to this requires some care. Of course, some such person may cite a particular value, but a question to ask is whether that particular value, as it is understood within our moral conceptual scheme, supports such a demand or judgement. Consider a particular value that has been suggested to me in this connection, honour. Out of honour, say when a person believes that they have been grievously disrespected by you, a person may demand that you fight them. But if we are considering our moral conceptual scheme (as opposed to say that of Alexander the Great) we should question whether honour as we understand it could support such a demand. We need not accept this demand; honour just doesn’t require any such thing within our conceptual scheme. Here, it is no good to reply that this person does not see honour as we do. To think this would throw our entire moral conceptual scheme into doubt and confusion; there are moral schemes that require slights to honour to be settled that way, but ours is not one of them. My suggestion has been that given our shared moral conceptual scheme different agents may reasonably reach, that we might reasonably accept that they reach, different moral judgements to us in the same situation. I have not suggested that we get unilaterally to choose, to accept, reject or redefine, particular ideas in such shared conceptions in such a radical way as my fighter. This is not to say that people have not tried to do so. The extreme example of the fantastical historical narrative invented by the Nazis about the German people to justify their actions is a case in point. Talk of different conceptual schemes, however, invites another objection; that morality is at some fundamental level only relative so that there are no truly objective values. As I argued in the last chapter, I do not think this is so. I believe it can indeed make sense to say, along with Wiggins, that ‘at some point in rehearsing these considerations, it will become apparent that there is nothing else to think but that slavery is unjust and insupportable’. But the way in which I am suggesting we are able to reach this conclusion differs radically from what is suggested by ethical theorists. On my account

124  A Moral Life any progress we might make in ethics – and I take it that there can be progress and that it makes sense to talk about objectivity or truth in ethics – will be only piecemeal. As should be clear from my argument the idea that we might alight upon a theory of ethics that can resolve all moral disagreements, will solve the problem of objectivity in ethics, as we might say, in one fell swoop, is an illusion. As the example of slavery perhaps itself suggests, the possibilities of progress in ethics are immensely hard. To see them as hard in the way I am suggesting depends on the fact that, as Murdoch says, ‘my initial delineation of the field of study’ is quite different from that of moral theorists. Moral progress towards a shared understanding in ethics depends not on the dictates of some moral theory as that which might be debated and defended in the narrow confines of moral philosophy, but on what can be achieved in a serious moral exchange between actual people. It depends upon what I can in this way say for myself in defence of my moral ideas and what you, in turn, might say in reply for yourself in defence of your own moral position. There are various possibilities that such an exchange might lead to. I might come to see on the basis of such an exchange that I was mistaken, or you might come to that see that you were. But, on the other hand, I might come to see that while your position is both worthy of my moral respect and shows me something about what is morally possible in a given human life, it is not a position I myself could occupy, that this possible moral life is not one I could lead. But in the most general terms I suggest that we cannot say in advance what might be achieved via genuine conversation, even between people whose moral views are vastly different and conflicting. The case of the black American musician Daryl Davis illustrates the point.1 Davis sought out and became friends with Roger Kelly, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. In time they visited each other’s homes for meals, Kelly attended Davis’s performances and, unbelievable as it may seem, Davis was invited to attend Klan rallies. In the end both men respected each other. Which is not to say that Kelly necessarily changed his views about racial segregation, though his close friendship with Davis is surely in tension with that view, and he did leave the Klan even giving Davis his Imperial Robe. I am not going to try to make any further sense of this, and I am not sure even Kelly or Davis themselves could – or would feel they need to. Mercifully for most people they do not feel the need to find a way to fit some moral stance or friendship into a wider moral theory. To return to the general point, the kind of exchange I am here suggesting, if I can put it in one phrase, is where morality both begins and ends. What it requires is that I take you seriously as a potential moral interlocutor, and that you pay me the same respect. It requires, in this regard, that in entering such an exchange, such a conversation, I have not in my own mind determined in advance the terms of the discussion and thus what you might say to me that may be relevant to my

A Moral Life  125 own moral position. On the contrary, the kind of openness I am here proposing carries with it the possibility that what you might say to me or simply show me might alter my whole way of conceiving of the moral. To consider a very different kind of objection, it might seem to some, and despite my attempts to forestall this objection, that my treatment of moral theory really caricatures it. I suggested in Chapter 5 that Nunu, from the safety of her friendship with M., is able to re-imagine her life with her mother in a more honest way. But, of course, there are philosophers that deploy the imagination in the articulation of their theoretical positions, there are philosophers who, we might say, deploy just the kind of literary style that I have contrasted here with moral theorising. An obvious example here would be Nietzsche. Thus, one might argue that my criticisms are really just about a certain style of moral philosophy and moral theorising, one that eschews any use of images or metaphors for bare argument or, as they might say, rational persuasion that can be achieved independently of the mode of its presentation or of our affective response to it. There are two replies I want to make to this objection. The first is that some analytic moral philosophers have thought that insofar as the philosophy and the method of persuasion offered by a philosopher like Nietzsche does not involve explicit philosophical argument it is nonrational, even that one might question whether Nietzsche is a philosopher.2 The second related reply is to suggest that while moral theorists may indeed make use of images and metaphors and similar literary devices in the presentation of their theories, they are likely to think that their conclusions have a more substantial foundation than that of metaphor. But, of course, they need not. Here again I turn to Murdoch. In the ‘The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts’, Murdoch suggests that moral philosophy requires two things: The examination should be realistic. Human nature … has certain discoverable attributes, and these should be suitably considered in any discussion of morality. Secondly, since an ethical system cannot but commend an ideal, it should commend a worthy ideal. Ethics should not be merely an analysis of ordinary mediocre conduct, it should be a hypothesis about good conduct and about how this can be achieved. How can we make ourselves better? is a question moral philosophers should attempt to answer. And if I am right the answer will come partly at least in the form of explanatory and persuasive metaphors. (Murdoch 1970, p. 78) Most moral philosophers will have no quarrel with Murdoch’s first point (ethical naturalism in some broad sense is assumed) or with the idea that we should be asking ourselves how to make ourselves better. They are, I

126  A Moral Life think, though likely to balk at the way Murdoch attempts to answer that question – with explanatory and persuasive metaphors. For Murdoch, metaphors are not just ‘useful models [but] fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition’ (Murdoch 1970, p. 77). So that it seems to her ‘impossible to discuss certain kinds of concepts without resort to metaphor, since the concepts are themselves deeply metaphorical and cannot be analysed into non-metaphorical components without loss of substance’ (Murdoch 1970, p. 77). The concepts that Murdoch has principally in mind here are value concepts and the concept and metaphor she favours in her own moral philosophy is Plato’s concept of the Good. I cannot explicate Murdoch’s account of the Good here;3 my point is merely to suggest, as Murdoch does, that there can be no neutral moral philosophy, that ‘[m] oral philosophy cannot avoid taking sides, and would-be neutral philosophers merely take sides surreptitiously’ (Murdoch 1970, p. 78). I have suggested throughout this book the various ways in which would-be neutral moral philosophers do take sides and I will not repeat myself here. But what I do want to stress is that insofar as there is no neutral moral philosophy, insofar as any moral philosophy will ultimately be guided by some metaphor or ideal or another we need to ask, with Murdoch, is this a worthy ideal? I have suggested that there is no ultimate way of adjudicating between differing moral conceptions, and I understand that many will see this as a problem, but the question I have just asked points us in a quite different direction so that our question is not which rival conception is true, or most rationally defensible, but whether a particular moral conception or ideal is really worthy of us, of the best that we might be, whether it fulfils our need insofar as we are to strive to be moral beings. Here again Murdoch refers to Plato: Plato, who understood [our] situation better than most of the metaphysical philosophers, referred to many of his theories as ‘myths’, and tells us that the Republic is to be thought of as an allegory of the soul. ‘Perhaps it is a pattern laid up in heaven where he who wishes can see it and become its citizen. But it doesn’t matter whether it exists or ever will exist; it is the only city in whose politics [the good man] can take part’. (Murdoch 1970, p. 94, citing Plato’s Republic, 592) One can be a moral theorist in the sense that Plato exemplifies in the passage Murdoch quotes. In the case of such a moral philosopher nothing I have said need be construed as any kind of criticism of their philosophy. But moral theorising as it is conducted in most corners of analytic moral philosophy bears very little relation to Plato’s Republic, at least as Murdoch envisages it. For them, moral theory is not fundamentally a matter of metaphor even in the deep sense that Murdoch understands it. For them,

A Moral Life  127 moral theory is not an ideal by which to live one’s life but a method or tool for solving moral problems concerning how to act rightly. There are moral theorists in some sense with whom I am in some sympathy. I am thinking in particular of certain moral theorists in the tradition of Aristotelian virtue ethics. But here we have to be careful, since the term virtue ethics has come to mean very different things to different philosophers. One might reasonably trace the revival of virtue ethics to Elizabeth Anscombe’s essay ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. In that essay Anscombe makes three claims, but the most important among them, in my view, is … that the concepts of obligation, and duty – moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say – and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought,’ ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives of survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it. (Anscombe 1958, p. 1) The lost conception of ethics that Anscombe here refers to is the Christian law conception of ethics, a conception she thinks that depends upon being ‘bound, permitted, or excused’, where to have a law conception of ethics is to hold that what is needed for conformity with the virtues failure in which is the mark of being bad qua man (and not merely, say, qua craftsman or logician) – that what is needed for this, is required by divine law (Anscombe 1958, pp. 5–6) As she goes on to say, such a conception depends upon a belief in God as a lawgiver, a belief that we have given up, at least in the sense that our idea of being bound, our idea of moral obligations, is founded on divine law. As she says with respect to that supposed special moral sense of ‘ought’, it ‘is as if the notion “criminal” were to remain when criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten’ (Anscombe 1958, p. 6). It is against this background that Anscombe, and most notably after her Alasdair MacIntyre with his After Virtue, returns to Aristotle in the hope that having done away with the moral sense of ought we might revive that earlier sense of virtue shared by both Plato and Aristotle according to which a good man was the flourishing of a man qua man. One might then say, suggests Anscombe while thinking of the virtue of justice as a part of that flourishing: X needs what makes it flourish, so a man needs, or ought to perform, only virtuous actions; and even if, as it must be admitted may happen,

128  A Moral Life he flourishes less, or not at all, in inessentials, by avoiding injustice, his life is spoiled in essentials by not avoiding injustice – so he still needs to preform only just actions. (Anscombe 1958, p. 18) What is striking, however, when looking at contemporary virtue ethics is the mismatch between what such contemporary theorists claim and what Anscombe claims in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. The point is well made by Talbot Brewer, a virtue ethicist whose thought, despite many differences, seems aligned with the kind of objection I have outlined to ethical theory in its more mainstream sense. As Brewer says, … if one re-reads the works of Anscombe and MacIntyre today then turns directly to one of the many new readers in virtue ethics, one cannot help but notice the virtual disappearance of the movement’s despair over the fallen state of our culture, its distress over the inarticulacy of contemporary moral philosophy and inaptness of the field’s guiding questions, and its call for radical reform in modes of ethical thinking in the academy and beyond. Virtue ethics is now commonly portrayed as one of a number of competing theoretical accounts of our moral concerns rather than as a frontal assault on the coherence, articulacy, or vitality of those concerns. (Brewer 2009, pp. 3–4) This ‘normalisation’ of virtue ethics, as Brewer put it, is exemplified by the prominent virtue ethicist Rosalind Hursthouse in her On Virtue Ethics where she claims, as Brewer quotes, that ‘now in the latest collections (as I write, in 1998), it [virtue ethics] has acquired full status, recognized as a rival to deontological and utilitarian approaches’ (Hursthouse 1999, p. 2). According to such an account, as Brewer goes on to say, ‘[c]ontemporary ethical theory is … pictured as a well-defined discipline of thought – one whose central questions and problems are agreed upon by all parties to what can be called, in virtue of this agreement, “the debate”’ (Brewer 2009, p. 4). As Brewer also says, Hursthouse is no isolated case. Similar contemporary and influential understandings of virtue ethics, Brewer suggests, can be found in Trianosky (1990), Watson (1990) and Louden (1984). What such theorists share is an understanding according to which – and despite Anscombe’s explicit claim that we should dispense with morally right and wrong and moral duty – virtue ethics is essentially one other theory of right action alongside deontological and utilitarian approaches. The long quote above from Brewer captures much of my own concern with contemporary ethical theorising, a conception to which I acknowledge Brewer as a happy exception. Indeed, it seems to me that Brewer’s moral

A Moral Life  129 philosophy comes from a similar starting point to my own – from Anscombe, of course, but also from Murdoch and in particular her conception that ethical activity cannot be reduced without remainder to a series of discrete acts.4 Which is not to say that Brewer would agree with all I have argued in this book, though I think there is some agreement between us concerning what much contemporary moral theorising leaves out in our attempts to understand ourselves in relation to the ethical. One might argue, however, and contra Anscombe, that Aristotle actually did have a moral sense of ‘ought’. So, Robert Louden has suggested the following four features of ‘moral duty or ought’ (Louden 1992, p. 35). In summary: Performance of the actions in question are not merely tied to some social role but ‘something that one recognizes, all things considered, that one must do’; ‘Moral oughts and obligations concern actions that are in our power’, that is, ought implies can; ‘Failure to perform [the act] without … excuse reflects poorly on the agent’s character’; and the ‘requirement is viewed as being not just one of prudence or convenience’ (Louden 1992, p. 35). With these features in mind, Louden cites as evidence for his view Aristotle’s claim in his Nicomachean Ethics that ‘The temperate man craves for the things he ought. As he ought, and when he ought; and this is what reason directs’ (1119b17–18). As Louden goes on to say: ‘On my view, what makes Aristotle’s use of die [ought] a moral use … is simply that it satisfies the four conditions’ (Louden 1992, p. 36). However, I do not think this reply really addresses Anscombe’s central point, which is about our more modern sense of being morally obligated or bound in some way. One might question Anscombe’s speculations about the source of the sense of moral obligation or ought being a Christian law conception of ethics (Louden in fact calls her speculations ‘wild’ (Louden 1992, p. 36)), but whatever its origin when we say that one morally ought to do a certain thing, we mean that we are obligated or bound in some way to do it. The question remains then: obligated or bound by whom or what? To reply that one is here expressing duties we have to ourselves won’t do. For, of course, that is always going to be a duty or obligation that we can exempt ourselves from simply because it is we that impose it in the first place. One can go on to say that we won’t flourish if we do not form the habit of doing that sort of thing, but that just exposes the fact that the primary thought here is not that of duty at all; that we might very well (and on Anscombe’s view do best to) simply dispense with it. But there is another way in which we might think of oneself as related to certain moral demands. One might say not that we are obliged to act in some way but that we must act in that way, or that we cannot do other than to act in that way. Such expressions express not moral oughts but moral necessities or impossibilities/incapacities. I have discussed one kind of moral incapacity in connection to the foundations of our moral

130  A Moral Life relations with other human beings in Chapter 3 and, as I noted there, I have discussed this general idea in much greater length in other places.5 The notion was first expounded by Peter Winch (Winch 1972) and then taken up later by Bernard Williams (Williams 1993). The central idea of a moral incapacity as they saw it is not an incapacity to act morally but an incapacity that expresses the moral identity of the agent who makes the claim; it is an expression of their particular moral life. So, it is not a mere psychological incapacity to act in some way; one is not here indicating a mere obstacle to acting in some way, but that the agent morally can’t act (or in other cases must act) in that way. The example that Williams gives here is of Martin Luther’s response when asked to renounce his faith, ‘here I stand, I can do no other’. It would obviously be to miss the point of Luther’s words to reply, ‘go on, try’ – maybe also suggesting a course of counselling. To talk in such a way would be to fail to take Luther’s life and moral commitments seriously. To give another example, thinking of the discussion of this chapter, we might imagine Andrew saying that he morally could not abandon his mission in China. Statements of moral incapacity, however, pose a general challenge to moral theory, since while it at least makes sense to talk of what just anyone ought to do in certain circumstances it makes no sense to talk of what just anyone cannot or must do in those circumstances. Claims of moral incapacity or necessity, that is to say, are of their nature essentially personal. It is no caricature to say that the above claim, against the universalizability of moral judgements, is a fundamental challenge to moral theorising. If moral judgements are not universalizable you simply cannot have a general theory of right action. You can, as I have conceded, have a theory of the good in the sense that Plato and in his shadow Murdoch have such a theory. But theory in this sense is in the end metaphor, albeit in the deep sense of being understood as an ideal by which we might live. If that is all that is meant by moral theory, then I have no quarrel with moral theory so understood. But that is not what is commonly meant by moral theory in contemporary analytic philosophy. And it is moral theory in that sense, moral theory as an all-encompassing theory of right action and impartial (in the strong sense I have outlined) moral judgement that is the target of this book. Given the way, I have argued, that such theory obscures or distorts the very phenomena with which morality is concerned, I suggest we would do well to do without it in that sense. Of course, those who defend moral theory may well reply that we cannot in fact do without it. Which leads me to a final criticism of the project of this book. Here I want to consider a recent review of Sophie Grace Chappell’s book Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience by Rachel Fraser (Fraser 2022). Chappell’s argument in her book very much aligns with the argument of this book. The target of Chappell’s book is also, as Fraser puts

A Moral Life  131 it, the ‘tendency in moral philosophy … towards systematicity. Moral philosophers are, by and large, engaged in what Chappell calls the “game of theory building”’ (Fraser 2022, p. 5). As against this, ‘Chappell proposes “a sharpened and self-critical capacity for moral perception … together with a wide, sympathetic, and humane awareness of the sheer variety of things that can come up in our moral experience”’ (Fraser 2022, p. 6). In this respect Chappell emphasises the personal in ethics, much as I have done in this book. But Fraser is not convinced: But our separate perceptions and experiences are not the whole story. Indeed, the phrase ‘personal ethics’ shades into oxymoron. Ethics is always on the cusp of politics; its questions cannot always be asked in the first person. They are questions about how I should live with and alongside others – not how I should live, but how we should live. (Fraser 2022, p. 7) What is important for Fraser in this context is not our personal visions that we live by but the arguments that we might advance in support of how we are to live together. As she goes on to say: Our collective lives are always governed by a thicket of normatively structured institutions – institutions that orient us to a particular conception of the good. … We may live by our visions, but they can’t write our social policy. (Fraser 2022, p. 8) Fraser’s challenge to Chappell then is ‘you owe me an argument. … Arguments can be challenged, rather than merely traded, in a way that visions cannot’ (Fraser 2022, pp. 8–9). There are a couple of very general points I would make about Fraser’s criticism here. First it is not at all clear to me that moral philosophers in the analytic tradition have much effect on social policy. For one thing much work in moral philosophy is in the sub-field of metaethics dealing with questions concerning cognitivism/noncognitivism and realism/antirealism in ethics, and many of those working in this area often have nothing much to say about normative ethics at all. Even those that do work squarely in normative ethics are often concerned with technical philosophical questions that don’t have obvious policy applications. Which is not to deny that some research in this area does feed into policy debates. To give one example, a recent report by the Australian Academy of the Humanities entitled The Power of the Humanities highlights the influence of the political theorist and philosopher Philip Pettit and his book Republicanism on José Luis Zapatero, at one time Spain’s newly elected

132  A Moral Life opposition leader, and in particular in providing a vision that captured that leader’s core values. But such cases are rare; if they were more common, we would surely hear about them given the importance contemporary universities place on research that has, as they like to put it, ‘real world impacts’. But with respect to much moral theorising in the current academy it is my earnest hope that it will have no real-world impact, no influence on social policy. Which brings me to my second point, which is that Fraser makes too much of the power of argument in support of moral theorising. Of course, arguments can be challenged, but consider the following conflicting arguments from two contemporary consequentialists. According to the anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar, human suffering for most human beings outweighs any positive benefit in their living, which leads him to the conclusion that we should not have children at all, that it is always a serious harm to come into existence (Benatar 2008).6 Compare with this the very different conclusion reached by the futurist philosopher Nick Bostrom. Bostrom casts his consequentialist eye not over the suffering of those yet to be born into the world as it is, but far into the future and the prospect of 1054 human minds spread out across the universe and ‘mainly implemented in computational hardware instead of biological neural wetware’ (Bostrom 2013, p. 18).7 Being implemented in computational hardware, it seems, will allow us to banish suffering forever. Thus, Bostrom suggests that given all the bliss enjoyed by this hardly imaginable number of future people, anything we can do now, no matter how small a contribution it may be to increasing the likelihood of our survival as a species into this future and no matter how morally egregious it may seem (like letting billions starve to free up resources so we can get off this planet), would be morally the right thing to do.8 Does Fraser really think that just another argument of the kind we get in philosophy seminars nowadays is going to be counter to any of this? Surely the pertinent question for any remotely reflective person is: How do consequentialists reach such wildly different conclusions? Interestingly, Anscombe does provides an answer to that question when she says that consequentialism is a ‘shallow philosophy’ (Anscombe 1958, p. 12). Her point here is first, that in deciding what one ought to do there will always be borderline cases. But: Further, the consequentialist, in order to be imagining borderline cases at all, has of course to assume some sort of law or standard according to which this is a borderline case. Where then does he get the standard from? In practice the answer invariably is: from the standards current in his society or his circle. (Anscombe 1958, p. 13)

A Moral Life  133 This is why Anscombe suggests that consequentialism is shallow; consequentialists simply don’t question the standards that in truth underpin the theories of their circle. So Benatar has one standard while Bostrom clearly has a very different one. In between the two, of course, there are perhaps the more ‘reasonable’ conventional standards of other consequentialists. But that, of course, isn’t to provide any sort of argument to help us out here. Anscombe’s general point then, and the real problem, as she goes on to say, is that ‘the chance that a whole range of conventional standards will be decent is small’ (Anscombe 1958, p. 13). To my mind Benatar and Bostrom certainly illustrate that point: to my mind anti-natalism and futurism are simply grotesque. But that, for those who so laud philosophical argument, and thinking again of Anscombe on consequentialism, will sound a bit like refusing to argue with someone because they show a corrupt mind.9 So, it may be objected that I have no argument. To which I can only reply, thinking of theories like the ones I have just described: Where will argument take you after that? Something, I contend, has clearly gone wrong with the kind of theories Benatar and Bostrom propose, but we are not going to get much clarity about that simply by appealing to argument. I am aware, of course, that there are arguments various philosophers may deploy here in order to show how such theories are flawed. But that does not get to what is wrong with them. It is not as if these philosophers have simply made a mistake, that one of the premises of their argument say is clearly false as opposed to just counterintuitive. Indeed, given their standard our objections will seem to them to miss the mark – and according to their standard they may be right. My point is that it is the standard that is the problem. To get at what has gone wrong with such positions you need to deploy critical concepts – that such theories are not just mistaken but shallow, grotesque and so on – that moral philosophers generally disavow as acceptable in reasoned debate. But it is only such concepts that can show how, as I would claim, thought itself has gone wrong; wrong not in virtue of a mistake as one might make in a complicated mathematical problem but in virtue of no longer being serious. And by not serious I don’t just mean unreasonable since that just gets us back to what we might think of as more reasonable conventional standards; and, as I say, futurism and anti-natalism are not merely unreasonable: they are grotesque. Of course, many analytic philosophers will concede that either or both the views I have outlined from Benatar and Bostrom are, if not grotesque, at least absurd. However, it is what they often do next that indicates my point of contention with them. Specifically, it would miss the point I am making as I noted above if they then simply go on to attempt to find the flaw in Bostrom’s or Benatar’s arguments, as if what is at issue is a mistake in some detail of their arguments. To explain that in more detail, ethical thought is not like thought that leads, say, to some physical theory, and it

134  A Moral Life is not like that in a crucial respect. While one can imagine that an error, maybe quite a small and simple one, might lead to a physical theory returning an absurd result in some situation, ethical thought cannot be quite like that. While it may be equally absurd to suppose that is morally alright, even just the right thing to do, to allow one billion people now to starve to make it a tiny bit more likely that there be countless future people living in bliss throughout the universe, that absurdity, it seems to me, cannot really rest on some mere detail of the relevant theory. Rather, it is the whole theoretical approach that is absurd. And if one thinks that, then that is to accept that the absurdity is not to be found through more careful argument. Thus, what we need is not another argument but to think differently, differently about value, including about what human life is like, and about where value lies in our life and in the world. This book is an attempt to do that. And there are in this book, I want to claim, arguments in aid of that for those who care to look, most obviously in Chapter 3 where I argued that our moral thought including about human and other animal life is itself grounded and structured by our shared natural responsiveness to other human beings, other animals and indeed the natural world generally, a responsiveness that is not at least in its totality subject to prior moral thought and reflection. I recognise all the same that the argument of this book will be unconvincing to many moral theorists. Still, I suggest that they too need to consider their own natural responsiveness to others and the world as I have outlined it, to consider the concepts that such responsiveness helps constitute and, in virtue of all that, all that they in their own thought take for granted. So, for example, if a consequentialist wants to suggest Anscombe’s objections to them, and mine in her wake, are offensive, I think it is fair to ask: where does such offence come from? Not, it seems to me, from the calculus of their theory but rather from the conventional morality of their circle. As if to say, ‘around here we do not call another philosopher’s theory shallow’. But that, far from refuting Anscombe’s point, merely illustrates it. What, then, really does go into a serious moral discussion or debate between people? What is assumed in it to the extent that it is even possible? That is the question that I have invited my reader to consider. Notes 1 I thank Andrew Gleeson for this example. 2 This is the conclusion that D.D. Raphael reaches (Raphael 1983). 3 For an account of Murdoch on the Good, see Taylor 2022. 4 See Brewer 2009, pp. 72–73. 5 See Taylor 2002, 2012. 6 Benatar’s conclusion is that it would be for the best if the human race became extinct.

A Moral Life  135 7 To be clear, Bostrom does envisage his research as having policy implications; it was published in the journal Global Policy and begins with a number of dot points actually outlining what he calls ‘Policy Implications.’ 8 Bostrom really does seem to mean this. For him, any amount of misery here and now is worth it when compared to the risk that the human race becomes extinct before those 1054 can come into being. As Bostrom puts it, ‘even the tiniest reduction in existential risk has an expected value greater than that of the definite provision of any “ordinary” good, such as the direct benefit of saving one billion lives’ (Bostrom 2013, p. 19). From which it follows that if it were to cost 1 billion lives for such a risk reduction it would be worth it. And it is easy to see how that might come to pass; it might be worth marshalling all our resources for the future to mitigate the existential risk just a tiny bit even if it means a billion people here and now starve in the process. 9 As Anscombe says about consequentialism, ‘if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration – I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind’ (Anscombe 1958, p 17).

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Index

Pages followed by “n” refer to notes. Akyol, Ö. 65, 68 animals, other 47–56, 58n4–58n6, 136 Anscombe, G.E.M. 62, 72n6, 103, 127–129, 132–134, 135n9 Aristotle 100, 107, 127, 129 Austen, J. 4–6, 9–18 Baz, A. 20n1, 24–25, 29 Benatar, D. 132–133, 134n6 Bennett, J. 47 Bostrom, N. 71, 132–134, 135n7, 135n8 Brewer, T. 128–129, 134n4 Buck, P. 115–119, 121–122 Carnap, R. 105 Casals, P. 60 Cavell, S. 22–24, 29, 30, 36, 43–45, 53, 105–106 Chappell, S.G. (T.) 95–98, 108, 110, 113, 130–131 Clark, M. 62, 72n5 Coetzee, D.M. 53–54 Crary, A. 10, 15 Cummings, E. E. 60, 71n4 Dancy, J. 76, 94n2 deflection 53 Diamond, C. 3, 8, 15, 50, 52–54, 58n4, 59–61, 65, 68, 70, 71n2, 72n9, 94n5, 99–105, 106–107, 113, 115 Dostoyevsky, F. 19, 21n6 Driver, J. 75 Ellmann, R. 35 Erman, O. 72n7

fantasy, consoling 7, 74, 80, 89, 90, 92 fellowship, with human beings and animals 15, 50–51, 55, 57, 58n4 Fodor, J. 58n2 Fraser, R. 130–132 Gaita, R. 3, 15, 51, 68–71, 89, 91, 105, 106, 121 giftedness, of life 61 Godwin, W. 112, 114n3 Grünewald, M. 43–45 Hauskeller, M. 71n2, 71n3 Hawthorne, N. 20n2, 27 Heal, J. 72n9 Hopkins, J. 58n1 Hopwood, M. 76 Hursthouse, R. 128 impartiality 2, 55, 58n7, 95, 109–112, 120; principle 55, 58n7 Joyce, J. 31–36 Kahane, G. 59, 62 Kemal, Y. 63–68 Korsgaard, C. 55 Ku Klux Klan 124 Kuusela, O. 104–105, 114n2 language-games 39 Louden, R. 128–129 Luther, M. 130 MacIntrye, A. 112 Maclean, A. 109–110 Mare, de la, Walter 50

142 Index McConnell, T. 71n2 McDowell, J. 55, 93n1 McMahan, J. 49 mental concepts, processes 39–43 metaphor 125–126, 130 Miller, A. 77, 87–89 Millgram E. 75 moral incapacity 47, 129–130 moral individualism 15, 21n4, 49, 54, 55, 59 moral judgement, as personal address 15, 20, 22–25, 29–30, 107, 121, 130 moral objectivity 99, 102, 107, 124 moralism 6, 23–24, 30 Mulhall, S. 15–16, 58n4 Murdoch, I. 3–4, 7–8, 10, 18, 21n5, 73–77, 79, 89, 90, 92, 119–120, 124, 125–126, 129, 130 Nagel, T. 62 Nietzsche, F 125 Nussbaum, M. 9 Orwell, G. 47–48 particularism 3, 75, 94n2 Pettit, P. 131 Plato 126, 127, 130 primitive responses 2, 45–51, 55, 62, 106 private language argument 39–46 Raphael, D.D. 134n2 Rattigan T. 25–29 realism, in moral thought 7, 73–74, 90, 92 relativism 8

Richards, D.A.J. 37n2 Ryle, G. 10, 16 Sandel, M.J. 59–62 Savaş, A. 77–86, 91–93, 94n3 Savulescu, J. 71n2 Scanlon, T.M. 113, 114n4 scepticism 3, 53 Schopenhauer, A. 56 Singer, P. 49, 53, 55, 57, 58n7, 95, 109–110, 111 speciesism 49, 54, 55; see also moral individualism Spinoza, B. 1, 120 subjectivism 7, 8, 73 testimony 15 Trianosky, G. 128 trust 15, 19–20 Twain, M. 47 universalizability 2, 6, 22, 37n4, 58n7, 76, 98, 107, 120, 122, 130 value, intrinsic versus extrinsic 65, 68–71 Watson, G. 128 Weil, S. 21n4, 115 Wiggins, D. 8, 99–108, 113, 123 will, others as limit to our 3, 48, 107 Williams, B. 3, 37n2, 55, 71, 72n10, 99–102, 108, 111–112, 123, 130 Winch, P. 1–3, 36, 37n4, 48, 120, 122, 130 Wittgenstein, L. 7, 38–46, 56–57, 103–105 Woolf, V. 4–6, 16