Ethical Encounter: The Depth of Moral Meaning (Swansea Studies in Philosophy)

Ethical Encounter The Depth of Moral Meaning

Christopher Cordner

Swansea Studies in Philosophy General Editor: D. Z. Phillips, Rush Rhees Research Professor, University College of Wales, Swansea and Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion, Claremont Graduate University Philosophy is the struggle for clarity about the contexts of human discourse we engage in. What we need is not theoretical explanation, but clarification and elucidation of what lies before us. Recent returns to theory in many fields of philosophy, involving more and more convoluted attempts to meet inevitable counter-examples to such theories, make this need all the more urgent. This series affords an opportunity for writers who share this conviction, one as relevant to logic, epistemology and the philosophy of mind, as it is to ethics, politics, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion. Authors will be expected to engage with the thought of influential philosophers and contemporary movements, thus making the series a focal point for lively discussion. Titles include: Lilli Alanen, Sara Heinâmaa and Thomas Wallgren COMMONALITY AND PARTICULARITY IN ETHICS Christopher Cordner ETHICAL ENCOUNTER The Depth of Moral Meaning David Cockburn OTHER HUMAN BEINGS

˙ Ilham Dilman WITTGENSTEIN’S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION The Question of Linguistic Idealism John Edelman AN AUDIENCE FOR MORAL PHILOSOPHY? Raimond Gaita GOOD AND EVIL An Absolute Conception D. Z. Phillips WITTGENSTEIN AND RELIGION RECOVERING RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS Closing Epistemic Divides Rush Rhees (edited by D. Z. Phillips) MORAL QUESTIONS

Swansea Studies in Philosophy Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71504–7 hardcover (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Ethical Encounter The Depth of Moral Meaning Christopher Cordner Lecturer in Philosophy University of Melbourne Australia

© Christopher Cordner 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–78636–X This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Cataloguing-in-publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 11

9 10

8 09

7 08

6 07

5 06

4 05

3 04

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

2 03

1 02

To my parents Donald and Moyle Cordner

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1

Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond

20

2

Altruism and Moral Meaning

45

3

Altruism and ‘the Other’

61

4

Absolute Otherness and Common Humanity

74

5

Duty and Ethical Motivation

86

6

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue

104

7

‘Romantic’ Love?

130

8

Liking, Loving and Respecting Others

147

9

Goodness and Vulnerability

165

Notes

178

Bibliography

201

Index

204

vii

Acknowledgements I am greatly indebted to the important work of Raimond Gaita and Iris Murdoch. To Raimond Gaita I am also very grateful for years of friendship, involving constantly searching and illuminating discussion. An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared as ‘Aristotelian Virtue and its Limitations’ in Philosophy, 69, 269, July 1994, pp. 291–316. Some material in Chapter 4 is incorporated from a paper entitled ‘Honour, Community and Ethical Inwardness’, Philosophy, 72, 281, July 1997, pp. 401–15. The Introduction includes a revised version of two pages from ‘Literature, Morality and the Individual in the Shadows of Postmodernism’, Literature and Aesthetics, 8, October 1998, pp. 60 –77. I am grateful to the publishers of these journals for permission to reprint this material. Finally, it is a pleasure to record my gratitude to my wife Merrin for her support, over many years, of this long-gestated project.

viii

Introduction

During a school camp on a remote island several years ago some schoolboys from Queensland clubbed to death hundreds of noddy terns. The birds were nesting near the boys’ tents, made a lot of noise and left droppings on the tents and occasionally on the boys. It appears that the first clubbing was done in frustration by one of the boys. Others followed suit, soon it became sport, and then a competition between some of them to see who could kill the most. Many people were moved to describe what the boys did as brutal and callous. (Sometimes people said it was wrong, but terms like brutal and callous pretty soon followed in articulation of their sense of the boys’ deeds.) If we ask what we should look to in discovering whether what they did was really brutal and callous, one natural answer is: the effect on the birds.1 But things are not so straightforward. What exactly is that effect anyway? ‘Well, they are dead, aren’t they?’ Yes, but that fact, by itself anyway, is not at the centre of the judgement about the boys’ deeds. (Of course it is far from irrelevant.) ‘Well, I imagine the birds suffered a lot of pain too.’ Perhaps they did, but here is another element of the story. The boys’ teachers, camped some distance away, discovered what had been happening only on finding dozens of dead birds one morning on the beach as they were about to go spear-fishing. In the lengthy discussion of the whole episode which I read there was no suggestion at all that in going spear-fishing the teachers were doing the same thing as the boys did in bludgeoning the birds. Yet the ‘effect on the fish’ – that they became dead and (let us suppose) suffered pain in doing so – is the same as the effect on the birds. (An obvious difference between the two activities is that the teachers were presumably in search of food.) Further: suppose these had been aesthetically refined 1

2 Ethical Encounter

schoolboys, who decided to try to club every bird right between the eyes and in such a way that the bird was instantly killed, and that they did this out of no concern to spare the birds suffering, but to refine their sport into an art. Suppose they succeeded in their aim. It is arguable that this would have made what they did worse – more brutal and callous rather than less – even though the effect on the birds, understood in terms of their empirically identifiable suffering, was not as bad. That too suggests that the effect on the birds, so understood, does not by itself get us to a judgement of what the boys did as being callous and brutal. Acknowledging this, we can ask: what else informs those judgements? Part of the answer is: a sense of violation, of wanton destruction, and also a sense of a relentless and ruthless refusal or denial of those creatures. This answer points in a different direction from information about specific effects on the birds of what was done. Something Stuart Hampshire says may help to make the direction clear. In discussing utilitarianism Hampshire dwells on epithets usually associated with morally impossible action, on a sense of disgrace, of outrage, of horror, of baseness, of brutality, and most important, a sense that a barrier, assumed to be firm and almost insurmountable, has been knocked over, and a feeling that, if this horrible, or outrageous, or squalid or brutal, action is possible, then anything is possible, nothing is forbidden, and all restraints are threatened.2 Hampshire goes on to refer to these ‘ideas’, but that is not the right word. ‘Experiences’ is closer to the mark, but still not right on it. ‘Lived sense’ or ‘lived meanings’ is closer still – a sense of disgrace, of outrage, and so on.3 Moral philosophy has had very little indeed to say about such experiences or senses or meanings; they play almost no part in its concerns. There are several reasons for this. One is the assumption that those things belong merely to the subjective side of a divide between human subjects and the world they inhabit. The thought is that if we want to ascertain what there really is to these experiences or senses – what in them is really ‘justified’ – we need to look at what occasions the sense of outrage, of horror, and to what extent this ‘sense’ is truly warranted. As Hampshire puts the point in relation to the experience of shock: ‘Shock … is the primitive, pre-rational reaction; after rational reflection the strength of feeling associated with a prohibition can be, and ought to be, proportional to the estimated

Introduction 3

harm of the immediate and remote consequences’.4 I shall return to this first and main reason for moral philosophy’s disregard of the kinds of ‘experience’ mentioned above. A second reason for that disregard has been moral philosophy’s focus on the ‘positive’ side of morality. Morality is concerned with improving things. As Geoffrey Warnock once put it: ‘the “general object” of morality … is to contribute to betterment … of the human condition’.5 Utilitarians of course take this to be self-evident, but they are not alone. Utilitarianism is a particularly prominent expression of a broader conviction, increasingly widespread since the eighteenth century, that life can be made indefinitely better, and that morality belongs to the attempt to bring this about. Both aspects of the view are still widely assumed. By contrast the accent of those experiences I spoke of is on impassable moral barriers rather than on amelioration – the improvement of the physical, psychological and social conditions of life. (That accent does not exclude a concern for such amelioration, but resists finding it to be what is morally most fundamental.) A third reason for ignoring the senses of things Hampshire mentions is the assumption that morality is primarily concerned with action, with what is to be done. From that perspective any concern with our experiences looks like an indulgence, a distraction from the main and serious business of doing what is right.6 Let us go back to the first reason for moral philosophy’s disregard of those senses of things. It can readily be brought to bear on the episode of the boys and the birds. Someone (one in the community who hears what has happened, or perhaps one of the boys themselves) expresses his sense of what was done as callous and brutal. All right, let us look at the effects of their deeds and see if we can discover there what might warrant or justify that pained sense of violation. I said that such facts do not themselves take us to those judgements. The usual options present themselves to bridge that gap between those facts and the ‘values’ expressed. (That there is such a gap is a common description of the lesson I found in the example.) It is to be bridged, for instance, by a further ‘feeling’ in the contents of the psychology of those who speak that way. That can find expression in an old-fashioned crude subjectivism: value is simply affect or feeling in us as that attaches to our representations of how the world is. Or it can be refined into different versions of ‘projectivism’. Such feeling gets projected on to the situation by us confronting it, and the projected feeling gets (so to speak) built into the very language we use to describe the situation. The basic model here continues to be the ‘deliciousness’ of the ice-cream which is to be

4 Ethical Encounter

understood as a linguistic projection of a ‘subjective’ sensation of taste.7 Or: ‘objectivism’ – the view that value is somehow ‘in the world’ rather than merely ‘in us’ – can be preserved by holding that ‘brutal’ and ‘callous’ register so-called ‘evaluative properties’ of (in this case) the boys’ deeds. (And the evaluative properties are not entailed by the non-evaluative properties of the deeds.8) I do not find any of these options promising. That is partly because of what they all presuppose as defining the possibilities available to us. ‘Brutal’ and ‘coarse’ must either register an objective property of some object in the world or express something merely in the psychology of the users of those words. (Or perhaps a combination of these.) But what other possibilities are there, it may be asked? One answer would be: that the use of those terms registers a certain meaning in (or of) what was done. Then what is at issue in that way of speaking is neither simply object-related nor simply subject-related. And it cannot be understood as a combination of those two possibilities. To speak of the meaning of what was done prescinds from that division.9 I shall bring what I mean by that into clearer view. But first it will help to explore another example, this time involving something done to human beings. In the wider world as well as in philosophy, the evil of rape is often discussed in terms of ‘denial of autonomy’. This can seem an obvious concept to fasten on, since in being subjected to sexual intercourse without her consent (it is more commonly ‘her’ than ‘his’) the rape victim’s capacity for self-determination (her autonomy) is thwarted. This way of speaking can sometimes be partnered by talk of rape as ‘really about power’. Power and denial of self-determination are both doubtless relevant concepts here, but to highlight them – or at least to do so without seeing that something different and distinctive has to be made of them in this context – risks trivializing the significance of rape. Rape is made to sound akin to the secretary, in order to annoy the boss, sending in to see him someone he had expressly said he did not want to see. His autonomy – here his power of deciding whom he will see – is denied, too; and perhaps the secretary is trying to assert some power over him. A comparison with rape is of course absurd. But if we think that the talk of autonomy and power by itself carries the real weight of moral significance of rape, then it becomes difficult to avoid morally comparing, indeed equating, the two offences. (Talk of the need to treat someone as an end rather than merely as a means fares little better. The secretary may treat her boss as a means to the end of making herself popular, by telling jokes at his expense in the cafeteria. Again that is of vastly different moral significance from rape.)

Introduction 5

We need a much richer language than this to articulate the moral seriousness of rape. It will have to be a language rich enough to reveal sexual love as capable of bearing deep significance, since the seriousness of rape must surely be defined by its relation to that significance. There is deep ambivalence in our culture just here. On the one hand we are tempted to think that we have freed sex of the baggage of myth and ideology with which it has historically been laden, and that we can now regard it as in effect just another source of intense physical pleasure. On the other hand we are also inclined to think that we have, for the first time in history, come to be fully aware of and responsible about the seriousness of sexual crime. The problem is that sustaining any real sense of that seriousness depends upon a sense of sexual love as meaningful, or at least as capable of being meaningful, in certain ways which as a culture we now tend to deny it to be. Perhaps part of the reason we so readily accept the ‘denial of autonomy’ diagnosis is that it seems to solve this problem. Talk of denial of autonomy seems to hold the promise of registering sexual violation as serious, without implying that sexual love is capable of carrying any depth of meaning or significance. But neither that diagnosis nor the related thought that rape is really about power can take us far at all unless we attend closely to the distinctive sexual context of application of these concepts. If we do not attend to that we deprive ourselves of the conceptual resources to distinguish the seriousness of rape from the relatively trivial offence of the secretary I mentioned. If we do attend to it, we will be led to acknowledge that the seriousness of rape is articulable only in a language capable of revealing a depth of meaning in sexual love. It is evidently not simply wrong to say that if we want to understand why rape is wrong, we should look to the effect on the rape victim. (Remember the parallel thought about what was wrong in what the boys did to the birds.) But we can now see more clearly how little is established by saying that. For what that effect is depends on, and reveals itself only in, the meaning of what the victim suffered in being raped. Talk of denial of autonomy echoes Kant. It is different from talk of (physical and psychological) effects on the victim. But still it does not get us very close at all to the meaning of what the victim suffered. Putting the point slightly differently: different ways of thinking about what is wrong with rape reflect different depths of understanding of what is done to one who is raped, of what that person suffers, of the character of her violation. ‘What she suffers’ is not a straightforward psychological question. Call it a psychological question if you like, but that leaves quite open what kind and range of concepts will be needed

6 Ethical Encounter

to answer it. Among other concepts, those of trust, intimacy, vulnerability and violation would in my judgement need to be brought to bear. But since these concepts can all be used in various ways and contexts how are they to be deployed here to realize a distinctive sense of what is being attended to? As we consider that question, though, let us bear in mind what makes it a pressing question. An inadequate way in which many philosophers and feminists (including feminist philosophers) have spoken here reconstitutes an aspect of human experience from a perspective upon it that drains it of its meaning and deprives it of its depth, and that way of speaking thereby risks alienating us from ourselves. Let me say something about the distinctive context of use in which those various concepts I mentioned might help render the meaning of rape. Nearly everyone can recall their awakening, usually in adolescence but not always then, to intense, even shocking, erotically charged awareness of another (usually someone of the opposite sex). That extraordinary hit of the other is not characteristically a matter simply, or even primarily, of sexual desire, at least if this is thought of as desire for sexual intercourse. That is so even though this intense awareness of another becomes available through one’s developing sexuality. In this experience another becomes urgently and vividly present to one in a way that has never happened before. (Of course there are also other ways and modes in which people can become vividly present to us.) Intense and vivid awareness of, and aliveness to, eyes, gesture, stance, walk, inflection of voice, smile, even texture of skin, and much more, are among the marvellous realizations of this other who has become so inescapably present. ‘He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!’ she may say or think. But talk of the other’s vivid presence here, and indeed of his beauty, is in danger of obscuring the other side of that. The shock of this experience of another is also the shock of realizing another person as absolutely and ungraspably other. The sense of the whole world as suddenly transformed, which this experience can occasion, is a sense of having been jolted out of oneself by a reality one cannot possess but only answer to. It is as if the centre of gravity of the world has shifted elsewhere. This other human being can even be felt to have become the very source of meaning.10 We know all too well how this experience can become sentimentalized, fantasy-ridden or obsessive. Then we might speak of infatuation. But those possibilities are (only) the other side of – they mark the inescapable risk involved in – this shocking and transforming realization of another which is mediated by our sexuality. Not everybody may

Introduction 7

be susceptible to this risk because not everybody may have this experience of disclosure of another, or even be capable of having it. Even so, the phenomenon is part of the background to our conceptually structured sense of human sexual love. And this means that it is part of the background to the sense of the kind of violation that is involved in rape. One philosopher who has discussed sexual love in terms that can help illuminate this background is Sartre.11 He speaks of sexual love as involving an attempt wholly to ‘incarnate’ the other – to discover the other as fully manifest in his or her flesh – so that he or she can be ‘possessed’ in the act of sexual intercourse. The attempt is doomed to failure precisely because of what motivates it – the shocking sense of absolute and unpossessable Otherness involved in the experience we have been speaking of. (Sartre put the point by saying that it is the other’s transcendent freedom that I impossibly aspire to capture in sexual desire.) So far as the other ‘answers’ to the lover’s attempt at incarnating her she is vulnerable in a distinctive way, since she is participant in the attempt to make herself incarnately present to the lover in her body. But the lover, too, is vulnerable, so far as he also answers to the other’s parallel attempt to make him incarnate himself and thus be wholly present to the other in his body. (One is more poignantly exposed in this way of being vulnerable than in the way one may be vulnerable when, for example, one is speaking in front of a large audience.) The sort of intimacy possible in sexual love is informed by the kind of vulnerable self-disclosure involved in answering to the other’s attempt to incarnate one. The sort of violation which rape involves needs to be understood in relation to such vulnerability and intimacy, and thereby to the kind of trust they make possible. Of course Sartre’s account of sexual love may be flawed in various ways. It is certainly too limited to be the whole story. Much of the detail of what I have said could also be questioned, or at least developed rather differently. Still, the kind of sense of another I have tried to describe is, I think, part of the background to any deep sense of what is morally wrong with rape. That is compatible with recognizing, what is of course true, that the expression of sexual desire is often more or less remote from that kind of sense of another. For one thing, as has commonly been noted, people often take their social roles and status to bed with them. Beyond that, sexual satisfaction can be and often is pursued in a spirit which is resolutely, sometimes grimly, opposed to acknowledging any such intimacy and vulnerability. Or again, any such acknowledgement may simply be submerged under the urgency

8 Ethical Encounter

of desire. Grant all that. Even so, it is an important fact that none of these possibilities reflects the spirit in which adolescents are characteristically first ‘hit’ by an erotically charged sense of another. Miranda’s cry from Shakespeare’s Tempest after seeing her first men apart from her father – ‘O brave new world, that has such people in’t!’ – is much closer to capturing that spirit. I have been exploring some aspects of rape’s meaning, including some of the background to its being able to carry that meaning. (That has involved bringing out how what is disclosable only in a certain sort of encounter12 can inform those concepts which articulate moral dimensions of our understanding.) The point has wide application.13 The meaning of murder cannot be captured, either, by focusing on the ‘effect on the victim’ – that she is dead – not even if we add in the fact that the death was intentionally effected by another human being, and the fact that the victim had all sorts of interests which she will now be unable to satisfy. Neither is what is missing from such a story just details about other sorts of effects of the deed, for example a weakening of the general disposition to refrain from murder. Crucial to the meaning of murder is that it is a terrible violation – as rape also is, if not in quite the same way – and if moral philosophy proposes to reflect on ‘what is wrong’ with rape or murder, it has to do so in a way which remains true to the sense that this is so (as well as to how it is distinctively so in the two cases).14 But in what moral theories usually say (or are committed to saying) about what is wrong with murder, for example, there is nothing remotely adequate to the sense of that violation. Someone who has committed murder may wake up one day stricken with remorse and horror at his deed, and perhaps haunted by his victim. Most moral theories regard these aspects of the murderer’s response as strictly external to his understanding of what he has done. That is something available to anyone wholly without horror or remorse, and without his being haunted by the victim of his deed. Those things are – so this line of thought goes – just psychological extras, external to the moral dimensions of what was done, which in human beings often happen to accompany recognition of the real moral significance of murder. Consider what Kant officially thinks to lie at the heart of what is morally terrible in (say) murder. It is that the murderer has acted in a way which contravenes rational agency. Raimond Gaita parodies Kant by imagining a murderer stricken with remorse for his deed saying: ‘My God! What have I done! I have contravened rational agency in another!’15 Why is this laughable? Because it is impossible to see how

Introduction 9

recognizing that one has contravened that could itself occasion such remorse. The parody shows the gap between what Kant represents as a true understanding of the terribleness of murder, and what remorse reveals that actually to be. (Kant wants to get to the reality which lies behind all those ‘mere’ appearances.) Kant’s moral picture leaves us, as we saw, a long way from our sense of what is morally terrible about rape. Kant’s emphasis on rational agency has partly shaped, and is partly shaped by, the cultural pressures that have given the ‘denial of autonomy’ story its current power. Just as that story excludes crucial dimensions of our sense of what is terrible about rape, so the Kantian account also misses, indeed blinds and deafens us to, crucial dimensions of what is terrible about (for example) murder. But what is true of Kant’s account is also true of most other philosophical accounts of morality. Is murder terrible mainly because of the interests the murdered person had which he will now not be able to satisfy? That is one utilitarian thought. But many philosophers who explicitly distance themselves from utilitarianism still broadly retain the outlook that motivates that thought. Anyone who thinks of what are sometimes misleadingly called our ‘pre-theoretical’ reactions in the way Hampshire criticizes has that outlook, whether it is interests or something else they invoke as the justifying measure of our reactions. The same quantifying, measuring habit of mind is in play, with its resolute rejection of ‘meaning’. Of course someone who has been murdered is thereby prevented from satisfying all sorts of interests. But this does not get to the heart of the matter. Recently I heard a police spokesman on the news describing a plan the police had used to separate a man from the hostages he was holding ‘so the police could then eliminate him’. The spokesman used that word ‘eliminate’ because he thought it made what the police were setting out to do sound less awful. And in that word ‘awful’ its original sense of ‘commanding awe or reverence’ is here still alive. In saying that what the police proposed to do was indeed awful, however, I do not mean that therefore they should not have done it. Killing that man may have been the only way of saving his innocent victims from being murdered. But the spokesman did not want to recognize the awfulness, the seriousness, the gravity of what killing him meant – or, more likely, he did recognize it but did not want to face up to it. Or perhaps he just did not want to acknowledge it publicly. Whatever the specific reason for his speaking as he did, the word ‘eliminate’ in this connection is chilling, and it is so precisely because it wholly denies the awful significance of killing another human being.

10

Ethical Encounter

You don’t get to that significance by reflection on the loss of interests brought about by killing someone. No such reflection enables us to make sense of the fact that ‘eliminate’ is a chilling evasion of the significance of killing someone. We cannot get to the awfulness of killing someone from any number of such effects, any more than we can get to the brutality and callousness of what the boys did to those birds from the ‘effects’ on the birds. The awfulness – in the sense mentioned – of killing someone is part of what is terrible in murder. There are at least two ways, of course, of responding to the gap between the effects of killing someone and the awfulness of doing so. To some the gap warrants discounting any sense of the awfulness of killing as mere prejudice from which rational beings should try to free themselves. Obviously utilitarians belong to this group. But many also belong to it who, while not utilitarians, share with them a modern suspicion of whatever cannot be straightforwardly quantified or measured. This discounting of the awfulness of killing has gained a strong foothold in contemporary thinking. Another example of it is to be found in the practice of administering the death penalty by lethal injection. Michel Foucault famously reminded us of the violence that attached to executions in an earlier age. He described the literal pulverizing of a regicide – as his dismembered body is burnt and the ashes are then scattered to the winds – as the intentionally terrifying demonstration of the sovereign’s power. He is half right. What was also being enacted, celebrated even, was the awful significance, the terrible gravity,16 of killing another human being. (For many people, of course, their sense of just that finds expression in their abhorrence of the death penalty itself.) A widespread modern idea is that the death penalty is simply the extreme in depriving someone of liberty. That is why the manner of killing the criminal must be as ‘mild’ as possible – so that we are not tempted, in finding the killing itself awful, terrible, to be distracted from that real purpose of punishment. Killing the criminal is, so to speak, only a means to the end of his punishment. This strikes me as a horrible evasion. Without making a judgement on the death penalty itself, I should say that a death which manifests the terribleness of killing is actually owed anyone sentenced under that penalty. He is owed a death which does not seek to hide the awfulness, still in that original sense of the word, of what is being done.17 Only then could his judicial execution stand any chance at all of manifesting the respect that is still owed him as a human being, whatever the crime he has committed. The modern practice and this response to it involve different views about the awfulness of killing. I called one of them an evasion, and

Introduction 11

noted that we cannot get to the awfulness of killing from any number of further effects of killing. I have already described one response to this gap between the effects of killing someone and the awfulness of doing so. It says, in effect: the awfulness of killing must therefore be an illusion or a prejudice, which rational people should aim to overcome. A second response to that gap points up the limits of the quantifying outlook informing the first response. It acknowledges the awfulness of killing as the meaning around which our further moral judgements and responses concerning murder are oriented. The point to note here is that the first response has been giving no more telling philosophical defence than this second one. That the former response has become more prominent reflects an important shift in the circumstances of cultural life. But that shift is not itself a philosophical argument. Neither is it self-evidently a shift to a generally truer or better perspective or way of seeing. The dispositions to quantify and rationally reconstruct18 our experience, in the sort of way suggested in that first response, are doubtless part of our ‘Enlightenment’ inheritance. Sometimes they may reap real benefits, by freeing us from the shackles of prejudice and illusion. But not always. There is just too much about ourselves and our experience that we cannot make sense of, or can make only seriously distorted sense of, through such ‘Enlightenment’ dispositions.19 My remarks about the meaning of what we do – and participate in – have other implications too. Much moral philosophy presupposes that morally speaking the world is simply, unproblematically ‘there’ to be known. There may sometimes be practical or technical or theoretical difficulties in the way of understanding or finding out, but there are no deep moral difficulties. It is characteristically assumed that the serious moral difficulties are difficulties in doing and not in understanding. This is of a piece with the assumption that morality is primarily concerned with action. There is little room for the thought that often a good part of the moral difficulty in a situation is rising to it in a way which enables one both truly to realize what belongs to it, and also truly to realize oneself in response to it.20 Sometimes a situation will readily enough summon forth in us a compelling sense of it – as in the spontaneous response that what those boys did was brutal and callous. On other occasions (perhaps that of rape) the process may be slow and piecemeal, partly because it has to contend with deep cultural and personal impediments to seeing clearly. Thus to rise to the situation can require that one be engaged by it in a deeply personal way. Moral philosophers have traditionally been suspicious of allowing anything personal into moral thinking and response,

12

Ethical Encounter

because they have supposed that this involves conceding moral thinking to be merely ‘subjective’. They think of any responsiveness that is essentially personal as obscuring appreciation of how things truly are. They have failed to see that being engaged in a deeply personal way can in some contexts be a condition of coming to realize how things are. To realize the ethical significance of rape, for example – to realize the kind of violation involved in rape – is to realize a depth of meaning in it to which talk of the denial of autonomy does not take us. But one can realize such depth of meaning only if there is an answering depth in oneself, which enables one – again reversing the directional metaphor – to rise to an understanding of the phenomenon. (Similarly, each of those who was pained by what those boys did to the birds – including some of the boys themselves – had to find a way of speaking to express how he found himself claimed in response and impelled to answer to what had happened.) Here reality can be discovered only if we are able to rise to what we encounter with an imaginative ‘answering’ which summons what Coleridge called ‘the whole soul of man’ of each of us. That is not, it must again be emphasized, a fancy or merely poetic way of acknowledging moral thinking to be essentially ‘subjective’ – if that is taken to mean that moral thinking cannot be a matter of trying to understand, or that there is no reality for such thinking to answer to. Yes, I am suggesting that moral thinking is and must be frequently personal, in the sense that it must engage each of us in deep individual responsiveness to what we encounter. But that does not mean that strictly speaking moral thinking in these contexts lacks something which genuine thinking about reality must have, or that it is essentially a matter of desiring or feeling rather than of thinking. Rather: in contexts such as these, the kind of being-personally-engaged I have spoken of is a condition of our encountering reality. Some personal elements of thinking, of course, can distort, distract from or obscure genuine understanding. Personal animus, or even just the bias of familiarity or affection, can have that effect. And one can be so close to a situation that it is extremely difficult to see it clearly, even when one has no immediate stake in it. In such circumstances as these, thinking well will indeed require that one seek to free one’s thinking of those variously distorting personal elements. But it does not follow, and it is not true, that in general the only way to think well is for one’s thinking to be stripped of all personal dimensions. It is true only that one’s thinking needs to be free of those personal elements which distort it. But if much moral thinking depends on forms of personal engagement,21 our capacity for such engagement also makes us vulnerable to

Introduction 13

distorted forms of it. The adolescent who is not at risk of becoming infatuated is not open to discovering certain depths of significance in sexual love. The kind of maternal love that helps shape our sense of the preciousness of children could not do this were it not of a depth and intensity that makes it vulnerable to becoming obsessive and destructive. The Western philosophical tradition has had at its heart a contrast between appearance and reality. Surely, it may be said, this contrast already suggests that the world is not easy to know (because the appearances readily obscure reality from view). Then it may seem no news that the world is not easily knowable – anyone who appreciates the contrast between appearance and reality will acknowledge the fact. But philosophers have too readily spoken of the contrast between appearance and reality. In fact there is no single such contrast. To think, for example, of reality as ‘behind’ the appearances and therefore hidden from view by them is to think of one’s task of knowing as requiring a switch from one domain to another. So in a recurrent version of just this picture, colour is held to belong to the domain of appearances, while scientific talk of light wavelengths, reflection and refraction points us to the reality behind the appearances. And the point has many other applications. Perhaps adopting the vocabulary of metaphysics or of religious dogma or of Marxism or Freudianism or some form of postmodernism, or some other theoretical discourse, will effect the needed switch from ‘mere’ appearance to underlying reality. In ethics, ‘moral theory’ will do the trick. How is this distinction between appearance and reality given substance in (for example) the way of thinking about rape that I was criticizing? The thought is that the heavy ‘emotional baggage’ carried in our ‘pre-theoretical’ experience of sexual activity gets in the way of understanding the true dimensions of harm – the physical and psychological dimensions of it – that explain why rape is a serious moral offence. (Psychological studies may help establish hitherto hidden aspects of those effects.) The concepts of autonomy and control come into play in relation to what is revealed in those dimensions of harm. A similar point can be made about the episode of the boys and the birds. ‘Brutal’ and ‘callous’ should give way to ‘wrong’, and the real grounds of the wrongness of what was done can then be established in a vocabulary purified of terms that supposedly distract us from what is fundamental. (I also explored a parallel thought about what is wrong with killing another human being.) This is another aspect of a familiar picture of our experience and how it is to be understood. I do not say we can learn nothing from it.

14

Ethical Encounter

The vocabulary and approach it enjoins may sometimes be useful and illuminating. But the shift involved in adopting them is importantly different from what happens when ‘knowing reality’ centrally involves not dispensing with the appearances but the deepening of one’s sense of them, with a correlative deepening of oneself. Then reality is not well thought of as hidden by and behind the appearances, but rather as disclosable only in a deeper sense of them. This is a different contrast between appearance and reality. Then our so-called ‘pre-theoretical’ reactions including our affective sense of things are part of what, in this context, shapes any true understanding we can come to of reality. ‘Pre-theoretical’ is the wrong word for them just because it implies the wrong kind of contrast between appearance and reality. Supporters of Aristotle may wish to agree with all this. (The important lesson may seem to be just the need to avoid reductionism.22) One of the much-vaunted attractions of Aristotle’s ethical philosophy is precisely his emphasis on the ‘appearances’. His rich evaluative vocabulary then seems able to register all I have been saying. In a different philosophical idiom, moral philosophy needs to acknowledge the ‘life-world’ – the world saturated with the meaning our experience of it has – as the site of ethical thinking and response. The life-world needs recovering from its mutilation at the hands of rationalistic critique.23 That involves both resisting reductive accounts of the ‘appearances’, and also bringing to view again the richness and variety of moral phenomena obscured by such critique. An Aristotelian approach – or at least an approach basically akin to his – arguably gives us what is needed here. Not so. His ethics does indeed temper an undue abstractness in much modern moral philosophy. But that alone does not take us to the orientation I have been sketching. That discloses particular kinds, or perhaps depths, of significance in the life-world which the life-world does not have to be thought of as bearing. There is nothing in the mere idea of the life-world that makes it, for example, the site of awe or reverence or wonder, or even of what is registered by those epithets of Hampshire’s. Already, in reflecting on some background to a sense of the significance of rape and murder, for example, I have disclosed a, rather than the, life-world meaning of those things, one in which awe and reverence are seminal. And the ethos of the Greek tragedies manifests a kind of life-world that does not inform Aristotle’s ethical writings at all. (The same is not true of Plato.) Nothing in Aristotle answers to Oedipus’ devastated horror at his discovery that he had killed his father and married his mother. Again: in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov Ivan tells the story of a rich landowner one of

Introduction 15

whose hundred hunting dogs had its paw hurt by a stone thrown by a peasant boy in play on the estate. The landowner has the boy stripped naked ‘on a bleak cold misty autumn day, a day perfect for hunting’. The boy is ordered to run, and the landowner sets the whole pack of borzoi hounds on him, who tear him to pieces before his mother’s eyes. This episode, too, is wholly outside the range of Aristotle’s ethics. Nothing in the territory of practical reason and its failings, of Aristotelian vices of character, of hitting and missing the ‘mean’ of action, comes close to engaging with the appalling cruelty of what is done here. After his release from Reading gaol, Oscar Wilde wrote to the governor of the gaol to thank him for his kindness. Explaining his delay in writing Wilde said he had been unable to stop thinking of ‘the wretched half witted boy who was flogged by the doctor’s orders’. We have no difficulty in understanding, even imaginatively sharing, Wilde’s pain at that brutality – greater because it was a child, and perhaps greater still because he was ‘half witted’. I think Aristotle would judge such pain unmanly, and probably vulgar. There is an important difference between what shows in Oedipus’ response, and what is revealed in those other two episodes. While Oedipus is horrified at the violation he has perpetrated, his attention is not concentrated distinctively on his father and his mother in the way Ivan’s and Wilde’s attention are intensely to the appalling violation of this child. It is true that the intervention of Christianity, with its unprecedented accent on the importance of each individual, helped make it imaginatively possible for us to share their responses. But the cogency of the responses does not depend on specifically Christian convictions. (As Raimond Gaita puts it: what was nourished in that soil can also take root elsewhere.) It does depend, however, on certain kinds of love of individuals. Of course any ‘life-world’ is inescapably a site of various kinds of love of individuals. Even so, those loves can have very different colours and depths in different realizations of the life-world. If love does develop or is realized in certain ways it is not guaranteed to develop in, it can disclose the individual reality of others in distinctive ways. Such disclosure is part of the background to the sense of violation informing the way Ivan Karamazov and Oscar Wilde register those deeds. It is also a condition of a certain kind of reverence and wonder. Only what can occasion such reverence and wonder can be subject to just that kind of violation. Already Oedipus’ bewildered remorse at what he has done bespeaks awe. But there is a kind of reverence and wonder which is dependent on certain forms of loving attention that are unknown to Oedipus. (They are unknown to him even

16

Ethical Encounter

though his response to his deeds reflects a strong sense of filial piety.) I quoted Hampshire on forms of ‘experience’ alien to the traditional cast of moral philosophical thought. These recent examples reveal more of them. And we can then perhaps see that Aristotle’s ‘omissions’ do not show simply the ‘incompleteness’ of his ethical picture – as if we just need to add in a few ‘appearances’ he may have overlooked. It is rather that, duly acknowledged, what Aristotle misses informs and transforms the whole ethical landscape. In one sense the picture a fragment of which I have sketched is one possibility among others. It points up one kind of way the life-world can show itself to be. But it is not, even so, merely one possibility among others. For one thing it is a picture which has a long and deep history in our shared cultural life. Beyond that, I think it still resonates deeply with us. For at least that reason it invites our reflective consideration as something more than just one picture among others. But there is a further point. Even if the reader did come to acknowledge that the picture I sketch does indeed resonate deeply with us (including him), that of course would not demonstrate the truth of the picture. But that is no reason either for regret or for scorn. No philosophical argument can demonstrate the truth of a picture of ourselves and our lives as moral beings. This is not because the limited intelligence of human beings means that their philosophical arguments could always be improved (although that is doubtless true). My remark was about the limits not of our intelligence but of philosophy itself. I do not mean, either, that no such picture can be true. The point concerned not the truth of the picture, but the impossibility of philosophy conclusively demonstrating its truth. Indeed I think this picture – the one I have briefly sketched – is a true picture. In this essay I try to show why I think this – mainly by developing the sketch. Each reader (of course) must decide for herself whether she agrees. She will decide on that – as Iris Murdoch said in a similar context – according to the picture’s ‘power to connect, to illuminate, to explain, and to make new and fruitful places for reflection’.24 Philosophy can contribute to letting the power of this picture show itself.25 Neither is this an idiosyncratic conception of the relation between moral pictures of ourselves and philosophical arguments about them. In Plato’s Gorgias Socrates astonishes Polus with his conviction that if you are forced to choose it is better to suffer evil than to do it. But Polus was not alone in being astonished. I think Plato himself was astonished, and in further ways as well. Socrates’ life was evidently lived in the light of the conviction, and Plato was astonished by that.

Introduction 17

Beyond that again, he was (I think) astonished to find himself being moved to take the conviction seriously as one he could not but acknowledge. Further still he was astonished by the fact that he could not give a logos – a philosophical account or justification – of the conviction. The inescapability of the conviction combined with his inability to give a philosophical logos of it defined Plato’s subsequent philosophical life. Whatever interpretation is to be given of his later writings, the important point here is that Plato’s acknowledgement of his inability to find such a logos does not touch his certainty of the truth of the Socratic conviction. And his conviction of the truth of that moral picture precedes and shapes whatever he supposes philosophy might have to say in reflection upon morality.26 It is a commonplace of the Western philosophical tradition that human beings are distinguished from the rest of creation by their power of reason. Even so, it is a striking fact that Kant stands out as almost27 the only philosopher in that tradition who has tried to articulate a sense of human beings as having a worth of a unique kind in the world. Kant held that worth to be grounded solely in the rational power of human beings. That does not make sense of the kinds of violation manifest in my examples. But do those examples still imply that human beings do have a unique kind of worth, even if Kant’s terms are unable to register it? Yes and no. Our fellow human beings do and should matter as nothing else in the world does, though not because nothing else matters deeply. Nor is it that while human beings matter ‘unconditionally’ – because, being rational, they are ‘ends in themselves’ – everything else in creation matters only ‘conditionally’ (matters, that is, only because of the purposes we bring to it). I spoke of a life-world in which awe, reverence and wonder are seminal. Those are attitudes (if that is the word) which can be evoked in response to the other-than-human world as well as in response to human beings. They could, for example, inform the way someone was moved to register the brutality and callousness of what was done by the boys to those birds, as they could also inform the way a policeman (though not the one I quoted earlier) shoots a man holding innocent hostages. But there is no reason why a difference cannot be registered within these possibilities. A sense – even a pervasive sense – of wonder at the world can coexist with a sense of an unequalled depth of human worth, value, preciousness. Then there can be both important continuities and radical discontinuities between our sense of that depth of value and a sense which we can also rise to of the wonder and mystery of the other-thanhuman world.

18

Ethical Encounter

But these references to wonder, mystery, awe and reverence now need balancing. I quoted Coleridge. It was poetry that he said ‘calls the whole soul of man’ into activity. I have been pointing to dimensions of our moral responsiveness that involve our rising with our ‘whole soul of man’ to whom or what we encounter. (I said that most philosophical discussion of ethics has been blind to these dimensions.) These are the dimensions in which awe, reverence and wonder have their place. Thus rising to the situation in a way which alone can realize what is in it characteristically requires a person to be alive to and capable of exploiting the nuanced richness of a living language. This also involves her making something of herself in the way she finds herself in the language that communally surrounds her. That is vividly so when her activity of judging engages her in a deeply personal way. But it is important to recognize that we are not galvanized in this way in all of our moral thinking. Our moral thinking can often and quite properly be everyday and mundane. The habitual and the routine have their important place, and so do apparently ‘impersonal’ concepts such as that of respect for all human beings and that of basic human rights. The picture I have been sketching is then (to use a phrase of Iris Murdoch’s) not a formula to be introduced into every situation, but a general background. Our ‘whole soul of man’ is not and cannot be galvanized in all that we think and do. Similarly, not every moral breach is a violation or an outrage of the kind I have been speaking of. Sometimes we can judge a deed, or a person, brutal and callous without being moved in pain and outrage to do so. (That may have been so of some people in relation to the episode involving the birds.) Conversely, even if respect for other human beings is always required of us, it is stretching things unduly to suppose that awe and reverence will always be manifest in such respect – or even that they should be. To do my duty to others I do not have to be ‘hit’ by them in any extraordinary way. Grant all this. Even so, it makes a big difference what one takes as one’s general background picture in ethics. Even if moral thinking and response frequently is mundane, habitual, routine – as Aristotle rightly reminds us – perhaps a true sense of that everyday morality still depends on an orientation marked by (among other things) awe, reverence and wonder. So I shall argue. We can then see more habitual and routine responsiveness as a kind of abstraction from that orientation – in its place a perfectly proper abstraction. But a personal rising in response to what one encounters, in a spirit of awe and reverence as well as love, is (so I shall argue) a complex background condition of ‘everyday’ moral response and judgement.

Introduction 19

Aristotle is once again popular among moral philosophers, and for several good reasons that have already been touched on. He offers a robust and apparently commonsensical ethical humanism. Aristotle does not favour abstract principles over actual human beings, or over nuanced responsiveness to the ‘particular case’. Moreover, he is centrally concerned with character and with the various virtues and vices which constitute character. He does not see ethics as solely or even most fundamentally concerned with deciding what to do, let alone with ‘bringing about outcomes’. He rightly supposes that ethics exists at the site, and concerns the manner, of our encountering the world, and one another. For these reasons there is point in saying that the life-world gets due acknowledgement in Aristotle’s ethics. But the problem remains in that word ‘the’. As already noted, from the perspective of this book Aristotle’s ethical understanding is limited in serious ways. Important dimensions of our humanity – dimensions, often, of our loves and of what they have the power to disclose – lie beyond the reach of anything in Aristotle’s ethics, and beyond the reach of much contemporary ethics that remains close in spirit to Aristotle. Much of the territory of my argument is therefore different from Aristotle’s, and from that of his many philosophical heirs. Aristotle’s ethical views are often and rightly invoked against the limiting preoccupations of much moral theory. Turning now to marking in more detail some of my differences with him will help give initial definition to my own views. Later I return to develop some of those differences further.

1 Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond

‘Virtue ethics’ is very prominent in contemporary moral philosophy. The philosophical model for most of those urging the claims of virtue ethics is of course Aristotle. Some features, at least, of the motivation to this renewed concern with Aristotelian ethical thought are fairly clear. Aristotle promises an understanding of the ethical which locates it robustly within the world. His moral virtues are evidently thisworldly qualities. Morality is a natural and not a transcendental affair.1 By moral virtues he means simply excellences of character. The place in our lives of such virtues, moreover, seems to be explained readily, and attractively, in Aristotelian terms. Moral virtue is essentially connected with eudaimonia, understood variously as happiness, as living well, or as flourishing. Morality is important most fundamentally because of its contribution to the living of a eudaimonic life. Aristotle’s this-worldly emphasis at the same time attractively resists reductionism. His ethical concepts are not only concrete and rich, but remain irreducibly ethical. What do I mean by irreducibly ethical? Here we come upon at least a blur, if not a flat error, in a range of contemporary discussions, and appropriations, of Aristotelian ethics. Many versions of ethical naturalism in the past century have been reductionist in inspiration and thrust. They have sought to explain ethical categories away. Thus: moral judgements are nothing but universalized prescriptions, or nothing but expressions of emotional reaction, or of individual or communal ‘preference’. In similar vein, some commentators have at least come close to interpreting Aristotle as saying that the virtues are instrumental in procuring a happiness, or a human flourishing, which can be fully characterized independently of any ethical concepts.2 This is mistaken. Aristotle is not a reductionist.3 That is why I speak of the irreducibly ethical character of his ethical vocabulary. 20

Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond 21

But there is still reason for calling his ethics ‘naturalistic’. It is probably true that general conditions cannot be given for naturalism. But there can be contextual spurs to thinking of an outlook as naturalistic. In the case of Aristotle’s outlook one such spur is his resolute opposition to Plato’s talk of the good as always ‘beyond’. That can be thought of as a ‘philosophical’ aspect of Aristotle’s suspicion of Plato’s accent on the good as claiming us in ways which put our worldly aspirations into question. The life of Socrates – Plato’s ever-present example of a good man – is marked by that accent, and partly for that reason he is in deep ways different from Aristotle’s megalopsychos. A second spur to regarding Aristotle’s ethics as naturalistic is that when Aristotle does speak of the divine element in human beings, and of ‘contemplation’ as giving expression to it, he takes himself to be pointing beyond ethics. (See Note 25 below.) Still, it is one thing to acknowledge the naturalistic and nonreductive character of Aristotle’s thought about virtue, and another to find its ethos wholly persuasive. Some aspects of Aristotle’s ethics must at least give us ‘moderns’ pause. There is, for instance, a range of qualities whose absence from Aristotle’s canon of virtues we4 surely cannot avoid being struck by. In the Nicomachean Ethics we find no mention of kindness, compassion, forgiveness, apology, repentance, remorse, humility, or of the ‘theological virtues’ of faith, hope and charity.5 Some of these qualities may have cousins in Aristotle’s ethical picture, but there seem to be few close connections. (Not only the theological virtues, but most of the qualities in this list found their most cogent expression in Christian thought. Even so, arguably all of them can continue to inform ethical life even when it is lived without specifically Christian convictions.) The distance between Aristotelian thought and a different ethical outlook whose provenance was largely though not wholly Christian is crystallized in the radically contrasting central images of two moral traditions. On the one hand there is Aristotle’s megalopsychos – noble, proud, reserved, politely disdainful of the masses, conscious of the requirement to comport himself well in the eyes of his peers. And on the other hand there is the figure of the almost naked, crucified, suffering, loving, forgiving Jesus. A worldly pride confronts an unworldly selfless love. It is salutary to try to imagine Aristotle’s reaction to a moral-religious tradition which had the crucified Jesus, asking God to forgive those who had crucified him, as its central image. I think he would have despised it. (In 1 Corinthians Paul says: ‘but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness’.) Of course Aristotle does acknowledge that the truly virtuous

22

Ethical Encounter

person might be subjected to sustained tribulation, and that if he is truly virtuous his virtue will survive this subjection. But for Aristotle that is only a kind of limit possibility, which the worldly self-possession of the virtuous man will carry him through. Aristotle’s central image of virtue remains the life of worldly flourishing lived amidst the due admiration of one’s peers. The Christian image has a very different focus and resonance, and registers a very different kind of self-transcendence, one which marks goodness as in more direct and potentially more radical conflict with the values of the world and with what makes for flourishing in the world. (In that respect, though not in all respects, the central Christian image resembles the figure of Socrates.) One daughter of bitterly estranged parents finds herself riven by the need to acknowledge her love for both while trying to avoid unjust hurt of either. Another daughter escapes being thus torn by siding with one parent and disowning the other. It may be the first daughter who shows the deeper sense of justice. Living its requirements might take a very great toll of her, while the other daughter is freed up to ‘flourish’ precisely by not being ethically troubled in the same way. Or a father might find himself in circumstances where the only thing he can do is give up his job, on which he thrives, in order to look after his severely retarded child full-time. One needs a tin ear to say of such a man that his doing this is his way of ‘flourishing’. What he does is abandon flourishing in order to do what he finds he must. These are not esoteric examples; and they evoke a different kind of spirit or ethos from that which pervades Aristotle’s thought. Still, like the preceding contrast between two images of morality, these examples are suggestive rather than probative. We need to say more to show that the differences I have suggested (and perhaps others) are real and substantial. And even succeeding in that would not by itself be a compelling argument against Aristotle’s view and in favour of another. It might still be that Aristotle’s outlook is broadly right, divergences from it marking philosophical or ethical lapses (or both). My view is that there are real differences here. Beyond that, I think that our own moral self-understanding is deeply structured in ways which run athwart Aristotle, and whose provenance is in significant part Christian, even if the continuing significance for us of such a self-understanding does not depend on our endorsement of specifically Christian beliefs. Much contemporary understanding and appropriation of Aristotle’s ethics blurs the differences which I shall argue are significant, and in blurring them distorts both Aristotle and our own moral self-understanding. In this chapter I want first to try to bring out

Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond 23

some of the themes of Aristotle’s ethics which I think have generally been distorted, or overlooked,6 in the recent revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics. The distortions could summarily be described as the effects of reading Aristotle through an ethical tradition informed by Christian values even if for the most part no longer committed to Christian dogma. Becoming thus clearer about Aristotle, we will be better able reflectively to appreciate both the character, and the significance in our lives, of a different ethical orientation. Aristotle says time and again that the virtuous man acts for the sake of the noble (to kalon). What does this mean?7 Well, Aristotle contrasts acting for the sake of the noble with (inter alia) acting from fear of punishment or for money, or merely for pleasure or for kudos. This may seem to suggest that acting for the sake of the noble is equivalent to ‘being virtuous for its own sake’; and Aristotle certainly says that the virtuous person chooses virtuous actions for their own sake. But the question is what Aristotle means by this. In us, the idea of being virtuous for its own sake summons thoughts like ‘virtue is its own reward’, or perhaps the Kantian thought that the good person acts wholly and solely from the motive of duty. Or it might summon the non-Kantian thought that the (for example) compassionate person acts wholly selflessly. None of these is Aristotle’s idea. If Aristotle would agree with (say) Kant that the pursuit of money and the avoidance of punishment, for example, are ends external to virtue, there are some things which for Aristotle are unproblematically integral to virtue, but whose moral status for us moderns is at least ambiguous. These include a proper regard for honour and esteem from one’s peers, the desire to avoid shame, and a proud valuing of oneself as a person who has succeeded in constituting himself as virtuous. These commitments – themselves closely linked – are on Aristotle’s view requirements of virtue, so that being virtuous ‘for its own sake’ includes giving rein to them. Acting for the sake of the noble is acting in a way which involves giving them rein. We misunderstand Aristotle unless we appreciate the centrality of these themes to his conception of virtue. These themes partly mark the distinctive worldliness, as I shall call it, of Aristotle’s ethics. While many have been attracted by that worldliness, its nature and implications have not been well understood. A better understanding will reveal how some seminal Aristotelian themes stand in tension with aspects of an ethical understanding whose claims upon us this essay seeks to bring out. We should note, by the way, that these aspects are not adequately marked by those non-Aristotelian formulations I mentioned above: that

24

Ethical Encounter

‘virtue is its own reward’, that the good person acts solely from the motive of duty, and that the compassionate person acts wholly selflessly. But that is for later. Here we need to characterize more fully what I called Aristotle’s worldliness. But first a caution needs to be entered. In this chapter my concern is specifically with an Aristotelian conception of virtue. Some of my critical remarks apply broadly, I believe, to any ethical conception which centralizes the virtues, but some have narrower application to Aristotle only. An ethics of the virtues need not centralize the kind of worldliness which marks Aristotle’s ethical thought. (Aquinas’ ethics does not do so.) Given the pre-eminence of Aristotle’ thought in discussions of virtue ethics, concentrating on him is warranted. But the outlook of this essay is at odds not only with Aristotle, but also with any ethical picture in which the virtues and character are what is ethically most fundamental. (That is not to say that character and the virtues are unimportant; they most certainly are not.) Later8 we shall critically reflect on a way of centralizing character and the virtues which does not involve Aristotle’s distinctive worldliness. Aristotle in part takes over a Platonic, and older, connection of the virtues with order, harmony, proportion, which qualities we can see imaged in what is beautiful. The ‘mean’ state that is Aristotelian virtue is a state of harmony and proper proportion, and as such is the opposite of the lack of harmony, the disproportion, involved in the ‘extremes’ that constitute vice. And appreciation of to kalon (the noble), involves appreciation of the harmony, the proportion, which belongs to virtue. But there is also a crucial difference between Plato and Aristotle here. Aristotle builds into to kalon a kind of worldliness which Plato thinks cannot reach to the heart of justice and the good. The desire for honour, and to see one’s worldly success reflected in the plaudits of one’s peers is, for Aristotle, internal to the achievement of the relevant harmony and proportion. More broadly, Aristotle attempts to graft a ‘heroic’ element on to Plato’s identification of goodness with reason. He tries to show how a heroic conception of arete (excellence) can be interpreted in such a way as to converge with a conception of excellence as realized only in a life in which reason holds sway. The attempt, and its less than full success, are evident in the strain between some of what Aristotle says about megalopsychia and his general account of virtue. (I touch on the strain below, but do not press it.)9 But let us stay with Aristotle’s ‘worldliness’. We know from Book One of the Nicomachean Ethics that Aristotle rejects the thought that the securing of honour for its own sake could

Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond 25

constitute the good for man.10 He gives two reasons for his view: first, that one so preoccupied surrenders his moral being to the responses of others towards him – surrenders his moral autonomy, we might say. Secondly, he says that ‘people seem to seek honour in order to convince themselves of their own goodness; at any rate it is by intelligent men, and in a community where they are known, and for their goodness, that they seek to be honoured; so evidently in their view goodness is superior to honour’.11 It may be tempting to conclude from these remarks of Aristotle’s that he thinks it cannot be internal to the virtuous person’s virtue that he be concerned with honour at all. But this conclusion would be at odds with Aristotle’s discussion of megalopsychia, and also with much that he says about other virtues, most notably courage. Moreover, the tempting conclusion does not follow from either of the above-mentioned thoughts about honour. Aristotle says that the megalopsychos – the ‘great-souled’ person – is ‘concerned with honour, because it is honour above all that (he) claim(s) as (his) due, and deservedly’.12 As Howard Curzer points out,13 this does not mean that the megalopsychos is unduly preoccupied with honour. The point is rather that honour initially enters the picture of megalopsychia as the particular subject matter of that virtue. Each Aristotelian virtue has a particular subject matter, or field: so the subject matter of courage, for example, is fear and confidence; the subject matter of temperance is bodily pleasure; and of liberality is getting and spending. Likewise, the subject matter of megalopsychia is honour, and the virtue of megalopsychia centrally involves having the right attitude, and acting in the right way, towards honours and dishonours. The megalopsychos, says Aristotle, will make claims for honours that are in accordance with his great worth, and will feel pleasure, though not excessive pleasure, at such honours when they are bestowed on him by his peers. But the megalopsychos is not just the man possessed of the particular virtue of megalopsychia. He is also the man who ‘is characterized by greatness in every virtue’, and megalopsychia itself ‘seems to be a sort of crown of the virtues’. While Aristotle is at pains to stress that this paradigm of virtue will not be overly concerned with honours, he equally insists that he will ‘make, and deservedly make, great claims’ for such honours. It is not that he just takes pleasure in such honours when they happen upon him. He actively seeks and claims them as his due. And his doing this is not a feature of his psychology merely external and additional to his virtue: on the contrary, it is what he does qua megalopsychos. Aristotle describes as guilty of pusillanimity the man

26

Ethical Encounter

who ‘deprives himself of the advantages he deserves, and through not claiming his deserts conveys the impression of having some defect, and even of not knowing his own quality – because otherwise he would have tried to secure his desert, being to his advantage’.14 Aristotle’s suggestion here – put forward in a perhaps tentative way – seems to be that an appropriate worldly self-assertion is not only consistent with, but even a proper part of, the greatest moral virtue. Elsewhere, Aristotle goes as far as to say that a desire for honour is actually internal to the motive to action of the virtuous person. Speaking of the courage of the citizen soldier, which he says is most like the ideal of courage he has already described, Aristotle writes that its ground is a proper sense of shame and a desire for something noble (that is, honour), and avoidance of reproach, which is a disgrace.15 And just prior to this Aristotle has written: citizens are considered to face their dangers not only because of the legal penalties and the disgrace, but also because of the honours.16 It is difficult to read these passages other than as acknowledging the propriety of the desire for honour as part of the motive to action of the courageous man. In addition, Aristotle several times says or implies that the courageous man is motivated by the desire to avoid disgrace. So he says that it is the mark of a courageous man to face things that are terrible to a human being … because it is a fine act to face them and a disgrace not to do so.17 And: citizen troops die at their posts … because to (them) running away is a disgrace, and death is preferable to saving their lives in such a way.18 In these passages Aristotle does not seem to be treating honour only as the greatest of those goods which are externally related to virtue. He seems to be making the desire for honour, and to avoid disgrace, internal both to the motive to courageous action in the virtuous man, and also to his understanding of what he is doing in acting courageously.

Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond 27

Putting the point differently: the courageous man’s conception of what he is doing is shaped in part by the concepts of the noble and the disgraceful. These concepts have a different orientation from (for example) the concepts of the morally right and the morally good. The conception Aristotle’s courageous man has of what he is doing makes essential reference to the appearing of his activity before the eyes of his peers. That is to say, when Aristotle’s virtuous man accords value to being courageous and temperate, and thinks of a failure to act in those ways as shameful and to be avoided, his thought is not: ‘such failure would be unvirtuous and a consequence of its being so is that it would be despised by others.’ Rather, the deed’s shamefulness is a fundamental mode of its viciousness, and his sense of its shamefulness includes a sense of how it appears to his peers. (The latter thought is also Sartre’s when he says of shame: ‘it is in its primary structure shame before somebody … I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the other.’) Essential to the thought of the deed’s failure in virtue, then, is the awareness of it as contemptible in the eyes of his peers. The concepts of the ignoble and the disgraceful share this structure, as do the concepts of the noble and the honourable. In acting primarily under these conceptions of what he is avoiding and realizing in his actions, Aristotle’s virtuous agent is thereby also defining himself morally for, and in front of, his peers. The concepts which shape his self-understanding when he acts virtuously mean that a certain kind of being-for-others (to use Sartre’s term) is essential to what he ethically is. What Aristotle says about courage helps illuminate this public dimension of Aristotelian virtue. Most like real courage, Aristotle tells us, is the courage of the citizen soldier fighting on the battlefield in defence of his city from ‘a desire for something noble (that is, honour)’.19 Courage is the first virtue Aristotle discusses at length. He certainly considers it a very important quality, perhaps even pre-eminent among the virtues.20 His discussion of courage highlights physical courage, and most importantly courage in battle: What are the terrors with which the courageous man is concerned? Surely the greatest … Now the most fearful thing of all is death … But … even death does not in all its forms afford scope for courage; e.g. death at sea or in illness. Death in what circumstances then? Surely in the noblest; and this describes deaths in warfare, where the danger is greatest and most glorious … So in the strict sense of the word the courageous man will be one who is fearless in

28

Ethical Encounter

the face of an honourable death, or of some sudden threat of death; and it is in war that such situations chiefly occur.21 Aristotle’s subsequent discussion of various states which resemble courage proper focuses almost entirely on courage in battle. That Aristotle’s courage seems fundamentally to be physical courage, and to be shown pre-eminently on the battlefield, I think reflects and also helps to shape his conception of virtue as crucially involving the presenting of self to the public world, the carving out of an impressive presence before others. It is tempting to express this by saying that for Aristotle the courageous person is moved not only by the desire to be, but also by the desire to be seen as, courageous. That would be a little misleading, for it implies that there are two distinct desires here, which happen to occur together. The point is that the desire to be seen as courageous – which involves the desire to realize oneself before one’s peers in a certain way – is partly constitutive of what Aristotle understands by the desire to be courageous.22 Courage is understood as essentially involving such an aspiration towards public acknowledgement and recognition by others of one’s virtue. The field of battle provides the best venue, so to speak, for fulfilling these aims. Much of this Aristotelian story is often overlooked by protagonists of virtue ethics who write about courage. It is often supposed that in speaking about courage as the virtue which pertains to the overcoming of fear for a good end, one has appropriated the core of Aristotle’s thought about courage.23 That core is then taken to be compatible with saying that physical courage need not be primary (moral courage may be a higher thing); that even where physical courage is salient, the battlefield need not be central; and that the courageous person need not – sometimes, that he must not – be motivated even in part by a desire to show his courage, or a desire to avoid showing up as a coward, if he is to be truly courageous. But then it is hard to recognize what some contemporary writers call ‘courage’ as the same quality of which Aristotle speaks. Richard Kraut, for example,24 thinks he is speaking of Aristotelian courage when he writes: ‘The truly courageous person is someone who wants to lead a political or a philosophical life, since his ultimate end is to use reason well, and this is the right reason for mastering one’s fear and withstanding enemies on the battlefield.’ But if the philosophical life is for Aristotle the site of true courage, it is hard to see why courage should on Aristotle’s view be itself noble, since philosophical activity is hardly exemplary of the noble, and is not represented by Aristotle as such. (If the life of contemplation is finally the best life, according to

Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond 29

Aristotle, then on his view ‘the best’ lies beyond what is noble.25) In any case, it surely distorts Aristotle to describe his truly courageous person in Kraut’s terms, when Aristotle’s examples of the courage that is ‘most like’ true courage are examples of physical courage. Does the courage of the soldier in battle really show him as someone who wants to lead a political or philosophical life, or point onwards to that life as the site of a ‘truer’ courage? I see no reason to think so, and no reason to suppose Aristotle thought so. Interestingly, Irwin translates andreia – the word usually translated ‘courage’ – as ‘bravery’, while Urmson suggests ‘valour’. Both terms reflect better than does the word ‘courage’ the greatness and glory Aristotle links andreia with, and ‘valour’ nicely reflects the primarily martial context of Aristotle’s discussion. (It is worth remembering that etymologically andreia means ‘manliness’.) Certainly it makes better sense in contemporary English to say that facing death from sickness is not an occasion for valour proper while facing death in battle is so – which is what Aristotle says about andreia – than it does to say the same about courage. (Courage can be shown in facing a mortal illness.) But if these are better translations of andreia as Aristotle uses that term, this brings out even more clearly the fact that there is a considerable distance between Aristotle’s thinking and our own. For it would be radical indeed for anyone nowadays to suggest valour as the very core of moral virtue. Yet, if I am right about the translation, doing so would come closer to Aristotle’s position, and the reason is that the virtue we call ‘courage’ lacks the essential character of heroic display which andreia has for Aristotle26 (and which valour, by contrast with courage, arguably has for us). Against the thought that there is a real difference between valour and courage, it might be said that ‘valour’ is just the name which courage is given when it is exercised in a martial context, rather as ‘bouquet’ is just the name given to smell when wine is the subject of discussion, and ‘fragrance’ when perfume is. But only a modern perspective could lead us thus to dissolve any substantial difference between (modern) courage and valour. For valour centrally involves an active physical confrontation of the world, and an attempt to subdue what is encountered. And this context of public activity is then one which is fit for that realization of self-as-hero which invites and properly receives public acknowledgement and celebration. That realization requires a field of public activity in which one can present oneself for such acknowledgement and celebration. Courage, on a modern understanding, differs from this in two ways. First, while courage can and often does involve

30

Ethical Encounter

such active physical confronting and subjugating of what is encountered, it need not do so. The courage of the person facing death from illness may show mainly through his patient acceptance of what is to come. Secondly, even when it does involve such active physical confrontation, as I said earlier it need not involve – on some views must not involve – a presenting of oneself for acknowledgement and celebration by others. For these two reasons it is not merely a semantic fact that facing death from sickness is not, for Aristotle, an occasion for valour. These reasons also explain why it is not a mere oversight on Aristotle’s part that he does not describe a form of andreia that much resembles what we moderns call ‘moral courage’. This leads us back to megalopsychia. We saw that Aristotle speaks of megalopsychia both as a specific virtue, which therefore has to be a mean determinable by practical reason, and also as ‘a sort of crown of the virtues’, which implies greatness in every virtue. Although it is discernible elsewhere, most evidently in his account of megalopsychia, we can see Aristotle’s attempted fusing of a (roughly Homeric) heroic conception of virtue with a later Greek conception of reason. The megalopsychos is a kind of moral hero. But the concept of the hero is a concept of someone with a certain sort of being-for-others. This does not mean just that it is others who designate one a hero. It is certainly true of (for example) the Homeric and Icelandic heroes that an essential aspect of them as heroes is their being recognized and celebrated as heroes by others (mainly by other heroes). To be a hero does thus involve being accorded a certain social and ethical standing. But, as Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, the (Homeric or Icelandic) hero also sees himself as a hero, and acknowledges the requirements upon him to comport himself in an appropriately heroic way vis-à-vis others. The hero is aware and proud of being a hero, and aware of the requirement upon him to sustain, by what he does and also the way he does it, his acknowledged status as a hero. It certainly would be a distortion to think of Aristotle as simply reviving an earlier heroic conception of virtue. The centrality of (practical) reason to Aristotle’s account of virtue is after all what most commentators have emphasized. That is a different accent, and its importance must be acknowledged. But writers commonly ascribe to Aristotle a conception of reason altogether uninformed by his attraction to heroic virtue. In doing this they strip Aristotle’s ethical thought of much that is distinctive of it. If we see the megalopsychos as (something like) a moral hero, and further see Aristotle’s conception of megalopsychia as casting its shadow back over his understanding of virtue in general, as I

Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond 31

have suggested it does, we can appreciate that the Aristotelian man of virtue is essentially (though not solely) concerned with presenting himself to others in a certain way. As I put it before, the desire to be acknowledged, even celebrated, as virtuous by others is partly constitutive of the desire to be virtuous. To characterize Aristotle’s ethical thought in this way is not to deny the centrality of practical reason to his understanding of the virtues. But it is to ascribe a content to the determinations of practical reason which is partly informed by the heroic aspect of Aristotle’s conception of megalopsychia. The aspiration to appear to others in a certain way is to be accommodated in the deliberations and conclusions of practical reason.27 Kant thought that the only absolutely good thing – the good will – might never in fact be manifest in action. According to Aristotle, by contrast, virtue can be realized only in an essentially public realm in which men appear before one another – in which honour, shame, praise, blame, admiration, contempt, are manifest in practice and ceremony. Hence, central to Aristotle’s description of the megalopsychos is a description of the appropriate forms of presentation of self to others, and of the appropriate ways of responding to and recognizing others. The megalopsychos … is disposed to confer benefits, but is ashamed to accept them, because the one is the act of a superior and the other that of an inferior … He is haughty towards those who are influential and successful, but moderate towards those who have an intermediate position in society, because in the former case to be superior is difficult and impressive, but in the latter it is easy; and to create an impression at the expense of the former is not ill-bred, but to do so among the humble is vulgar – like using one’s strength against the weak. He does not enter for popular contests, or ones in which others distinguish themselves; he hangs back or does nothing at all, except where the honour or the feat is a great one. The tasks that he undertakes are few, but grand and celebrated … He is the sort of person to prefer possessions that are beautiful but unprofitable to those that are profitable and useful, because this is more consistent with selfsufficiency. The accepted view of the magnanimous man is that his gait is measured, his voice deep, and his speech unhurried.28 His concern for exactly how and where he locates himself vis-à-vis his peers, in and by what he does, is inseparable from his sense of what is required for the realization of virtue. This is so even when he realizes the

32

Ethical Encounter

need to sacrifice his life – for his city, say. One’s worldly standing, after all, includes one’s reputation (as we would call it) – the glorious memory of one’s name – and Aristotle’s virtuous person is concerned with that. Sir David Ross translates megalopsychia as ‘pride’. Perhaps this is questionable as a translation; but there is certainly a close connection between megalopsychia and pride. Unlike Kantian ‘proper pride’, Aristotelian pride is not constituted independently of the character of one’s engagement in the public world, and sustainable whatever one’s position in that world. The worst and most vicious person is entitled to – and indeed should have – the same (Kantian) proper pride as the saint. Nothing in Aristotle corresponds to this. The megalopsychos is entitled to – and will have – a pride which ‘the many’ cannot share, and which would also not be found in the saint. Worldly self-assertion – albeit constrained by decorum – and a sense of one’s being-for-others as salient in what one ethically is, are both necessary features, so I have argued, of Aristotle’s understanding of moral virtue. Aristotle has sometimes been charged with having an egoistic conception of virtue. This charge says that the person of Aristotelian virtue is unduly preoccupied with the fashioning and sustaining of his own virtue. In Bernard Williams’ phrase, he is morally self-indulgent. According to Williams, the charge of moral self-indulgence will be attracted if the suspicion is that … (someone’s) act is motivated by a concern for his own generosity or loyalty, the enhancement or preservation of his own self-image as a generous or loyal person.29 Williams seeks to mark a contrast between one who acts out of genuinely virtuous attitudes towards another and one who acts out of reflexive concern with being himself that sort of person. His contrast is in effect between motivation that is altruistic and a kind of motivation that is in reality egoistic. It might be thought that my interpretation of Aristotle implies his ethical thought to be thus egoistic. But I do not think this is so; let me say why. The reason is not that I reckon that Aristotelian virtue registers essentially altruistic concern on the part of the virtuous person. For it does not. I should say, rather, that Aristotle’s view does not admit of allocation to one side or other of this modern divide. Aristotle does indeed ascribe to the virtuous agent a self-directedness in his ethical thinking, of a sort which is incompatible with altruism as that is usually understood. But the virtuous agent’s thought is not egoistic in the modern sense of involving a concern for his own welfare that is essentially to be

Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond 33

contrasted with a concern for the welfare of others. The point is not, either, that the concern of Aristotle’s virtuous agent is as much a concern with particular others as with himself. It is rather that his concern must be understood in terms that are altogether different. These terms can be clarified by an analogy. Consider the concern a soldier might have for the honour of the regiment. If the conception under which such a soldier rejects a course of action is that it would be dishonourable, the soldier’s concern may then be inextricably both with his own honour and with that of his regiment. This is not because he has psychologically run together two independent variables, but because his sense of his own moral worth is given to him as essentially a function of the honour attaching to the regiment. The desire for honour in and from the regiment can be internal to his motive for action without this meaning that he has an egoistic concern for his own welfare and flourishing as opposed to an altruistic concern for the welfare of others in the regiment. The desire for honour can then be thus internal to his motive for acting if it is desire for honour on the grounds of recognition by others that his action has served the honour of the regiment. Given that, his desire for honour can be something he recognizes as constrained by the need, on various occasions, for all sorts of altruistic sacrifices on his part – by the need, perhaps, to give his life for his fellow soldiers. I do not mean that he realizes that his serving others is an instrumental condition of his getting something logically independent of that, namely individual honour. Nor is it just that what he desires in desiring honour is a certain sort of recognition of the contribution he has made to sustaining and furthering the virtue of the regiment. It is also that his sense of himself as honourable is a sense of himself as (so to speak) a local instantiation, as well as an actively constituting ‘moment’, of the regiment’s virtue. The honour accorded to him he values as expressing a recognition of him as that. That is to say, his ‘individual’ honour as a soldier matters to him only as his moral being is identified with the flourishing of the regiment. The kind of concern he has with himself, in his desire for honour, passes through that identification. The analogy is clear enough. In the current parlance, Aristotle’s virtuous person has a communitarian sense of his moral selfhood. Whatever moral limitations there may be in such a way of thinking of oneself and of comporting oneself in relation to one’s moral community, it is at least misleading to describe them as manifesting egoism. Aristotle would regard the modern contrast between the egoistic and the altruistic as assuming a separateness between members of a moral community which

34

Ethical Encounter

is incompatible with ethical virtue. His is an anti-atomistic conception of the moral self. Only if we appreciate this communitarian character of Aristotelian virtue can we grasp the true character of the pride and pleasure the Aristotelianly virtuous person takes in his own virtue, and of his concern to appear to others in a certain way. We can then see that these attitudes betoken neither egoism, nor a concern with the mere appearance – by contrast with the reality – of virtue. It is rather that a certain kind of appearing before others is for Aristotle partly constitutive of the reality of virtue. Aristotle’s ethics is then neither narcissistic, nor egoistic, nor ‘aesthetically’ obsessed. It does, however, remain resolutely worldly. That term marks the interdependence of Aristotelian virtue with a concern to appear to others in the appropriate way. This orientation makes Aristotle’s ethics very different from another historically important ethical orientation which continues to inform our moral self-understanding. As this may suggest, my critical relation to Aristotle here is complex. I think Aristotle is right to eschew what can be called an ‘atomistic’ conception of moral selfhood. (In this respect he does better than nearly all moral philosophy since the eighteenth century, with its commitment to atomism in one form or another.) I have tried to show how Aristotle’s anti-atomism is internal to his ethical worldliness. But the worldliness of his communitarianism shows the limitations of his ethical outlook. At the very least, a philosophical space can be preserved for a powerful ethical orientation, nourished by Western culture, which rejects the worldliness while endorsing the anti-atomism. So far I have tried to bring out some of those striking themes of Aristotle’s which tend to be obscured by many modern and broadly Christianinfluenced interpretations of him. I have also suggested that at various points we might find ourselves in significant disagreement with Aristotle. Let me briefly enlarge on some of these divergences, aiming thereby not finally to settle anything, but only to point up that ethical orientation which is fundamentally different from Aristotle’s, and which has been and still is of moment in our lives. I shall try to bring various aspects of this orientation into clearer light in later chapters. The Mark Antony given to us in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra can be seen as an exemplar of ‘the noble’ who is in many ways akin to Aristotle’s great-souled man. Thus Cleopatra celebrates him: For his bounty There was no winter in ’t, an autumn ’twas That grew the more by reaping; his delights Were dolphin-like, they sho’d his back above

Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond 35

The element they liv’d in; in his livery Walk’d crowns and crownets, realms and islands were As plates dropp’d from his pocket. (V.ii.86–92) The noble hero’s largesse, even magnanimity, may here seem a kind of super-abundance of generous life, wholly careless of its worldly position. We should remember, however, that Antony, and Cleopatra too, would have been mortified at the thought of his not occupying a grand position from which to dispense such largesse. His ‘bounty with no winter in it’ in fact depends upon, and also expresses, a proud sense of himself as a great figure in the world. It is the bounty of one who is, who sees himself as, and who acts to sustain himself as, a great-souled man – one of the ‘triple pillars’ of the world, no less. This is not to say that were Antony suddenly to lose his greatness, he would necessarily lose his disposition to generosity. (Though even in saying that we have to remember that this Antony does take his own life when his greatness is gone.) But generosity from an impoverished and reduced Antony – one finding himself in the circumstances of, say, the widow with her mites in Luke’s Gospel – could flow only from a radically transformed sense of himself and of the significance of his actions. For the generosity that Antony actually has is tied to his sense of his worldly greatness. These are reasons why it remains appropriate to speak of Mark Antony as one whose moral being is shaped by the idea of the noble. The apparent carelessness of Antony’s noble generosity is in fact the manner of one who is aware that that is how the noble man comports himself, and who comports himself that way partly out of the desire to sustain himself as one who is properly acknowledged as noble by his noble peers. (These are complex communally constituting conditions of ‘the noble’.) Mark Antony’s magnanimity must be seen against the background of an aspiration to realize himself as a man of worldly greatness and glory. Mark Antony’s magnanimity expresses something very like Aristotelian megalopsychia. (Etymologically, of course, ‘magnanimity’ comes directly from magnanimitas, the direct Latin equivalent of megalopsychia.) The quality is, in Mark Antony for example, undeniably impressive. But how is magnanimity, so conceived, related to what we mean by being generous or being magnanimous? We can hardly but acknowledge a very different kind of ideal of generosity, if not instead of that Aristotelian ideal then at least in addition to and at odds with it, an ideal to which a figure like the widow with her mites is much closer than Mark Antony is. If Mark Antony’s own sense of his public presence before

36

Ethical Encounter

others is essential to his magnanimity, that feature is characteristic not only of megalopsychia among Aristotelian virtues. We saw earlier that it also informs the central Aristotelian virtue of courage or valour, for example. The fact that courage, as Aristotle understands it, does not occupy the same place in our moral understanding points to an aspect of an ethical conception we cannot but take seriously. This conception rejects the centrality, to someone’s goodness, of his taking pride in the nobility of his presence before others, and of his acting in part out of the wish to sustain a sense of that nobility. Hence the space, in our moral thinking, for a figure like the widow with her mites. Her orientation is selfless30 in a way Mark Antony’s is not; though as we shall see in Chapter 2, ‘selfless’ does not by itself take us very far in characterizing this different ethical orientation. I do not think it plausible to say, as Bernard Williams does, that this different ideal reflects only something we ‘think we think’, and not something we really think at all. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, and again in Shame and Necessity, Williams sketches the commitments of what he calls the ‘morality system’. This is an orientation which Williams says has been most commonly opposed to a Greek ethical understanding that he thinks offers, in important ways (but certainly not in all ways), a helpful model for our own ethical self-understanding. Williams says that the ‘morality system’ involves certain illusions and philosophical mistakes which have not only been influential within philosophy but which have sometimes also corrupted people’s ethical sensibility. The ‘morality system’ assumes obligation to be the only ‘type of ethical consideration’, that ethical practical necessity is peculiar to obligations, and that morality requires an ‘utter voluntariness’.31 I agree that philosophical thought about ethics, and even extra-philosophical ethical practice, have been distorted in much the ways Williams says. But I think that along with these distortions Williams mistakenly dismisses something else. That is the possibility that what he rightly denigrates as the ‘morality system’ might be a distortion of something not only historically powerful in Western culture, but also humanly important and defensible, which is absent from the Greek context as Williams understands it. I think that the distortions of the ‘morality system’ are indeed distortions of a humanly fundamental reality. The contrast with Mark Antony already points to that ‘something’, though obscurely, and I shall end this chapter by trying to clarify it a little through a further comment on Williams. (Only a little: later chapters will clarify it further.) In his attempt both to justify the ethical

Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond 37

centrality of shame against guilt and to bring out some important affinities between our ethical conceptions and those of the Greeks who preceded Plato and Aristotle, Williams discusses Sophocles’ Ajax.32 Feeling slighted by the award of Achilles’ arms to Odysseus, Ajax slaughters the Greek army’s flock of sheep and cattle, and also two herdsmen, under the delusion that he is killing Odysseus and the other Greek leaders. Williams writes that when Ajax has recovered his senses there is a passionate lyric outburst of despair and, above all, shame: he has made himself, apart from anything else, utterly absurd. It becomes increasingly clear to him that he can only kill himself. He knows that he cannot change his ethos, his character, and he knows that after what he has done, this grotesque humiliation, he cannot live the only kind of life his ethos demands.33 In commentary Williams says that ‘it need not be merely some exaggerated sense of looking ridiculous or any other value that turns simply on appearances that leads someone to think that he or she cannot live as someone who has done a certain thing’. That is true. I knew a youth who killed himself when a girl he had made pregnant was forced by her parents to have a late abortion, as a result of which she could never have children. (That was thirty years ago.) There is no difficulty in making sense of his suicide as expressing unbearable remorse for what he had helped bring about.34 And there is then no question of his suicide turning on ‘an exaggerated sense of looking ridiculous or any other value that turns simply on appearances’. What moved him to suicide was no sense of his ‘utter absurdity’ or of his ‘humiliation’ before others, but his terrible remorse at what he had helped do to her. (We might of course think his response excessive and terrible, even while we have no difficulty understanding it.) So Williams’ general claim is true. But he makes it specifically in relation to Sophocles’ Ajax (as Williams has pictured him). And that it is not an ‘exaggerated sense of looking ridiculous’ which leads Ajax to kill himself is in my judgement very far from clear. The only justification Williams offers for his claim is that while ‘people do not have to think that they could not live in that situation … they may sensibly think it if their understanding of their lives and the significance their lives possessed for other people is such that what they did destroyed the only reason they had for going on.’35 What does ‘sensibly’ mean here? People’s thinking that way can readily enough make sense. But Williams clearly intends something stronger: that if people think that way in the circumstances he mentions then their so thinking of

38

Ethical Encounter

themselves lies beyond the scope of any serious critical moral judgement. I do not think this is true, nor that Williams provides any good reason for thinking it so. Certainly, that such an ‘understanding of his life’ led Ajax to think that he must kill himself provides little support for Williams’ view. Ajax’s sense of looking ridiculous surely does not avoid being exaggerated just because it leads him to kill himself. Indeed that might well be part of what leads us to think it exaggerated. While we can similarly make sense of the failed business tycoon committing suicide out of shame, we might still think his doing so shows cowardice and selfabsorption. (I do not suggest that Ajax’s suicide is cowardly.) Again, the point is not that we will think this about any failed tycoon who commits suicide. Suppose we are persuaded that his suicide expresses his terrible remorse at having ruined so many other people by his business dealings. Then there is no difficulty in recognizing that his suicide (however misguided we may still think it) did not come from an ‘exaggerated sense of looking ridiculous’. It expresses his anguish at the wrong he has done these people. They as the victims of his deeds are vividly present to his mind. But if his suicide expresses not that but rather his sense of the ‘absurd’ figure he has become with his loss of status and esteem, then we may well think that his suicide shows an exaggerated concern with how he appears to others. Would Williams want to say that this tycoon’s suicide lies beyond the scope of moral evaluation? Why should anyone accept that? And why should we accept the parallel claim about Ajax’s suicide? Williams seems to suppose that any sense of Ajax’s orientation as morally limited must be constrained by an appreciation of what is psychologically possible for him. The thought seems to be that if, according to the psychologically deepest understanding he had of his life, what he did destroyed ‘the only reason he had for going on’, then what he did lies beyond the scope of a critical moral evaluation brought from beyond the bounds of such a self-understanding. But I see no good reason to accept this. Let it be clear, though, that in disputing it I am not disputing everything Williams says about Ajax. Williams is right to hold that Ajax’s concern with ‘how he appears’ is not a shallow concern. It is not a concern with appearances by contrast with something else which he is psychologically capable of recognizing as his own ethical reality but which he has on this occasion been tempted into overlooking or denying. His psychologically deepest sense of what he really is, is of himself as one who is to be seen in that specific way. But this fact by itself should not persuade us that such a self-conception lies beyond the scope of moral evaluation.

Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond 39

Why does Williams think otherwise? One reason is that ex hypothesi the attempt to persuade Ajax to a different view would be fruitless. In such an attempt, anyone would be talking at Ajax, and not to or with him, just because the dispositions out of which he acts go so psychologically deep with him as to place them beyond discussion by him. When that happens an attempt at moral persuasion has become at best pointless and more likely moralistic brow-beating. But even if all that is granted, Williams’ conclusion follows only if it is assumed that the point or focus of moral evaluation must be to persuade another to act or become otherwise. But it is not always so. A second thought here is that it would be unfair to Ajax to judge his thought as morally limited since to understand himself otherwise was beyond him and beyond his culture. But that would have substance only if it were assumed that moral judgement must take the form of blaming.36 (The thought would be that it is unfair to blame someone for what it is beyond him to alter.) But blame is only one mode of moral judgement, and the judgements at issue – for example, that it is an exaggerated sense of looking ridiculous that leads Ajax to kill himself – need not reflect it. The registers, or modes, of adverse moral judgement are various. Blaming and attempts to persuade are two such modes. Then moral judgement may take the form of judgement about what someone ‘ought’ to have done, or what it was ‘wrong’ of him to do. But it need not do so, and sometimes it is important – morally important – that it not take that form. Sometimes, indeed, it is inane for it to do so; and the judgement of what Ajax did strikes me as such an occasion. And even when it is not inane, it will often be misguided. But the point or focus of adverse judgement need not be to persuade or blame, or even to register a conclusion about what is to be done. It may instead be to register a sense of the ethos, the kind of life or spirit, animating someone’s deed. That is arguably what is registered in a judgement that Ajax was indeed moved by an exaggerated sense of looking ridiculous. (There is still, of course, the question why one would venture such a judgement. One pressure towards doing so is simply resistance to Williams’ very suggestion that such judgements cannot ‘sensibly’ be made. That is perhaps pressure enough, and need warrant no ‘moralistic’ judgementalism. But more commonly, so judging can manifest a natural disposition, which need not be moralistic, to orient ourselves to deeds, people and forms of life we encounter, whether directly or through contemporary or historical report.) If Ajax is indeed psychologically37 incapable of appreciating the force of this judgement, that is by itself no warrant for withdrawing it. Instead, his very incapacity

40

Ethical Encounter

only reflects the ethical limitations of having that kind of character.38 (It makes no difference to this point if that kind of character is not only one which Ajax happens to have but also a kind of character which reflects the limits of the culture. Then the ethical limitations in question are limitations of the culture and not just of a member or a section of it.) These points so far have been negative, opposing the claim that Ajax’s cultural and psychological situation places his suicide beyond critical moral evaluation. Now more positively again: I think we cannot but register the orientation expressed in his suicide as seriously ethically limited. Here we might reflect on a detail of the episode which Williams, like Sophocles, mentions only to pass over: Ajax’s killing of two herdsmen during his rampage. Ajax thinks that the character he has, which is such that he cannot live with his shame, is the only character which befits a hero, and he is essentially a hero. But that latter thought of himself carries an implicit relative valuation of others: heroes are of greater worth than those who are not heroes – perhaps not in every sense or respect, but certainly in the sense that it is of little account that one has killed (for example) two (mere) herdsmen, when to have killed two heroes would be something momentous indeed. Ajax is presented as having no regard whatsoever for his having killed the herdsmen. His ethical conception is such that his slaughter of them plays no part at all in shaping his ethical sense of what he has become through what he has done. (Or rather: it informs that sense only so far as his mistaking the herdsmen for heroes is part of what makes him absurd.) There is no sense, even no room for any sense, that his slaughter of those men gives to his deeds an ethical dimension quite different in kind both from the unwitting slaughter of any number of cattle and from anything which can be registered by the sense of his ‘absurdity’ which Ajax comes to have. Ajax’s thought about the absurd figure he has become, and the despair which flows from that sense of himself, wholly occupies the space of his ethical understanding. Would Williams say that Ajax can ‘sensibly’ be wholly concerned with that and wholly unconcerned with his slaughter of the herdsmen? That seems to be the implication of his line of thought. Again we can surely understand this orientation, but we do also acknowledge the force of an ethical perspective which judges that orientation as radically limited – as, for example, involving ‘an exaggerated sense of looking ridiculous’, perhaps even as narcissistic. Williams recognizes that Ajax’s humiliations reach to the bottom of his ethical self-understanding. But that feature of Ajax’s selfunderstanding is not merely contingently connected with his complete

Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond 41

failure to appreciate his slaughter of the herdsmen as having any ethical significance. As I said, Ajax’s concern with ‘how he appears’ is not a shallow concern. It would be wrongly described as a concern with the ‘appearance’ by contrast with the ‘reality’ of virtue. Ajax’s concern, like that of the Aristotelian man of virtue as I discussed him earlier, is indeed a concern with virtue, but where virtue is so understood that the concern with it is conceptually interdependent with a certain kind of concern with how one appears before one’s peers. Hence the emphasis on Ajax’s shame, and his sense of the ‘utterly absurd’ figure he now cuts before his peers, in Williams’ account of Ajax’s ethical orientation. I have been suggesting, through my critical comments on Williams’ discussion, that this is an ethical orientation which we cannot but find limited. That is partly because of the limitations of the concept of shame, and of other concepts which cluster around it, for articulating a crucial aspect of our sense of others and of ourselves. Ajax’s humiliation, and his sense of the ‘absurd figure’ he has become, are conceptually very close to the concept of shame. The limitations I have noted in what these concepts enable us to register point to ways of making sense of others and ourselves which lie beyond their resources. The tycoon who kills himself out of remorse at the lives he has destroyed is not moved by a sense of such absurdity or humiliation or shame. Neither would Ajax have been so moved if what had come most to appal him was recognizing that he had killed two herdsmen. But that thought is not precise enough. Suppose that killing the herdsmen was salient in his sense of what he had done, but that the deepest reason for this is that Ajax finds the deed to be the most shameful and humiliating thing a hero could do. Then his understanding of what he had done in killing them would still, by lights we cannot but acknowledge, be seriously ethically limited. One way of expressing the limitation is to say that those actual herdsmen would then not sufficiently inform his sense of the terribleness of his deed – because his humiliation was blocking them from doing so, and his shame focused on the sense of himself as diminished by his deed rather than on them as having been wronged by him. I do not mean that he would cease to feel shame if those herdsmen came to inform his sense of the terribleness of his deed (though humiliation would certainly no longer be central). But if that happened then his experience would be one not only of shame, but also of remorse. We have no difficulty at all imagining that someone who killed two ‘insignificant’ people while doing something else might experience terrible remorse. That is so even if the two he killed were jobless, friendless and homeless. We can readily imagine even that such a person might

42

Ethical Encounter

contemplate suicide (however strongly we might also think he should resist that temptation). That we can so readily imagine these things reflects something deep in our moral outlook. Yet they are unimaginable, it seems, to Ajax. He would have found the thought of suicide for having killed two herdsmen utterly absurd. So would Aristotle. That is not a remark merely about Aristotle the man but about a certain ethical outlook and those conceptions structuring it that we have discussed. Again I do not say that his outlook is identical with Ajax’s as Williams represents that. Aristotle’s picture is more complex than Ajax’s concern with honour, but here the salient point is that both would have found it flatly absurd that a good person might be paralysed by remorse and contemplate suicide because he killed two homeless beggars. And that marks a chasm between them and us (or more precisely, between something they share and an outlook from whose authority we cannot detach ourselves, even if we can also find ourselves attracted by an outlook in tension with it). Of course who knows how he would actually respond to his doing of such a deed. But anyone who found the possibility of the response I described utterly ludicrous would thereby show himself morally very distant – disturbingly morally distant – from us. In saying that Aristotle would have found it absurd that a good person might be paralysed by remorse because he killed two beggars I did not mean that nevertheless he would find it intelligible that a good person would experience such remorse for killing two of his peers. The point is rather that so far as he finds the thought of suicide for killing two beggars absurd, something crucial to remorse as I understand it is absent from his conception of the repertoire of ethical experience. The concept that expresses his most fundamental sense of violation is shame rather than remorse. Then the point is not that Aristotle has the kind of sense of his peers and of his relation to them which by our lights he should also have of the beggars. For that would suggest that the main problem with his outlook is its narrowness – that the circle of ethical concern has not been drawn widely enough. But that is only part of the problem. The further (and deeper) point is that the ethical outlook which in that way excludes the beggar also shows a limited understanding of those who are within its range. The limitation is summarized by saying that shame and not remorse marks the deepest sense available in it of the wrong which can be done them. I have been gesturing towards a sense of the reality of another human being to which Aristotelian resources cannot take us. In later chapters that sense is explored in some detail. Here I note only that a sense of

Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond 43

the limitations of Aristotle’s – and more broadly of the Greeks’ – ethical thought need not depend upon the pattern of metaphysical illusions and philosophical mistakes which Williams says characterizes the ‘morality system’. Nothing I said, and nothing in my appeals to the reader, assumes obligation to be the only ‘type of ethical consideration’, or that ethical practical necessity is peculiar to obligations, or that morality requires an ‘utter voluntariness’. On the contrary, since it is indeed inane to say that Ajax ‘had an obligation’ to overcome an exaggerated concern with appearances, my point depends on the possibility of ethical considerations other than obligations, as it also depends on recognizing a sense in which moral judgement need not presuppose an ‘utter voluntariness’. That sense is given simply by the possibility of judging Ajax’s comportment as seriously limited, ethically speaking, even while agreeing that the possibility of conceiving otherwise was psychologically unavailable to him. Neither does the ethical contrast with Shakespeare’s Mark Antony to which I pointed import any of the ‘illusions’ and ‘mistakes’ which Williams says belong to the ‘morality system’. (My suggestion is, of course, that the concern Ajax shows with how he appears is continuous with Mark Antony’s. Mark Antony’s falling on his sword after his defeat at Actium shows the same species of ethical self-conception as Ajax’s suicide. That is again very close to the self-conception expressed in Antony’s magnanimity as I characterized it, although Mark Antony has a generosity of imagination and gesture which Ajax lacks.) I have been trying to indicate ethical possibilities which lie outside Williams’ conception of the options. One way of gesturing to where those possibilities lie is to say that the distortions of the ‘morality system’ are distortions of something deep and important in our ethical thinking which is not reflected in what Williams would substitute for them. I began by saying that many contemporary ‘virtue ethicists’ fail to appreciate much of what is crucial to Aristotle’s ethics because they read Aristotle through a tradition shaped in good part by JudaeoChristian thought. Thus they assimilate his virtue of liberality to (modern) generosity, his valour (andreia) to a modern understanding of courage, and so on; and they overlook other salient features of his ethical thought as well. I tried to bring out a few of the main themes of Aristotle’s ethics which have been muted in this way, some of them continuous with aspects of an earlier ‘heroic’ conception of virtue. My disagreement with Williams is very different from my disagreement with those other writers. Williams is very perceptive about much in Aristotle and some of his predecessors. He too seeks to dissolve a difference

44

Ethical Encounter

between Aristotelian (more broadly Greek) and modern ethical thought, but it is a different difference from that which is blurred by those virtue ethicists I spoke of. They proceed by reading Aristotle anachronistically, tacitly endorsing unAristotelian values in whose light they then interpret Aristotle. Williams proceeds by being much clearer about Aristotle (and other Greek thought) and then seeking to discount, as illusions bred of bad metaphysics, some (though not all) of those respects in which we seem to differ ethically from the Greeks. In the last few pages I have tried to provide some reason for finding his attempted discounting implausible. Overall, then, I have tried to reveal something of the distinctiveness and impressiveness of (specifically) Aristotelian ethical thought, to suggest that we find ourselves under the authority of an ethical outlook deeply incompatible with his,39 and to indicate something of the character of that different orientation. In the rest of this essay I want to try to bring out more of that character and the ways in which it continues to structure our moral self-understanding. But if it really does that, why is there a need to perform this task? Why should we need reminding that this outlook does indeed still crucially structure our moral understanding, including our self-understanding? The brief answer is that other themes in our culture, and also deep and perennial limitations in each of us, conspire to cloud this self-understanding. So my task is one of recuperation as well as of reminder.

2 Altruism and Moral Meaning

The next three chapters sketch some aspects of an ethical understanding which lies beyond anything acknowledged by Aristotle, which has historically been salient in Western culture at least, and which I believe still informs our deepest sense of ourselves. We do not get to this understanding, however, just by parting ways with Aristotle. As acknowledged earlier, there may be versions of virtue ethics not marked by Aristotle’s worldliness. It could be held that we find ourselves under an ethical outlook different from and perhaps incompatible with Aristotle’s, which even so is well described as a form of virtue ethics. Later I shall argue that the understanding sketched in the following three chapters resists such description. One way of revealing this understanding is via attention to neglected elements of the background to some of those concepts on which moral philosophers commonly focus. My starting point is critical reflection on the concept of altruism. Let me explain why. By contrast with Mark Antony’s magnanimity, I described the generosity of the widow with her mites as ‘selfless’. This might be thought to point to a general way of marking an ethical orientation incompatible with Aristotle’s, yet which is not only familiar but has also been a compelling ideal in our culture (however much we in fact fail to rise to it). The idea of selflessness, however, may not by itself take us very far. Bernard Williams speaks of the possibility of ‘sheer malice, the selfless desire that another be harmed, whether one comes to know about it or has anything to do with it or not’.1 Perhaps selflessness can thus be for good or for ill. The idea of altruism then seems to go beyond mere selflessness, in itself ethically neutral, towards selfless generosity or charity. (‘Selfless generosity’ is not tautological, because there is a generosity, such as Mark Antony’s, which however impressive is not selfless.) 45

46

Ethical Encounter

Altruism has been widely thought to be a crucial mark of the ethical, a mark of a kind of ideal attentiveness to the claims of others, in which the self does not intrude at all. The word ‘altruistic’ need not be used by those who think roughly this. The ‘benevolence’ which Hume thinks the core of the ethical can be regarded as the ‘sentiment’ which occasions altruism: … there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and the serpent. Let these generous sentiments be supposed ever so weak … they must still direct the determinations of the mind …2 And in discussing ‘moral self-indulgence’, Bernard Williams writes that it ‘involves a reversal at a line which I take to be fundamental to any morality or indeed any sane life at all between self-concern and otherconcern’.3 ‘Other-concern’ is close to synonymous with ‘altruism’. There can be different views about the precise weight, and place, in an ethical orientation, of altruism. Nothing in Hume or Williams, for example, suggests that only altruism is morally acceptable. Both acknowledge a natural and healthy self-concern in people. (And Hume describes one class of virtues as ‘qualities useful to ourselves’.) Utilitarianism, too, allows that a person is to consider herself as one among equals, and to give her interests equal weight with the interests of every other. Selfconcern can thus be thought not only compatible with an ethical orientation, but even to be required by it. But the most important element, still, of such an orientation is held to be a concern for the interests of others that is genuinely for their interests. It is not a calculation aimed, even indirectly, at furthering one’s own interests. The common contrast term to ‘altruism’ is ‘egoism’. The word has been used to denote different things in the philosophical tradition. Sometimes it may register a particular sort of ulterior motive out of which a person benefits others. Sometimes it can denote a pervasive ‘manner’ in which someone acts, even when he or she does things which are overtly civic-minded or of benefit to particular others. Someone who, perhaps even herself unaware of doing so, lives off her cause rather than for it, could manifest such a manner. Sometimes egoism denotes a more specifically selfish concern, and sometimes merely self-interested concern. These last two are different. The lazy slob in the shared house may be selfish, but, if his co-tenants are likely to

Altruism and Moral Meaning 47

ostracize him for his laziness, and this matters enough to him, continued (selfish) laziness may not be in his own (self) interest. Conversely, giving up smoking may be in the smoker’s own interest but is not selfish. In the previous chapter, I said that Aristotle’s virtuous person was not an egoist, even though there was an irreducible self-concern – a concern for how he appeared – in his virtuous orientation. Given that concern, he could not be regarded as an exemplar of what is commonly meant by altruism either. I noted that Antony’s magnanimity, also, is neither altruistic nor egoistic. That contrast just does not seem to be a useful one for understanding an ethical outlook of the kind so well characterized by Aristotle. But that may be thought precisely why the concept of altruism crystallizes an ethical orientation which lies beyond the scope of Aristotle’s thought, and which, however much we have failed to realize the ideal embodied in it, has historically been and continues to be central to our deepest ethical understanding. As remarked before, many have thought of altruism this way, and my own description, as ‘selfless’, of the orientation I distinguished from Mark Antony’s magnanimity may seem to have been inclining that way. It seems hard to deny – hard for us to deny – that a concern for others which in no way involves self-concern is crucial to our sense of the deepest ethical responsiveness. It would be silly to say there is nothing in this thought. Still, there is reason to think that a focus on altruism – or on related concepts such as other-concern and (more restrictedly) benevolence – has expressed and encouraged a fundamentally limited understanding of the ethical. (And not because such a focus may obscure the need for each person to have a healthy concern for himself: that thought is not at issue here.) This is so in two ways. First, a traditional emphasis on altruism is blank to the way in which an ethical orientation implicates – better, defines – the one compelled by it. If there is something important in the idea of a selfless generosity or compassion (though we have not yet explored just what this might mean), such an orientation can still be self-defining, and can be so without being in the least egoistic. Secondly, the concept of altruism affords too limiting a sense of the way in which others are most deeply present – we could also say most fully real – to one ethically engaged by them. Someone’s orientation may satisfy the usual conditions of altruism yet still involve, in more than one way, an ethically shallow sense of ‘the other’. The concept of altruism is inadequate to reflect a way in which others can be fully present to us. Being able to realize them as present in this way is a condition of the deepest ethical understanding.

48

Ethical Encounter

My main interest in this and the next chapter is not in altruism and its limitations per se. It is in what an exploration of some of those limitations will help reveal both about our ethical relations with others – more precisely, about what it is for others to be fully present to us – and also about our own ethical self-realization through such encounter with others. These, it will be argued, are two interdependent dimensions of an ethical orientation that I said earlier we cannot but find ourselves under and that lies beyond Aristotle. I begin by discussing a relatively straightforward way in which someone’s ethical responsiveness to others can be definitive of what he is, about which the concept of altruism is at best unhelpfully mute. As will be seen, the second of my two lines of critical reflection itself divides into two. Both of these, but the second of them more fully, will require appreciation of a different and deeper form of ethical self-definition. Something very like the common contrast between egoism and altruism is presupposed in Thomas Nagel’s description of what he calls ‘the central problem of ethics’. That problem is ‘how the lives, interests and welfare of others make claims on us and how these claims … are to be reconciled with the aim of living our own lives’.4 While there is something in this, it invites development in two mistaken ways. First, it makes the ethical demand external and subsequent to the aim a person has to live his or her own life; and secondly, it simply asserts that an ethical orientation has to be towards the ‘lives, interests and welfare of others’. Let me elaborate. Nagel seems to assume as unproblematic – or at least to assume as not internal to the central problem of ethics – what it is to ‘live one’s own life’. I already have my ‘aim’ to do that before I encounter ‘the central problem of ethics’. A very different thought would be that the central problem of ethics – if one is going to speak at all of ‘the’ central problem of ethics – is what it is to live one’s own life. That does not mean that for one who thinks that to be the central problem of ethics the ‘lives, interests and welfare of others’ must be of no ethical concern. But they will be of ethical concern as they enter in relation to the (never-completed) discovery of what it is to live one’s own life. They do not enter after that is known and one is engaged in the business of living that life, only to encounter – lo and behold! – the ‘problem’ of how to ‘reconcile’ the claims of those other lives with the living of one’s own. If that is how the ‘problem’ arises, it is hard to see it as a problem at all. For then the claims of others would be wholly external to the living of one’s own life, and Thrasymachus and Callicles would be right that only a weak-minded fool would be gulled into acknowledging them.

Altruism and Moral Meaning 49

But if the central problem of ethics is what it is to live my own life – the life which is most fully, most truly my life, the life which makes the deepest sense, has the deepest significance, for me (all of these different formulations helpfully elaborate the central idea) – then it cannot just be assumed that the ‘interests of others’ will be a concern for anyone resolving that problem. Consider the person whose life is most fundamentally shaped by what he understands as the ethical demand continually to overcome his appetites and passions. Someone so described might of course have the further thought that the purpose of this overcoming is to enable him better to respond to the ‘interests’ of others. But that need not be so. That self-overcoming might itself constitute the deepest understanding such a person has of the requirement upon him, so that his on occasion ‘acting to satisfy another’s interest’ instead of his own matters most just because it manifests his then having overcome his passions. Such a person shows an understanding of ‘the central problem of ethics’ to which acknowledgement of the ‘lives, interests and welfare of others’ is not most fundamental. Michel Foucault argued that this is the main emphasis of Greek ethics: selfmastery is its governing idea. But whether or not he is right about that, think of that familiar Western cultural figure, the hermit. It seems that Nagel would have to think of the hermitic life as necessarily lying outside the scope of ‘the central problem of ethics’. Presumably the same would go for life in those contemplative religious orders – the Cistercians, for example – whose members live very isolated lives. Someone might reckon those lives to be ethically limited on that account. Even if that were so, it would be a big step to say that they lie altogether outside the ‘central problem of ethics’. But whether or not one judges such lives as ethically limited, the point here is that judging them to be limited is already the expression of an ethically substantive, and disputable, outlook. It is not the expression of a purely conceptual truth about ‘the central problem of ethics’.5 Nagel speaks of the lives and interests of others as ‘making claims on us’. That phrase points to something important, which Nagel’s own terms do not enable him fully to acknowledge. For me to register something as thus making a claim on me is for the sense my life makes to be bound up with my answering that claim. I then discover that my responsiveness to the claim is involved in what it is to ‘live my own life’. This is a grammatical remark, in Wittgenstein’s sense, about recognizing a claim upon one. (I do not mean that it is therefore unintelligible that I should fail to answer any such claim. There could be various explanations for my so failing: perhaps other claims are greater, or perhaps I act

50

Ethical Encounter

self-deceptively – or simply weakly, giving in to some temptation.) Nagel does not deny that the ‘moral’ person will sometimes decide to accord weight to the interests of others where these conflict with his own. He acknowledges also that the ‘moral’ person will not do this only when he calculates that his doing so will in fact be to his own long-term advantage. Sometimes he will do it even when it is contrary to his own long-term advantage. But now the puzzling character of Nagel’s description of the ‘fundamental problem’ stands out more clearly. If the most fundamental characterization of being moral is such that being moral requires a person sometimes to act against his own interests, for the sake of others’ interests, someone’s acting in that way is going to require a very special sort of explanation. It seems that this will have to be in terms either of some psychological or ethical deficiency – idiocy or weakness or madness or despair or self-deception or pusillanimity – or of a motivation which is absolutely different in kind from all of one’s ‘interests’, and which can oppose and subordinate those. The former is the view of Thrasymachus and Callicles. The latter is often thought to be Kant’s view, and perhaps Kant says a good deal which fosters the interpretation. Kant, rightly, wants not to lose sight of the strangeness, the extraordinariness, of the human capacity to be moved by an ethical demand even at the cost of one’s life. But his formulation, in terms of our response to the demands of Pure Reason, also risks making it wholly unintelligible, and not (so to speak) merely extraordinary, that anyone should ever be so moved: ‘What is mere Reason to me that I should respond to its demands at the cost of my life?’ Kant lacks the resources to answer this question,6 and Nagel does not seem to offer a better option. (Kant moves closer, but only a little closer, to showing how morality’s demands might be bound up with the meaning things have for us when he speaks, in the Groundwork, of ‘reverence’ for the moral law as what properly moves us: we can at least make sense of reverence as a motivation. The problem is that nothing else he says helps make sense of how reverence gets into the picture at all.) There is moving footage of Martin Luther King speaking a few days before his death in a way which suggests that he had good reason to believe that pursuing his cause would lead to his assassination. Nagel’s formulation implies that King faced a conflict between the ‘aim’ of living his own life, and responsiveness to others’ interests. But this seriously distorts things. To one moved by King’s comportment, his readiness to die for his cause shows itself as a condition, in these circumstances, of his living of his own life. This may sound paradoxical,

Altruism and Moral Meaning 51

but it is not. We need not deny all sense to the thought that in being ready to sacrifice his life a person is ready to act in a way which is ‘contrary to his interests’. It has a clear enough sense: he does not want to die. But it is at least misleading just to say flatly that in his readiness to give up his life King ‘subordinates his interests’ to the interests of others. For one thing, saying this does not distinguish the moving example of King’s resoluteness from the pusillanimous self-subjugation of the human ‘doormat’. It is misleading also because, as Hume might have said if he had used these terms, human beings naturally have an interest in fostering the interests of others. (In Hume’s terms, benevolence is natural to human beings.) But the further point is that King’s response to this felt moral demand upon him is internal to his living his own life. This takes us beyond Hume’s thought because it again makes salient the idea of the sense or meaning of one’s life. Hume never talks in these terms, and the philosophical tradition has followed him in this.7 King discovers that the deepest sense of his life is such that a readiness to lose it in these circumstances is a condition of his continuing to be able to make sense of it as a life he can recognize as properly his. (I speak of how King struck me. Others may need to think of think of a different example.) Nagel’s way of putting things is not flatly wrong. It rightly sustains a sense of ethics as a site of potential tension and conflict. But it distorts the character of such conflict by its insensitivity to the way in which acknowledgement of ethical requirement can be entwined with the sense or meaning of a life.8 The point is not that the desire or intention to preserve the sense or meaning of his life is (part of) this person’s reason for being ready to sacrifice his life. That might indeed mark a kind of egoism. It is rather that someone’s being moved so to act – a being-moved which he might register with the words ‘I must … ’ – can show that for him so responding does indeed realize a crucial significance of his life, that something crucial to the meaning of his life is crystallized in the need so to respond. The point perhaps comes out more clearly in connection with failures of moral response. Someone who, perhaps through fear of death, betrays her cause may suffer terrible remorse for this, and express herself by saying ‘what has become of me?’ This is one expression which shows a sense of having denied or betrayed something crucial to the meaning of one’s life. If she had not weakened, her action – perhaps at the cost of her life – would have sustained a crucial aspect of the meaning of her life, but the thought of its doing this need not then be part of her reason for so acting. The significance of her deed – shown in her cry ‘what has become of

52

Ethical Encounter

me!’ – enters her consciousness, if at all, only through her sense of denial or betrayal. And when it does thus enter her consciousness – when she responds with these words to the betrayal she has perpetrated – it is quite wrong to say that she is then being egoistic, that she has her eye on herself rather than on what she has done. Of course such remorse could become egoistic, an occasion for self-absorption, but it need not do so. The anguish in what she says can be informed by an attentiveness to, and a truthful sense of, what she did. Then her anguish of remorse reveals her sense of the significance of what she did. What Nagel says lies very close to the view that altruism and egoism are the two poles, so to speak, between which the axis of ethics runs. So far my criticisms of that view, and its Nagelian counterpart, involve little departure from Aristotle. Aristotle could not (neither could Plato) make any sense of a conception of the ethical which located ethics outside the question of what it is for one to live one’s own life. For both of them ethical concerns are engaged at the point of resolution of the deepest sense or significance one’s life can have;9 and that point of resolution is equally a point at which the always-yet-to-be-realized living of one’s own life takes further shape. Secondly and relatedly, while Aristotle does indeed think that others do inform one’s ethical concerns, he does not think that when they do so the question one faces about them is whether one is going to allow their interests to ‘outweigh’ one’s own. It is rather that (if one puts the point in the language of interests, which Aristotle does not) the way they do inform one’s ethical concerns helps to constitute one’s own interests. That even Aristotle could share most of my criticisms hitherto of the view that altruism and egoism are the true poles of ethics shows the complexity of the present state of play. I spoke of altruism because its contrast with egoism arguably appeared to mark a pure other-directedness which both is central to an ethical orientation and, while foreign to Aristotle, has been important in Western culture. I suggested that the appearance would turn out to be illusory, but that this would not call into question the importance of such a sense of other-directedness. It would only show up the relative shallowness of the concept of altruism, as unable to capture that sense. Our attention so far has been on a kind of blankness, in philosophical discussion of morality, about the link between moral responsiveness and the sense or meaning which a person can find to be realized or sustained in his life through such responsiveness. I suggested that to think of the axis of ethical concern as running between the poles of altruism and egoism helps make for such blankness. (Other things may

Altruism and Moral Meaning 53

of course make for it too.) But if Aristotle and Plato would also find such philosophical reflection on ethics inadequate, there are also two other lines of criticism of the idea of altruism. The second line brings out the inadequacy of a reductionist way in which the idea of altruism has been used. Once again, this will not take us beyond anything Aristotle could recognize. The third line, however, reveals an orientation that Aristotle does not, and in my view could not, acknowledge. A question then arises about how these lines of criticism relate to the one already developed. My suggestion will be that the link between ethical responsiveness and the sense or meaning of a life invites development in a direction which Aristotle cannot take. Or, putting it slightly differently: this third line of criticism of the idea of altruism will reveal a kind of depth in the ethical sense someone can make of his life which nothing in Aristotle answers to. That kind of depth echoes, or reflects, a kind of depth which can be discovered in the reality of other human beings, to which nothing in the concept of altruism can take us either. Let me develop these two lines of criticism in turn, initially by reflecting on another fairly recent version of the view that altruism is the key to the ethical. The version belongs to Bernard Williams, though it seems clear he would now reject much of it. In an early paper, ‘Egoism and Altruism’, Williams characterizes altruism as a ‘general disposition to regard the interests of others, merely as such, as making some claim on one, and, in particular, as implying the possibility of limiting one’s projects’.10 And he says that altruism is a necessary feature of a morality. Williams’ territory here is ‘the antagonism between egoism and morality’; and the point of his paper is to encourage the view that both in moral theory and also in moral psychology, it is not the Kantian leap from the particular and the affective to the rational and universal that makes all the difference; it is rather the Humean step … from the self to someone else.11 This is the step from egoism to altruism. I do not think that the Humean step can make ‘all the difference’, though it misconceives the options to think that we then must take what Williams calls the Kantian leap. One reason the Humean step cannot make all the difference has already been canvassed. Like Nagel, Williams seems to beg the question against (for example) the self-overcomer mentioned earlier – the person for whom the fundamental ethical imperative is to master his passions. For it seems that such a person indeed finds himself under an ethical

54

Ethical Encounter

demand, though not necessarily because the interests of others carry any weight with him. He need be no altruist, but he is not an egoist either, in the usual sense of that term, given how his concern with himself is mediated by his ethical understanding. In one sense he certainly does go ‘beyond the self’ in his ethical concern, since his deepest understanding of himself is under the aegis of that ethical requirement to master his passions. The point, however, is that the direction beyond the self in which he goes in this case is not towards someone else. But that point is not the focus of the discussion that follows. The themes of ‘Egoism and Altruism’ are developed more fully in Williams’ book Morality, especially in his discussion of a figure called the ‘amoralist’, and of what he needs in order to get him into what Williams calls ‘the world of morality’. There may exist pathological creatures devoid of sympathy who are never inclined to want to help anyone else. But the figure of Williams’ essay is one who at least occasionally cares about someone else. He is still recognizably amoral, says Williams, ‘in the sense that no general considerations weigh with him, and he is extremely short on fairness and similar considerations. Although he acts for other people from time to time, it all depends on how he happens to feel’.12 He will help someone in need when he happens to want to. Of him Williams then says: … this man is capable of thinking in terms of others’ interests, and his failure to be a moral agent lies (partly) in the fact that he is only intermittently and capriciously disposed to do so. But there is no bottomless gulf between this state and the basic dispositions of morality. There are people who need help who are not people who at the moment he happens to want to help, or likes; and there are other people who like and want to help other particular people in need. To get him to consider their situation seems rather an extension of his imagination and his understanding, than a discontinuous step onto something quite different, the ‘moral plane’.13 A page later, Williams writes: … if we grant a man with even a minimal concern for others, then we do not have to ascribe to him any fundamentally new kind of thought or experience to include him in the world of morality, but only what is recognisably an extension of what he already has. He is not very far into it, and it is an extensive territory: as we saw in

Altruism and Moral Meaning 55

drawing up the amoralist, you have to travel quite a long way to get out of it. But the man with the extended sympathies, the ability to think about the needs of people beyond his own immediate involvement, is recognisably in it.14 A significant thought here is that even if you have to ‘travel a long way’, it is still at least possible to get out of the territory of morality. Kant did not think this was possible, neither did Plato. They thought that we are necessarily subject to moral judgement whatever the state of our own individual sympathies. Denying this can seem plausible because it seems only common sense to say that it is pointless to blame someone who is wholly blank to moral considerations. But the moral judgement to which Kant and Plato thought we remained subject come what may need not take the form of blame.15 Williams’ view seems to imply that, lying ‘outside the territory of morality’, the amoralist (as I shall continue to call Williams’ figure) could acceptably be treated wholly with indifference by those within it – that he could be treated with the indifference, or whimsy, with which the amoralist himself treats others. (If it does not imply that, then it is misleading to describe him flatly as outside the territory of morality.) But the amoralist and the psychopath whom it might indeed be pointless to blame still arguably cannot be treated like insects. Arguably, they are still owed justice, and the thought that they are is already expressive of a kind of respect for them. I say this view is arguable,16 and some will argue with it. But that very possibility shows a difference of moral outlook between the disputants, and that is a difference which cannot be properly resolved by the conceptual fiat implicit in Williams’ claim that the territory of morality is indeed escapable. But while this issue – whether it is even possible to get out of the territory of morality – will be in the background of what follows, it is not my immediate concern. The passages quoted above spell out what Williams earlier called the ‘Humean step’. And they are of a piece with what he says elsewhere about other-concern as the having of wants which aim at the furthering of others’ interests. ‘Wanting to help’ is a crucial feature, perhaps the crucial feature, of the ‘basic dispositions of morality’. Before going further we should note a large step that has been taken in crystallizing other-concern as ‘wanting to help’ others. Arguably only a modern assumption that morality is most fundamentally concerned with benefiting people, improving their circumstances, would lead to crystallizing other-concern in this way. (I referred to this assumption in the Introduction.) In other historical contexts other-concern would have

56

Ethical Encounter

been taken centrally to include, for example, observance of various prohibitions in respect of others. Other-concern can be manifest in the refusal to lie to someone, or indeed in the refusal to help someone because you think that what she is doing is wrong. The preoccupation with ‘wanting to help’ narrows the scope of other-concern. That narrowing is one, but only one, of the themes of the following reflections on altruism. Of the amoralist Williams also says: Even if he helps these people because he wants to, or because he likes them, and for no other reason (not that, so far as these particular actions are concerned, he needs to improve on those excellent reasons), what he wants to do is to help them in their need.17 The point of the emphasis on ‘helping people in their need’ is, I take it, that there is no ulterior motive at work here: the helping is not in order to improve one’s reputation, or to get a reward in the after-life, or to entrench a sense of one’s superiority over the other. In Williams’ terms, the altruist’s desire to help has no I-content: it is not a desire to help ‘in order that I … ’ (where what follows specifies an aim of mine which will be furthered by my giving of the help). Then the attention of the altruist is surely in the right moral place – on the other ‘in his need’. The other is then surely present to the altruist in the kind of way which marks an ethical attentiveness, for what more could be ethically required than such a direct and selfless attentiveness? Here the moral philosopher finds himself in apparently familiar territory. The Kantian response to this question might be supposed well-enough known – that an ethical attitude has to be grounded in something fundamentally different from desire, whatever content desire has. (The usual candidate is duty – or obligation, or perhaps recognition of the need to do what is morally right.) But we need to re-think the possibilities here. Perhaps thinking of ourselves as facing a choice between desires on the one hand and moral motivation on the other – between the so-called ‘Humean’ and ‘Kantian’ alternatives – is not the best way to conceive things. For that reason I shall proceed without much attention to what is supposedly already familiar to us.18 What Williams says here is compatible with the amoralist thinking about, and even saying to, those others: ‘Lucky you. It is true that I want to help you but if it hadn’t been such a lovely day I probably would not have felt like it, and in any case I may leave you in the lurch tomorrow if the desire has flown by then.’ Their beneficiary might

Altruism and Moral Meaning 57

have reason to be relieved that this person’s whims did not on this occasion go the other way, but his action is hardly expressive of anything we can recognize as an ethical appreciation. One thing lacking in this whimsically beneficent person is any sense of being claimed by the object of his want.19 He has no sense of responding to a demand or claim upon him. Suppose Williams’ amoralist does not have the reflective thought I recently ascribed to him – the ‘Lucky you’ thought – and that instead he is all focused on the situation, ready to help. But then suppose that he is distracted from his desire to help the other person by something else he finds he wants more. Imagine that the one who needs his help has been framed for some crime. The amoralist – an eyewitness to what really happened – can rescue him by coming forward. He is ready to do so, but those who did the framing bribe him to keep silent, and, wanting the money, he accepts the bribe. If the amoralist is as Williams describes him, there is no space in him for the recognition that he has done the other an injustice. He had a desire to help but it was outweighed by another desire and that is all. If that is how it was, his desire can hardly be thought of as a compelling ethical example. That can be so, even if as it happens his desire is not thus outweighed or deflected. Suppose, after all, that the bribe had not been forthcoming, and the amoralist had gone ahead and given the evidence, but that he would have accepted the bribe if it had been offered, and would have done so with no remorse for having abandoned the other person. Nothing in Williams’ description of the amoralist with extended sympathies excludes this possibility. Further, not only would he have felt no remorse for abandoning the other person for the bribe. In addition, he might be quite incapable even of conceiving of the possibility that were he to abandon the other person he would do him a grave injustice. But if he is like that, then his actual action of helping is very different in ethical significance from that of the person who, under the other’s felt claim upon him, would have gone ahead with giving his evidence, the offer of a bribe notwithstanding. (Such a person might well say of what he did that he had to do it.) Note that the point does not turn quite on whether the person in fact would have gone ahead with giving his evidence despite the bribe. One reason it does not is that what motivates him to go ahead might be (for instance) an obstinate refusal to be cajoled or coerced – often admirable enough in itself, but not the same as responding directly to the other’s felt claim upon him. But still, even someone acknowledging that claim upon him might indeed succumb to the temptation of a bribe – or perhaps to a threat of being beaten up by the accusers. The

58

Ethical Encounter

point then is that unless he were in the interval wholly to lose his appreciation of that claim upon him, this succumbing would require of him a remorseful recognition of the injustice he had done the other. (If his relation to the other were close enough, he might be moved to think of himself as having betrayed the other.) We can find his desire to help expressive of an ethical understanding only if his relation to the other has such dimensions as I have been describing. The remorse registered, for example, in his sense of himself as having betrayed the other is an expression of a failure to rise to a demand authoritatively made of him.20 The desire to help, therefore, even when free of ulterior motives is not, merely of itself, expressive of an ethical understanding, for it can exist in the complete absence of such a relatedness to the other. Something substantial has been added once ‘wanting to help the other in his need’ involves recognition of the other as a creature who needs to be treated justly in being helped. This recognition, in turn, involves recognizing the other as one who can be wronged, and a condition of genuine recognition of that is the intelligibility of remorse at any failure to answer the call to serve such a need. The ‘amoralist with extended sympathies’ described by Williams is not alive at all to these dimensions of the other’s need, and of what is required of one who would serve it. As he stands he can therefore hardly be taken as exemplifying all that belongs to even the ‘basic’ dispositions of morality. Notice that in filling in what is missing, ethically speaking, from the mere desire to help another in his need, we have not abandoned the ‘particular and affective’ and moved instead to something distinct from that called the ‘rational and universal’. At issue, rather, is the need for the desire to help to be expressive of a certain sort of understanding of the other, which invites description as a moral understanding. But perhaps I have not done justice to what Williams says. He does say, after all, that the amoralist is only on the brink of the ‘world of morality’, and that in order to be brought fully within it his dispositions to help need to be both less intermittent and less capricious or whimsical. (Altruism he characterized as a general disposition, remember.) Perhaps, then, the thought is that we can locate the amoralist within the ‘world of morality’ whenever his dispositions to consider the interests of others lose that intermittence and capriciousness, and become extensive and settled. The tendency to think of an ethical orientation as defined by such extension of concern is widespread. That there is an ‘expanding circle’ of those whose well-being one is concerned for is, according to Peter Singer, a crucial mark of an ethical orientation. And Richard Rorty writes of the

Altruism and Moral Meaning 59

progressive broadening of the domain of those we become prepared to identify as ‘us’ instead of ‘them’, as such a mark. This view about how a (mere) ‘desire to help’ acquires an ethical character is reminiscent of Marx’s dictum that sometimes a big enough change in quantity is ipso facto a change in quality. Perhaps sometimes it is, but not here. One’s concern does not become ethically informed just through an extension of the number of those creatures about whose welfare one deliberates, but only through a certain kind of engagement with another. However many people, or however often, a person might feel inclined to help, unless that disposition is informed by capacities of recognition and response including those summarized in the previous paragraph, his actions are not expressive of an ethically conditioned understanding. Of course it is often necessary for us to raise our eyes, as it were, and attend to others to whom we may hitherto have been indifferent or at least less attentive than we should have been. Extending the scope of our attention does matter. But in centralizing that thought, as it has often been centralized, we risk missing something fundamental. So far I have come at what that is through reflection on the ethical limitations of the theme of ‘wanting to help’. No elaborations on that theme will reveal the character of an ethical orientation. Mere ‘wanting to help’, even when all ulterior motive has been pared from it, and even when it has become generalized, still lacks a certain kind of normative dimension. In lacking this it fails to realize a certain kind of understanding of the person one is helping which is internal to the ethical character of the help. Ethically speaking, altruism has to be held in place, so to speak, by several things: the possibility of shame and remorse for failure of responsiveness; recognition of the other as one who can be wronged along with a sense of oneself as able to wrong him; and recognition that one’s helping of him is to be shaped by the requirements of justice. This is to say that the concept of altruistic desire cannot by itself ground ethics in the way Williams seemed to suppose in the passages we have discussed. My emphasis on the character of one’s understanding of the creature one helps, rather than on the desire to help itself, suggests a shift of spatial metaphor. I spoke of the widespread thought that what matters most, ethically speaking, is the extending of the desire to help. My own remarks, by contrast, could be thought of as marking a kind of intensiveness, a kind of depth, which one’s attention to another can lack or come to have. This is a different dimension, so to speak, in which attention can ‘increase’ from that implied in ‘extension’ of the desire

60

Ethical Encounter

to help. But there is a great deal more to say about such intensiveness, or depth, in our understanding of human beings. So far I have spoken, in fairly abstract terms, of the background against which altruism needs to be seen. But we need also to speak in a different idiom to clarify the kind of depth of ethical understanding of human beings which has so far been only sketchily indicated. In the next chapter I shall try to do that. That will involve bringing out a dimension of our sense of the reality both of others and of ourselves which it lies beyond the resources of Aristotle’s moral philosophy to acknowledge. Whether it lies beyond the resources of Kantian thought may be a more delicate question. In my judgement it does, but at the very least it lies beyond Kantian resources as these have been interpreted by even his most congenial and generous commentators. But, while Kant will be discussed in this connection later, my main interest does not lie in such scholarly questions. It lies in trying to reveal – better, to remind us of – aspects of our ethical understanding of ourselves with which moral philosophy has largely lost touch. This matters because those aspects of ethical understanding have traditionally gone, and continue to go, very deep in our sense of the kind of creatures we are. We need a reflective understanding to match that depth, lest our lives outside philosophy also lose touch with these elements of our ethical being because we have lost the resources to articulate them reflectively.

3 Altruism and ‘the Other’

Imagine two well-to-do and well-known figures – Peter and Paul – both of whom are generous with their time and energy and money in their community. One day both lose all their money. Paul becomes bitter and resentful – or perhaps he just becomes self-absorbed, unable any longer to attend much to anyone else. Peter does not. In his own deep troubles, he is still able to respond compassionately and attentively to the needs of various others. These different outcomes point to the possibility of a very different significance in the apparently similar orientations of Peter and Paul before they lost their wealth and status.1 It is important to note that the different outcomes do not necessarily mark such a difference between those two men. No (merely) empirical difference, of the kind I’ve described, between ‘cases’ can guarantee such a difference. I knew a gentle, patient and compassionate doctor who developed lung cancer and suffered a protracted and painful decline. He became resentful and bitter, thinking that he did not deserve his illness because he was not a smoker, that it was deeply unfair to him. That he became this way does not demonstrate that his earlier compassion – for example, towards those of his patients who had developed lung cancer after being smokers all their lives – was in fact shallower and more limited than it had appeared to be (because he thought that, unlike his, their suffering was to some extent deserved). His reaction to his own illness does raise this question about his earlier compassion, but perhaps he did just change, quite understandably, under the pressure of his own sufferings, and lose a power of responsiveness which he had once had. Knowing him, that is how I think of what happened. But in another case, the earlier comportment might appear differently in the light of later such events – as having been, all along, relatively shallow. So the difference in the way Peter and Paul 61

62

Ethical Encounter

respond to their changed circumstances does not necessarily point to a difference in the ethical character of Paul’s earlier activity from that of Peter. Even so, those different outcomes can help point us towards a significant difference between two kinds of orientation. Here I am imagining that Peter’s and Paul’s earlier orientations were in fact thus different. There is a kind of compassion that bears the imprint of the worldly status, wealth, comfort and relative security of the one who shows it. (Such compassion may well dissolve into self-absorption in a person, like Paul, who loses that status, comfort and security.) Compassion of that kind is essentially compassion-from-him-as-rich-and-respected-and-secure. Paul’s compassion before he loses his wealth and status could be of that kind without his so thinking of it, without any consciousness in him that the difference in his worldly position from those he helps shades the quality of the compassion he has for them. If Paul is like this, his orientation is in one salient respect like Mark Antony’s magnanimity as I spoke of that in Chapter 1. For both of them, the other to whom they attend is fixed within an understanding which takes its fundamental shape from the status they have in the public world. The other’s significance for them is crucially constituted by his or her allocated place in that understanding. In a clear enough sense, the other’s significance for them derives from the place within a determinate conceptual economy from which each of them shapes his encounter. Of course there are differences, too, between Paul and Mark Antony as I have described them. Mark Antony has an explicit sense of himself as one who is noble and who is to comport himself out of, and to sustain, that sense of himself. In a culture marked by its Christian history, Paul may well explicitly eschew such a conception of himself. (Perhaps he even sees himself as a good Samaritan, but he also may resist the temptation to form such a picture of himself.) Still, he resembles Mark Antony in the way I mentioned. Peter’s compassion is not dependent on his worldly position as Paul’s is. That is intimated (though as I said it is not made certain) by the fact that his compassion does not dissolve even when he himself becomes destitute. His compassion is informed by a sense both of those others whom he helps and also of himself that is different from Paul’s sense of himself and others. Let me try to say a bit more about this difference. Paul’s responsiveness to others is powered, we could say, by a sense of himself constituted by his place within a determinate conceptual economy. Or rather: by his places within a network of such economies. He is rich and not poor; a professional man and not a labourer; from a good family and not working class; he is successful in his work; he

Altruism and ‘the Other’ 63

lives in a good neighbourhood; he is well-respected; he has a devoted wife. He does what he thinks is right (in the exercise of his generosity). The sense of himself which informs his thinking it right, however, is one which hardly reaches beyond those differential locatings of himself in a social world. He thus has a relatively shallow self-understanding. The force of putting it that way is suggested by what happens when Paul loses his money and position. For then what powered his earlier philanthropy has gone. There is no continuing sense of himself reaching deep enough below that fabric of differential locating of himself to sustain a real compassion with those whom he earlier helped. The point can also be put round the other way: there is no compassionate response in him able to realize a continuing sense of himself which goes deeper than that fabric of differential locating. The limitations of his compassion show a sense of the significance of others – we could equally call it a sense of their reality or a sense of their value – which is correlative with that relatively superficial sense of himself. The understanding of them out of which he helps them is shaped by how and where they fit in that network of social (and perhaps psychological) differentiations out of which his own self-understanding is chiefly constituted. The sustaining of Peter’s compassion through the radical change of his circumstances suggests2 that the sense of himself out of which he acted was all along a deeper one, lying beyond all of those trappings via which Paul constituted his sense of himself. But, as with Paul, Peter’s sense of self is correlative with a sense of the reality of those others whom (like Paul) he thought he ‘had to’ help. If we are moved by a depth in Peter’s compassion which Paul’s lacks, I should say that this marks a difference in the depth of Peter’s sense of the reality of those others in their need, from Paul’s sense of that. Peter’s sense of that reality is as reaching behind (or beyond) all of those differential determinations which condition, and limit, Paul’s sense of their reality. And Peter’s sense of that reality also reflects, as we noted, a different sense of himself. I have described the difference between Paul’s and Peter’s sense of others (and of themselves) in terms of relative shallowness and depth. That description reflects a particular ethical orientation – the one revealed in Peter’s kind of responsiveness. Only that kind of orientation shows up Paul’s compassion as relatively shallow. What warrants or justifies speaking from that perspective? Only the force, the impact, the persuasiveness, of the perspective as I am trying to reveal it in this discussion. The reader has to judge that for him or herself, which is also to discover whether and how he or she is placed by it.

64

Ethical Encounter

We could (perhaps riskily) crystallize the difference between Peter and Paul’s sense both of self and others this way. If they were Christian, both might say or think, as they acted to help another in his need: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ (If they were not Christian, they might still have similarly thought: ‘There but for fortune go I.’) Those words can register a sense of what one most deeply is as reaching behind or beyond the differences – physical, psychological, social, cultural, and otherwise circumstantial – which distinguish and locate people in a public world. But while Peter and Paul might both have this thought, only Peter could really think these words in their full depth. For in the example as given, part of what Paul’s later loss of compassion and his resentment and bitterness signify is that in his heart he did not really believe that ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. The meaning of his resentment is that while certain events have happened whose empirical possibility he could not ever have denied, these events are an outrage against reality, a contradiction of what he morally is and deserves. ‘Empirically’, yes he ‘goes there’ – in the desperate position of those he once helped – but these very empirical facts are a blatant rupture of the moral order, the order according to which he can never truly be in such a desperate position.3 His resentment shows his sense of the injustice of his downfall: he deserved better, his downfall is inconsonant with his real moral status, whereas he never in his heart really felt that way about those others down-trodden in their poverty. His reaction to his own downfall shows something about the source of the energies informing his earlier compassion. They came largely from his having a position of wealth and public esteem. This is not so of Peter’s compassion, the energy for which remains when that position is gone. There is, I’ve been suggesting, an important ethical difference between the orientations of Peter and Paul.4 The difference involves different ways in which others are present to Peter and to Paul, as well as a different sense each has of himself in relation to those others. But these differences can also be expressed as differences in the depth of Peter’s and Paul’s compassionate attentiveness towards others. Yet Williams’ formulation of altruism applies equally to Paul and Peter, for both want to help those others in their need.5 That formulation is unable to reflect or mark these ethically significant differences between Peter and Paul. This is the second of the two reasons why the concept of altruism will not take us very far in articulating a kind of compassionate attentiveness to others crucial in an ethical understanding which has long, though always unstably, been at the heart of Western culture. The concept of altruism turns out to be relatively shallow.

Altruism and ‘the Other’ 65

But this example of Peter and Paul takes us only so far. The difference between them is already enough to reveal limitations in the concept of altruism. But it is possible to go further beyond Paul than the example of Peter as it has been developed will take us. And we need to go thus further if we are to reveal the full dimensions of a particular ethical understanding we cannot but take seriously. Other examples will help. Consider the change that Ivan Ilych undergoes on his deathbed in Tolstoy’s story. Ivan Ilych is a civil servant who has carried out his duties meticulously. He has lived a life of ‘legality, correctitude and propriety’,6 which has included living his marriage in accordance with all the demands which the social role of husband places upon him: he provides adequately for his wife and son, is perfectly civil and fair to them, entertains at home as a man in his position should, and so on. He falls seriously ill, and comes to reflect on his life: ‘Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done’, it suddenly occurred to him. ‘But how could that be, when I did everything properly?’ he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this … as something quite impossible.7 But the thought continues to torment him, and he comes to a judgement about the falsity of his life of legality, correctitude and propriety: In them (his wife and daughter and doctor) he saw himself – all that for which he had lived – and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a huge and terrible deception which had hidden both life and death.8 When he becomes conscious of his failure, he does not know how to go on from there: At that very moment Ivan Ilych fell through and caught sight of the light, and it was revealed to him that though his life had not been what it should have been this could still be rectified. He asked himself ‘What is the right thing?’ and grew still, listening. The passage continues: Then he felt that someone was kissing his hand. He opened his eyes, looked at his son, and felt sorry for him. His wife came up and he

66

Ethical Encounter

glanced at her. She was gazing at him open-mouthed, with undried tears on her nose and cheek and a despairing look on her face. He felt sorry for her too. ‘Yes, I am making them wretched … I must act,’ he thought. With a look at his wife he indicated his son and said: ‘Take him away … sorry for him … sorry for you too … .’ He tried to add, ‘forgive me,’ but said ‘forgo’ and waved his hand … .9 Earlier, Ivan Ilych could be described accurately enough as one acting from the roles of husband and father, if a role is thought of as (something like) a ‘nameable position within a social network’,10 whose incumbent is expected to act in certain ways – which may or may not be precisely specifiable. It would not exactly be false to say that Ivan Ilych continues in his final moments to act ‘in accordance’ with the demands of those roles. He does after all arguably continue to respond to his wife and son out of a sense of requirements upon him as husband and father. But now his sense of what it is to be those things reaches beyond a sense of them as roles. His orientation, in responding as he now does, has dimensions which lie beyond the satisfying of expectations shaped and sustained by the social network within which they occur. Ivan Ilych is now enabled to ‘look’ and ‘feel sorry’ in a way he never has before, and in a way which, if a husband and wife find themselves claimed so to respond, cannot be demanded of them in their fulfilling of the roles of husband and wife. That is a logical ‘cannot’. Ivan Ilych has become enlivened to a new kind of relatedness – there is reason to call it, for the first time, a personal relatedness – with his wife and son. She and he are present to him in a different way. Their new significance to him cannot be adequately captured by concepts marking what they can reasonably expect of him in his roles of husband and father. The difference I am trying to point to between Ivan Ilych’s earlier and later orientations cannot be fully captured in the terms of Aristotle’s ethics. The difference is not, for example, that the later Ivan Ilych realizes that mere rules cannot take the place of judgement and practical reason, and that ‘perception’ or ‘discernment’ of the particular case is required. (That difference is highlighted by Aristotle.) Or rather: there may be that difference here, but acknowledging it will not itself take us to what is revealed in Ivan Ilych’s later orientation. Perhaps the extreme nature of Tolstoy’s contrast obscures this. I said that the expectations which a role imposes on a person need not be precisely specifiable. When they are not, practical reason as understood

Altruism and ‘the Other’ 67

by Aristotle – involving discernment of the particular case, of a kind which draws on various affective capacities – will indeed be required of a person in fulfilling the requirements of a role. That does take us beyond the mere ‘legality, correctitude and propriety’ of Ivan Ilych’s earlier comportment: such a comportment is only one very stiff and often inadequate way of living out one’s roles. What Aristotle has to say about practical reason is thus important as a corrective to a mistaken conception of practical reason as mechanistic, or even as merely routine, in its application. But suppose Ivan Ilych did indeed use the full scope of practical reason in his ‘discernment of the particular case’. Even so, Ivan Ilych thus unstiffened is not thereby the transformed Ivan Ilych of Tolstoy’s story. The transformation in Ivan Ilych’s understanding both of himself and of his wife and son lies beyond what can be learnt from Aristotle.11 It lies also beyond the scope of Alasdair MacIntyre’s thoughtful and rich resuscitation of a virtue ethics in After Virtue.12 The ideas of a practice and a tradition which provide the background, according to MacIntyre, against which the virtues are to be understood, sustain a conception of the ethical as realized in an essentially public forum. MacIntyre’s conception of practices and traditions both extends the range of virtues beyond Aristotle’s, and also provides a rich social context for the virtues. Even so, his picture sustains Aristotle’s occlusion of (as I shall now put it) a certain sense of the individual and personal. I say ‘a certain sense of’ the individual and personal because of course Aristotle’s picture includes some substantial sense of these things. But we do not get much closer to Ivan Ilych’s transformed relatedness to his wife and son by speaking of his participation in some practice or tradition than we do by speaking of his response as conditioned by a role.13 The deeply personal way in which he is newly engaged by them spills beyond, and transforms, whatever constitutes the essentially public character of any practice or tradition of being a father or a husband. That is the force of saying that a husband or wife finding himself or herself claimed in response in (something like) the way Ivan Ilych comes to do, will ‘feel’ and ‘look’ and ‘feel sorry’ – and much else – in a way which cannot be demanded of him or her because of participation in any practice or tradition of marriage. MacIntyre of course insists that practices and traditions are open, and that they can – must, if they are to remain vital – be progressively transformed through the character of people’s engagement in them. But while the way in which one like Ivan Ilych comes to live his marriage might partly transform an extant tradition of marriage, it also might not. And even when it does, the

68

Ethical Encounter

‘more’ which Tolstoy renders Ivan Ilych as finally coming to make of his marriage and of himself reaches beyond anything plausibly understandable in terms of the possibilities of a culturally defined practice or tradition.14 Like Paul when wealthy, Ivan Ilych before he changed might well have ‘wanted to help’ his wife and son on various occasions. (He certainly often acted to help those who came under his civil service umbrella.) In so helping, he need have had no ulterior motive; he may have ‘wanted to help them in their need’, as Williams puts it. In Thomas Nagel’s different but related vocabulary, Ivan Ilych may well then have ‘considered their interests and welfare’ and even have, on occasion, put their ‘interests’ before his own. His actions hitherto, like Paul’s, thus seem to satisfy all the criteria for altruism as Nagel and Williams think of it. Yet he himself comes to judge those earlier responses of his to be radically wanting. And (although he does not put it to himself in these terms) what limits those responses is that he did not allow the reality of his wife and son to be fully present to him, and to be what was really moving him, when he acted under the old dispensation. The concept of altruism is meant to mark the importance, to an ethical orientation, of our relation to the other. But the conditions for the concept’s application seem to be satisfied by an orientation which falls ethically far short of the kind of attentiveness realized in Ivan Ilych’s transformed sense of his wife and son. It is in the light of the way they become present to him that he judges his earlier comportment as false. (Ivan Ilych discovers, likewise, that he had a limited and shallow understanding of himself – of his life – and that he had not allowed himself to be fully present to them, either.) Ivan Ilych’s conversion is stark and extreme – as conversions perhaps always are. But its significance can also be revealed elsewhere. This is King Lear on the heath in the storm, after he has given away his kingdom, and been slighted by his daughters: Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just. (III.iv.28–36)

Altruism and ‘the Other’ 69

The proud monarch has been stripped of his power, and these words could just mark the glimmering of a new kind of sense of common humanity on Lear’s part. I think they do, but even here the old Adam shows through in Lear’s new compassion. He cannot abandon the grand style, those rolling cadences which register monarchical status. And notice how his attention shifts quickly enough from the ‘poor naked wretches’ to the grander matter of ‘showing the heavens more just’, work fit for a king indeed. What seems to begin as a direct and pure response to the plight of others turns out to have its sources of energy still partly in the old kingly pride of power. Lear’s poignantenough sense of ‘poor naked wretches’ remains circumscribed by his still slightly self-dramatizing picture of himself as fallen ‘pomp’, and to that extent cannot be wholly uncondescending. It is therefore not expressive of an open, selfless kindness. He is not absolutely and unqualifiedly ‘of a kind’ with those wretches. (I suggest below that this is not a mere pun on the word ‘kind’.) He subtly defines his sense of significant difference from them in the ways indicated. The kind of otherness the ‘poor naked wretches’ have for Lear is still partly determined from the standpoint of that worldly sense of himself as sadly fallen ‘pomp’. More than that, its content is given by the contrast with that sense of himself. A specific difference of worldly status between him and them still partly defines his sense of their helpworthiness or value. An assumed conceptual economy is background here to Lear’s compassion – and both his own place in it and the place of the ‘wretches’ are established and known. The character even of his new compassion remains partly informed and energized by his sense of his particular place in that economy. The reality of those wretches for him is still defined contrastively with that sense. Thus his compassion for them does not wholly escape condescension: he does not quite acknowledge them his moral equals. In a slightly different way from Ivan Ilych, Lear, too, does not quite – despite his best attempt – allow those poor naked wretches he imagines, to be fully present to him in their own human otherness. His rhetoric still keeps them slightly veiled from him. That it does so is correlative with his continuing to think of himself as essentially a king – ‘every inch a king!’, as he says. The continuing closure of his moral sense of them – in the terms of that conceptual economy I spoke of – is the mirror image of the closure of his own sense of himself as essentially a king. Like Paul and the ‘correct’ Ivan Ilych, Lear here could well satisfy Williams’ requirement for altruism. Yet, I have been suggesting, his orientation realizes an ethically limiting sense both of those he imagines and also of himself.

70

Ethical Encounter

How does this example from King Lear illuminate what was at issue in Ivan Ilych’s conversion? The answer lies in the implicit sense against which Lear’s compassion shows itself as still residually condescending. The whole of Shakespeare’s play helps to define that sense, but important to it is the capacity genuinely to realize another as ‘unaccommodated’, as a poor bare forked creature, and the point here is that Lear cannot quite do that because he cannot disclose himself, allow himself to be present, to others in that way. We can recognize the limits of Lear’s orientation only in the light of a wholly direct, open-hearted deeply compassionate acknowledgement of another, which importantly includes but also reaches well beyond the capacity to realize another as ‘unaccommodated’. The possibility of such an acknowledgement it is one marvellous effect of the play to make imaginatively available to us.15 And that also finds us in the territory of Tolstoy’s story. How is what is revealed by these examples linked to my earlier criticism of Williams’ neo-Humean attempt to derive ethics from the desire to help? The examples show what needs adding to my earlier discussion of what was missing, ethically speaking, from the ‘desire to help’ of Williams’ amoralist whose sympathies have become extended. That person, we saw, lacked any sense of being responsive to a claim or a requirement upon him. Now Paul, Lear and the untransformed Ivan Ilych all might sincerely have used an ethical vocabulary apparently expressing a sense of such a requirement. Lear does indeed speak of the need to ‘show the heavens more just’; and Ivan Ilych and Paul might have spoken of what they ‘must’ or ‘had to’ do, and might have felt some sense of guilt or shame or remorse at their failure to do it. In any empirical sense their responses are indeed normatively constrained, expressive of a sense of ethical requirement upon them. Yet, we have just now been pointing up the ethically limited character of those responses. In that case, Williams’ account of ethical response is not made good just by, so to speak, adding a sense of ethical requirement to his ‘desire to help’. This suggests that my earlier way of specifying such requirement did not take us deep enough. The reason it failed to do so lay in what could be called the ‘externalist’ logic of my specification. The difference between Paul and Peter, like that between the earlier and later Ivan Ilych, is not a difference in the fact of their finding their responses ethically required, but in the significance – which we could also call the depth, or inner character – of the way in which they find themselves ethically bound in response. One need not be moralistic about that difference. In an everyday sense, Paul acts kindly and generously enough, at least until he loses

Altruism and ‘the Other’ 71

his money: these people needed help, he helped them, and he did so with no ulterior motive. Lear, too, shows compassion, and even the untransformed Ivan Ilych is punctilious and well-behaved. Yet Peter’s compassion – and still more Ivan Ilych’s, flowing not from that sense of worldly position from which Paul’s and even Lear’s sprang in part – marks what could possibly be called a different kind of kindness from that shown by Paul and by Lear. But I should rather call it a deeper and purer kindness. A not-too-speculative reference to the etymology of ‘kind’ may help here. Kindness – that familiar but extraordinary quality of sympathetic attention – is a response which realizes a sense of the other as of-a-kind with oneself. The basic link between the moral sense of ‘kind’, and ‘kind’ meaning ‘type’, lies in the (always tricky) idea of nature. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, moral kindness is that quality which, originally, showed a person as moved by natural affection. A kind (type) is a classification ‘according to nature’. (Moral) kindness can then be thought of as realizing one’s natural kinship with – one’s belonging to the same kind as – another. But what kind is that? Well, a natural form of words to use here is that Peter was moved simply by the common humanity of those others with him, while Paul was not. Similarly, Lear never quite allows himself to be moved by that, nor does Ivan Ilych before his conversion. Any terms in which Paul and Lear and Ivan Ilych might register how they find themselves bound in response to those others therefore realize a different sense both of those others, and of themselves in relation to those others, from what is realized in Peter’s finding himself so bound. The bond itself is therefore different too. This is so even when they use the same words to express their sense of being claimed by what they respond to, as Peter uses. I should not want flatly to deny that Paul, Lear and even the earlier Ivan Ilych had given expression to a sense of ethical requirement if they were to speak of finding that they ‘had to’ think or respond as they did, or that it would be unjust or wicked of them not to help some particular person. But still Peter’s use of the same words expresses a different – a deeper, ethically purer – sense of ethical requirement. Ivan Ilych himself, after his conversion, could well reflect on just this difference: ‘I used to think and say that it would be wrong of me not to give due attention and consideration to my wife, but only now do I truly understand what that meant. Those words, in my earlier use of them, did not, so to speak, have their full meaning.’ That is not just because only now does he truly understand what kind of attention is indeed due to her. It is also because his different understanding of that in turn transforms his understanding of how

72

Ethical Encounter

she would be wronged by his failing in that attentiveness, which also reflects a transformed sense of her. No attempt to identify ethics merely by its vocabulary can take us as far as we need to go here. I spoke of ‘different depths of kindness’. The point now is that we can, similarly, recognize different senses of ethical requirement, even though this difference is not registrable by the linguistic terms usually used to mark such requirement.16 The different senses of ethical requirement go with the different depths of kindness. So one kind of understanding of another – and of oneself in relation to another – finds expression under one sense of ethical requirement, while a different and deeper sense of another reflects a different and deeper sense of requirement in relation to him.17 But let us return to the thought about different depths of kindness. We can also recognize, similarly, different depths of compassion, of justice, of sense of common humanity, and of various other moral ‘concepts’.18 Perhaps we could speak even of different depths of altruism, but in my judgement doing so distorts our usage of this particular term. As I put it earlier, the concept of altruism is relatively shallow: it is what Simone Weil called a ‘mediocre’ concept. We can then speak of an ethical orientation to others which takes us beyond whatever can be revealed by the concept of altruism. But many other moral concepts which philosophers have highlighted, and also many different approaches to ethics, show similar limitations. Let me indicate some of them. I argued before that neither Aristotle’s ethics nor Alasdair MacIntyre’s adaptation of it make space for the orientation I have been trying to characterize. Many other approaches are even further from doing so. All of the ‘conditions of personhood’ of which Daniel Dennett (for example) speaks can be recognized in his family by Ivan Ilych before he changes, and by Lear and Paul in those with whom they engage. They recognize that those others form intentions, upon which they can reflect and which they can revise, and that those people are capable of recognizing that others can do this too, and so on. Similarly, Ivan Ilych, Lear and Paul can recognize that others have all the rights of which rights theorists speak, and on the grounds which those theorists reckon to be proper. All three may be perfectly ready to adopt Rawlsian ‘principles of justice’ towards those people, and can more generally satisfy the requirements of any ‘social contract’ theory of ethics in their dealings with them. They can take into account all of the ‘interests’ those others have which utilitarianism says are ethically relevant. They can even acknowledge those others as ‘strong evaluators’ in Charles

Altruism and ‘the Other’ 73

Taylor’s sense, and themselves act from their own strongly evaluated and beneficent dispositions. They can satisfy all of these different requirements for being fully ethically fledged respondents to those others without, as far as I can see, their sense of those others ceasing to be seriously limited in the ways I have suggested. Perhaps they can even ‘treat the other always as an end and never merely as a means’, and their ways of ‘realizing’ those others still be thus limited. If it be said that, no, their attitudes are incompatible with true Kantian respect for the other, I should not flatly disagree. But then there is a crucial gap between respect so understood, and any point which can be made simply via the distinction between treating others as ends and treating them only as means. It may be that a Kantian understanding is not subject to some of the limitations inherent in regarding sympathetic desires as the key to ethics which were discussed in the previous chapter. Even so, neither kind of perspective is capable of revealing a difference – between a deep realization of common humanity, and various shallower attitudes which fail to realize that19 – which my examples have explored.20 In the following chapter I reflect further on some of the philosophical implications of this difference.

4 Absolute Otherness and Common Humanity

The concept of a role can illuminate some of my examples so far. We could say that Lear and the earlier Ivan Ilych undertake to constitute the significance of others via the role or roles each takes himself to occupy (though we can also see Lear groping for a deeper sense of others than that). When another’s significance to one thus becomes shaped via a role then, depending on the role in question, sometimes the other will be significant because in the salient respect different from oneself, and sometimes because the same. If the role is that of teacher, for example, the other is significant as pupil, whereas if the role is that of trade unionist, the other’s significance may be as (fellow) trade unionist – not a qualitative difference in this case, but a qualitative sameness. Still, the crucial thing in both cases is that the significance of the other is constituted via their place (whether sameness or difference) within a limited moral-conceptual economy which subsumes both self and other. But expressing this point in terms of roles risks distorting what is at issue here. For two sorts of ‘case’ which are for different reasons not readily described as cases of role-morality still fall under the terms of the previous chapter’s discussion. Williams’ amoralist (the one with extended sympathies) can hardly be said to be acting from a role. He just happens to want to help this person – perhaps because he ‘took a shine’ to her. Her salience for him need not be mediated by any particular role he occupies. She comes into his ken just as one who happens to be on the other end (as it were) of his whim. Her significance to him is constituted within a framework of significance which already allows his whims their sway. The amoralist’s inclination to help is just the continuing of his absorption in the ‘objects’ of his everyday (to use Heidegger’s term) world. One mark of that being so is the amoralist’s 74

Absolute Otherness and Common Humanity 75

lacking any sense of being bound in response by the other in her need: a better offer (the bribe, for example) readily and painlessly distracts him from the other. That makes him different from Paul, Lear and the earlier Ivan Ilych, for they may well think of themselves as in some way bound in response to those others. Even so, at another level they also resemble the amoralist. The import of their finding themselves thus bound is still conditioned by the way in which their sense of the other’s value emanates from their subsumption both of themselves and the other under a classificatory system of differential significances. They locate themselves, and simultaneously the other, under such a system. The other’s ‘otherness’ to them, we could therefore say, is relative to that system of differential significances in which they locate themselves and him. Likewise, the one whom the amoralist wants to help is ‘other’ only as relative to his (the amoralist’s) desire to help. (And adding, as Bernard Williams does, that the amoralist wants to help the other ‘in his need’ does not change this.) Neither the amoralist, then, nor Paul as I described him, can be said to act merely from a role. That is so of the amoralist because his desire to help whimsically alights on this or that other; and it is so of Paul because in some way he takes his responsibility to others to reach beyond the requirements of any particular roles in which he stands to them. But the point is that Paul and the amoralist share something important with those whose sense of their moral relation with others is defined by the roles in which they stand to those others. They all share a sense of others as having only what Levinas calls a relative alterity. Saying this we can still acknowledge the contrast I mentioned between Paul and the amoralist. Paul has a sense of being bound in response while the amoralist does not. That difference is indeed significant and I highlighted it earlier on. But I have since been insisting on an ethically important difference between ways in which, or depths at which, people can register a sense of being bound in response. Just now I have been marking – in Paul and perhaps in those with a roledefined sense of the moral requirements upon them – a sense of ‘being bound in response’ which is comparatively shallow. It is shallow by contrast with the deeper way in which Peter, and Ivan Ilych in his final moments, discover themselves bound in response.1 What makes that sense comparatively shallow is precisely that it reflects a sense of the other as, merely, relatively other.2 Peter’s sense of the otherness of the others to whom he responds is not merely relative as even Paul’s is. His sense of them is as not confined within the framework which he brings to them. This is of course

76

Ethical Encounter

not because he brings no concepts with him to his experience of those others. Of course he does so. But his sense of others is as always escaping those concepts which do indeed apply to them. Strange as it may then sound, Peter thus allows others to be more fully present to him than does Paul. And what shows in Ivan Ilych’s transformed sense of his wife and child is a depth and purity of compassionate attentiveness which allows them to be more fully present to him (as he allows himself to be to them). It is tempting to say that Ivan Ilych’s orientation reveals a sense of others as absolutely – by contrast with merely relatively – other. But before we reflect on that temptation, notice how what has been said helps reveal the force of speaking of someone as moved by the common humanity of others with him. For that commonness is realized only so far as those differential determinations of significance spoken of above cease to be what is most salient. The ‘sameness’ of those others with him is not a matter of their determination within a wider, but still limited, moral-conceptual economy. It is not a matter just of broadening the classificatory term or terms under which one subsumes others with oneself until it becomes (say) ‘all human beings’ or ‘all sentient creatures’, so that the sameness in question is sameness in that now very broad respect. It is a sameness which reaches beyond any classification of the other or of oneself. (This is a reason for not speaking of the realizing of such sameness as the registering of a ‘fact’.) This is something Richard Rorty is not alive to in a discussion in which he is critical of moral theories which seek to give a ‘universal’ characterization of human value or worth. Writing about those who helped save Jews at risk of their own lives during the Second World War, Rorty says: Did they say, about their Jewish neighbours, that they deserved to be saved because they were fellow human beings? Perhaps they sometimes did, but surely they would usually, if queried, have used more parochial terms to explain why they were taking risks to protect a given Jew – for example, that this particular Jew was a fellow Milanese, or a fellow Jutlander, or a fellow member of the same union or profession, or a fellow bocce player or a fellow parent of small children … . [O]ur sense of solidarity is strongest when those with whom solidarity is expressed are thought of as ‘one of us’, where ‘us’ means something smaller and more local than the human race. That is why ‘because she is a human being’ is a weak, unconvincing explanation of a generous action.3

Absolute Otherness and Common Humanity 77

Norman Geras has recently shown that Rorty is flatly wrong about this.4 In articulating their sense of what they were doing, a great many of those who risked their lives to help save Jews in occupied Europe in fact reached for just the terms which Rorty claims are weak and unconvincing. ‘They were persecuted. It was a human bond’; ‘We thought of them as human beings, just as we were’; ‘One has to help another regardless of who this human being is; as long as he is in need, that is all that counts’; ‘I just had to help people who needed help and that was that’. But it is important to be clear about just what is shown by the evidence Geras brings to light. It is not that those he quotes did in fact act from extremely general classifications of those they helped, which removed those who fell under them from any more specific vital relation to the classifier. The phrase ‘human being’ in the mouths of those Geras cites is misunderstood as an extremely broad classificatory term. (So is the use of the phrase in relation to my examples misunderstood that way.) The misunderstanding is of a piece with supposing that the movement towards greater moral understanding is simply extensive, ranging outwards to cover an ever larger number of people, an ever larger class of ‘entities’. I have put the accent elsewhere, on a progressive deepening of the sense of another. (Two metaphors of movement – that of moral understanding being extended, and that of its being deepened – with different significance.) Realizing a sense of common humanity can manifest just such a deepening, and when it does the movement of understanding is not in the direction of greater generality and abstraction, ever further removed from concrete, vital, nuanced responsiveness to another. On the contrary, as in the various examples discussed earlier, the movement of moral understanding can involve fuller and deeper such responsiveness. I also hear such responsiveness in the words of those Geras quotes when they say that the Jews they helped were ‘human beings, as we were’. But now we must return to the contrast between ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ Otherness. Whatever precisely may be meant by ‘absolute Otherness’, it surely seems that it will be in conflict with the sense of ‘common humanity’. For that implies the realization of a sameness, while talk of ‘absolute Otherness’ seems to press in just the opposite direction – of absolute and irrefragable difference. (This seems to be what Levinas thinks.) But there is no conflict. On the contrary, the basic thought here is that the crucial sense of sameness with others that is realized in that sense of common humanity with them is interdependent with their absolute Otherness. But this rather forbiddingly expressed thought needs speaking to in a simpler – perhaps a less metaphysical – way.

78

Ethical Encounter

W. B. Yeats wrote that ‘ tragedy must always be a drowning, a breaking of the dykes that separate man from man’. He was speaking of dramatic tragedy, that extraordinary phenomenon realized through only a small number of creative works across more than two thousand years of Western literature. Yeats can be taken as meaning that in the experience of dramatic tragedy, we are returned to a sense of our absolute commonness with others. In that experience each of us becomes (in Lear’s words) ‘such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art’, no longer differentiated from others by the ‘lendings’ (also Lear’s word) of social position or power, wealth, intellect, temperament, looks, character and personality. As Stanley Cavell puts it, in the experience of tragedy (he is speaking about King Lear) ‘what is purged is my difference from others, in everything but separateness’5; we are separated by nothing but the absolute difference of our stark individual distinctness. (Cavell is speaking about our experience of King Lear, the play. Earlier I spoke about a change in King Lear the character in similar terms – about the way his sense of others comes to be shaped less and less from the standpoint of his ‘differences’ from them.) Yeats recognized that the experience is as disturbing as it is deeply compelling. Its disturbingness is marked by his use of that surprising word ‘dykes’, instead of just ‘walls’. When the dykes fall, what is protected by them is inundated, ‘drowned’ under the forces against whose pressure the dykes gave resistance. Dykes do not just draw the boundaries of the domain within them. Like walls, they are indeed a condition of the identity of the domain within them, but unlike mere walls they carve that identity out, and sustain it, against a ceaseless pressure to dissolve it. At the breaking of the dykes, what was thus ‘individuated’, given its very identity, by the dykes, is dissolved into a commonness with what lay outside it, a commonness which is every bit as natural as the condition of things constituted and preserved against enormous pressure by the dykes. Yeats’ thought is that being human means that one’s very identity, as the particular person one is, is constituted in good part by those ‘dykes’ – in a different metaphor those ‘lendings’ of social position, wealth, intellect, temperament, looks, character and personality – which tragedy ‘breaks’. In ‘purging’ these differences – in making us, the audience, here in this experience discover them to fall away as (‘mere’) lendings – tragedy compels us to find ourselves anew beyond them,6 in our human commonness or sameness. But, as Cavell’s remark brings out, the second aspect of that realization of our commonness with others is encounter with the other as absolutely Other, absolutely separate and distinct from us.

Absolute Otherness and Common Humanity 79

And realization of that absolute distinctness is informed by our temporary release from the import of those mundane differentiations of self and other which the experience of tragedy reveals to us as ‘lendings’ – of social class, power, wealth, talents, and even character and personality. Of course we cannot remain in that ‘weightless’ condition – which resembles what Keats called ‘negative capability’ – freed from our usual self-identifications. We return to our mundane selves but we do so newly charged and powered by that moment of engagement, the dykes down, with the other as absolutely Other, a moment which also realizes an absolute kinship, kind-ness, commonness, with the other. To say something formally very like this, Kant reaches for a category he calls ‘Reason’. As rational7 I am located wholly beyond my merely worldly being, in my acknowledgement of another as likewise ‘rational’. But Reason is too thin a name both for what is realized in that sense of common humanity discoverable in the experience Yeats speaks of, and for that in us out of which we are able to realize it.8 The pressure of what I have said is not away from but back down into the deepest, fullest, most wholehearted human responsiveness it is possible for us to have – which the tragedies Yeats has in mind have themselves helped enable us imaginatively to realize. Yeats marks an experience of the commonness of self and other that realizes each as reaching beyond all those classifications within which the other is the same as or different from me, and which do indeed condition the identity of each of us.9 We can thus appreciate a kind of commonness or sameness here the realization of which is interdependent with the acknowledgement of what I have called an absolute, by contrast with a merely relative, Otherness. If dramatic tragedy is the site of an imaginative ‘entertaining’ of such an experience, the experience itself has a very wide significance. What Yeats says about tragedy points, indeed, towards the heart of ethics. I do not mean that (for example) those Geras quotes who said of the Jews they helped save during the Second World War that ‘they were human beings’, forgot or were no longer aware of specific distinguishing features of those they helped – that they were, variously, men, women, rich, poor, professionals, labourers, nasty and resentful, courteous and grateful, etc. The point is rather that these differences ceased to be salient. While they still mark out differences which at some level and for all sorts of purposes may be significant, they are not differences which now count. The one who helps can realize his ‘sameness’ indifferently with (for example) the nasty resentful human being and with the courteous and grateful one.

80

Ethical Encounter

(That he does so is part of what can be shown in the exclamation ‘They were human beings!’) In another context that last difference – between ‘nasty and resentful’ on the one hand and ‘courteous and grateful’ on the other – may well be a salient moral difference between people. Here it is no more salient than those ‘lendings’ mentioned. Not all mundane understandings of self and other are thus ‘lendings’. Or rather, we need to distinguish different ways in which some among such mundane understandings can be held. When Ivan Ilych’s sense of his wife and son is transformed, I should not say that his sense of them as his wife and son falls away, ceases altogether to count. It is true that he can no longer understand his ethical relation to them as defined by his and their ‘roles’ as husband and father, wife and son. And that is not just because he now realizes that his ethical relation to them requires the exercise of practical reason involving an attention to the particular case which cannot be determined by a formula. Even if it does require that, and even if his earlier comportment was rigidly ‘proper’, we do not (so I argued) get to the transformed Ivan Ilych of Tolstoy’s story just by taking that Aristotelian step. The sense of what it is to be a husband or a father, for example is radically transformed under a sense of another as absolutely Other.10 Then that differentiation does not fall away as a ‘lending’. Rather, the sense of it is deepened through what is revealed to one in such an encounter. (As it may also be deepened through what is revealed to us in our experience of an example of husband and wife, friends, neighbours, teacher and pupil.) Here the realization of absolute Otherness does not dissolve but rather transforms and deepens the sense of certain differentiations that also partly constitute our mundane individual and social identity. This is the way I should describe Ivan Ilych’s transformed sense of his wife and son and of his relation to them. This example reminds us of the need for conceptual delicacy here. It would be inadequate to say only that Ivan Ilych is moved by a newly discovered common humanity with his wife. That would not do justice to the way his sense of her is shaped by and answerable to her being his wife. On the other hand, his sense of what that now means is informed, indeed transformed, by his newly discovered sense of commonness with her. Putting the point slightly differently: the otheras-student (or -as-wife, or -as-friend) can be the specific mode in which one encounters him or her as absolutely Other. The relationship between teacher and pupil or between nurse and patient, for example, can remain a professional one while still allowing for acknowledgement of the other as what I am calling absolutely Other.

Absolute Otherness and Common Humanity 81

I have been trying to reveal the interdependence of a certain sense of commonness with acknowledgement of absolute Otherness. Perhaps my remarks help to clarify that sense of the individual which I said earlier lies beyond Aristotle’s ethical orientation (and beyond MacIntyre’s reconstruction of it). Let me try to bring this sense out still more fully. In his poem ‘The Ruined Cottage’ Wordsworth has his narrator say, about Margaret who has died waiting for her husband to return from the French wars, ‘I blessed her in the impotence of grief’. ‘The impotence of grief’ – in one way the sense of the phrase is obvious enough: grief has no power to bring back those for whom we grieve, or to alleviate their sufferings if they are still alive. The compact ambiguity of the line’s grammar lets the ‘impotent grief’ be both Margaret’s for her lost husband, and also the narrator’s for Margaret. But how then can his impotent grief be the source of a blessing, since a blessing is so to speak by definition not impotent?11 A main theme of Wordsworth’s early poems is the fact, the necessity, and even the value, of a kind of compassion for others in their suffering which goes beyond anything we can do to alleviate it.12 Wordsworth’s concern is not what Kant disparagingly called ‘melting compassion’, a mere sentiment which is in excess of what it makes practically feasible (that alone, Kant says, being morally significant). The compassion Wordsworth is concerned with is expressive of a kind of understanding of another. It is both a form of connection with others – the realization of a kind of commonness with them, which certainly requires us to ‘do’ whatever we can to alleviate their suffering – and a painful grieving sense of those who suffer as also beyond the reach of whatever we can do to help them. This sense realizes others – every, single other – as radically singular, inappropriably other to us. This is a distinctive, and almost paradoxical, mode of realization of another’s presence. It is almost paradoxical because the other becomes present precisely as one whom I realize to lie beyond whatever actual (perhaps considerable) power to help him I may have. (The other side of that depth and fullness of his presence to me is then a sense, often poignant and even painful, of him as absent, beyond all presence.) ‘Com-passion’ (‘suffering with’) is a name for this realization of another. Such suffering with another then also realizes an unbridgeable gulf between human beings, as utterly singular and therefore crucially beyond any ‘community’ which they can have together. Yet such grieving compassion is also itself the very realizing of a kind of community, a commonness, of ‘singular’ human beings.13 Something very like this almost paradoxical sense – compassion as the realizing of commonness with the absolutely Other – Wordsworth

82

Ethical Encounter

seeks to realize in his poetry. We can also recognize it in all sorts of encounters between human beings. We saw it in Ivan Ilych’s transformed sense of his wife and son – his discovery of a deeper kind of Otherness, which we can also call individuality but which does not depend on his coming to know of further distinguishing characteristics of his wife and son. And we also saw a spark of it in Lear’s new sense of those ‘poor naked wretches’. The emphasis here is on neither action nor feeling in relation to others, but rather on how one understands or thinks of others. But those terms misleadingly suggest that the other is then adequately comprehended by me under certain general concepts. The emphasis is better put, as I put it above, on how another can be present to one, though present as radically Other. This ‘how’ will certainly have implications for what one does to and for her, but its ethical significance does not lie only in those implications. It is itself an irreducibly important dimension of our ethical orientation – one obscured by a common emphasis on moral thinking as fundamentally ‘practical reason’. But I am not instead emphasizing theoretical reason. The sense of another I have been speaking of – realizing another as present to one in a certain sort of way – does not fit at all well into that dichotomy. Here is another example of discovery of the deeper kind of otherness I spoke of, this time drawing on a different idea from compassion, namely remorse. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the Elder Zossima recounts to Alyosha how he came to be a monk. After an imagined slight to his vanity when a young officer, Zossima struck his valet in rage, bloodying his face. Unexpectedly, he found that what he had done continued to gnaw away at him until he sought forgiveness of the man. Zossima found the whole course of his life changed. Remorse is the name of what Zossima was seized by.14 In his remorse he finds himself claimed – possessed, even haunted – by this particular man in his singular, human, being. No longer just a ‘valet’, nor even ‘my valet’, nor just an instance of the kind ‘human being’, this human being in his unassimilable individuality is what haunts Zossima, and claims him in penitent response. In this respect like the compassion Wordsworth renders, Zossima’s remorse simultaneously realizes the valet in his absolute and unassimilable Otherness and realizes Zossima himself as bound to this man in a direct and immediate way. Zossima’s remorse is not just a ‘feeling’ which is consequent upon a logically prior understanding that he has wronged another. It is an experience in which the individual reality of another is disclosed, in a way and at a depth at which it has never before been disclosed. Zossima’s understanding of

Absolute Otherness and Common Humanity 83

what it is to wrong this man is transformed by his experience of remorse. As with the kind of compassion thematized by Wordsworth, so remorse like Zossima’s is a mode of imaginative realization of another’s presence. Its ethical significance reaches beyond whatever is to be done in reparation for the deed that occasioned it.15 Again we have to recognize the almost paradoxical character of the description given above. His valet becomes present to Zossima in a way – with an immediacy, a depth and an urgency – he never has been before. Zossima is (to use Gaita’s word again) haunted by his valet. But the other side of that is the unexpected strangeness to Zossima of his sense of his valet. It is as if his valet has now escaped all of the categories in which Zossima hitherto had him placed. That is the force of speaking of the valet in his unassimilable Otherness as what Zossima now and for the first time realizes in his remorse. His remorse jolts him ‘out of himself’, as he finds himself compelled to ‘answer’ to what he cannot grasp or know – the reality of this other as encountered in the experience of remorse. Here a reminder of the status of the argument of this chapter is in order. Towards the end of Chapter 1 I suggested that we could not but find deep resistance in ourselves to the ethical orientation of Sophocles’ Ajax (as represented by Bernard Williams). I said that this betokened, as going deep with us, an ethical orientation which was foreign to anything in Aristotle, and to anything Williams identifies in the pre-Platonic writers he discusses.16 This and the previous chapter have explored some aspects of such an orientation (and indicated that a good deal of other ‘moral theory’ is also blank about them). It will be said, quite rightly, that one could share resistance to Ajax and to Aristotle of the kind mooted in Chapter 1, without embracing all, or even most, of what has been said in this chapter. A liberal and a Kantian, for example, might both wish to distance themselves from Ajax and Aristotle. The liberal might invoke a conception of universal human equality and a conception of justice which is informed by it, while the Kantian spoke about the absolute and inviolable rational essence of each human being. And both could do this without speaking about human individuality or Otherness in the way spoken of here. That is quite true, but no objection to anything so far said. A distance from Aristotle can indeed be marked in those ways. But one thing distinctive of the ethical conception whose distance I have been marking from Aristotle is the place within it of a certain sort of experience or encounter. One might be tempted to say that it involves a sense of human beings as transcendent – as belonging to or coming

84

Ethical Encounter

from another world. That would register it as in one respect nearer to Kant than to (say) Hume or Aristotle, thinkers perhaps closer to the philosophical spirit of the current age. But there is also point in resisting the temptation. If the Other is most fundamentally realized in a certain sort of experience, a certain sort of encounter with another, that takes us a good distance both from Kant17 and from a ‘liberal’ contrast with Aristotle. Experience is characteristically ‘of a world’. My experience of a cup, for example, reaches (as John McDowell puts it) ‘right out to the world’.18 The reality of the cup is, if you like, the transcendent reference of the experience. Such ‘transcendent references’ are woven together into the fabric of the mundane world we inhabit. Transcendence here, in this sense, betokens only the real being of a mundane world which my experience is ‘of’. But the sort of experience of another that I have been speaking of can be taken to point to an outside or beyond that mundane world. There is a ready sense in which others are realities in the weave of that mundane world, and then there is the experience in which absolute Otherness is realized to us. This gives a sense in which anyone who is responded to in (as we might say) their full humanity is responded to as an ‘outsider’ to that mundane world. Not necessarily, or even probably, an outsider in the straightforward sense of one who does not belong to whatever counts as the ‘in-group’. (Even so, it is perhaps no accident that one of the seminal stories in the Christian tradition exemplifies the reality of absolute Otherness through an encounter with such an outsider – the Good Samaritan encountering the Jew, his traditional enemy.) But the point is that in such encounter with another, as I tried to bring out, a commonness with the other is realized beyond everything which civilly relates or differentiates him or her. The other can then be realized as outsider to, as beyond, the mundane world, even when he or she is already empirically speaking very close to home – those in his daily round whom Peter encountered, his wife and child to Ivan Ilych, his valet to Zossima. Then the story of the encounter with the actual outsider – the Good Samaritan episode – can be understood not just as urging us to extend our sympathies and help to those beyond our immediate circle (although it does urge this), but also as imaging the possible transformation of even our closest engagements. As well as enjoining us to treat strangers as our familiars, it also enjoins us to be open to the strangeness of our familiars. The ethical movement is then not just outwards, the taking of what Williams called the ‘Humean step’ from

Absolute Otherness and Common Humanity 85

self to others, all belonging to the mundane world. (Centralizing altruism, too, assumes this as the crucial direction of movement, and so do Peter Singer with his concept of the expanding circle and Richard Rorty with his emphasis on the inclusion of ever more others into the ‘us’ group.) Neither is it a movement from ‘personal’ engagement to ‘moral’ understanding, or a movement from ‘affectionate’ relations with others to ‘moral’ relations with them, or from ‘particular’ to ‘universal’ as this is usually understood by those with Kantian leanings. In context there can be point to these various emphases (though they can also readily distort). But the ethical movement at issue here is different from and more fundamental than any of these. It is a movement to an ever deeper understanding of and responsiveness to those we encounter. As such it also involves the transforming of our sense of ourselves. This strangeness just mentioned points to a dimension of mystery and wonder in ethical experience (about which I shall say more in Chapter 6). But it is a transforming, and a mystery and wonder, which do not show themselves in (or as) our being directed to another world beyond.19 They show themselves in (or as) the deepening of our sense of others in the world in which we already dwell. We have found reason for saying that the various experiences spoken of so far take us beyond or outside the mundane world (including beyond what I called Aristotle’s worldliness). But we could also say instead that they transform that world in returning us to a fuller and deeper living of it. Recovering everyday life, including human beings in everyday contexts, as a potential occasion of reverence and wonder has become a philosophical theme in recent years. These remarks shape a version of that theme. One effect of my discussion has been to point us not only beyond the assumptions of most talk of altruism, but also beyond Aristotle’s differences from those assumptions. In his moral philosophy the concept of character both reflects and organizes Aristotle’s concern with virtues and vices. Many philosophers20 think that Aristotle’s emphasis rightly puts the ethical subject, rather than just actions, at the heart of ethics. In my judgement, however, important aspects of what we are as ethical subjects are obscured by an emphasis on character and virtues, whether or not that emphasis is distinctively Aristotelian. But before developing that thought I want to reflect on another question arising out of this and the previous chapter.

5 Duty and Ethical Motivation

One theme of Chapter 3 was the impossibility of deriving ethics from human desires. There is therefore no ‘all-important’ step, ethically speaking, from desires registering ‘concern with self’ to those registering ‘a concern for others’. Whatever contents or objects they are allowed to have, desires themselves are not the origin of ethics. So expressed, that is a familiar enough negative theme. But there are various ways of going on from here. Kant famously contrasted actions whose source is our ‘inclinations’ – close to what I have intended by ‘desires’ – and actions motivated by duty.1 Only the latter, Kant held, have any moral worth. Kant recognized that one can do what is morally right without being motivated by duty. But doing what is right, he thought, does not of itself confer moral worth on what one does, since one might do it for the wrong reason, or in the wrong way or the wrong spirit. (One might do it simply out of fear of punishment, or to curry favour, for example.) Kant seems to think that acting from duty involves being motivated by the recognition that such and such is indeed morally required of one. Does what I have said about desires imply that the moral worth of our activity depends on its being motivated by duty? Recently Marcia Baron and Barbara Herman (among others) have defended a conception of the source of moral worth of our activity which they hold to be at least close to Kant’s.2 Baron has undertaken this in the course of arguing against ‘all attempts to explain the motivation of the perfectly moral person solely in terms of de facto wants’, and much of my critical discussion in Chapter 3 is close to the lines of Baron’s arguments. Baron’s and Herman’s account of what it is to be moved by duty is less austere than Kant’s is usually thought to be, and than the accounts mostly given by those who highlight duty as the 86

Duty and Ethical Motivation 87

moral motivation. But their emphasis on duty still distorts the character of much of our ethical thinking and responsiveness. ‘Duty’ is of course a common enough word in the language. Arguably these days it is too often set aside in favour of (for example) ‘rights’. I think that is so. But even so, ‘duty’ is not a master term in ethics, even under the flexible interpretation of it urged by Baron and Herman. Much of Baron’s and Herman’s criticism of traditional opposition to Kant is well-taken. But still they remain, in my judgement, tied to the picture of Kant which they rightly wish to oppose. So my criticisms of them will not be criticisms of Kant but of even their generous interpretation of him as still in one way itself a narrow and mistaken reading of Kant. Up to a point, then, I am implicitly defending Kant against one aspect of Baron’s and Herman’s defence of ‘Kantianism’. I shall try to show that something fundamental to what Kant meant by duty is both different from and more radical than Baron and Herman suppose. That marks one theme of Kant’s moral thought which coheres with, and even helps illuminate, my own argument hitherto. I will then balance that finding by identifying another pressure in Kant’s thought to which my own is deeply opposed. Only modestly interested directly in Kant’s views here, I am more concerned to develop my own by placing an appreciation of Kant up against them. Baron writes: I count as ethics of duty all ethics which hold that the perfectly moral person is governed in his actions by a conception of what is morally required or recommended. This can be in the form of a conception of the good life, of the ideal person, or of right conduct. Such theories share the view that the perfectly moral person’s choices are not grounded in her desires. They are grounded ultimately in a conception of what is right or good independently of what she likes or wants.3 And again: … it becomes clear why I never speak of acting from a desire to do one’s duty: acting from duty, as I understand it, is altogether different from acting from a desire (simpliciter) to do one’s duty, since the desire does not require that one’s conduct be governed by a sense of duty. A desire to do one’s duty is in the end a desire; a commitment to doing whatever one morally ought to do is not. A desire to do one’s duty does not have the legislative powers that a sense of duty has.4

88

Ethical Encounter

Part of what Baron wants to capture, here and elsewhere, is a sense of the morally good person as compellingly and authoritatively moved by something beyond her desires, something which can indeed be authoritative over her desires. A sense of this as inherent in moral responsiveness is as old as moral philosophy itself. So is reflective puzzlement about how anything could have such a character; and this puzzlement has helped to generate various reductive accounts of moral responsiveness. (The attempt to ground moral responsiveness in desires to help is a salient instance.) It may sound as if my earlier talk of ‘discovering oneself under a sense of ethical requirement’ commits me to something very like Baron’s thought about what moral choices must be grounded in. But while there can be real point in describing the good person as moved by something beyond her desires, in my judgement Baron’s way of trying to articulate what that involves is far from adequate. I spoke not only of ‘discovering oneself under a sense of ethical requirement’, but also of ‘finding oneself authoritatively moved’, as happening in encounter with a person or situation. (I said that in the story about ‘wanting to help’ which I was criticizing there is no space for so finding oneself.) But that this happens in encounter does not mean that one then acts in a morally good way only if one’s action is an instance of an antecedent determination to do one’s duty (or to do whatever is morally required) which one brings to the encounter. This is not just the point, made by Baron herself, that in order to be governed by duty one does not every time have to think about one’s duty immediately before acting. Baron says that one can be governed by duty provided one thinks ‘from time to time’ about the moral status of one’s actions and of acting from various motives. Then one can be governed by duty, on her view of the matter, even when on a particular occasion one consciously registers no sense of ethical requirement. My point is more radical. Not even that occasional reference to duty (or to the morally required character of his deed) is necessary for someone to find himself authoritatively moved under an ethically deep sense of requirement. Ivan Ilych was not moved by what he likes or wants – Baron is right about that. But neither was he moved by ‘a conception of what is (morally) right’, or a commitment to doing what is morally right. If he formed such a conception or commitment at all, his doing so was itself an effect of how he was newly moved by his wife and daughter as he now sensed or saw them to be. That is the site of his ethical engagement, and it does not acquire that character from his thinking explicitly at other times about the moral status of his actions. Baron’s account mislocates, by demanding that it be put into the

Duty and Ethical Motivation 89

content of a thought about morality, a sense of necessitation expressive of a morally conditioned responsiveness whose source lies elsewhere. Duty is a shadow cast by ethical encounter, as is a ‘conception’ of what is morally required, or a ‘commitment’ to doing whatever one morally ought.5 Sometimes we have to attend to the shadow, but we should not mistake the shadow for what casts it. Baron’s description of what being morally moved must involve seriously distorts the way Ivan Ilych is ethically moved in his encounter with his wife and daughter. Let me try to clarify this rather cryptic point through reflection on an example from Baron herself. She quotes Richard Henson criticizing her (Kantian) claim that action has moral worth only if done from duty: What if Paolo loves his child and loves reading and teaches her in a spirit of joy and gratitude for her companionship, and someone congratulates him on being a dutiful father? – and he says ‘Ah, yes, I guess that was a duty, wasn’t it?’ Baron comments thus on Henson’s example: There is no indication that Paolo is attuned to the moral dimensions of his conduct. Is he aware that he should help his child even it ceases to be fun? After all, no matter how virtuous he is, his child, like all children, will sometimes be testy and impatient. No matter how virtuous he is, turmoil at work or other health problems or marital problems (all of which happen to the virtuous as well as the vicious) might turn his attention away from reading with his child. So although it is wonderful if he loves reading with his child and engages in it without any thought that morally he should, still it is important that he be aware that her needs make a normative claim upon him.6 Baron’s point is telling against Henson: his description of the desires and feelings out of which Paolo reads to his daughter is by itself not sufficient for Paolo’s response to express a morally informed appreciation of the situation. But what more Baron thinks must inform Paolo’s response if it is to be expressive of a moral understanding can be questioned. Baron says that ‘it is important that he be aware that her needs make a normative claim upon him’. This is a looser formulation than those Baron characteristically uses in her discussions of moral motivation. In the other passages I quoted she speaks of acting from a ‘conception of what is morally required’, and from ‘a commitment to doing

90

Ethical Encounter

whatever one morally ought’. These formulations seem to capture what she means by being ‘aware of a normative claim’. How else might one speak here? Well, there is love and love, and we can mark differences in manifestations of love by how deeply, lucidly and faithfully they are responsive to their object, and register a sense of being claimed by it. One father might indeed respond to his daughter in a way which could be described as ‘teaching her in a spirit of joy and gratitude for her companionship’, yet be readily enough distracted from the task – by other pursuits, or by his own troubles perhaps. Then his love would show itself to be rather superficial. While he is very far from being the canonical ‘amoralist’ of Chapter 3, this man is also distant in another direction from a different father whose response to his daughter never wavers, despite deep problems of his own of the sort Baron mentions. This could show a very different, deeper, more lucidly attentive love of his daughter. The point is not that any unwavering continuity of reading to a daughter must show that. Sometimes a father’s unwavering such response might be manic or obsessive or even cruel. But I am imagining a case in which that is not so, a case we would be moved to describe in the terms mentioned – as showing in the father a deep lucidly attentive love for his daughter. Would the continued reading to his daughter which showed such love necessarily mean that he acts from a conception of (or a commitment to) what is morally required? Not if that is thought of as introducing a kind of motivation distinct from his love for her, which is the strong suggestion of the way Baron (and often Kant too) speaks. But it certainly manifests in the father a sense of necessitation, a sense of himself as responding to a claim, even an absolute and unavoidable claim, upon him. The origin of that felt claim upon him is her, the absolutely singular other who is his daughter.7 This response to Baron’s example suggests a certain way of thinking about the relation between moral requirement and ‘natural’ responsiveness (the territory of what Kant calls ‘inclinations’). It is missed not only by Kant, but also both by his critics and by his sympathetic commentators. Raimond Gaita crystallizes it nicely when he says that ‘among what Kant called inclinations are some that we need to be true to’. At least some of our loves are such that our very living of them involves awareness of the need to be responsive to their demands. This could be understood as a quasi-Platonic thought about the ascent of love (eros) represented in the Symposium – except that Plato tends to represent the ascent as a matter of aspiration to ever more general, and abstract, objects of love. My thought is rather about the refinement of

Duty and Ethical Motivation 91

love in the direction of an ever more true8 and more lucid responsiveness to its particular object. We can understand the father’s sense of requirement upon him as an expression of the character of his love for his daughter. Suppose a philosopher were to press him: ‘but with all these troubles besetting you do you keep reading to her because it is your duty or because you want to do it?’ Puzzled by the question he might respond: ‘I do it because of my love for her. Continuing to do such things despite the difficulties is part of what genuine love for your daughter demands.’ He acts from a love that is informed by a sense of love’s requirements here. That is to my mind no reason to resist speaking of his appreciation of an ethical or even a moral requirement upon him. At least what Baron and others have taken to be mainly at issue here seems now to warrant calling it that. For the father acts under a sense of requirement – of answering a demand upon him – and we can find ourselves moved by the purity of his response. It would also be very natural to speak of the way he responded as showing him to be a good father. It might still be insisted that his response does not manifest a sense of distinctively moral requirement – because a thought about duty or even about ‘what is morally required’ does not come in as a distinctive motivation for the deed. But why should that thought remain at the heart of our ethical self-understanding? Because ethics involves acknowledgement of normative claims – peremptory and even unconditional such claims? But we have already seen that these claims can be acknowledged without any thoughts about duty or what is morally required. Baron’s locating of the sense of necessitation or requirement involves an intellectualist distortion both of our ethical practice and of our understanding of ourselves as morally responsive. There is an analogy here with our logical practice. Consider someone proposing a psychological account of that practice, perhaps by saying that we are just ‘inclined’ – though very strongly and constantly inclined – to conclude ‘q’ from the conjunction of ‘p’ and ‘If p then q’. Someone arguing in parallel fashion to Baron might say: ‘One thing this leaves out is the sense of logical requirement by which someone must be moved if her conclusion is to register a genuinely logical inference.’ Well, yes, but this does not mean that the concluder must have an explicit ‘commitment’ to thinking logically. (Moreover, it does not mean that when he or she does have such a commitment this is the real site of her sense of logical requirement.) I should say that the idea of an encounter is just as important here as in ethical response – though here it is of course a logical encounter rather than an ethical one. One finds that

92

Ethical Encounter

confronted with ‘p’ and ‘If p then q’ one must, one cannot but, conclude that q. There is the sense of being logically required: one encounters a limit which is not of one’s own making. But this encounter is not a matter of one’s having a thought about logic and its requirements, neither is it derived from a general commitment to thinking logically. The encounter is not most fundamentally the expression of a ‘conception’ of logical requirement, although such a ‘conception’ might (so to speak) grow out of the encounter and others like it. Someone can have such a ‘conception’ of logical requirement, such a thought about logic and its requirements. Indeed, perhaps such a thought is an inevitable concomitant of the sense of logical requirement realized in the particular encounter. I should say even that such a thought is necessary for the full development and refinement of our logical sensibility. But it depends upon such encounters for its character and force, even if it can also help to articulate their significance. The mooted account of our sense of logical requirement is as much an intellectualist distortion as Baron’s account of our ‘sense’ of ethical requirement. It is important to be clear about the scope of my remarks so far. The initial point was that a thought about duty (even in Baron’s generous interpretation of what that could involve) is not necessary for awareness of and responsiveness to ethical claims upon us. (The living of our loves can carry such demands with it.) But it does not follow from this, of course, that a thought about duty (or about what is morally required) cannot inform our moral deliberations and itself then be sufficient for the ‘moral worth’ of deeds performed from such a motivation. And this point may be pressed. Such a thought about morality, it may be said, had better frequently inform our deliberations. We need it to do so when, and because, our loves falter in the many ways they do, and when and because we still have to serve those we do not love, either because we do not so much as like them or because we do not even know them. There are a number of important questions here, and some of them are explored further in Chapter 8. Now, though, I want to point out a second kind of inadequacy in Baron’s formulations. Baron speaks of the perfectly moral person as governed by ‘a conception of what is morally required’. But being so governed in one’s deeds is not sufficient for their moral worth, and does not take us to the core of Kantian duty. Someone governed by a conception of what is morally required can still act in morally terrible ways – if his ‘conception’ is enough distorted, or perverted, or shallow, or corrupt or self-serving, or inadequate in one or more other ways.9 But on Kant’s picture no one

Duty and Ethical Motivation 93

motivated by duty can act in morally terrible ways. Baron’s formulation has a chance of reflecting Kant’s thought only if the conception of what is morally required is itself a wholly pure and true conception. But the question then is whether what is doing the real motivating work is the conception of what is morally required, or rather that which the conception so to speak aspires to be shaped by. Kant calls it the Good Will. Baron errs – as have many other commentators – by giving in effect a psychological reading of what Kant meant by acting from duty. Let me frame what I take to be her mistake slightly differently. Kant famously said that two things command awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. ‘Within’ is a tricky preposition here, since part of the point of Kant’s juxtaposition is that just as the heavens present themselves to us as limitless, so is the moral law ‘within’ – the law of Reason – limitlessly ‘beyond all sense’ and therefore knowledge. That means no ‘conception’ of it can ever be adequate to it, even though we cannot but keep forming conceptions of it. To be ‘governed’ by the moral law, then, is to be governed by what cannot be contained by any representation or ‘conception’ of it. (In the Critique of Judgement the starry heavens above are a sublime aesthetic image of the limitless power of Reason ‘within’ us.) Our being governed by the moral law – as we are when we act from duty – is then not to be equated with our being governed by a ‘conception’ of what is morally required, however important such conceptions may be. When Barbara Herman articulates a view of moral motivation she takes to be essentially Kantian, what she writes is close to Baron. These passages all occur on a single page of Herman’s: An action that is done from the motive of duty is performed because the agent finds it to be the right thing to do and takes its rightness or requiredness as his reason for acting. And: … a dutiful action has moral worth because the agent takes the fact that an action is morally required to be his reason for acting. And: … if the agent acts from the motive of duty he acts because he takes the fact that the action is morally required to be the ground of choice. 10

94

Ethical Encounter

And later in the same essay Herman writes that for a helping action to have moral worth it must be ‘the idea that it was morally required that led to the giving of help’.11 Herman speaks of ‘reasons for action’ and ‘ground of choice’ where Baron speaks of the perfectly moral person as governed by ‘a conception of what is morally required’. Despite her opposition to what she calls a prevalent ‘empiricist’ interpretation of Kant’s account of motivation, Herman’s passages also obscure the sense in which, for Kant, duty is trans-psychological. The point can be focused by asking what is referred to by ‘the idea’ that an action is morally required. The way Herman speaks, ‘the idea’ seems to denote a psychological representation, in the agent, of the action as being morally required. The same reading seems right for ‘the agent takes (an action’s) rightness or requiredness as his reason for acting’, and for the other passages quoted. But no such idea is necessary, I argued, for an action to have moral worth. (I suggested that even Kant might be interpreted as agreeing with this.) It is not sufficient either: no such idea can ever capture the content of what Kant means by being motivated by duty, as Herman supposes it can. That someone has ‘in mind’ a psychological representation of his action as morally required which he sincerely offers as his reason for acting does not show that duty (in the Kantian sense I am trying to clarify) really did move him. On Kant’s view this idea is, as a psychological representation, on a par with all other psychological items. It is another empirical phenomenon, and therefore just another element in (a natural way of using the phrase) ‘an empiricist account of motivation’. Crucial for Kant is what conditions any such psychological representation: is it or is it not – again in Kant’s terms – the Good Will?12 On Kant’s picture, as I see it, the idea that the helping was morally required could indeed be what led to the giving of help (or could be someone’s reason for helping), yet that helping still lack moral worth. Suppose the person’s thinking of that idea were complacent, or servile, or condescending, or merely conventional, for example. If it be said that then it is not really duty which is motivating the person, Kant would agree. (He can allow, of course, that the person is performing a morally required action. What is at issue here is his motivation to it.) But even if duty in Kant’s sense is not motivating this person, still his reason for action might be that this helping is morally required. His action ‘lacks moral worth’ because of the way the reason is held (servilely, complacently, condescendingly, merely conventionally).13 Kant’s thought is that nothing in any psychological representation – including the idea of this helping as morally required – itself is

Duty and Ethical Motivation 95

ever sufficient for the moral worth of what is done. The moral purity of the deed derives not from the psychological representation but from what conditions it, namely the Good Will. What can show that the Good Will is indeed the source of one’s reason? The manner or spirit in which the resulting deed is done may do so. (I do not, myself, want to put things quite in these Kantian terms, even though I find something important in Kant’s point. I use his terms here only to indicate where I differ from Herman.) Think again of Ivan Ilych. He finds himself newly compelled in response to his wife and child. I should say that he is ethically moved in response to them. Ivan Ilych comes to have a deeper compassion, a richer understanding, a larger heart, a greater power of human responsiveness, than he had, and his being changed in these ways informs his conviction of the rightness of the way in which he now responds to his wife and child. It would be very misleading to say of Ivan Ilych that what moves him to action is ‘a conception of what is morally required’, or a ‘commitment to doing whatever one morally ought to do’. It would be truer to say that through being moved to respond in the way he does in this encounter with his wife and child his conception of what it is for something to be morally required is transformed, deepened. He discovers that this here involves his whole soul of man (to use Coleridge’s phrase) being compellingly moved in response. So while Ivan Ilych is not moved by what Baron and Herman emphasize, he surely is ethically compelled in response to his wife and child. Tolstoy seems, to me at least, to have rendered a powerful sense of a man discovering himself deeply ethically engaged, perhaps for the first time. (Not all ethical responsiveness has this character of deeply personal encounter. On the other hand I should not want to identify such encounter as merely one mode among many of ethical responsiveness. It is part of the permanent background to what might – but only tendentiously – be called ‘normal’ ethical responsiveness. Chapter 8 discusses these questions further.) I have suggested that even subtle neo-Kantians such as Baron and Herman are implicated in an intellectualist distortion of ethical motivation.14 What about Kant himself? It may at first seem that he gave the distortion an axiomatic form, which either Baron’s or Herman’s formulation captures. In Herman’s formulation Kant takes it that to be responding to a moral claim upon us, the recognition that we are so responding must be, and be acknowledged by us as, our reason for acting. In Baron’s slightly less restrictive formulation, the recognition that we are so responding must be the ‘conception’ that governs what we do.

96

Ethical Encounter

I have already intimated that Kant is more complex than either formulation allows; and I shall now focus specifically on his thought. For Kant, what is distinctive about duty as a motive is that, unlike our ‘inclinations’, it pertains to our noumenal being. Duty therefore cannot be a content of, or an object for, consciousness as any merely phenomenal motive – that is, any motive other than duty – can be. How is this difference between duty as a motive, and any other motive, manifested in what Kant says? One way is in Kant’s acknowledgement that we can never know that we have in fact been moved by duty: It is indeed at times the case that after the keenest self-examination we find nothing that without the moral motive of duty could have been strong enough to move us to this or that good action and to so great a sacrifice; but we cannot infer from this with certainty that it is not some secret impulse of self-love which has actually, under the mere show of the Idea of duty, been the cause genuinely determining our will.15 The phenomenal realm, for Kant, is the realm of the knowable. Any motive other than duty, on Kant’s view, we could in principle come to be aware of as operative in us on a given occasion. Of course it might sometimes be extremely difficult for us to achieve this awareness – Kant might have been receptive to the suggestion that sometimes protracted psychoanalysis, for example, might be needed to bring this about. But the achievement is in principle possible in relation to any motive other than duty, since all such motives belong to the realm of phenomena – in particular to the domain of empirical psychology – and the realm of phenomena just is the realm of the knowable. So the passage just quoted does not express a general scepticism about knowledge of motives. Kant implies an asymmetry in our relation to good and our relation to evil: we can indeed come to know that we have acted morally badly – that our motives were base – but we cannot ever know that we have acted ‘with a pure will’.16 When we so act – if we ever do – we are moved by duty, and to be moved by duty is to be moved by what we cannot know. It is to be moved by that which lies beyond the scope of our powers of cognition. ‘Duty’ thus marks the transcendence of what moves me when I act in a morally good way. We should note what does not follow from the passage quoted above. If we cannot ever ‘infer with certainty’ that we have acted from duty, this does not mean that we must always be hesitant and uncertain about our moral actions. That is because knowledge is not, for

Duty and Ethical Motivation 97

Kant, the only mode of certainty. In the Doctrine of Virtue Kant speaks of hope and trust as the appropriate modalities of conviction about our best attempts to respond morally. Hope here is not the speculative anticipation of the racecourse punter. Trust, similarly, is not belief in the truth of a proposition but without the usual evidence for it. Neither is it the expression of a reluctant epistemic fall-back – the issue of recognizing that, unfortunately, you have nothing better to go on: ‘I suppose I’ll have to trust you’. It is more like ‘the promise of things unseen’, as the biblical phrase has it. This trust is not quite trust that what you did was the right thing to do, although there is that too. It is rather trust in yourself as the doer: that here, to use Kant’s terms, your will really was a Good Will. Analytic philosophy has almost wholly failed to acknowledge these modalities of conviction, in good part because it has been so wedded to propositional or ideational models of certainty.17 One difference between hope and trust as they are at issue here, on the one hand, and certainty about the truth of some proposition or idea on the other, is shown by a difference in other attitudes implied by them. The obstacles to the kind of certainty analytic philosophers have been almost exclusively interested in urge caution in the face of limited evidence, and scrupulousness of epistemic attention. Perhaps these are modes of humility, but they are very different from the kind of humility about one’s goodness the need for which is implicit in the hope and trust Kant spoke of. Epistemic caution (as we might call it) is required in inverse proportion to the strength of the evidence for the beliefs in question. The stronger the evidence, the less such caution in belief is needed. There is no parallel to this with one’s trust in one’s own moral comportment to which Kant refers. Humility is not the attitude one has only when one’s trust is shaky. It is rather that attitude whose continued presence marks trusting as the mode of one’s conviction here. Such trusting expresses a sense of not being in control, but in the hands of something not oneself. Of course in one sense much is within my power: I can try, try harder, and harder still. Yet, however hard I try there remains a sense in which I have no guarantee that (sustaining Kant’s terms) my will is good. Humility is another side, as it were, of this recognition of the sense in which I am not in control of things here. I have been arguing that if duty as a motive is not a phenomenon, in Kant’s sense, and therefore cannot be known, this does not mean we have to locate our moral comportment outside the bounds of certainty, confidence and conviction. We just have to appreciate the different forms these things can take.18 But we need to dwell longer on the way

98

Ethical Encounter

Kant understands the motive of duty. Far from identifying moral goodness with anyting in consciousness, including one’s reasons, Kant’s view is that to act in a morally good way is to be moved by what necessarily transcends consciousness and thus lies beyond the reasons one has. (In one so moved, of course ‘feelings’ and ‘wantings to help’ and all sorts of ‘reasons’ can inform what one does and how one does it. And expression of these things can of course count – because it usually does count – as explaining one’s actions. So far as they partly constitute one’s ethical orientation, though, they are no longer just subjective psychological states, but conditioned by their relation to what, beyond one’s psychology, actually moves one.) On Kant’s picture, thus understood, a crucial difference between moral goodness and activity lacking it is the difference between being moved by what necessarily transcends consciousness, on the one hand, and by what can be brought within consciousness on the other. The deep point of Kant’s contrast is in danger of being hidden by the usual reading (and translation) of him. To centralize the contrast between inclination and duty as motives is to risk making it seem that what is at issue is just two different mental contents:19 as if, both when an action lacks moral worth and also when it has moral worth, the doer is moved by some psychological state of his, and the difference lies just in what particular state does the work. Kant does not in fact speak of acting ‘from the motive of duty’. That is a translators’ amplification, and it subtly distorts Kant’s real emphasis. His phrase is aus Pflicht, and ‘from duty’ and ‘out of duty’ are the most literal, and the best, translations. Kant’s point is that when someone acts ‘from duty’ what moves him is not simply a psychological state of his. It is not that Kant thinks that what else moves him is some ‘state of affairs’ in the world. There can be debate about whether reasons for action are to be thought of as psychological states or as states of affairs in the outside world which are then represented in agents’ deliberations. Kant’s point has nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of this debate, even though as it happens his contrast between duty and inclination assumes that inclinatory reasons are psychological states. But Kant thinks that when one is moved by duty then neither a psychological state nor a state of affairs in the world, nor any combination of these, is simply motivating one. Kant of course does not speak of the ‘desire’ to do one’s duty, since duty supposedly exists beyond desire. But he does not speak even of the ‘recognition’ of duty, or of a ‘conception’ of what is morally required, or of a commitment to doing what one morally ought, as what moves the moral person. As noted,

Duty and Ethical Motivation 99

he speaks simply of acting ‘from duty’.20 He is therefore also not saying that a person’s reason for acting, if his action is to have moral worth, must be his recognition that ‘this is what I ought to do’ or ‘this is my duty’, or even ‘this would be right/wrong to do’. In addition, Kant is saying that when someone does act with such a reason and does indeed act in a morally good way, even then she does not succeed in fully representing before her mind what motivates her to act. If this seems puzzling that is partly, I think, because of a potential ambiguity in the concept of a motive. The motive a person has can be thought of as the consideration on which she acts – or at least as a consideration on which she might act. (One can have a motive and not act from it.) Motives are then considerations ‘before the mind’. Perhaps there can be unconscious motives. If these are not exactly before the mind, still on this understanding they must in some sense be ‘in the mind’ if not before it, if they really are motives. More than that, they must be capable of being brought to consciousness – brought before the mind – if they are to be motives. So understood, motives are very like reasons. But there is another, broader sense of the word ‘motive’. As the etymology of the word suggests, it can denote whatever moves one to activity. (‘To activity’, since if one is literally moved about by the gale-force wind, or by the undercurrent in the water, one is not thereby active, and the wind or water is not motivating one, but only moving one.) ‘Motive’ in this sense registers something other than considerations before the mind. So someone’s motive can be greed or insecurity or vanity, although those concepts do not enter his reasons for acting. It is rather that those concepts give the significance of the reasons on which he does act. The boss says: ‘If I skimp on the safety provisions for my workers I can make a bigger profit’. One who acts on that reason, for example, may well be motivated by greed. The boss’s reason is to make a bigger profit; his greed is shown in that reason being, in these circumstances, one on which he acts. (In other circumstances doing something in order to make a bigger profit will not show greed.) The relation between motives in this broader sense, and reasons, can then be indirect and elusive.21 If it is not to misrepresent Kant’s thought, ‘the motive of duty’ has to be understood in accordance with this second sense or use of ‘motive’. Duty is what is to motivate me, so far as my action has moral worth, but this does not mean that my reason for acting need make reference to duty. It can make reference to all sorts of things that people do in fact make reference to: ‘Just look at the state he’s in. He needs help … ’, and so on. A person is acting in a morally worthy way, Kant says – she

100 Ethical Encounter

is motivated by duty – if reverence for the law is what moves her. Whatever that positively involves, a key negative point is that it need not involve a particular thought about duty or even about what is ‘morally required’. One characteristic thought of a person motivated by duty can sometimes be ‘This is what I ought to do’.22 That thought can reflect a sense of being authoritatively bound in response, though Kant was mistaken if he thought it reflected the only sense of that, or even the deepest sense of oneself as authoritatively bound. A sense of moral necessity – as it has recently been called – can also be registered in such expressions as ‘I can’t leave him here’, ‘I must help her’, ‘I have to stay with them’. (It can also be shown, however, in the comportment of one whose words and thoughts never find such expression.) Again, these thoughts need not – characteristically do not – provide one who thinks them with her reason for staying and helping. ‘I can’t leave him here’ is not one’s reason for staying to help him, but an expression of one’s sense that one must stay. One’s reason for staying is, perhaps, that he is injured and needs help. (Of course ‘I can’t leave him here’ could provide one’s reason for something else one was here doing – for example, changing one’s mind about going to the party. ‘Why aren’t you going to the party?’ ‘Because I can’t leave him here.’) Nor does someone’s thinking any of these thoughts guarantee anything about what is really moving him. On occasion we might find ourselves moved to take such an expression as registering someone’s sense of moral necessity. But if we are, the ground of our being so moved will not be an even implicit judgement that he has succeeded in adequately representing the ‘moral law’ in his understanding, and that his (psychological) grasp of what the moral law requires is the reason from which he acts. What moves us will indeed be our sense of how the other person was moved to respond as he did. Their reasons and deliberations can of course be relevant to our sense of that ‘how’, but even then they fall well short of wholly determining our sense of it. On this reading of Kant, duty as a motive – even when ‘motive’ is understood in the second and broader way – is still unlike any other motive. When greed, say, is someone’s motive (broad sense), greed is not ‘before her mind’ as a consideration on which she acts. On the contrary, she is wholly preoccupied by the money or the food, or whatever it is she wants. But the greed which thus motivates her could become a consideration for her – if she comes to see what she did as greedy. That may or may not make a difference to how she comports herself. ‘I realize I was being greedy; I will give some of it back’ is one possibility. Sometimes the coming of a motive before the mind in this

Duty and Ethical Motivation 101

way will make a difference to how the person responds without changing what she does. That is sometimes true of generosity, for example. Reflective awareness of oneself as generous may well infect the spirit of one’s giving, even while one continues to give. As I said before one cannot get duty ‘before the mind’ in the way one can get greed or arrogance or pleasure or generosity before the mind. In Kant’s terms, this is because duty has a noumenal origin – it pertains to what cannot be known. To act from duty is not just to be moved by something that is not within the scope of consciousness at the time of action. That is indeed true of one who acts from duty, but it is also (usually) true of one who is motivated by greed or arrogance or generosity. What is also true of the motive of duty, but not of those other motives, is that it cannot be brought within the scope of consciousness, and it is not so brought even when a thought about duty is one’s reason for acting. The Kantian motive of duty, we could say, is our relation to transcendence. Kant’s preoccupation with duty marks his sense of a moral orientation as towards what is inappropriably and absolutely ‘other’ to all we can know and possess in consciousness. That is the specific bent of his thought which parallels one of my own themes hitherto (and which I think is obscured even by Baron and Herman). But this does not mean that Kant acknowledges everything I said Baron misses. Kant, too, can give only a seriously distorted picture of what it is that moves us in (for example) the father with the deep and lucidly attentive love of his daughter. But he goes wrong in only one way, as it were, while Baron goes wrong in two. Kant does indeed hold that so far as the father manifests a Good Will, it is because his response to his daughter is motivated by something fundamentally different in kind from his love for her. Baron thinks that too, and I argued against both of them. But Baron (like Herman) differs from Kant in supposing that this different kind of motivation is well-described as a commitment to doing what is morally right. And one thing wrong with that is the suggestion that a certain empirically identifiable psychological state is sufficient for a person’s acting from duty. That is to say, it misses the Kantian emphasis on moral responsiveness as involving what I labelled a relation to transcendence. But Kant distorts what that involves by saying that we aspire to be moved by a moral law which we can never get to possess. Well, in some contexts that phrase ‘moral law’ might hit the right note. When something strikes us as especially horrible or vile, Hampshire’s ‘sense that an insurmountable barrier has been knocked over’ can take hold, and this

102 Ethical Encounter

is close to a sense of violation of ‘moral law’. But Kant of course equates the moral law with the law of Reason, and that is grossly inadequate to the sense of what has been violated that Hampshire describes. When Paolo’s response to his daughter manifests a steady, lucidly attentive love, any adequate characterization of his response must centralize the way it is shaped in response to her. It is not the moral law to which he is wholly responsive, but her. And it is not her only ‘qua rational being’ either, but her as the whole individual human being she is. Equally, that in himself out of which he responds to her is not adequately described as the moral law, or the Law of Reason. Kant’s emphasis on the moral law (with the accent sometimes on Reason, sometimes on the other qua rational being) reflects his determination to avoid grounding moral response in our affections or inclinations. Only, he supposes, if the moral law (or Reason, or the other qua rational being) determines our response do we get beyond being moved merely by our affections. Then and only then are our choices (to use Baron’s formulation) ‘not grounded in our desires’. But we should reject this picture of the alternatives. So far as the father’s response is expressive of the lucidly attentive love we spoke of, then his affection has become purified by attention to its object. He finds himself answering to a requirement which his love for his daughter places upon him, and he finds himself bound to answer to it despite the testiness and impatience of his daughter, the turmoil at his work and his own marital problems. (‘That’s what loving your daughter means’, he might say.) It would not be flatly wrong to say that his response shows him as obedient to a normative requirement that is authoritative over his desires and affections. But it certainly would be mistaken to describe the source of this requirement as a ‘moral law’ his capacity to register which is wholly independent of his desires and affections. What Christine Korsgaard calls ‘reverence of life’ is closer to the mark. Such an orientation is not independent of affection and desire. But it is not reducible to those things either. It is rather an orientation in which our affections are deepened and purified, and in which their power over us is transformed into authority for us. Kant spoke of reverence too. He implicitly recognized that without it, or something like it, he had said nothing to make sense of how moral demands can go deep with us in the way they do. But he spoke of reverence for the moral law, understood as the law of Reason, and that is not adequate to this father’s response to his daughter as I described it. (For that matter neither is reverence of life.)

Duty and Ethical Motivation 103

The father is moved by the full human reality of his daughter as authoritatively disclosed to him through his love for her.23 (That is different from his daughter qua rational being.) What then authoritatively claims him from beyond is not Reason or the moral law, but his daughter as what I earlier called absolutely Other. (Here again I am close to Levinas.) I agree with Kant, then, that ethics involves an orientation to transcendence. But his reflective characterization of what that amounts to is a rationalistic distortion which cuts us off from our humanity. Opposing a reduction of ethics to desires, and acknowledging the force of speaking of an ethical relation to human beings as absolutely Other, places me in important respects close to Kant. But it does not involve the serious distortions introduced by a number of the ways in which Kant speaks to those themes.

6 Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue

In Chapter 1 I explored some of the limitations (by the lights of a different outlook) of Aristotle’s ethics of virtue. But I noted that an ethic of the virtues need not centralize a concern to appear before one’s peers in a certain way, as Aristotle does. Aquinas’ picture of the virtues, for example, might be thought free of that feature, as may other – perhaps especially other Christian-influenced – conceptions of virtue ethics. There is something in this thought. I begin with it and then ask whether there is a kind of goodness that matters greatly to us which cannot be brought under virtue concepts even when these are understood as free of that distinctive Aristotelian feature. I think there is such a goodness. I try to reveal and remove some of the obstacles in the way of reflective acknowledgement of it. Charles Taylor puts a main emphasis of virtue ethics neatly by speaking of its concern with ‘what it is good to be’ alongside the concern with ‘what it is right to do’.1 The former concern is with virtues and vices – human dispositions to action, feeling and desire – and thereby with character understood as a structure of such dispositions. We can then ask why we should have a concern with ‘what it is good to be’ in addition to a concern with what it is right (or wrong or wicked) to do. One answer is: because for various reasons having to do with the kind of creatures that human beings are, such a concern will make it more likely that we will do what is right and avoid what is wrong. A second answer would include that response but also go beyond it by saying: so that we can have a proper pride in ourselves as what Edmund Pincoffs calls ‘the right sort’. The second answer can be developed in two rather different ways. Aristotle develops it in one way. For Aristotle, virtue involves pride in one’s appearing before others as virtuous. That emphasis reflects the link 104

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue 105

between virtue and the noble in Aristotle’s thought. But the emphasis on appearing before others can be muted, without abandoning the second answer. Aquinas shows how. Jean Porter helpfully describes Aquinas as holding that virtue has a ‘dual meaning’. On the one hand ‘a good act is an act which corresponds to the general standard of human action, that is, conformity to reason’. But at the same time ‘it is also good in the sense of actualizing, and therefore perfecting, the powers of the agent, including passions, will, and intellect’.2 And Aquinas himself says that ‘virtue denotes the perfection of a power’.3 Indeed, in a medieval sense of the term, the virtues of a thing just are its distinctive powers. Someone can be concerned with his virtues, understood in this way, without having an Aristotelian aim of presenting himself before others in a certain sort of way.4 He can be concerned to actualize and perhaps perfect various of his powers. This concern is then distinguishable from his concern with the rightness or terribleness of his deeds, and is not recessive in relation to that latter concern.5 If this is right Aquinas agrees with Aristotle about one strand of the meaning of virtue – that it involves determining the right action as that which is in conformity with reason. But he differs on the second strand. Where for Aristotle moral virtue centrally involves a concern to present oneself before others in a certain sort of way, for Aquinas the perfecting of one’s powers does not essentially involve that. With this difference in mind we could say that Aquinas makes of the virtues – and thus of character – something less worldly than Aristotle does. It is worth noting that David Hume’s understanding of the virtues and character and how and why they matter is closer to Aristotle than to Aquinas on this score. The poet Andrew Marvell’s ‘forward youth who would appear’ is Hume’s potential paradigm of virtue. Hume aside, the important point here is what Aquinas shares with Aristotle, rather than what divides them. If one’s virtues are the perfections of one’s powers and one is concerned with them as such perfections, one then values them for something beyond their contribution to making one less likely to do evil and more likely to do what is right or good. This valuing need be neither priggish nor narcissistic. It goes naturally with – indeed it is what keeps in place – talk of the virtuous person as ‘living well’ or as ‘flourishing’ because of his virtue. Those forms of words expressly register a point, a telos, of having a virtuous character which reaches further than its contribution to one’s doing right and avoiding wrong. In recent years many philosophers have criticized moral philosophy’s narrow preoccupation with right action. They have highlighted qualities of character, and have often spoken of ‘living well’ and sometimes of ‘flourishing’ as what is made possible by

106 Ethical Encounter

possession of the right qualities. That last move is a dubious way of extending ethical concern beyond right and wrong action. It is strained, to say the least, to describe someone’s giving up her career to look after her retarded child as her form of flourishing – or even of living well – unless that is only a synonym for her doing what she finds she morally must. It is much more natural to say of her that any concern with flourishing gives way to her responding to her child in its need. And it is not only extreme examples that sever any link between goodness and flourishing. Answering the demands of justice towards both of her bitterly separated parents may take a terrible toll on one child, while her sibling may be freed up to flourish by siding with one parent and rejecting the other. Those people by whose goodness we are moved do not strike us as having any concern at all for flourishing, or for the perfecting of their own powers. Of course someone can want to be a better person, and to have a better character. But there is a great difference between the guiding thought that if you do not become better you will have failed yourself, and the guiding thought that you will have failed to be fully attentive to, failed to answer to, the claims of particular others upon you..(‘Others’ here can include non-human others – whether animals or philosophy or one’s garden.) Note here that I am not ascribing to Aquinas the implausible view that all that matters, or even that what matters most, to the virtuous person is the perfection of his own powers. The view is, as Porter puts it, that virtue has a dual aspect, and such concern involves only one of the aspects. (The other is the rightness of the act as ‘determined by reason’.) But I am saying that in those people the goodness of whose deeds moves us the first aspect does not seem to come into play at all. Not only are they not motivated by the aim of perfecting their own powers, but they seem not at all concerned or interested in that, and were they to be so, their deeds would not be moving in the way they actually are. Neither is it even that while they may have no concern with the perfection of their powers, nevertheless what they do in manifesting their goodness involves the perfecting of their powers. If that were involved, then such perfecting would still be something which an onlooker can recognize and value, even though they do not concern themselves with it. But that does not happen, either, when we encounter moving examples of goodness. We simply do not think that way at all about what we then encounter. And that is not because we ignore or overlook something – the perfecting of the other’s powers – which is nevertheless ‘there’. It is because this is not in play at all.

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue 107

Goodness has not, to say the least, loomed large in the vocabulary of moral philosophers. Plato’s ‘form of the Good’ gets occasional reference and then scant regard. The Good has an important formal role in Aristotle and Aquinas as the ultimate end of all activity. Iris Murdoch for many years, and more recently Raimond Gaita, have tried to bring not only the Good, but also goodness, and the adjectival form ‘a good man or woman’ back into philosophical thought about morals. But for the most part – especially though not solely among intellectuals – hostility or suspicion, or sometimes just awkwardness, remains. Nietzsche’s acidic critique of Christianity clearly reflects the first such attitude and may have helped intensify all three. (It is worth noting the strangeness of the fact that the concept many philosophers are content to take as most fundamental in their reflections upon what is supposed to be an integral dimension of everyone’s daily life is one that has virtually no life outside the academy – that of virtue, or ‘the virtues’. It need not be strange that a fundamental philosophical concept in some area should have little or no life outside philosophy. It is arguably strange that this should be so when what is to be made philosophical sense of is our everyday ethical practice. And of course for Aristotle and for medieval thought the concept of virtue was readily and robustly available.) Goodness is sometimes associated with behaviour that is conventional, and with an attitude of passivity and docility. I think these are corruptions of the thing rather than the thing itself; and it is an interesting question what the sources of those corruptions are. Oriented as it is to achievement and the many teleological concepts that go with it, including success, satisfaction, fulfilment, purpose, maturity, selfassertiveness and intellectual and technological sophistication, our culture perhaps helps to make it difficult to see that these corruptions indeed are corruptions. Even so, I think very many people do continue to believe that goodness is the only adequate name for what lies at the heart of morals, and to believe also that it is what is of greatest importance in human life. However hard they find it to elaborate this conviction, and also in the face of the many strong forces both in themselves and in the world around them that ceaselessly militate against their adherence to it, at some level many still find it alive in them. Plato imaged that thought beautifully when he spoke of human beings as clinging in a fallen world to dim but still powerful recollections of what they had once seen elsewhere. These thoughts are of course not philosophical arguments, but the conviction they describe is part of the background to the philosophical discussion so far, and to what follows. I begin by reflecting on another

108 Ethical Encounter

quality which very naturally comes to mind in one’s thinking about goodness: namely, humility. (Iris Murdoch aptly said that although the humble man ‘is not by definition the good man, perhaps he is the kind of man who is most likely to become good’.) John Keats spoke of the ‘chameleon poet’, whose personality disappears into the colours and form of what is realized in his poem. This is the operation of what Keats famously called ‘negative capability’. It summons a contrast close to that which J. C. F. Schiller drew between the ‘naive’ and the ‘sentimental’ poet. The latter is so to speak there in the poem, as a presence the perfection of whose powers we are made conscious of. Milton is one of Keats’ sentimental poets. The naive poet – like Keats’ chameleon – is by contrast all responsiveness, obedience, in the poem only negatively, as it were, as the realization of what is not-self. (Shakespeare is Keats’ non-pareil here.) His powers are perfected only in, and as, the disclosure of something not-himself. Keats’ thought could stand as an image of the significance of humility.6 The mode of the humble person’s presence is her obedience, her wholehearted answerability, to what or whom she attends to. In a sense she disappears into that to which she answers, realizing its presence ever more deeply. This carries over into what someone who is witness to such humility may be moved by. What we may be compelled by in such humility is not ever more impressively ‘perfected’ structures of virtue in the doer. The perfection of powers here consists only in the compelling disclosure of something or someone else. This is a reason for speaking of a goodness which, unlike virtue, does not have what Porter calls a ‘dual sense’. Yes, Aristotelian virtue has such a duality and so do other conceptions of virtue ethics even when they do not emphasize the presentation of self to others in the way Aristotle’s version does. But there is a kind of goodness – to which humility of the kind mentioned7 points – which cannot be understood in the terms of any such conception of virtue. On one of those ‘Real Life’ television programmes recently, two policemen were called to an apartment building in which a man had been beating his wife who was screaming. The woman was both injured and shaken. The neighbours said that this was a frequent occurrence: he was unemployed, alcoholic and often violent, and she took the brunt of his rage and aggression. As the police led away her husband, who had been sitting hunched in the corner, the woman walked over and in a movement of unmistakable tenderness put her hand on his arm. I know that many will respond to this episode very differently (some feminists will be angered by it), but I found what she did extremely moving. Its gentleness quite overcame the physical

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue 109

clumsiness of her movement (she was herself unkempt and shambling). Her unexpected response showed in her a sense of him as having a worth, a value, of a kind which nothing discernible in him seemed to warrant. Moreover her sense of him was also a sense which others might suddenly be led to acknowledge, precisely in being moved by her response. What I have said does not mitigate the wrongness of what he did in beating her. Nor need she believe that it is mitigated. But that clearly did not settle for her how she was to respond to him. Suppose someone – her neighbour or her sister perhaps – were to question her response: ‘But look what he’s done to you!’ She might say ‘Yes, I know’, and shrug her shoulders. What was so moving in her response? Not just a certain feeling for him which I might have registered her as having. Nor was it that I just found it touching that someone might still love another despite what he had done to her, or even that she had a sense of his worth which none of his evident qualities seemed to warrant. That last thought is closer to the mark, but the key point is not my awareness that she had such a sense of his worth. It is rather the revelatory power of her response:8 that this man could be revealed to have such a value, a value or worth not dependent on his character or other observable qualities. That the policemen shepherding him away did so more gently after she had touched him was further testament to her movement’s having that significance. They were evidently moved in the same sort of way as I. They were led to see the man, at least for the moment, in the light of her response to him. If one were to ask how they then saw him, it would be difficult to answer other than by saying: as having a value or a worth which they had not acknowledged before. And if one asks, further, about the status of what they then saw in seeing him that way, the answer is that it is there to be seen only in the light of the kind of gentleness and tenderness which the woman displayed in her gesture. Such gentleness and tenderness are forms of love. Such love exemplifies a goodness that is missed by a preoccupation with virtues. Both Aristotle and Hume would be scornful of my remarks about humility, and neither would find in the woman’s response anything ethically moving in the way I described. Pride in oneself as a fine and admirable figure in the eyes of others is something both philosophers assume to be ethically important. Nor is this assumption idiosyncratic. It answers to something deep in our culture, perhaps in any culture. (Both Aristotle and Hume take themselves to be giving expression to what is widely agreed, even if Hume is also consciously responding to a contrary philosophical and religious tradition.

110 Ethical Encounter

It is worth repeating, moreover, that such pride need not be priggish or narcissistic or redolent of vanity. It can express something impressive and admirable.) But Aristotle’s and Hume’s concern with pride and worldly self-presentation is not all that can get in the way of appreciating what is shown in the demeanour of that woman. That is obscured by any talk of a ‘dual sense of virtue’, even when that is not given a distinctively Aristotelian or a Humean cast. It is obscured, for example, by Aquinas’ emphasis on virtues as perfections of powers. That still centralizes something foreign to what we can be moved by in another’s goodness – for example in that woman’s response. What then moves us presses against the distinctive kind of concern with character which all of those ‘virtue ethicists’ in their different ways take for granted. No sense of the perfection of her powers is of concern either to the woman or to us who see her; and if it had been of concern to her or to us we would not have been moved in the same way by her deed. Its revelatory power depends on her so to speak disappearing into what she does. But I may be said to be missing something here, that was already hinted at in the way I described the episode of the husband and wife. After all, did I not describe what mattered there as shown in the expression of certain virtues she possessed – gentleness, tenderness, compassion? In that case surely what is displayed in the example still falls within the scope of virtue concepts, and thereby within the scope of what is expressed of the woman’s character. The problem, it might be said, is not with virtue concepts per se, but only with an undue restriction on the particular virtues recognized. We just need to make sure our range of virtue concepts is broad enough, and then it will be able to register what is shown in the kind of goodness I spoke of. But matters are not so simple. Suppose we hazard a distinction between virtues which are essentially other-regarding, and those which are not. In the latter category lie, for example, courage and temperance or self-control – half of the traditional quartet of cardinal virtues. Of course these qualities can be exemplified in deeds serving others’ good, but they can also be exemplified quite independently of such deeds. A main theme of each of these qualities is self-mastery: courage requires overcoming one’s fears and self-control one’s appetites or passions. Perhaps not just any display of such overcoming will manifest courage or self-control. If someone overcomes his fear out of greed for the gold in the corpse’s teeth, for example, this may not show courage. But still, many such displays will manifest courage or self-control without anyone else’s good motivating what is done.

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue 111

Gentleness, tenderness, compassion and kindness, by contrast, appear to be essentially other-regarding qualities. (They can all be regarded as forms of love.) Neither Aristotle nor Aquinas excludes other-regarding qualities from his canon of virtues. Justice in both Aristotle and Aquinas, for example, and probably charity in Aquinas, count as essentially other-regarding qualities. But my point concerns how any such qualities are understood by those thinkers. It is revealing of the way they think of them that none of the specific other-regarding qualities I just mentioned – gentleness, tenderness, compassion and kindness – is of much interest to either philosopher. Their emphasis still tends to be, as it is when they reflect on any virtues, on the choice of the correct action – in these cases as it happens an other-regarding action. Such choice often matters, of course, but it leaves out something which can show itself in the expression of the other-regarding qualities mentioned and which does not come into play with (say) courage or self-control, or with other-regarding qualities as Aristotle and Aquinas do write of them. We can initially describe this ‘something’ as the spirit in which, or out of which, the other person is engaged with. (We will see that this description does not go far enough, in part because charity in Aquinas can be understood as marking something like that. But it gives us a starting point.) Of course the concern for another registered in that spirit can degenerate into sentimentality, or at least into the attitude that feeling is more important than anything else – what Kant acidly labelled ‘melting compassion’ – but it need not do so, and when it does, something important has been distorted. What is at issue here can be clarified this way. If someone is kind, gentle, tender, compassionate to another, the latter may be very grateful for whatever material benefit he thereby receives. (His wounds are dressed, his belly is filled.) But his gratitude may also have a further object. He may also be grateful for the kindness or tenderness itself. Indeed the nourishment (to use Simone Weil’s term) he finds in the kindness or tenderness might be the most important thing of all. There is no parallel to this with deeds of courage. The one whose life is saved by another’s courageous deed may of course be deeply grateful to his saviour. It is true, too, that he can be grateful for more than the material benefit of (say) having had his life saved. But if he is so it will not then be his saviour’s courage that is the object of his gratitude and a source of nourishment. That object is rather the valuing of him, as it were, that he takes to be revealed in the other’s having been ready to risk her life for his sake. Of course a person’s courageous deed may not

112 Ethical Encounter

involve any such thing. And if and when it does, it is enlivened by something of a radically different kind from courage. What the person treated kindly or tenderly can thus be grateful for in addition to the material benefit he received can also be what most moves someone else who witnesses such kindness or tenderness. What the woman’s husband may find most nourishing in her response to him is also what I, like the policemen, was moved by.9 But then we have gone beyond what is captured by Aristotle’s and Aquinas’ concern with choice of the correct other-regarding action. What is that action after all? Giving her husband moral support? Comforting him? But what moved me was the particular way she did it. An action so described could have been done in many other ways, and then not have been thus moving. The beneficiary of the kindness may indeed be grateful that the other did ‘the right action’, and I watching the woman may endorse her deed as the right thing to do. But both the object of the husband’s deepest gratitude, and what moved me, is something beyond that. From his point of view it is the spirit in which she engaged with him; from my point of view it is the way in which that uniquely revealed his humanity – the full human reality of him.10 And in a sense these points of view converge since the spirit in which she engaged with him is exactly what he finds answers most deeply to him. His gratitude for the tenderness she showed is gratitude for the way she thus acknowledged him. That is what nourished him. But couldn’t that gratitude of the husband’s still be described as being for the gentleness and tenderness she showed him? (Perhaps he would call it ‘her love’.) If so, surely everything of ethical significance in the episode has still been registered in the language of the virtues. Well, yes and no. Yes, simply because the point can be put in precisely the terms just used. But still there is a crucial difference from what is involved in the expression of courage, say, in helping another. Then it is courage – exercised, as it happens, in a context which benefits him. The virtue is instantiated in a deed, and Bill is the beneficiary, and the rescuer may well be aware that it is Bill she is rescuing. But I said that a person cannot be grateful for another’s courage itself 11 in addition to being grateful for the benefit it provides. That is because he is not the individualized object of the courage in the same way in which the husband is the individualized object of the woman’s gentleness. Of course there is a straightforward sense in which Bill will often be the individualized object of his rescuer’s courage – when, for instance, she knew it was him she was setting out to rescue. But the woman’s response to her husband involves an individualizing quality of attention of a different and deeper kind.

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue 113

Someone could display extraordinary courage without the way he acts and responds being informed by the individualizing quality of attention we have been considering. He could even live a life of such courage without that happening. But no one could manifest the deepest kindness or tenderness or gentleness or compassion in the absence of that kind of individualizing attention which is able thus to nourish those who receive it. Those qualities in their deepest form are modes of that attentiveness, with the disclosive power of which I have spoken. Neither of the dual aspects of virtue mentioned before – the determining of the right action and the perfecting of the powers of the virtuous person – engages with this dimension of these other-regarding qualities.12 As I said, a courageous deed can be the occasion of an individualizing attention of just that kind. No doubt what the wife in my example did was courageous, given the beating she had taken and the presence of those policemen. And her husband may even have admired her courage in doing it, as might Aristotle and Hume. But ‘her courage’ does not describe what her husband may have been so deeply thankful for and nourished by, nor what I was moved by. To find the courage of her deed what is most ethically salient about it would be to show a radically different ethical orientation from one which saw in her deed what I spoke of. For one who saw that, the woman’s courage could no longer be what is most important. The former orientation – the one in which her courage would be central – has certainly been a constant and powerful presence in our cultural history. I said that justice is an essentially other-regarding virtue in Aristotle and Aquinas. Aquinas defines it as ‘a habit whereby a man renders to each one his due by a constant and perpetual will’. Simone Weil describes the need to be treated justly as a deep need of the soul. Sticking with my way of speaking: someone grateful to another for his just treatment can again be grateful for more than whatever material benefit that just treatment brings him. He can be nourished by the justice of the treatment itself, and grateful for that too. But a question arises as to whether, or in what sense, this is gratitude for an individualizing attention to, distinctively, him. On the face of it at least, he is not the distinctively individual object of the just treatment in the way in which the husband of my example seemed to be the distinctively individual object of his wife’s tenderness. She was his wife, after all. A very short answer to this question can be put this way. If Weil is right about justice being a deep need of the soul, then it is a deep personal need which has so to speak an impersonal dimension. What shows the need to be personal is just that I can be grateful for being

114 Ethical Encounter

treated justly and can myself be nourished by that treatment. One aspect of its impersonality is that I can recognize that another could be grateful for exactly the same just treatment from the same person. It is a fact – and I don’t think it matters what kind of fact we call it – that we are capable of recognizing that this does not by one jot diminish the depth of its engagement with the individual me. What that fact in turn shows is that our individuality is crucially defined by our answerability to an impersonal justice. Our individuality has an essentially impersonal dimension. I have been trying to sketch different pictures of the centre of gravity, so to speak, of ethics. Goodness and the forms of love that manifest it have an altogether different register from talk of morality or even of virtue. No one would say of the woman of my example that she acted in a highly moral way, or even a very virtuous way. Or if someone did, it would be either under the distorting pressure of the way moral philosophy too often takes up its work, or because they had not attended to or been moved by what I tried to describe. One who thinks the centre of gravity lies in the traditional cardinal virtues of courage, temperance (self-control), wisdom and justice13 will not think that such individualizing attention to others, and the love and goodness that realize it, lie at the heart of ethics. Of course one can supplement the cardinal virtues with various other-regarding virtues, but the latter will then tend to be understood on a model which distorts them. (They will be thought of on the model of right acts chosen under a universal description – which can of course be as specific as necessary.) Or rather, that way of understanding them will be adequate to some versions of some of these qualities, but not to all versions of them. ‘Virtue ethics’ then assimilates those versions of these qualities that can be understood on this model and misses the rest. There is a sort of kindness readily enough understood as a disposition (roughly) to help those in need, and, to do so out of no ulterior motive. It is certainly not to be disparaged (as I noted in Chapter 3). And the character and importance of such kindness are captured by the dual aspects of virtue discussed before. It can rightly matter to people that they develop the quality (that they ‘perfect’ this aspect of their power), and that they correctly determine the right actions required for such kindness. It is probably true, even, that a certain form of that disposition marks something in modern conceptions of morality distinguishing them from earlier conceptions. Charles Taylor says that ‘one of the central beliefs of modern western culture’ is that ‘we all should work to improve the condition of human life, to relieve suffering, overcome

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue 115

poverty, increase prosperity, augment human welfare.’ However much or often we fail to live up to this self-imposed demand, and however much some people rail against it, Taylor is arguably right. This belief is woven into the fabric of modern social democracies.14 It would have sounded strange to both Aristotle and Plato. A concern with practical charity is of course not distinctively modern. It is a longstanding theme of much Christian thought. What is perhaps distinctively modern is the political dimension of the concern – its embodiment, or the attempt to embody it, in political institutions and policies. This modern emphasis on generalized and especially on institutionalized practical charity15 does mark an ethical distance from a primary concern with the traditional cardinal virtues. But that is not my focus. The distance I have been pointing to is greater. For there are questions about the mode and depth of attention to others which is engaged in such generalized charity. It is obvious enough that when charity is institutional and indirect it can become abstract and disengaged from those who need it. It can do so even when they materially benefit from it (for example, when genuinely well-intentioned people write out cheque for charity in response to television advertisements or telephone calls). I do not mean, of course, that people should not thus give money, or that we should not have institutions of welfare. But there remains a serious question about the quality of attention to others which marks these manifestations of charity – kindness in that first form that I said is not to be dismissed. A deeper form of kindness turns precisely on the character of such attention. Such kindness, and also those forms of tenderness, compassion and gentleness which go with it, cannot be understood as virtues in the way Aristotle and Aquinas think of the cardinal virtues. That is because of the distinctive way these forms of love – such kindness, tenderness, compassion and gentleness – open onto, and also disclose, the individuality of others. Certain forms of these qualities are the site of a sense of what it is to be a human being, whose depth Aristotle, and virtue ethics more broadly, is unable to acknowledge. If these qualities, in these forms of them, are still to be called ‘virtues’ the word has now taken on a different cast. In a much-vaunted essay entitled ‘Freedom and Resentment’ P. F. Strawson discussed what he called ‘reactive attitudes’ to others.16 These are attitudes to the ‘goodwill, (or) its absence or opposite’ that others show to us. Strawson takes resentment and gratitude as central reactive attitudes of this kind. I too have been speaking about responses to the attitudes towards us that are displayed by others – in their tenderness, gentleness or compassion, for example. How does what I have said

116 Ethical Encounter

go beyond Strawson? Strawson does not discriminate between different forms of the reactive qualities he identifies. He speaks about ‘goodwill’ and its ‘absence or opposite’ as though there is a single form of each of these things. By contrast, I have been trying to elucidate particular forms of ‘goodwill’ which differ from others in their power to engage with, and to disclose, a certain depth of individuality in others. Remember Zossima in Dostoevsky’s novel, and the new and radically deeper sense, in his remorse, that he came to have of his valet. In such remorse, I said, a sense of the individual as ‘absolutely Other’ is given through the awareness of having wronged him. Zossima’s remorse is an experience in which the individual reality of another is disclosed as never before. His remorse is a distinctive mode of imaginative realization of another’s presence. Remorse opens on to various forms of ‘goodwill’. Aristotle’s blindness to the deep forms of those other-regarding qualities I have been discussing is of a piece with the absence from his ethical picture of any sense of remorse which reaches beyond shame. Aristotle would judge Zossima servile. The different sense of his valet to which Zossima comes in his remorse also opens up in him the conceptual and psychic space for forms of kindness, tenderness, gentleness and compassion hitherto beyond his comprehension – forms of those things which he too would until now have dismissed as expressive merely of servility. Having ‘seen’ his valet that way Zossima would, for example, be able to appreciate the tenderness shown by the woman I spoke of. Conversely, one capable of a love of another that can find expression in such tenderness and gentleness is thereby one to whom such remorse as Zossima’s is intelligible. Further, that different sense of his valet shapes for Zossima the conception of new depths of humiliation, degradation, cruelty and injustice to which human beings can be subjected. The significance of his experience, after all, is not just that he now realizes that other people in addition to his fellow officers and other men of his class are capable of being seriously degraded and humiliated. It is not just that he now realizes his valet too can suffer these things. For it is not as if his fellow officers had previously been present to him in the way his valet now comes to be. Rather, the remorse he experiences for what he has done to his valet is altogether new to him, and radically transforms his understanding of the meaning of real humiliation and degradation, including his understanding of what they had really meant in his earlier relations with his fellow officers. This understanding is transformed precisely through the different way his valet becomes individually present to Zossima in his remorse.

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue 117

The forms both of ‘goodwill’, and of its ‘absence or opposite’, can thus vary very significantly, according to the depth of individuality they disclose. The responses to them can reflect those differences. Strawson’s discussion of resentment and gratitude, and of the ‘manifestation of attitude’ which generates them, is insensitive to these differences.17 Resentment and gratitude, after all, are possible between Zossima and his fellow officers, and even between Zossima and his valet, before Zossima undergoes that experience of remorse. Something fundamental to our sense of ourselves and others as subjects rather than objects no doubt depends, as Strawson argues, on the possibility of some form of those reactions he discusses. This is a substantial point, which Aristotle also could acknowledge. But acknowledgement of it leaves all the points I have been trying to make still to be made. Aristotle’s blindness to what I have been discussing can be partly explained by certain ‘classical’ (as I shall call them) presuppositions of his thought. Aristotle takes human beings to share an ethical essence which is knowable and statable,18 and these assumptions show themselves in more than one way in Aristotle’s thought, as in virtue ethics more broadly. For Aristotle, all human beings, because they are a kind, have a single (teleological) essence, which is reason. Aristotle lists the moral virtues which he takes to be the specific manifestations of that essence in its practical aspect. Aristotle’s conception of human excellence is fixed independently of the specificity of the subject who realizes it. Any particular human being will realize human excellence only by fulfilling in his own life this already determinate, universal ideal.19 A properly fulfilled human life is ‘my own’, on this picture, only in the sense that I am a human being – any human being – and therefore this is the proper and fulfilling life for me. In achieving that ideal, one will be realizing what a much later age would call one’s ‘best self’. Of course most people will fail fully to realize that ideal. But what a person actually is can be understood only by relation to that ideal, and the vocabulary of virtues and vices articulates that relation. This means that one’s best self is one’s true self – what one most deeply and truly is. So unless one is a human ‘monster’ one’s vices are those respects in which one has failed to realize one’s true or real being. But since the good for human beings is equally and indifferently the good for any person, everyone’s best self is the same.20 Of course, given differences between different people’s natural endowments there will be some variation in what people need to do in order to hit Aristotle’s ‘mean’ of virtue. But, this small qualification aside, individual differences between people lie outside their human and moral essence. The point is not quite that Aristotle could not

118 Ethical Encounter

acknowledge such differences. It is rather that the importance of these to our sense of others is obscured, since the differences can be thought of only as lying outside what defines us as essentially human. Essences are what understanding is directed to, and our responses and actions should be shaped by our understanding. To idiosyncrasy, difference, variety – the kind of richness so often disclosed and celebrated in good novels – Aristotle the philosopher cannot allow any real importance. Not being fully intelligible – because it is a falling away from essence – such idiosyncrasy is also on his view less than fully real. Unlike Plato, Aristotle would find novels pretty trivial affairs. But the idiosyncrasy and variety they celebrate matter hugely to us, and not because we have a regrettable taste for what is trivial. Such idiosyncrasy and variety both sustain and are sustained by that ethical orientation which is centred on what I called individualizing attention. I said that neither Aristotle nor Hume would find anything ethically compelling in the episode of the woman with her violent husband. That is not the same fact as the fact that neither is really interested in idiosyncratic individual differences.21 But the second fact is part of the background to the first. (I return to this at the end of the chapter.)22 It may sound as if I am objecting only to the brevity of Aristotle’s list of virtues. Certainly it is brief but, as already suggested, we do not overcome the limitation I have been discussing just by extending the list. Edmund Pincoffs presents a list of qualities which might be used to describe the ‘sort of person’ (as he calls it) that someone is, a list which includes many terms not readily called moral virtues, or even just virtues. The terms on his list include: brainy, cosmopolitan, humorous, frank, independent, learned, lively, methodical, persistent, polite, sensitive, serious, sober, virile, zany. Some of these terms seem to reflect natural endowments rather than virtues (brainy, humorous); others may only sometimes count as morally desirable (polite, sensitive); and others again seem relatively superficial because very closely tied to a specific milieu (cosmopolitan). Not much needs to hang, I think, on whether we regard all these (and of course indefinitely many more) terms as naming qualities of character, or whether we separate out some as qualities of ‘personality’. If we understand character narrowly, so that only a few qualities count as ‘moral’ virtues and vices, we can use the word ‘personality’ to denote all sorts of other qualities that go to make someone the ‘sort of’ person he is. (There can then be various tensions between the attractiveness of character and of personality.) Pincoffs’ list is long, and it could easily be made longer. But extension of the list of qualities we bring to bear in making sense of someone

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue 119

does not by itself take us beyond the limiting classical preoccupation with essences which we were discussing. One can think of everything relevant to ‘what sort of person someone is’ as a knowable quality whose name can appear on such a list. Then the sort of person someone is shows in his instantiating the relevant qualities. Of course recognizing him as the instantiation of just those qualities is indeed recognizing the individual he is – as, precisely, that ‘sort of person’. A certain conception of the individual is engaged here. But it is not the only possible one. There is a different way of relating to another as an individual, or in his individuality, which does not register him as a ‘sort’ of person at all, however far we extend the vocabulary in whose terms we identify ‘sorts’. Such extension increases the resolution, so to speak, of the classical picture, but it does not change the picture – which is of human beings as readily enough knowable as the instantiators of given and readily intelligible universals. Her laugh, his way of sitting, Karenin’s ridiculous ears as his wife Anna saw them, ‘McDonagh’s bony thumb’ as Yeats summons it in memory, or simply the grieving repetition on someone’s lips of the name of one she loves: what is evoked in such ways is the individual, but not thought of as a ‘sort of person’, even a very complex sort of person.23 Aristotle’s classical temper is not his alone. It is, indeed, almost the distinctive mark of the philosophical mind, which is thereby disposed to miss what is involved here. R. M. Hare, for example, misses it. He thinks that all that is involved is a confusion, which he is clearing up when he writes: (Some philosophers) have thus been led to say that people, and the situations in which people find themselves, are ‘unutterably particular’, and thus beyond the reach of any universal predicates and principles … . But in fact individuals can be described as fully and precisely as we wish by the ingenious device (which is even older than the confusions of these philosophers) of putting the names of individuals as subjects and appending predicates to them.24 Hare may be right that individuals can be described as fully and precisely as we wish. (Though he probably is not. Often we can’t find the right word. Must there be one? Why?) But beyond that, often we find that the way we need to express our sense of another does not fall under the pattern of name followed by general (‘universal’) term. My sense of the individual him is given to me only through his way of sitting, or her laugh, or McDonagh’s bony thumb. These indexical references are

120 Ethical Encounter

ineliminable from the expression of my ‘sense’ of the individual. This fact does not contradict Hare’s claim about the possibility of ever further description by means of (merely) general terms appended to a name. But it points to a sense of the individual that no such description captures. These remarks point to a romantic picture that can readily – perhaps too readily – be opposed to the classical one I sketched. It highlights not a universally shared essence, but individual ‘genius’, each person distinctively different and not fully knowable. On this picture each human being in his or her deepest reality is not a ‘sort’ of person at all, but an irreducibly singular this. This romantic emphasis need not dispense with virtues and character, but it will insist that that they are not the whole story. There is ‘something more’, and that something more is the centre of gravity of the human being, around which various concepts may then be clustered. If I had to locate my view in one or other camp – the classical or the romantic – I should choose the latter. But for a reason I shall return to I do not propose to develop what I say under that opposition, even if reference to it can help imaginatively orient us to what is at issue. Let us pause to see where this discussion has led us. I said that there is a kind of goodness which seems to resist absorption into an ethics of the virtues. That is because it involves attention to and disclosure of another in his individuality in a way which virtue concepts seem inadequate to characterize. I then suggested that the classical background to preoccupation with virtue concepts helps explain this inadequacy: ‘understanding’ is of essences sharable by many particulars. But a way in which another can be present to us in his individuality takes us beyond such essences.25 The classicist Aristotle finds such individual presentness surd, unintelligible. The Western moral tradition has remained broadly at one with Aristotle on this. But the point goes further. What, it can be asked, has the individual sense of another focused in ‘McDonagh’s bony thumb’, or Karenin’s ears, or her special laugh, got to do with that deeper appreciation of the individual him which I and those policemen seemed led to have of the husband in my example? For they need not have been aware of the idiosyncratic him at all, as I was not.26 Similarly, the gratitude someone may feel for his gentle or tender treatment by another does not seem to depend on her being engaged by any such idiosyncratic details of him, or on his thinking that she is so engaged. (She may never have met him before.) Three distinguishable ‘conceptions’27 of individuality have come to attention in the present discussion. The first is evident in Aristotle, and is altogether unavoidable. One way it is exemplified is in the courageous

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue 121

person’s awareness that it is Bill, specifically, that she is rescuing (or of course in the coward’s awareness that it is Bill, specifically, that she is abandoning). It is also exemplified in countless ordinary interactions between people. Indeed it is exemplified in the ability to refer to anyone by use of his or her name, or even to anything, however trivial, by means of a definite description or a demonstrative pronoun – the piece of cheese you ate, that speck of dust. A grasp of individuality in this sense is shown by (roughly) what Hare speaks of: the capacity to use referring terms in subject position and to attach general terms in predicate position to them. A good deal of moral philosophy assumes that this is the only coherent conception of individuality. I think even Aristotle assumes this. His much-vaunted emphasis on the importance of particularity certainly does not contradict the assumption. Many philosophers have rightly objected to the abstractness and generality of the descriptions of people, their situations and their actions with which moral philosophers have often been content. But we can make those descriptions as specific as we like, without the sense of the individuality of those described by them itself being any different. The individuals in question are still (just) the entities which instantiate those descriptions, only now we have a much richer idea of the particular features of them and their situations. Such attention to particularity is certainly important. But its possibility evidently lies within reach of Aristotle’s classical assumptions. And it does not take us to either of the two further conceptions of individuality engaged in our discussion. The second is that which is engaged in what is summoned by the sense of her laugh or his way of sitting, where the individuality of the individual, so to speak, is beyond general description, because registrable only by descriptions indexed to him or her. Then the general terms – the ‘universals’ – are (so to speak) organized around the sense of this never-wholly-graspable him or her.28 But this sense of the individual other is not quite the same as what I or the policemen were led to realize when we saw the husband in the light of his wife’s tenderness. For we did not ourselves relate to the husband in just the way his wife did. He was not, for us, someone whose individual presence was registered in or through intensely dear, indexed-to-him features. We did not love the husband, as she did. Yet still we were brought to a vivid and moving sense of the individual him – and this marks the third conception of individuality. There is then a question about the relation between the second and third of these conceptions of the individual. I shall return to it at the end of the chapter.

122 Ethical Encounter

In the following passage David Hume says something with an interesting bearing on the present discussion: But besides all the agreeable qualities, the origin of whose beauty we can, in some degree explain and account for, there still remains something mysterious and inexplicable, which conveys an immediate satisfaction to the spectator, but how, or why, or for what reason, he cannot pretend to determine. There is a manner, a grace, an ease, a genteelness, an I-know-not-what, which some men possess above others, which is very different from external beauty and comeliness, and which, however, catches our affection almost as suddenly and powerfully. And though this manner be chiefly talked of in the passion between the sexes, where the concealed magic is easily explained, yet surely much of it prevails in all our estimation of characters, and forms no inconsiderable part of personal merit. This class of accomplishments, therefore, must be trusted entirely to the blind, but sure testimony of taste and sentiment; and must be considered as a part of ethics, left by nature to baffle all the pride of philosophy, and make her sensible of her narrow boundaries and slender acquisitions.29 Even making ample allowance for Hume’s irony, we can identify a wobble, an uncertainty, in his treatment of this ‘manner’. On the one hand he treats it as itself a universal, which ‘some men possess above others’, and which is also such that anyone will find their affection caught by it. Then the manner is just another general quality, alongside all those other ‘agreeable qualities’ whose attractiveness Hume has been ‘explaining and accounting for’. But we can also see him as close to the thought that this manner is not quite another specific trait of character or personality, so much as a way in which any and all of a person’s traits may be realized. This manner – as much as any substantial traits and perhaps even casting them into shadow – can be what ‘catches our affection’. (It may be something quite beyond the will and knowledge of the one who shows it, just as our affection’s being caught by it can happen to us willy-nilly, and even against our better judgement.) What we respond to in that manner – or better, what we then realize as that manner – is then not a specific trait but the distinctive individual presence of this human being. That then helps to shape our sense of whatever traits or qualities he may have, so to speak organizing those around itself. In that case, the adequacy of the generalizing universalist ‘explaining and accounting’ which Hume has spent many pages developing is indeed called into question.30

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue 123

The point is not, we should note, just that there are qualitative differences between different instantiations of the same quality. Of course there are, and (sometimes anyway) these qualitative differences can themselves be named by the terms for other general qualities. So, two people can both be vicious, but one vicious because cowardly, the other because intemperate. Then two people can be intemperately vicious (vicious in the intemperate way), and one be so because gluttonous, and the other because licentious. Then of two people who are licentiously intemperately vicious, one can be ‘pederastically’ so, the other adulterously so. And so on. Given two instantiations of a given universal, there need be no limit to the possibility of specifically differentiating, in terms of further universals, the ways in which those instantiations differ in character. (As mentioned, we may well need a very extensive evaluative vocabulary – much more extensive than Aristotle’s – for this purpose.) Hume is well aware of that possibility, but he is gesturing towards something else – a way of relating to another person other than as the instantiation of any number of universal qualities. This different mode of relating – which I have already touched upon – involves a kind of swiveling of the mind in relation to whom (or indeed what) it ‘knows’. (I shall return to it in the next chapter.) I describe Hume as only gesturing towards this because it is as if, despite what he sets himself to say in this passage, he cannot himself quite escape his eighteenth-century preoccupation with a rationalistic ethical universalism. His ‘I-knownot-what’ – echoing the je-ne-sais-quoi ascribed to the French honnête homme – looks forward to Romantic preoccupations with the irreducible individuality and indefinability of genius. By contrast, his readiness to speak of ‘the’ passion between the sexes – as if the differences in what obtained between Héloise and Abelard, Anna and Vronsky, and Antony and Cleopatra were not as significant as anything those couples may have had in common – still reflects his classical (as we might call it) acceptance of universally shared essences as adequately defining the human. (Notice also that he slips into referring to the ‘manner’ in question as ‘this class of accomplishments’, as if it were not only a set of determinate qualities, but also subordinate to the will – what can be ‘accomplished’.) Hume does not here quite succeed in escaping the idea that any particular human being is adequately defined by the set of universal properties he possesses. He still himself shares the classical essentialist commitment evident in Aristotle, even while half recognizing its limits and the need to go beyond them. Hume’s own distinctive ‘manner’ and grace as a writer is powerfully present in this passage, and this reader, at least, finds his affection

124 Ethical Encounter

caught by that. Just as we can register another’s manner or grace as much as his several qualities, so in coming to what is philosophically disclosed in Hume’s writing we read between the propositions, as it were, as much as we read the propositions themselves. If thus reading Hume leads beyond an ‘understanding’ of the ‘pure’ philosophical content, so much the worse for that conception of the limits of philosophical discourse. For it is an abstraction from what more an alert reader can register as philosophically alive in what Hume writes – and even that is of course still less than all that a reader might find to answer to in this man’s writings. The particular passage of Hume’s we have been looking at, and the way a reader – this reader anyway – finds himself in relation to it, thus exemplifies what it is I am suggesting Hume only half recognizes and half conveys in the explicit content of the passage. His own distinctive ‘manner’ informs the way in which any abstractable philosophical contents of the passage, for example, are registered by us. That distinctive manner is crucial to the depth and persistence of our ‘affection’ for what we here encounter. And all that, in turn, is why the business of ‘explaining and accounting for’ Hume’s own philosophy is an endlessly complex and reiterated business (as well as one which has to be undertaken anew by anyone who reads it with any attention). That distinctive and individualizing ‘I-know-not-what’ continually subverts the attempt to set out its significance in terms of already given general concepts. Aristotle has a rosy view of the possibilities of ethical life, in two respects. He seems to think that all of the virtuous person’s human potentialities can be harmoniously realized. He does not allow that a truly fulfilled human life could involve the sublimation or subordination or even suppression of energies or capacities that might have gone to the realizing of a different kind of genuine human fulfilment. Not for Aristotle Hampshire’s observation that however well and richly anyone lives still he can recognize that he goes ‘lopsided to the grave’, important human possibilities unrealized in his life. Secondly, Aristotle seems to think a similar point is also true at the communal level: there can be a society in which all human possibilities are simultaneously realized, and perhaps any society in which people are severally virtuous will be such a society. Here is one way of moving beyond those limiting Aristotelian thoughts. One might instead think, for example, of civil life not just as fostering and shaping potentialities but as also, however politically robust and rich it be, necessarily sublimating various energies and capacities – ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, as Freud put it. Then you can develop a picture which allows for certain

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue 125

depths of inwardness, including self-deception – to accommodate all those necessary discontents, as it were – which Aristotle never acknowledges.31 Thus you can move from Aristotle to Freud, adding a good deal of psychological depth and richness in the process. One might thus think that any social order which realizes a significant range and degree of human goods must also involve the atrophy of others. For example: ‘You can’t have Singaporean social harmony and the kind of individual autonomy we Westerners value, at the same time.’ If that were so, then – as on the Freudian picture – one’s moral selfhood might not involve one’s perfectly harmonious accommodation to the social and civic domain. That does seem to mark a difference from Aristotle, and perhaps from Hume. But it is not a difference which involves going beyond what I called the classical picture. All it gives us is a picture of rather less neat accommodation of human beings to their social world than is assumed by those two thinkers. Am I suggesting that the passage quoted above from Hume intimates a more radical departure from that picture? Yes. The grace Hume ruminates on is, we noted, not just another general quality, possessed by some and lacked by others. It is rather the realizing of a certain presence of another that is not analysable into their instantiating of any number of distinct general qualities although it is not independent of such qualities either. Hume is here intimating that second sense of individuality that I discussed before. His ‘grace’ marks a distinctive way in which the unique individual – or the individual in his or her individuality – can become present to another. Hume’s own ambivalence on this very point, however, is shown by the unconvincing apposition of genteelness with grace. Genteelness is a perfectly Humean mark of a person’s accommodation within the categories and canons of civilized life and discourse. Grace, by contrast, marks both an escape from that economy and also a realizing of a different ‘at home-ness’ in the world, an at home-ness at a quite different level, as it were, from genteelness. (Hume also calls it an ‘ease’, a word with ambiguous resonance. It can so to speak fall on the side of genteelness, marking a kind of socially or culturally mediated freedom – the effortless superiority of the Oxford man perhaps – or on the side of grace, marking a kind of candour and simplicity of manner which can transcend boundaries of class and civility.) In this way Humean grace does indeed lead, though haltingly, beyond the categories of accommodation to civil life which mark the official limits of his account of human relations, and which constitute his version of a classical picture.

126 Ethical Encounter

Two other concepts which resemble Humean grace are those of charisma and charm. The root of charisma is the Greek charis, which is often translated ‘grace’. Charisma was originally the quality of being infused by divine grace. Theologically this enabled a priest’s giving of the sacraments to remain effective even when he had lost his faith. ‘Charisma’ has now come to mark the compelling presence of a person which resists explanation by appeal to any combination of his or her specific qualities. In common parlance, though, the term wobbles in much the way Hume’s use of ‘grace’ does, between thus registering a sense of a person which escapes pinning down to specific qualities, and marking yet another determinate general concept – like genteelness and perhaps ease, for example. ‘Charm’ oscillates in significance in a similar way. When charm is something which can be ‘turned on’, it is just another general quality, indeed an ‘accomplishment’, which any number of people can have. But the older flavour of magic – originally the magic effect producible by a song (Latin carmen) – does still linger in the word, so that at least sometimes when we are charmed we are moved in a way which escapes being pinned down to the various qualities in the person whose operation we could identify, either individually or in determinable combination. It is rather this distinctive individual presence which their melding has helped inform, by which we are charmed. There are two directions in which Hume’s thought can be pressed further than he takes it, both suggested by my remarks so far. Hume speaks as if a person’s grace is something that just anyone will see, because its possession by a person does not depend on any distinctive capacity in others to see it. Perhaps we sometimes think of charisma and charm that way too: this person has it and that one doesn’t, and it can be seen by anyone who cares to look. But we also recognize that one person can be charmed by another while a third person may not be. ‘What does she see in the old toad?’ The answer given by the fairy story is ‘a prince’. But perhaps one needs just her eyes to see a prince in him. Once we think of charm or grace as a way in which a distinctive individual presence attracts us, organizing (as I put it earlier) the person’s specific qualities around it, we open up the possibility that only some other individual ways of being present to that charm or grace will disclose it.32 Then perhaps Hume’s point invites broadening in a way to which the concepts of charm and grace are no longer quite adequate. We are back to ‘McDonagh’s bony thumb’, her way of laughing, the repetition of another’s name – in grief, for example – as summoning him or her. Here we have moved a good distance from Hume’s

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue 127

thought about grace. What we have taken from him is his glimpse of the possibility of realizing another as compellingly present in a way which cannot be traced to her instantiation of the general qualities which make up Hume’s (or any other) evaluative canon. But we have pressed the possibility further in a direction which Hume’s classical temperament makes him unable to follow. The second direction in which Hume’s thought could be further pressed is a Nietzschean one. Hume says no more about how the grace he mentions relates to the other virtues he discusses. But his remarks at least invite the thought that such grace may show in one who conspicuously lacks important ‘moral’ virtues.33 Then our attraction to his grace can be in serious tension with our ‘moral’ judgement of his character. (Just such a tension is the main theme of R. L. Stevenson’s novel The Master of Ballantrae.34) We may feel that if we were to try to resolve this tension we would be foreclosing on something of great importance, and we may then be moved to live with it. Sometimes, though, we may feel compelled to distance ourselves from it – by, for example, resolving to end our friendship with someone. And sometimes we then may remain painfully, even bitterly, aware of the cost to us of doing that. These reflections on Hume help clarify some of the classical limitations of the concept of character in moral philosophy. The kind of individuality I said Hume half recognizes and Aristotle does not recognize35 already leads beyond the reach of the concept of character. It does so not because it imports general qualities of a ‘non-ethical’ kind – qualities of personality or aesthetic qualities, for example – but because it involves a way of realizing another which lies beyond the conceptual reach of determination of character. If the grace Hume speaks of lies beyond the bounds of class and civility, that is not because it lies within some other specifiable domain – that of biology, perhaps, or psychology. It is rather a mark of the other as not graspable just as an instance of any number of general concepts. Hume thus glimpses the importance of a way of realizing other human beings which, as noted before, is shouldered out by much in our moral-philosophical tradition. But this point reaches only so far. What Hume glimpsed does not require acknowledgement of the kind of individual reality which I sought to mark by the phrase ‘absolute Otherness’. Similarly, what is disclosed by the wife’s response in the television episode is very different from Humean grace. The woman might sincerely acknowledge that there is nothing impressive about her husband resembling what prompts the admiration Hume speaks of. Moreover, the fact that her tenderness and

128 Ethical Encounter

compassion can disclose this man in the way they do does not depend upon our thinking that really, if only we could see it, he has the impressiveness of someone with Hume’s grace of manner. His individual worth or value disclosed by her deeply compassionate gesture is of a different kind from the attraction exerted by the grace Hume speaks of. We can also put this point in the terms of Hannah Arendt’s remark that the men of the eighteenth century had no conception of goodness beyond virtue or of evil beyond vice. Like Aristotle and their contemporary Hume they would find nothing moving in that woman’s gesture beyond her perhaps admirable courage. They could not see what she did as an expression of goodness because they could not see him as disclosed by her gesture in the way I described. Their classical allegiance is part of what prevents them from doing so. But Humean grace, and the individual sense of another which it yields, is not an instance of what Arendt thought those men were blind to, even if it does indeed stand in tension with their ‘universalizing’ discourse of virtues and vices. They could have acknowledged such grace (even if they did not)36 while still being blind to goodness beyond virtue and evil beyond vice. In the ways I have been discussing, Humean grace itself spills beyond character and thus beyond the classical limitations of virtue and vice, and can certainly complicate ethical understandings framed in those terms. But the distinctive individual value of another which loving goodness is capable of revealing, is something else again. So between Hume’s grace and what is disclosed in the television episode there is a gap. But perhaps the possibility of its being bridged opens up once we press Hume’s point in the two directions I mentioned. Once the idiosyncratic individual is duly acknowledged there is the space for appreciation of those dimensions of the ‘other-regarding virtues’ of kindness, gentleness, compassion, tenderness which I said tend to be shouldered out by a classical preoccupation with character. Putting the point the other way around: part of the background to the possibility of that woman’s gesture having the disclosive power I described is an appreciation of the distinctive way another can be individually present to us which classical assumptions make invisible. The woman’s gesture could not have just that power were particular others not able to strike us in that idiosyncratic way instanced in Yeats’ ‘McDonagh’s bony thumb’, or in my sense of her laugh, or Anna’s sense of Karenin’s ridiculous ears. But I thus recognize that I am not alone in being idiosyncratically struck in this way. The rest of humanity, too, is idiosyncratically struck by particular others, different particular others from the ones who thus strike me. And many of those different others

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue 129

will be people in whom, try as I might, I can myself see nothing striking. But I need not conclude that there is ‘nothing there’. Instead I can recognize a space, so to speak, between what I can register and respond to in another, and what someone else may be able to register and respond to. Others can recognize the same space between what they can register and what yet others can register. And we can all recognize this variability. Then our shared sense of human worth is sensitive to this acknowledgement of possibilities in others that are intelligible to us but which we cannot ourselves actually see. I may not be able to see a prince in the old toad, but I can find it intelligible that she does. The capacity to be moved by the woman’s gesture to a deeper sense of that man’s worth exists against the background of acknowledgement of such possibilities. My finding her gesture thus moving does not depend on my finding anything striking or impressive in the husband. Neither need I suppose that further acquaintance would reveal anything in him interesting to me. Does my description of the background to being moved by the woman’s gesture imply that I take her to be thus ‘struck’ by him? If I take her to love him I suppose I do assume she is thus struck. But we could be moved in a similar way by tenderness, kindness, compassion shown for someone who was hitherto wholly unknown to the one who showed it. Then there is likely nothing idiosyncratically compelling in the other, to him who shows the compassion. Must we in that case think of the one attended to as somehow, somewhere, possessing qualities that could strike someone in the way this woman is in fact struck by her husband? I do not see why. Certainly all the evidence may be against thinking of him that way. (He may just be too nasty to make the supposition plausible.) Even so, tenderness, compassion, kindness can move us to a compelling sense of even this person’s individual worth. But this possibility is still linked to the background I described. The very fact that we think of him as (say) extremely nasty shows our sense of him as of the same kind as those who are not nasty but instead (say) affable or considerate. His nastiness is one kind of failing in that same domain of possibilities. We thus still understand him as belonging to a kind whose members are intelligible objects of a kind of love which answers to others in their idiosyncratic individuality. That is a crucial link between our particular sense of him and the second sense of individuality I spoke of. Against the background of that sense, goodness beyond virtue (and evil beyond vice) may show themselves and move us.37

7 ‘Romantic’ Love?

Iris Murdoch once wrote that ‘the central concept of morality is “the individual” thought of as knowable by love’. But there are many forms of love, and they can realize the individual they ‘know’ in very different ways. We have already pondered occasions of some such forms. In this chapter I want to reflect on a passage from Shakespeare which might (tendentiously) be thought to register ‘romantic’ love. There is evidently something different here from what is disclosed in (say) the wife’s gesture towards her husband discussed in the previous chapter, or in any of the other examples so far explored. I am interested in that difference, but the conceptual resources useful for articulating what shows itself in this passage also have broader application, to what has already been discussed. In these lines from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale Florizel, the king’s son disguised as a shepherd, is speaking of Perdita, whom he believes to be a shepherd’s daughter: What you do Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, I’d have you do it ever: when you sing, I’d have you buy and sell so; so give alms; Pray so; and for the ordering your affairs, To sing them too: when you dance, I wish you A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that; move still, still so, And own no other function: each your doing, So singular in each particular, Crowns what you are doing in the present deed, That all your acts are queens. (IV.iii.135–46) 130

‘Romantic’ Love? 131

What captivates Florizel is not just what Perdita does, but her doing of it, which ‘crowns what you are doing’. Her distinctive manner of doing, ‘so singular in each particular’, is what he is seeking to render. Florizel’s ‘understanding’ of the girl here is not given by his subsuming of her under any number of already determinate concepts. She is not for him an instance of a set of general qualities which could equally well be instantiated in another. Of course he does use general concepts in what he says – we can hardly speak without doing so. But his understanding of her seeks to realize something which is not just there to be seen by anyone with his eyes open, nor necessarily even by one with as scrupulous an attention to ‘the facts’ as possible. What he seeks to realize in her, or rather the her which he seeks to realize, requires the sustaining of just this full and open responsiveness if it is to be registered. Florizel’s sense of Perdita is shot through with ‘you’ and ‘your’. Recall Hare saying that ‘individuals can be described as fully and precisely as we wish’. A lesson of Florizel’s rendering of Perdita is, to put the point in Hare’s terms, that the individual who is the subject of his ‘description’ is insinuated into the sense of the predicates used to describe her. The point is most intensely registered in the closing lines: … each your doing, So singular in each particular, Crowns what you are doing in the present deed, That all your acts are queens. The reality of Perdita is given to him only so far as the ‘doings’ are realized by him as ‘your doings’. That he cannot distil into a wholly public description his sense of the individual her is precisely what is registered by that ineliminable ‘your’. ‘Understanding’ is then perhaps not the best term for Florizel’s relation to Perdita (nor indeed is ‘seeing’).1 He is not figuratively ‘standing under’ her, with a framework of concepts, so to speak, by means of which he intellectually ‘supports’ this being which instantiates a number of them. Indeed, she is realized by him, only in his imaginatively answering to her in the way he does. The general concepts which he does use, are put, in his use of them, to the incompletable service of an imaginative realizing, or rendering, of this singular whole way of being alive in and to the world. His understanding moves in ‘the direction of the ideal (“singular”) limit’, to use Murdoch’s phrase, which it can never reach. But more than that, his sense of the unreachability of that limit is enacted (and shows itself to us readers) in the open, celebratory, almost

132 Ethical Encounter

prayerful humility which is the passage’s tone. His understanding of her is exactly not a subsuming of its ‘object’ under the already given categories of an impersonal public language. But that understanding can then never be wholly contained in whatever words are used to express it, since it can never possess the ‘singular’ being which shapes it. Florizel seeks to answer to the reality of what he encounters as, precisely, a reality which cannot be grasped, but only answered to.2 But now let me speak rather more philosophically about what shows itself in Shakespeare’s passage. In his Critique of Judgement Kant distinguished between two directions, so to speak, in which the mind can move in judging. In the earlier Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had described judgement only as ‘the faculty of subsuming under rules’.3 In the later work he similarly characterizes judgement in general as ‘the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal’, but he continues: If the universal (the rule, principle or law) is given, then the judgement which subsumes the particular under it is determinant … If, however, only the particular is given and the universal has to be found for it, then the judgement is simply reflective.4 Reflective judgement is ‘compelled to ascend from the particular in nature to the universal’. We must not be misled by Kant’s speaking of the individual as ‘given’ in reflective judgement, because part of the point of the contrast is that in reflective judgement the object can never be grasped, held within the understanding, as it is in determinant judgement. I spoke of Florizel as ‘answering’ to what he encountered in his very judgement of it.5 Determinant judgement is not such an answering but a ‘taking hold’ of the object, a grasping of it as an instantiation of some general concept or concepts (in Kant’s terms, a grasping of it as subsumed under ‘the universal’). In what Kant calls reflective judgement, the mind swivels round in openness of response to what it encounters, by contrast with taking that to be given by its subsumption under those concepts (rules) of which one is already in possession. A generation later John Keats wrote (as mentioned earlier) of ‘Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Keats was not referring to a capacity to be satisfied with something merely less than knowledge. He intends a different kind of orientation, strikingly like what Kant meant by ‘reflective judgement’. It is

‘Romantic’ Love? 133

more a letting something disclose itself than an attempt to grasp it. But it is not therefore a passive condition. It involves a kind of open answering to what is encountered, and Florizel’s orientation to Perdita exemplifies it beautifully. And that orientation also shows him as ‘in question’ in the very openness of his response, open to resolution by what is disclosed in the encounter.6 The concept of attention that Iris Murdoch borrows from Simone Weil has a similar connotation, which is obscured if attention to an object is thought of simply as the directedness of the mind towards it. The idea is of ‘attendance on’ someone or something, a ‘waiting on’ what will authoritatively shape one’s response. (The French attendre means ‘to wait for’.) Why ‘authoritatively’? Because the answering to what is thus encountered involves one’s wholehearted consent to how one is shaped by it. Then one is not just subject to the power of what one attends on. Mere ‘power over’ is indifferent to the consent of those it compels. As this thought about consent helps bring out we must not be misled, either by the word ‘negative’ in Keats’ phrase or by the connotations of ‘attendance’, into thinking of this orientation as an empty receptivity. We bring ourselves, with our various capacities, to it. Some of these capacities of course may be such as to prevent us from answering in a genuinely open way to what we encounter. But we do not answer in a genuinely open way merely by freeing ourselves of particular obstacles to doing so. Keats himself knew that even the ‘chameleon poet’ had to labour long and hard to write in a way through which something significant could disclose itself. Ethically speaking, we know the importance of developing various virtues of character. In many contexts these form part of the background against which the resolution of self by what is disclosed in encounter, involved in reflective judgement, takes shape. But as the poet’s ‘genius’ leads him beyond the hitherto accepted poetic limits, so in our encounter with another we can be led beyond what is ascribable to those virtues of character. Kant introduces the idea of reflective judgement in explication of our sense of beauty. According to Kant, beauty is neither a property of the object, nor a mere ‘affection’ of (or in) the experiencing subject. The judgement of beauty emerges in the discovery of an object as occasioning a sense of perfect harmony of self and world. This sense is described by Kant as a ‘feeling’, but it is not merely a feeling in the subject; for the subject can articulate his feeling only by reference to the beauty of the object. It is beautiful, but a (formal) condition of its being so is the subject’s feeling or experience of harmony. That is so to speak embodied, or crystallized, in the object.

134 Ethical Encounter

Determinant judgement marks out ‘a way things are’ in the world, and it emerges out of a background harmony of self and world – a ‘fit’, so to speak, between the world and our capacities for knowing it. This harmony is a condition, on Kant’s view, of the very possibility of knowledge. A ‘sense’ of it is what is reflected to us in the experience of beauty. That sense of harmony expresses, or manifests, our ‘at-homeness’ in the world. It is an earnest of the world’s readiness to answer to our attempts to make sense of it. Emerging from that background harmony, determinant judgement specifies a way the world is for the subject (implicitly, for all subjects). The rainbow is, biblically speaking, the mark of God’s covenant with his people – that agreement with them which means that whatever may happen ‘the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh’. Similarly, beauty for Kant is the mark of the ‘covenant’ (the agreement or harmony) between subject and world in virtue of which the world is not mere chaos but intelligible to us, able to be known by us. The experience of beauty is then for Kant a ‘moment’ of transcendence, a moment in which the background harmony or agreement out of which our theoretical and practical engagements with the world emerge is so to speak affirmed for us. That explains, Kant thinks, the great weight of significance which beauty can carry for us. In the experience of it we are blessed with a direct and deep sense of being spiritually ‘at home’ in the world. But two sides, as it were, of this thought have to be acknowledged. The rainbow can betoken a covenant only because there is a question, so to speak, whether God would give his people such an undertaking. Similarly, realizing oneself as spiritually ‘at home’ in the world depends on the possibility of not being so. Only if there is space for a question of our being at home in the world can the experience of beauty resolve it for us. Only if we acknowledge both sides of the experience of beauty – not only the harmony of self and world but also the question which that experience resolves – do we do justice to the power of the experience. Part of beauty’s power is to cancel narcissism.7 It can take us ‘out of ourselves’, resolving anew our sense of ourselves. That is part of what I meant in saying that in reflective judgement the judger is ‘in question’ in his answerability to what is judged, in a way he is not when judging ‘determinantly’. Iris Murdoch describes a moment of beauty that helps bring out what this means: I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel.

‘Romantic’ Love? 135

In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to the other matter it seems less important.8 The brooding is not at first understood by the brooder as a matter of ‘resentfulness’ and ‘hurt vanity’. Perhaps she is feeling pity for herself and fantasizing about getting her revenge. The beauty of the kestrel takes her out of her immersion in that field of sense (which gives her experience to her in those ways) and she comes instead to register her preoccupation as a matter of ‘brooding self with its hurt vanity’. Thus part of the field of sense which then defined her dissolves, and a (partly) new field is constituted through the ‘being taken out of her self’ – the self-transcending – which is effected in the experience of the kestrel. Now she finds herself enabled to ‘go on’ in a new and better way, thanks to what we might call the grace of that moment. In being open to the kestrel’s beauty (negative capability again) she rediscovers a harmony with the world, in which a truer understanding emerges. The beauty of the kestrel can move the brooder as it does because it returns her to that condition of balance or harmony in which the hurt vanity can show itself for what it is. As this suggests, true beauty is felt, whatever sensory medium the experience of it involves. (Of course seeing or hearing, as the case may be, are then also involved in the experience.) In particular cases the ‘concept’ of beauty can be applied in the absence of such feeling, but these cases are derivative. Coleridge made the Kantian point nicely when he wrote, wistfully, of his gazing at the stars and the crescent moon: I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! His sense of beauty is limited, less than fully real, so far as he only ‘sees’ beauty and is not moved by feeling it. The true sense of beauty involves being thus feelingly moved in the experience of it. The moment Murdoch describes exemplifies beauty cancelling narcissism. How can beauty do this? Putting it slightly differently: what is it about beauty that it can have such power? Beauty can shift the centre of gravity of the meaning of our experience. That is what happens to the one brooding when she sees the kestrel. Taken out of herself by the sight, she finds the meaning of her experience changing because the sense of herself in relation to it is transformed. She is enabled, by the experience of beauty, to make sense of her grievance differently – because she now

136 Ethical Encounter

experiences it from a perspective which does not (so to speak) pit her here against others over there. We could even say that when she comes to understand her experience as one of ‘brooding self with its hurt vanity’ – so that she now longer is brooding self with hurt vanity but instead is able to judge her experience as having that significance – she comes to understand her experience under the aegis of justice. A natural corollary of that understanding would be for her to think of herself as earlier having been self-absorbed and self-pitying, these also being expressions of a sense of herself under the aegis of justice. For her to understand herself under that aegis is for the meaning of her experience now to be given through a perspective on it which is not merely her own. It is a less merely individual, more impersonal perspective, to which she is moved – out of her ‘egoistic’ self-absorption – by the experience of beauty. Putting the point in the first person: my experience of beauty renews a summons to me to discover myself under the aegis of a meaning of my experience that I cannot think of as ‘coming from me’. But that negative formulation does not go far enough. The point is not just that beauty betokens a source of meaning beyond me. It betokens a source beyond all that I can name and know. Sophocles’ Ajax, remember, is moved by a meaning of his experience which he does not think of as coming from himself alone. He finds it in a communally shared recognition by heroes of one another’s fierce nobility. He can know and name that as the source of the meaning by which he aspires to live. In the terms of an earlier discussion, that source has only a relative alterity or otherness. The shock of beauty, by contrast, is the shock of an Otherness beyond such relative alterity. (Ajax’s orientation is not, I should say, narcissistic, since he is already a robust participant in a social world. If beauty betokens a source of meaning beyond the relative alterity such participation implies awareness of, it reaches further than ‘cancelling narcissism’.) The brooder of Murdoch’s example might simply turn from seeing the kestrel to find herself no longer anxious and resentful, and just resume what she was doing freed of that weight. Or she might articulate a new sense of her experience in the way I described. In that case she is moved to use a particular vocabulary that no doubt comes from her cultural surroundings: ‘my vanity was hurt; I let myself be taken over by self-pity’. But she cannot think of the source of her changed response as merely the values of her culture. I mean that she cannot think this so far as her understanding is true to her experience of beauty. Her response has to find some determinate form, and of course it cannot avoid deploying the resources she finds in her cultural and

‘Romantic’ Love? 137

social life. But the point is that in this response – emerging from the shock of beauty – she is ready to be moved by justice, and not just by what her culture (or her family or her friends or her husband or indeed her own conceptions hitherto) says the requirements of justice are. She is ‘ready to be moved by justice’? I mean that the significance of her experience of beauty is that she is oriented to an Otherness that is (in my earlier terms) not relative but Absolute. Putting the point in terms of my earlier discussion of Kant: beauty moves her from beyond her ‘conceptions’, and can transform them. Florizel’s wondrous sense of Perdita’s beauty answers to this characterization. But there is something else in that sense as well, that perhaps does not quite fit what Kant, at least, understands by beauty. To get at it, we need to consider briefly his concept of the sublime. Kant famously contrasts the beautiful and the sublime as modes of aesthetic judgement or experience. If the experience of beauty is one of harmony of self and world, the sublime involves our sense of a diremption, a breach, an unbridgeable gap, between us and what we experience.9 The object is experienced as lying beyond our conceptual and imaginative grasp, but not merely as that. In the sublime experience, according to Kant, the ungraspability of what we attend to effects in us an invigorated sense of our own spiritual transcendence. In encountering the sublime – be it in the form of towering mountains, a Gothic cathedral or the mysteriousness of a human face – we are not bewildered or cowed by our inability conceptually and imaginatively to master what is before us. For we are moved to awareness of our capacity to transcend the limits of our understanding and spiritually to answer to what we can never know. Earlier I spoke of the interdependence of a certain sense of human commonness with acknowledgement of what I called absolute Otherness: the deepest kind of ‘harmony’ with others is a condition of, as it is conditioned by, a sense of their absolute and unbridgeable Otherness. The community of human beings is, then, a community of the utterly singular, in a sense of utter singularity which is marked by such Otherness. I spoke also of a mode of individual presence which was correlative with an absence – a presence intimating an ungraspable ‘more’. In those formulations we can now recognize the interdependence of what Kant registers as the contrasting significance of the beautiful and the sublime. That community with others is an experienced harmony with them. But at the very heart of that harmony, and defining its character, is the sublime ungraspable Otherness of those with whom one there realizes one’s common humanity. The sense of

138 Ethical Encounter

commonness with others echoes the harmony of Kant’s sense of beauty, while the commonness in question is of those whose individuality is partly defined by what in Kant’s terms can be called sublimity. In invoking Kant’s reflective judgement of beauty to illuminate the character of Florizel’s individualizing sense of Perdita, I thus wish to include within its scope what Kant thinks of as the very different significance of the sublime.10 I am thus bringing into contact what Kant keeps apart. J. C. F. Schiller echoed Kant when he said that beauty and grace we love, while dignity commands not our love but our respect. (For Kant dignity is a name for the meaning of our Rationality ‘transcending every standard of sense’. Awe and reverence are the attitudes such dignity compels from us. The sublime is the aesthetic counterpart of these attitudes.) There is obviously point in this contrast, and in the following chapter I tease out one aspect of it. But it is also important not to distort the contrast. My point here is that basic forms of love of other human beings already implicate us in awe and reverence. This is not because they direct us to another’s Rationality, however, but because of their interdependence with an individualizing sense of another which, differently from Kantian Reason in a way I have tried to describe, escapes the bounds of determinate knowledge. Kant and Schiller are led to distort their contrast because they cannot see that while love indeed involves a harmony, important human forms of it are also marked by encounter with another as absolutely Other. (Kant cannot see this because he thinks Reason alone brings us to the absolutely Other.) Awe and reverence mark such encounter – and dignity, it is worth noting, will often not be in play there. Florizel’s realizing of Perdita is, I suggest, an activity of reflective judging in Kant’s sense. As my earlier talk of ‘answering’ may suggest, Florizel’s imaginative rendering of Perdita summons and realizes him as well. Florizel’s language here mimes, or echoes, the spirit of the life it seeks to render. The image of a dance, in which Florizel ‘catches’ a sense of how Perdita ‘might ever’ move, itself animates the movement of those two half lines: … move still, still so, And own no other function. Their poise, the pause on ‘still, still so’, and the fluid and wondering movement of the lines themselves share in the gracefulness they seek to catch. Here we meet another limitation of the visual metaphor

‘Romantic’ Love? 139

(if metaphor it is) in application to Florizel’s orientation. He is not ‘seeing’ Perdita, so much as feeling his way into the distinctive mode of aliveness that he finds her to be. His own ‘whole soul of man’ is animated by that. Or, to change the figure, like Keats’ ‘chameleon poet’ he takes on the colour of the life he responds to. His ‘judging’ of Perdita is as much a resolving of himself in relation to her as it is a locating of her, and it is the former in the same movement, so to speak, as it is the latter. The self-resolution, and the judging of her, are two sides of the very same thing. Perhaps Keats’ chameleon, though, is a less than perfectly apt figure here. The background into which the chameleon merges would be just what it is even in the chameleon’s absence. But if we ask whether Perdita is ‘really’ as Florizel renders her, what answer could we look for? It is certainly not true that everyone – not even every unprejudiced onlooker – will feel moved thus to speak of her. (As we shall see, Florizel’s father is not so moved.) Only one moved by the wonder of her will be moved thus to speak. But even this way of putting it may be too ‘ontological’ – in perhaps implying that ‘the wonder of her’ is just another fact of the world. It is rather that being moved to speak in that way – where this involves being moved not just to utter certain words but to answer in that way with all of oneself to what compels one – is being moved by the wonder of the other. We may contrast Florizel’s way of ‘judging’ Perdita, with that of his father Polixenes, the king, who has been present in disguise throughout this episode, trying to discover what his son is up to. After Florizel has spoken as above, Polixenes mutters to himself about Perdita that … she smacks of something greater than herself Too noble for this place. There are resemblances in the ways father and son register Perdita. If to Florizel ‘each your doing … Crowns what you are doing in the present deed’, making Perdita more than her acts, Polixenes too sees her as ‘greater than herself’. And where Florizel ‘concludes’ that ‘all your acts are queens’, Polixenes says that Perdita smacks of ‘something noble’. In a sense father and son both register something more in Perdita, beyond her being a shepherdess (as both believe her to be). In one way each registers much the same thing: her nobility or queenliness. But the difference in their mode of registering is what is of real moment. When Polixenes muses that Perdita ‘smacks of something greater than herself/Too noble for this place’, he is simply mooting a certain objective

140 Ethical Encounter

fact about her. She does not behave or move in the way he knows shepherdesses to do, but in something like the way he knows those of noble birth to behave and move. So when it turns out that Perdita is indeed of noble birth, Polixenes is ready to think that his guess was vindicated. The facts are as he surmised them to be. But Polixenes does not – and his word ‘smacks’ makes it clear he could not – use Florizel’s language to express his sense of the girl. Florizel’s ‘whole soul of man’ – Coleridge’s phrase again – is engaged in realizing a queenliness in Perdita, so that what he registers he does so only in answering to it in the full and open way I described. Florizel finds himself claimed in response to Perdita. By contrast, Polixenes’ perception of her is contracted into the determination of a possible fact about her: that she may be of noble birth. Her being so would explain her ‘smacking’ – the word also marks Polixenes’ awareness of a gap between what he knows and what he can so far only sense – of something ‘greater’ than shepherdess. For Florizel, unlike Polixenes, the discovery that his beloved is in fact a queen could not provide him with ‘empirical confirmation’ of the way he speaks of her. The language in which that empirical fact can be expressed is, so to speak, taken away and re-fashioned by Florizel to realize something other than and beyond any number of such facts about Perdita. (The ineliminable ‘your’ in his description of Perdita and her ‘acts’ and ‘properties’ reflects that ‘something more’.) Notice that even the word ‘wonder’ can be used of the attitudes both of the father and of the son, as expressed in what they say. After all, Polixenes is led to wonder whether the girl is of noble birth. He is in doubt, but in his doubt (or ignorance) knows that something could wholly remove it. He even knows what could remove it – namely, the discovery that she is or is not in fact of noble birth. His wonder is, we might say, merely epistemic. Further investigation is aimed at, and may succeed in, eliminating the wonder, by answering the question which expresses it. Employing Kant’s distinction: Polixenes takes the concept of nobility as given, and is concerned with whether this individual is subsumable under it. His own being is not ‘at issue’ in his judgement of Perdita, since the categories in terms of which he will ‘understand’ her are already fixed. His wonder is only uncertainty about the answer to the question under which of them she will fall. His judgement of Perdita is determinant. Florizel’s wonder is very different. Its realization involves his ‘letting her be Other’. Through the way he answers to his experience, he shows that she cannot be appropriated by him in his answering to her. It is

‘Romantic’ Love? 141

not that he decides that he will not appropriate her, that he will ‘treat her as an end and not merely as a means’. It is rather that the whole way in which he finds himself compelled to answer to her – realized in the repeated demonstrative ‘so’, the miming in his lines of her grace, and his fluid, yet steady, attentiveness to her – shows him as always reaching for what the passage also shows him as realizing he cannot comprehend, get within his grasp. As he is thus seeking to make sense of this individual reality, his judgement is, in my extended sense of Kant’s terms, reflective. In another – recently popular – terminology his renderings are traces. He is attempting to trace Perdita’s being, to limn the distinctive character of the life that is her. But his attempts are ‘only’ traces: vestiges, momentary glimpses, a trail or spoor emanating from a reality which cannot be wholly grasped in those traces. This ‘cannot’ is not, and is not taken by Florizel to be, a kind of failure on his part which greater effort might overcome, or which owes to a contingent, if deep-rooted, limitation in him. On the contrary, the quality of wonder which infuses Florizel’s words is precisely given in the rendering of this ungraspability as the organizing ideal limit of every attempt he makes to realize Perdita’s being. Unlike Polixenes’ wonder, that is to say, Florizel’s is not of a kind which some further discovery or revelation is fitted to remove. His wonder is, rather, the mode in which her ungraspableness – by contrast with an as yet undetermined fact or facts about her – is as if given to his ‘sense’ of her. Further dwelling by Polixenes on what he wonders at aims to remove the wonder. In Florizel such dwelling sustains and deepens the wonder. Of course Polixenes’ further attention to Perdita might not provide him with the answer to his question, and then his wonder will remain, and may even increase. But another word which will do equally well to describe his sense of his contingently limited epistemic condition here is puzzlement. The puzzle of her noble demeanour remains, and that is quite different from the deepening of the sense of wonder I spoke of in connection with Florizel. That deepening is not incompatible with something which could properly be called explanation. But when Saint Augustine explained the beauty and wonder of the world by reference to God, he was not explaining it away – as the explanation Polixenes seeks is one which would dissolve his puzzlement – but rather testifying to it. Florizel’s wonder is the registering of what is essentially mysterious, while Polixenes’ wonder is only curiosity at what is not (and as it happens may never be) known. Luke’s Gospel (9:43) tells us that people ‘wondered everyone at all the things which Jesus did’. Luke would have marked a different response if he had said that the people were very

142 Ethical Encounter

curious about, or very puzzled by, all the things Jesus did. Then they might have found out something which would satisfy their curiosity, resolve their puzzlement. Of course Luke thinks that there is something which can adequately answer to that wonder. That is God. He would doubtless think that their coming to God is the only response by them to their wonder that could possibly be adequate to it. But he could not think that their coming to God showed its adequacy to that wonder by dissolving it. Their coming to God could be adequate to that wonder only if it sustained and perhaps deepened the wonder, by disclosing its further significance. The point, note, is not that this sense of the other as essentially mysterious cannot in fact be lost. Florizel himself might acknowledge the possibility of that happening. But he could do so only while judging that its happening would be a travesty and betrayal of that of which he is now the witness. Estrangement is related to wonder. We might also mark the difference in Florizel’s and Polixenes’ modes of relatedness to Perdita, by the difference in the way Perdita is estranged not from, but to, each of them. Perdita is strange to Polixenes just in that he cannot quite make sense of what she ‘smacks’ of. We could call this an empirically mediated estrangement, as we might speak of his empirically situated wondering about Perdita. Both mark a curiosity or puzzlement which more knowledge will dissolve. Her estrangement to Florizel is quite different. There is a kind of estrangement which, far from being opposed to close acquaintance, lies at the heart of the deepest intimacy.11 The progressive deepening of estrangement, in this sense, is a mark of just that kind of understanding I have been trying to characterize. Such estrangement between people is akin to what is meant by speaking of poetry as ‘making it strange’ – making what is familiar once again strange to us so that it discloses itself anew. Its doing that is part of its deepening of our sense of the significance of what we commonly take for granted. There is also estrangement between people which involves hostile alienation – sometimes the estrangement of separated husband and wife, for example. Such estrangement is both like and unlike the deeper kind I mentioned. Those thus estranged cease to be able to get on each other’s wavelength. (I am not talking of estrangement when it is only a synonym for separation.) That is a kind of estrangement – from the humanity of another – which does not mark even the strongest revulsion one might feel at (say) spiders or snakes. Such estrangement is a kind of negative image of that wonder or mystery which marks Perdita’s estrangement from Florizel, and it can be manifested in deep hatred.12

‘Romantic’ Love? 143

Suppose an adolescent’s rhapsody about her crush is largely fantasy. To that extent no creative response is called forth in her. The particular occasion is only the playing out of a given theme. The theme as fixed determines the way in which the playing out will go. Various others would have served just as well to elicit the rhapsody: the particular other has at best a subordinate role. He or she is subsumed under the requirements of the project brought to him or her. Then there is no genuine becoming – no creativity or growth in responding – in the one who loves, because her moves and responses are already shaped and limited by the project of her making, into which the other has been absorbed.13 Only when she engages with the other in such a way that the other escapes such absorption will her response be a genuine answering to a reality absolutely other than herself, and then she is open to becoming in and through that response. For what she is, in responding, is then a matter of what is required of her in answering to the other. If the other is now engaged with as escaping her projects then she cannot foresee the limits of what this might require of her. She is thus open for the other to ‘breake, blowe, burn and make (her) new’.14 What is called from Florizel, in similarly answering to his experience of Perdita, is a new way of being alive in and to the world, a way of being alive which participates in how it realizes the other to be. What Perdita is for him, we might say, is shown in that openness which marks him as ready to ‘become’ in response to her felt claim upon him. He is like the iron filings under the pull of the magnet, cohered and galvanized into a new pattern of being. Florizel encounters Perdita as absolutely Other. His wonder is a wonder at Perdita as beyond grasp. This kind of wonder – by contrast with curiosity and puzzlement – is precisely a mode of registering such Otherness. The reality in excess of what he can grasp of her casts its light on everything in the way she is progressively realized for him, and it is expressed as her wonderfulness. One who finds himself claimed by an Otherness which necessarily escapes all of his projects finds himself called to become in unpre-emptable ways. But so far as he is ready to answer that call – and thus progressively to discover himself in what and how he will indeed thus become in answering it – he realizes a sense of himself as not wholly definable or capturable by anything he is or has been. That kind of readiness to become which is the form of an answering, like Florizel’s, to absolute Otherness, realizes oneself as thus absolutely Other, too – as escaping final definition by any and all of one’s projects, as well as by any and all of those other qualities which locate one empirically in the world: one’s character,

144 Ethical Encounter

personality, social status, material condition, and so on. We could speak of a reciprocity of transcendence here: Florizel’s realization of Perdita’s absolute Otherness at the same time realizes his own.15 These philosophical reflections were prompted by a glorious dramatic expression of a kind of love tendentiously describable as romantic.16 But they do not illuminate only what is expressed there. The concept of ‘answering to’ another, the bearing of Kant’s category of reflective judgement on that concept, and the relation of both to what was said about estrangement and becoming: these themes also help illuminate modes of encounter discussed in earlier chapters. And they bear also on a wider sense of wonder at the world, as already indicated in my remarks about beauty. The most ordinary event – an event, that is, of a kind most certainly predictable and most often repeated – can strike us as absolutely extraordinary and mysterious. The birth of a baby is an example, and so is death. Recently I heard a funeral eulogist say of death how common and everyday it is, and yet how extraordinary we find it when someone close to us dies. So it is and so we do. In similar vein, G. K. Chesterton spoke of the sense that ‘a tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree’.17 We can confidently predict fruit’s appearing – it is a perfectly ordinary occurrence – yet still marvel at the wonder of it. Then our wonder is in part at the creative abundance of the world, in again and again giving forth these marvels, even while we realize their predictability. A wonder akin to that evoked by Shakespeare’s passage can possess us in all sorts of places and moments. This wonder takes various forms – all of them very different from inquisitiveness, puzzlement, curiosity and the desire to know. It will differ, for example, according to whether awe or reverence on one hand, or love on another, is the mode of our finding ourselves claimed in response. (But we should not, as I said before, exaggerate this difference.) As well as in many of our lovings, such wonder is even implicit in what Stuart Hampshire called the ‘sense of … outrage, of horror, of baseness, of brutality’ informing our moral understanding of human beings, other creatures, and even the natural world. For these senses of things register forms of deep violation. And only what can move us to wonder can be thus violated. (Such wonder is implicit even in that sense of the brutality and callousness of what those boys did to the birds, discussed in the Introduction.) We should not assume that the categories taking us deepest in moral philosophy are those of right and wrong, and correspondingly of ‘obligation’ to do what is right and wrong. We should not suppose, either, that we get the balance right just by acknowledging the importance of

‘Romantic’ Love? 145

what is sometimes called ‘the secondary moral vocabulary’ – including virtue and vice concepts along with indefinitely many other evaluative terms. Thus extending the ethical vocabulary may still leave in place a questionable broad ‘picture’ – of moral thinking as the making of ‘determinant judgements’, albeit about more than what is right and wrong. (Aristotelian phronesis does not take us beyond this picture.) I have tried to remind us of forms of ‘relatedness’ that are left out by this picture. Some of those forms (not all of them) implicate us in wonder at the world. We arguably cannot make proper sense of the kind of weight that right and wrong, obligation, and the various virtues and vices have in our lives unless we see them as emerging from a background of such wonder. I have tried to explore some aspects of that background. Questions are prompted by these reflections. One question, or set of questions, bears specifically on what I have loosely been calling romantic love. If love can inform ‘knowledge of the individual’ sexually based romantic love is not a plausible candidate for doing so. Partly structured by, and fraught with, the intensities of sexual passion, it is too readily the occasion of illusion, self-deception, jealousy and psychological dependency. Subject to its giddy influence, people are led to adulate images fabricated by their own fantasy and thus away from loving other actual human beings. Murdoch herself acknowledges as much when she says that ‘human love is normally too profoundly possessive…to be a place of vision’. Romantic love does not disclose, with an unparalleled depth and truth, the individual reality of the one loved. On the contrary, it generates illusions which we pardon because of our familiarity with the ‘human madness’ (as Plato called it) that generates them, and because of our ambivalent recognition of its importance in our lives. This plaint has a good deal of force, but it also has little bearing on the Shakespeare passage I discussed. I contrasted Florizel’s response to Perdita with the fantasizing that might be involved in an adolescent rhapsody. Shakespeare’s passage is remarkable in the way it transforms – I should say spiritually transforms – a sensuous and passionate love for a particular other while losing nothing of its passion and sensuousness. The stuff of that passage is not specifically sexual passion, nor is it romantic in the pejorative sense of the previous paragraph, even though it is deeply erotic and Florizel’s shocking wonder at Perdita is of a kind accessible only to sexual beings. The centrality of love to ethics has been a main theme of this essay. In the Phaedrus Plato contrasts ‘merely human’ and ‘divine’ madness.

146 Ethical Encounter

By divine madness he means the disturbance of love in its power to disclose reality to us. The point of Plato’s contrast is that having that kind of power love can also disturb us in ways that obscure, distort, deceive, obsess. Murdoch echoes Plato when she writes that ‘love … is capable of infinite degradation and is the source of our greatest errors; but when it is even partially refined it is the energy and passion of the soul … that joins us to the world through Good’. Perhaps it is true that some kinds of occasion of human love are more at risk than others of remaining ‘merely human’ forms of madness. Plato thought, probably rightly, that sexually mediated love was of this kind. We know how it can strike like a thunderbolt, and can recede almost as quickly, or metamorphose into bitterness, resentment and even hatred. But it, too, is capable of being ‘refined’, perhaps into a distinctive kind of friendship, but also possibly into what is marvellously realized in Shakespeare’s passage. That passage images a ‘standard’ of lucid, loving attention in whose light the quality of other ‘attachments’ may be revealed. But only a standard, and a different lover – the wife from the previous chapter, for example – may afford another light. We shall take our exemplars where we find them, and we are unwise to be too confident ahead of time about where that might be. A second kind of question prompted by my reflections on The Winter’s Tale is this. Suppose the passage does register what Plato called a ‘divine madness’, in which realities disclosable in no other way can be revealed to us. What has such madness to do with morality, centrally concerned as it is with generalizable responses? Some kinds of ‘madness’ may be permitted by morality – love of this woman, these offspring, that artform – but they lie quite outside whatever moral attitudes one should have to all others (respect for them or for their rights, for example). As it is sometimes put, you don’t have to like people, let alone love them, to respect their rights. This second kind of question clearly engages not just with my remarks on Shakespeare’s passage, but with anything which falls under the head of ‘love of an individual’ (as well as with any sense of mystery and wonder at the world). This is of course far from the first appearance of the question in this essay. I have already said a good deal against the assumption that morality is only, indeed even centrally, concerned with generalizable response. But of course it often is so concerned, and I have also explored some contexts and ways in which individual love informs such responses. But we can better situate those earlier discussions if we reflect directly on the thought that you don’t have to love or even like people to treat them morally. That is one of the concerns of the following two chapters.

8 Liking, Loving and Respecting Others

I quoted Murdoch’s dictum that ‘the central concept of morality is the individual thought of as knowable by love’. Only by love? Already we have seen that the bow needs drawing more widely. Karenin’s presence to Anna was intensely focused in his ‘ridiculous ears’ – just those ears – but she did not love him. Or another could be crystallized in just that slug-like repulsiveness. The second conception of individuality that I distinguished earlier may thus be exemplified in a ‘sense’ of another which is not easily described as registering love of him or her. A more radical point might be pressed, in relation to what I called absolute Otherness. We can approach the point by asking whether hate might not be able to realize another’s individuality. Aquinas might be right to say that hate is most commonly directed at classes of beings – blacks, women, Jews, the rich – so that hate of a particular person is then hate for them as a member of that class. Again, someone can hate a specific other for a particular reason – because her callous manipulations devastated his brother, say. Then he hates only that one. Still, in that case the hatred may not engage with the other ‘as an individual’ any more deeply than that she happened to be the one who devastated his brother. But hate surely can also be intensely focused on a particular other in a more individualizing way than this. Someone may find himself hating this person who ridiculed him, but not that person who did so. Then his hatred may be intimately bound up with a certain sense of the distinctive individuality of its object. Murdoch’s dictum may then seem under further challenge. Think of Javert in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, the detective who devotes his life to relentless pursuit of Jean Valjean, guilty only of the petty theft of bread to feed his starving family. Why does Javert so hate this man, Valjean? An important part of the answer is that Valjean 147

148 Ethical Encounter

refused to respond to Javert’s relentless pursuit of him with resentment and hostility. His refusal to do that directly threatens Javert’s understanding of himself, because it removes the opposition on which that understanding depends. Javert’s sense of himself as solidly ‘there’, as a secure and substantial being, depends on his wresting acknowledgement of his power and standing from those on whom he imposes himself. He does not demand that their acknowledgement take the form of respect and admiration. Valjean’s responding with resentment and hatred to Javert’s ill-treatment of him also would confirm Javert’s sense of having a solid self-defining presence in the world – since his own cruel power would then still be acknowledged and its value confirmed by the very resentment and hostility it aroused. Valjean’s refusal to respond with the resentment and hostility Javert hopes to elicit from him is a refusal to acknowledge and confirm Javert’s power. And that is a refusal to confirm Javert’s explicit sense of his own substance and worth. Without such confirmation Javert’s sense of himself is under threat. Valjean’s refusal thus throws Javert back against the possibility that he has no substantial moral identity. This terrifies him; he is threatened by the loss of all his bearings. But there is a further point. Valjean’s refusal so to acknowledge him suggests to Javert a sense in Valjean of himself (Valjean) which lies beyond definition in those terms in which Javert insists on defining himself. Javert has an intimation of Valjean’s self-understanding as shaped in a way utterly different from his own, a way which calls into question the mode of his own self-understanding. This threat to his sense of himself he must try to cancel, and the only way to do that is to try to get Valjean within his compass. As this indicates, his primary aim is not to destroy Valjean but to get Valjean to deny, by submitting to resentment and hatred of Javert, any sense of himself in terms lying beyond those of Javert’s own self-definition. If Javert could bring that about, the threat of dissolution of his moral identity which Valjean’s actual refusal represents would be defused, because Valjean’s resentment and hatred would show Javert’s power over him, thereby affirming Javert’s substantial moral presence in the world. But the intelligibility of Javert’s way of behaving depends not only on his recognition of Valjean as ‘escaping’ him morally as well as physically. It depends also on Javert’s own only partly repressible attraction to the glimpsed significance of Valjean’s refusal to define himself morally in Javert’s terms – which is that what one most deeply is morally does indeed escape determination in any such terms. Javert certainly hates Valjean for keeping this possibility before his (Javert’s)

Liking, Loving and Respecting Others 149

mind. For Javert finds himself psychologically unable – because too insecure – to relinquish the self-definition, in terms of ready-to-hand certainties of power and self-assertion, whose very inadequacy to his own deepest sense of himself he is constantly forced to glimpse in the compelling shape of Valjean’s demeanour. If this is right, the logic of the story is such that Javert would have to continue to deceive himself about his motivation for pursuing Valjean, or undergo a conversion of his sense of himself, or kill himself.1 He commits suicide. As I have characterized it, Javert’s hatred is internally (conceptually) related to a sense of moral individuality which I said is realizable through a kind of love. For the background to that hatred is Javert’s inchoate sense of Valjean’s understanding – both of himself and of Javert – as crucially different from his own. Javert is obscurely aware that Valjean’s deepest sense of himself and of Javert is of them both as escaping definition in those terms of assertion of power, and of wrenching from others an acknowledgement of that power, in which Javert seeks to understand himself. Instead, Valjean understands himself (and Javert) under the requirements of obedience to justice. And Valjean thinks that anyone who understands himself that way is quite beyond definition in the ‘worldly’ terms of Javert’s mooted self-understanding. In terms I used earlier, Valjean’s sense both of himself and of Javert is as ‘absolutely Other’ to what is registered in the worldly conceptions of domination and submission in which Javert tries to enmesh himself and Valjean. That is what Javert hates in Valjean. His hatred is then conceptually related to a sense of individuality marked by absolute Otherness. But that conceptual relation remains ‘negative’. The hatred realizes the absolute Otherness of the individual only in the mode of deeply and desperately resisting its acknowledgement, and could not – logically could not – survive lucid acknowledgement of it. The motivation for the resistance is self-protection. Javert cannot bear the thought of not understanding himself through those categories of power, because to be torn from that understanding would be to lack a solid ‘positive’ identity. His hatred is the mode of his resistance to surrendering that self-understanding. For him lucidly to acknowledge what his hatred desperately resists would undermine the hatred. This example helps to crystallize a suggestion that it certainly does not conclusively establish. It is that perhaps all individualizing hatred is negatively related, in the sort of way sketched above, to the realization of Otherness explored in previous chapters. I turn now to the unanswered question from the end of the previous chapter. The question could be distilled from the essentially personal

150 Ethical Encounter

character of Florizel’s engagement with Perdita. It has often been thought that ethical relations, and the kinds of requirements (including obligations and duties) which help constitute them, bear mainly on our orientation towards those with whom we are not personally engaged. Ethical concepts serve to regulate our responses towards those whose distance from us means that our personal affections will not be sufficient to ensure we do well by them. This need not mean that our personal engagements have no ethical dimensions, but it suggests a certain way of thinking about any ethical dimensions they may have. One’s affections even for one’s intimates can waver, or be crossed by other affections so that one will be tempted to treat them badly. Ethical concepts then come into play to regulate one’s treatment of one’s intimates, when affection thus flags or is crossed. (Baron spoke in these terms about the father reading to his daughter.) In the other direction, people can be tempted to favour those they personally care for at the expense of others in ways which are callous or cruel or simply unfair, and ethical concepts register constraints on this indulgence. Ethical concepts then stand at the borders of one’s affections, ready to be applied when needed. Any ethical dimensions of one’s personal affections are, on this view, essentially external to their character as personal: the ethical dimensions of those affections pertain only to the ways in which personal affection sometimes needs to be either supplemented or constrained. Conversely, personal affection – ‘love of the individual’ – does not in itself inform or condition the character of ethical responsiveness. On such a view, our ethical responses do not essentially involve the deeply personal character of Florizel’s response to Perdita. Empirically speaking it may seem evident that this is simply how things are: I just ‘do my duty’, do what I ought or must, without needing to be engaged affectively and personally. More strongly, my so responding in action is what matters most, ethically speaking. If I am also engaged affectively and personally, then that is extrinsic to what is essential to my ethical response. In particular there does not, for ethical responsiveness, need to be that particular ‘hit’, that galvanizing of the whole soul in individual encounter which transforms Florizel (and in different ways Ivan Ilych and even Lear in my earlier examples). As Peter Singer once put it, you don’t even have to like people, let alone love them, in order to acknowledge their rights – or, it could equally be said, to show them the kind of respect that is due to human beings. In that case, highlighting a deeply personal engagement like Florizel’s by Perdita does not reveal anything important in, and may seriously distort, our ethical orientation to others.

Liking, Loving and Respecting Others 151

That sort of opposition to my example could also take a more restricted form. It might be acknowledged that such personal engagement as I have tried to characterize does matter ethically. But even if this is so, it is not all that matters ethically. Recognition of the requirements of impartiality, and of the need just to ‘do our duty’, and also, perhaps, of the need to carry out our own ‘projects and commitments’, is necessary for an appreciation of the whole field of morality. Ethical response may be, but is not necessarily, personal in the way I have been trying to render. Neither need it engage one in affectively deep ways. There is certainly a sense in which this is true. But the truth in it is distorted by saying that there are different ethical ‘perspectives’ – among which ‘impartialism’ and ‘the point of view of our own projects and commitments’ can be numbered alongside ‘love of the individual’ – each of which stands as a distinctive legitimate ethical perspective, and arguably has a claim on our partial allegiance. This more restricted view2 is not flatly wrong. But it does seriously both simplify and distort the relations between (as we might put it) affection and respect. Those relations are the subject of the rest of this chapter. I have already broached this issue. Earlier I emphasized aspects of our engagement with individual others to which moral philosophy has been inattentive. I am now interested in a movement in a slightly different direction: from my relations, however deep, to those I am personally engaged with, to my relations with all those others I do not know. Iris Murdoch said: … we are not always the individual in pursuit of the individual … Often, for instance when we pay our bills or perform other small everyday acts, we are just ‘anybody’ doing what is proper or making simple choices for ordinary public reasons.3 The way we thus act as ‘just “anybody”’ can manifest genuine respect for others. Murdoch adds that we may quite properly ‘decide on occasion to act abstractly by rule, to ignore vision and the compulsive energy derived from it’. Our acting in this spirit need not be confined, either, to the doing of ‘small, everyday acts’. The tyrant demands of me, under threat of death, that I betray an innocent person of whom he wants to be rid. Kant rightly says that while none of us could be certain how we would respond, we can all recognize the possibility of concluding that we would have to refuse to comply. ‘It would be terrible to do otherwise’. Here one need not be ‘the individual in pursuit of

152 Ethical Encounter

the individual’, yet the act morally required is hardly a ‘small, everyday’ one. But notice how Murdoch goes on from there: To decide when to attempt such leaps is one of the most difficult of moral problems. But if we do leap ahead of what we know we still have to try to catch up. Will cannot run very far ahead of knowledge, and attention is our daily bread.4 Habits of right action, and simple readiness to do many of those things one recognizes straightforwardly as duties, are of course very important. But there is a background to their being thus important. If we consider them in isolation from that background, we distort their ethical significance. Murdoch’s point is that they must continually be referred back to, and nourished or energized by what she calls ‘attention’ to individuals, if they are not to become empty shells. (Murdoch does not here distinguish real attention to those we already like or love from the individual attention one might be led to give even a stranger. But her point applies, I think, to both.) There is more than one way in which someone can act as ‘just “anybody” doing what is proper’. Ivan Ilych’s way of doing that, before the change in him which Tolstoy describes, is not thus shaped by a background depth of personal engagement. He acts perfectly conventionally, in two senses of that ambiguous adverb. It is not just that what he does happens to be in accordance with what is dictated by an accepted understanding of what a civil servant in his position does. In addition to that, he is motivated only by his recognition of what he does as thus conventionally required. His habitual and conventional performance of ‘small everyday acts’ is not undertaken as a momentary or provisional ‘leaping ahead’ of an individually lived sense of things, a leaping ahead which has continually to be nourished by that lived sense. Instead, it is insisted on as the very substance of the ethical life, a dehydrated, merely ‘willed’ and thoughtless compliance. But doing one’s duty in that way – being ‘just “anybody” doing what is proper’ in that way – is living and responding in a way that is seriously morally limited. In the life of someone transformed as Ivan Ilych is only moments before he dies, good habits and daily duties will still have a place, but a different one from before, and from the place accorded them by many philosophers. Often he will still be ‘just “anybody” doing what is proper’, but so far as his doing that is now informed by the very different

Liking, Loving and Respecting Others 153

sense he has come to of those around him, it bears a very different ethical significance. The way in which he is still ‘just “anybody” ’ will show him as one in whom habitual duty does not run ‘very far ahead of knowledge’, and in whom habitual responsiveness remains nourished by the ways he discovers himself personally engaged. Dutiful action – including both just ‘doing something because it is right’, and more or less routinely carrying out those particular duties which flow from one’s station and various roles – can fill many of the spaces there are between occasions of a person’s finding his or her ‘whole soul of man’ claimed in response by this particular person or situation. But the occasions on which one does find oneself claimed that way will help to shape and locate those spaces which are filled by routine or habitual duty. Remember the policemen leading away the husband I spoke of earlier. I said that after his wife’s gesture they responded more gently and considerately to the man. Her gesture might stay with one of those policemen and come to inform the whole way he subsequently does his police work. His subsequent obligations, that is to say, present themselves to him differently because of that encounter. In one sense he may come to carry them out habitually enough. But still the habits will be marked by a new gentleness of attention and response. It was Murdoch who said that ‘the central concept of morality is “the individual” thought of as knowable by love’. I have been drawing on her remarks about how some rather more impersonal elements of moral thinking and action can be brought into contact with that dictum. What Murdoch says suggests a kind of necessary oscillation between modes of individualizing loving attention on the one hand, and modes of moral response that are both more routine and more habitual, and also more abstract and impersonal, on the other. She here sees repeated returns to the former as providing a necessary nourishment for the more ‘everyday’ forms of moral responsiveness of the latter kind. (Moral philosophers have tended to concentrate on those latter forms.) But one can also speak to this issue in a rather different way. There are two thoughts here. The first has been a recurrent theme of this essay: that ethical demands are internal to our individualizing loves. (Elsewhere Murdoch herself recognizes this.) Secondly and conversely, perhaps even the most impersonal – and often routinely applied – moral concepts are themselves informed by what belongs to those modes of individual attention. In both these ways there may be more intimate connections between individual love and impersonal moral response than Murdoch’s way of speaking here might suggest. (The relation between them might be complex interdependence rather

154 Ethical Encounter

than oscillation.5) In the rest of this chapter I shall develop the second of those two thoughts. The conviction that all human beings are to be respected expresses one form of a universal moral understanding. The universality can refer to the constituency of those who show the respect, or of those who are its objects. (Typically it refers to both. Then the idea is that all human beings are to be respected by all other human beings.) This does not mean, of course, that it is a conviction which is as a matter of fact universally held. Universality here is a normative concept, and it applies in two directions, in a total of three ways. First, a duly ‘moral’ attitude (of respect) towards another cannot be directed towards her only as an individual, but must be held or had towards her as embodying, or instantiating, something common (and essential) to all human beings. Then genuine respect for another implies – since it will engage with what is universally shared by human beings – respect for all others. The second aspect of this thought is that what is thus universally shared is something that cannot be forfeited by what one does or because of particular features of one’s character or situation. The powerful Kantian conception of respect thus implies that it is owing to the worst criminal as much as to the best of us. The second ‘direction’ of universality is this. If respect is for all as having a common essence, then all also must show it. Kant gave its modern canonical form to this idea. The shared essence of human beings is Reason. Reason is that out of which we respect others, and it is also that in others which we respect. I am here interested in the first of the two thoughts just distinguished – the thought that the domain of those to be respected includes all human beings. (That thought need not exclude the possibility of a form of respect that is not universal. People after all say such things as ‘I cannot respect him after what he is done’. There is simply more than one form of respect.6) Obviously someone who recognizes the requirement of such respect upon him acknowledges that it is binding on him in relation to all sorts of people whom he has never met and never will meet. They are therefore people whom he never knows ‘as individuals’. If such respect is morally required of us in relation to others, and it is required of us in relation to all others, then there seems to be a gap between it and any encounter with another to which realizing his or her individuality is crucial. (Such respect for another might co-exist with such an encounter with him or her, but on this view the two would be conceptually independent of one another.) The question then is how (or whether) one can both emphasize the importance to ethical responsiveness of the individual encounter, and

Liking, Loving and Respecting Others 155

also acknowledge the ethical importance of a kind of respect for human beings that is universal and individual-indifferent. Some of my earlier discussions touch on an answer to this question. I now want to explore it in more detail. Remember the example of the father reading to his daughter. It may be said that the father’s kind of sense of being claimed-in-response cannot mark anything generally important in our sense of moral requirement, since we can recognize a requirement upon us of universal respect for people whom we never have met and never will meet. Moreover, we can recognize ourselves as bound by a requirement of such respect for people whom we do know, and whom we are very far indeed from being able to love as the father loves his daughter. So, even if my example allows – perhaps even invites – the description I gave of it, and even if it does point to one kind of sense of ethical requirement, it enshrines nothing which informs an ethically universal understanding. This conclusion is mistaken. Reflection on some of the ways in which ‘respect for persons’ can and does show itself will help reveal why. It might be said that acknowledgement of the requirement of such respect for those we have not encountered is only counter-factual. That is, we acknowledge only that if we encountered them then we would be required to treat them in certain ways manifesting such respect. But that is not so. Suppose we hear of brutal ‘ethnic cleansing’ in another land. The character of our response to it might show that we spontaneously recognize those who suffer it to have been just as violated as any victims of such practises in our home territory would be. That spontaneous recognition could itself be an expression of respect for those others, and it precedes acting towards them in ways which show respect when we encounter them. More than that, it is a condition of any acting towards those others being so much as capable of manifesting due respect for them. Suppose we were ready to send aid to those thus victimized, but that we were also evidently incapable of recognizing that the victims suffered the same kind of violation that ‘our kind’ would suffer if they were murdered, raped, betrayed, deceived (‘it is not the same for them; they hold life cheap; their sufferings do not go as deep as ours; they are only savages’, etc.). Then the readiness to send aid would go with a failure of genuine respect for those others. (That fact by itself of course need not mean that the aid should not be sent.) What can count as genuine respect in my treatment of those others depends upon how I think of them, or, since that may sound too intellectual, on the sense of their humanity which I bring to my specific ‘treatment’ of them.7

156 Ethical Encounter

This simple aspect of what is involved in having respect for all – in what conditions the full significance of that idea – shows a path to such respect from various kinds of personal engagement with others (of which the father’s with his daughter in my example is one). Indeed, it shows that such respect can be reached only along such a path. My moral sense of those distant strangers as able to be violated in just the ways my kin and neighbours can be violated involves an extension of moral imagination on my part. It presupposes that I can think of them as daughters, fathers, neighbours, friends, lovers, and so on. But it also presupposes a certain content to these ways of thinking of them. After all, those who are condescendingly thought of as ‘savages’ can be thought of as ‘in a way’ daughters, fathers, neighbours, etc. The condescension lies in the shallowness of what it is assumed that being a daughter, a father, a neighbour, a friend, a lover, could mean to them. Being a father, for example, could not mean what it meant to the father in my example who read to his daughter; being a lover could not mean what it meant to Florizel; being a wife could not involve seeing your husband in the way the wife I described saw her husband, and so on. My thinking of those distant strangers as daughters, fathers, neighbours as we are involves my being able to think of them as bound to one another in the same kinds of encounter, and by the same requirements which shape and are shaped by those encounters, as I and my kin and fellows are bound. I recognize them as respondents within the domain of the same kind of claims and recognitions and acknowledgements that I and ‘we’ inhabit in our lives as daughters, fathers and so on. That domain centrally includes individual and deeply personal engagements of which that between the father and daughter I spoke of is one kind of instance, and the love between Florizel and Perdita is another. I implicitly recognize these people as, for example, fathers and mothers bound in requirements of love for their children of the same kind as those we spoke of in discussing that example of father and daughter before. And I recognize them as men and women open to the same possibilities, and answerable to the same demands, of love with one another as that which claims Florizel. And so on. All of that is involved in my being able to think of these others as capable of being violated in the same way as me and my kin. And my being able so to think of them is a condition of my respect for them having the same depth as my respect for my kind (and indeed for myself ). In that case a form of universal respect – a respect for all – shows itself conditioned in part by the kinds of individual responsiveness I have discussed. That is so since the sense I make of them as

Liking, Loving and Respecting Others 157

human beings like me and mine involves my understanding them in the light of what is disclosable only through those forms of individual encounter we have explored.8 There is something right, then, in saying that you do not have to love or even like someone to respect him (or respect his rights). But it does not therefore follow, and it is not true, that the capacity to respect others is independent of the love of individual others in the way Singer’s remark suggests it is. On the contrary, various modes of such love crucially condition the forms of genuine respect. There is a further aspect of the present point. It is tempting, but mistaken, to think of respect as a ‘threshold’ concept. Respect is then something we either have or fail to have for another: it does not come in degrees, or, to change the figure, it is not something which has deeper and shallower forms. It is also tempting and mistaken to think of respect as fixed by simple, perhaps even behavioural, criteria. Respect is realized simply by what is done, for instance, rather than also by the way in which it is done. So, sending aid to those in need overseas ipso facto shows respect for them, however condescendingly or slightingly those to whom the aid is sent are thought of. Or (a common feature of discussions in bioethics, for example) you show respect for another’s autonomy simply by letting her make her own decisions. That example also brings out clearly the first thought above. When autonomy and rights are spoken of as ‘respected’, the word is virtually synonymous with ‘allowed exercise’, an all-or-nothing concept. (You either respect their autonomy or their rights, or you don’t.) Something similar has also tended to happen with talk of respect for people (by contrast with respect for their autonomy or their rights or their opinions). In a pluralist culture, ‘respect’ becomes almost synonymous with ‘tolerance’, a letting-be of difference that is largely, even wholly, negative – that is, a matter of not interfering with others, and not seeking to impose one’s own standards or norms on them. That is of course an important enough idea to keep in mind – even if respect for another sometimes requires one to ‘interfere’, perhaps by contradicting or berating or otherwise opposing him – but it is too restricted, too emasculated, to articulate a substantial sense of respect for others. (You don’t actually have to respect someone at all to ‘let him be’ in that way.) Perhaps the abstract individualism of our pluralist culture encourages this emasculating of respect, even while trumpeting the inviolable value of individual difference. Again, that latter idea is important, but unless it is linked to a more substantial conception of respect its importance is puzzling.9 (In practise I think a more substantial

158 Ethical Encounter

conception is commonly assumed but we come close to depriving ourselves of the imaginative and conceptual resources for making reflective sense of what we thus assume.) So far as respect is understood in the emasculated sort of way just indicated, it will be hard to see it as informed by the kinds of individual responsiveness explored in this essay. When our respect for others involves seeing them in the light of (or making sense of them through) what is disclosable in various forms of encounter between human beings, then respect is capable of being deepened indefinitely. That is because the individual reality of other human beings can be disclosed to us in ever deeper ways in such encounters. And that constitutes part of the background against which respect for those we do not even know takes shape. Appreciating that woman’s tenderness to her husband can deepen one’s sense of the respect one owes all others. The possibilities of such deepening depend in part on the languages of love – in its various forms – that are available in the cultural worlds we inhabit. Such contingencies affect the depth of respect for one another which human beings, in different times and places, are capable of realizing. But there is another range of affective human encounters not adequately described as forms of individual love – even allowing for the variety of forms that can take – which also informs genuine respect. Such respect is conceptually adjacent to reverence, awe and perhaps even fear, and we do justice to these conceptual relations of respect only if we also appreciate this further range of affective encounters. Raimond Gaita says that we cannot understand another as someone we can seriously wrong, unless that other is an intelligible object of our remorse.10 We could also say that no attitude of mine towards another could count as genuine respect unless that other were an intelligible object of my remorse. I think that is right, but here I want to focus on what else clusters around that truth. No attitude of mine can count as genuine respect for another unless I am potentially vulnerable before him or her in certain ways. Gaita describes a slave-owner whose slaves are not intelligible objects of his remorse. He is capable of killing them or raping them without thinking he is doing something with the same significance which his murder or rape of one of his own kind would have. Gaita links that with the slave-owner’s not being able to recognize his slaves as belonging to the same domain of human meanings as he and his kind inhabit. His not recognizing that is compatible with his seeing his slaves as having all sorts of things in common with him: they bleed, die, weep, grieve, laugh, worry, love, marry, make decisions on the basis of reasons, and can even reflect upon their decisions and

Liking, Loving and Respecting Others 159

upon their lives. The problem lies in the limited kind of meaning the slave-owner is able to recognize in their activity when they do these and many other things. As Gaita puts it, this slave-owner’s thought is: ‘we love, but they only “love”; we grieve, but they only “grieve”; we marry, but they only “marry”; we can betray and humiliate one another, but they can only “betray” and “humiliate” one another.’ Such a slave-owner could be challenged, moved and changed by his slaves in all sorts of ways. He could be angered, pleased, perhaps embarrassed, by his slaves. He can be intellectually challenged and perhaps defeated by them, and he can be physically hurt and even killed by them, as those he loves also can be. But he can be challenged in all of those ways without anything deep in his sense of himself being open to change directly through encounter with his slave. Nothing his slaves do can show up for him anything in his own deeds or practices, rituals, observances, convictions as shallow or trivial, because he cannot register anything in their life and activity as having the depth necessary to do that. Only those we acknowledge as belonging to the same domain of meanings as ourselves have the power thus to show up our lives to us, the power directly to deepen, perhaps by calling into question, our sense of whom and what we are.11 Only them can we genuinely respect. Nietzsche likewise linked respect with admiration, reverence and even fear. He thought (not unlike Aristotle) that we could respect only those formidable enough to test us and before whom we are vulnerable in certain ways.12 He put it by saying we can respect only those we would find worthy enemies. In trying to reinstate this conception of respect Nietzsche was opposing what he thought of as the saccharine sentimentalism of a Christian emphasis on love. Nietzsche would agree with Singer that ‘you don’t have to love or even like someone to respect him’. But Singer would be happy to add: ‘and you don’t have to admire him or think him formidable in any way either’. Not so for Nietzsche. Respect as he understands it is indeed affectively saturated, only not with love or liking, but with much ‘harder’ affections such as admiration and fear, and a kind of awe and even reverence that grow partly out of them.13 I am suggesting that there is something importantly right in this view. (I have already spoken of what is right and wrong with simply dismissing love and liking as having nothing to do with respect.) But it is also important that the view does not have to be developed in the way Nietzsche develops it. If a substantial concept of respect is conditioned by the possibility of encounter with others as challenging, even

160 Ethical Encounter

threatening, in ways at least close to those Nietzsche highlighted, it does not follow that only those individuals specifically able to encounter us in those ways fall within the scope of such respect. For Nietzsche (though I am here more interested in the point than in Nietzsche) someone weak, flaccid, cowardly, submissive, can be no object of respect. Only Christian sentimentalism, he thought, could mislead anyone into regarding such another as his moral equal. The matter can, however, be thought of differently. The very possibility of evaluating someone in those terms shows him or her as belonging to the same domain of contrasts as those who are not weak but strong, not flaccid but vital, not cowardly but courageous, not submissive but assertive. What counts for being a proper object of respect, it can then be said, is belonging to that domain of contrasts rather than on which side of any particular contrast in the domain one falls. This reflects a conception of respect with deep roots in our cultural history. According to that conception a person’s respectworthiness is not contingent on his showing himself to be a Nietzschean aristocrat of the spirit. But even so, respect is not simply severed from the attitudes of admiration and fear, or from the related idea emphasized by Nietzsche that respect can be commanded, perhaps even extorted. The point is that these attitudes inform genuine respect in a way, or at a level, that Nietzsche did not recognize. The main point here is evidently formally similar to the point about respect in relation to loving and liking. There the thought was that while one need not love another to respect him or her, the other had to be recognized to belong to a domain of meanings constituted in part through encounters realizing individual love in its various forms. Here the similar thought is that while one does not need to find another formidable in the way Nietzsche spoke of in order to respect him or her, one has to be able to recognize him or her as belonging to a domain of meanings constituted in part through encounters which do disclose others in that way. But this may be thought to leave one with a concept of respect whose scope of application is still much less than humanly universal, even if it is a good deal broader than Nietzsche’s. For people can lack strength, vitality courage, assertiveness, in more than one way. As we have already noted, they can lack these things by instead being, contrastively, weak, flaccid, cowardly and submissive. But they can also lack them without then having the contrastive qualities – because they are (say) more or less severely retarded, or because of the onset of dementia, or through having suffered terrible affliction. Then they may not be, or may simply no longer be, capable of either

Liking, Loving and Respecting Others 161

courage or cowardice, strength or weakness, vitality or flaccidity. In this way at least, then, it seems people can lie outside the domain of contrastive meanings belonging to which I said makes it possible for someone to be genuinely respected. But while some might indeed think of such people as beyond the scope of any serious respect, one need not think that, and what I have been saying does not imply it. Towards those who are either severely retarded or suffering from dementia or whose extreme affliction has apparently cut them off from participation in that domain of contrastive meanings, pity – or better, compassion – can be shown. Pity, and perhaps even compassion, can sometimes take forms which involve condescension, but they need not do so. The quality of pity or compassion for such a person can show a sense of her as having been unfortunately and contingently deprived of participation in that domain of meanings. (She may have been thus deprived by a birth accident or a genetic defect, or by illness or accident or terrible affliction in later life.) That is a very different kind of way of not belonging to that domain of meanings from the way in which a stone or a tree or even a dog does not belong to it. In no sense has the stone or the tree or the dog been deprived – by nature or circumstances – of participation in such a domain of meanings. It was never a candidate for belonging to the domain marked by those various contrastive concepts.14 Such compassion for a human being can be the form taken by our sense of him or her as properly belonging to that domain, and as having only contingently been deprived of participation in it, and then it is not a form of condescension but a mode of acknowledgement of the other’s moral equality with us. Note that logic does not require us to think in this way. (Nietzsche’s view is, after all, perfectly intelligible.) But it is possible to think this way, and it is important that doing so does not involve a pusillanimous turning away from the ‘hardness’ of Nietzschean respect. It does involve insisting on (what Nietzsche scorns) a kind of respect for others that is universal and not dependent on their possessing the particular moral qualities Nietzsche praises. But it does this while also acknowledging that such respect is partly conditioned by modes of individual encounter marked by qualities closely akin to those he praised, which are not well-described as modes of love. That is one point. A second is that this way of thinking answers to a concept of respect that has gone, and still goes, very deep in us. Our problem has been that this concept of respect combines elements which seem incompatible: an emphasis on various forms of love and a pagan

162 Ethical Encounter

(including Aristotelian) emphasis on the wrenching of regard from those for whom one has a duly admiring and fearful regard. These elements seem to press in different directions. They certainly can do so, in ways canvassed in earlier chapters. But we can also appreciate a form of respect which is informed by both themes, and which as I said has been seminal in our cultural history. Still, my point is not mainly about our cultural history. Some elements of that history we should look at askance, even disown. But this ‘richer’ concept of respect is not one of them. On the contrary, we can come reflectively to acknowledge that it still answers to our sense of others and our relation to them, even if it is informed by very different modes of responsiveness which can and often do conflict, even deeply, with one another. The main point I have been making is not one about individual psychology. The point is not that unless an individual is psychologically capable of ‘loving encounter’, and of Nietzschean encounter, with another he or she must lack the capacity genuinely to respect any and all others. There can certainly be serious questions about the effect of such psychological incapacity on anyone’s moral understanding, but still there is force in something Kant says in the Groundwork bearing on this point. Kant presents us with the ‘friend of man’ whose mind is ‘overclouded by sorrows of his own’ and who has therefore lost all sympathy with the fate of others, but who ‘tears himself out this deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination for the sake of duty alone’. If we understand this man’s loss of sympathy with the fate of others to include his having lost all capacity for what I called ‘loving encounter’, he still might possess an imaginative understanding of what he himself has lost the capacity for. And that imaginative understanding could just possibly inform a continuing respect for others. Suppose, however, that the forms of such encounter are wholly unintelligible to him – that they are imaginatively and conceptually as well as experientially unavailable to him. Then, contrary to what Kant seems to go on to claim in the passage referred to, nothing this man does or thinks could be expressive of substantial and genuine respect for others. A person might, for contingent reasons, similarly have lost all capacity to experience others with that combination of admiration and fear which Nietzsche highlights, while still retaining a conceptual appreciation of those attitudes. (Unlike Kantian respect, they are not had or held towards others simply qua rational.) He might, for instance, continue to appreciate their significance when he sees them manifest in others’ responses. Then the possibility of genuine respect for others

Liking, Loving and Respecting Others 163

might perhaps still be alive in him, if hardly robustly so. But now suppose not just that he has for contingent reasons lost the capacity to encounter others in that way, but that such encounters are wholly unintelligible to him. Such admiration tinged with awe and fear before others is as wholly puzzling to him as the apparent display of such attitudes before a mouse or a mollusc15 would be to us. Then any attitude he might have towards other human beings could express at best a very emasculated respect for them. The concept of rights provides another example of the point. When philosophers (such as Singer) speak of according others their rights as what is morally crucial, they forget or overlook the background to that which makes sense of it as crucially important. It is because human beings are disclosed to us in those various kinds of encounter in the ways they are, that according them their rights matters as much as it does. We simply assume such a background when we endorse such a thought about rights. If we were not to assume it, then the disposition to accord others their rights would be only an empty and senseless reflex. I have been trying to bring my emphasis on ‘individual encounter’ into relation with an attitude of respect for others. But it is important to keep the right balance here. We can recover a more robust and substantial conception of respect than is often invoked, while still acknowledging its universal and impersonal character. But even such robust respect cannot carry the whole, or indeed even the greatest, burden of our moral responsiveness. Crucial dimensions of our ethical relations with others resist articulation by means of the concept of respect. (Why should anyone ever have thought otherwise? Partly because we find ourselves so readily tied to the search for single-criterion ‘accounts’ of that upon which we reflect; and partly because as Kant emphasized respect can be thought of as a rational attitude, so that by placing it at the centre of morality we can keep morality within the bounds of reason. Philosophers, especially, find very powerful motives here.) Respect can indeed deepen, and as we have seen it is informed by some of the modes of love we have explored. Even so, not everything deep and important in those loves is preserved in the respect that they variously help to condition. Many examples could illustrate the point. Recall the woman and her husband on the real life television show. His worth as revealed to another by her loving gesture is not fully registerable by an attitude of respect, even if it is partly so. (The point is not that respect is adequate to describe the attitude to which I and the policemen were moved by the woman’s gesture,

164 Ethical Encounter

but just inadequate to describe the woman’s orientation to her husband.) Perhaps there is no single word for the purpose. But the example at least suggests why a Christian tradition found it necessary to shape its concept of agape. A rich concept of respect, with its universal application, is ethically very important. But it is not a master concept in ethics.

9 Goodness and Vulnerability

In The Fragility of Goodness Martha Nussbaum reflects on Plato’s Symposium as presenting us, she thinks, with a stark picture of mutually exclusive ways of living life: … on the one hand, the life of Alcibiades, the person ‘possessed’ by the madness of personal love; on the other, a life in which the intellectual soul ascends to true insight and stable contemplation by denying the ‘mad’ influence of personal passion. Alcibiades’ madness is, allegedly, incompatible with rational order and stability; its vision is a barrier to correct vision. The life of the philosopher achieves order, stability, and insight at the price of denying the sight of the body and the value of individual love.1 [Plato] then shows us, through Socrates and Diotoma, how despite our needy and mortal natures, we can transcend the merely personal in eros and ascend, through desire itself, to the good. But we are not yet persuaded that we can accept this vision of selfsufficiency and this model of practical understanding, since, with Vlastos, we feel that they omit something. What they omit is now movingly displayed to us in the person and story of Alcibiades. We realize through him, the deep importance unique passion has for ordinary human beings; we see its irreplaceable contribution to understanding. But the story brings a further problem: it shows us clearly that we cannot add the love of Alcibiades to the ascent of Diotoma; indeed that we cannot have this love and the kind of stable rationality that she revealed to us. Socrates was serious when he spoke of two mutually exclusive varieties of vision … [The Symposium] does make a case for that [Socratic] conception of value, but it shows us also, all too clearly, how much that conception 165

166 Ethical Encounter

requires us to give up. It starkly confronts us with a choice, but at the same time it makes us see clearly that we cannot choose anything. We see now that philosophy is not fully human; but we are terrified of humanity and what it leads to.2 As already noted, recent years have seen strong philosophical attacks on an understanding of morality as the source of impersonal universal dictates which are absolutely binding on us. These attacks have taken different forms, but common to them has been the idea that morality so conceived is hostile to our humanity, and therefore should not, and perhaps even cannot, be authoritative in our lives. What we need, instead, it is held, is a conception of the ethical – the ethical here is sometimes contrasted with the moral – which answers not just to the rational but also to the affective and personal dimensions of our being. ‘Virtue ethics’ and ‘ethics of care’ are two banners under which such moves have been made. Nussbaum’s concerns in the passage quoted above (as well as elsewhere in The Fragility of Goodness) can be seen as belonging to this debate. So can my discussion in the previous chapter of aspects of the relation between affection and respect. Here I say a little more about ways in which moral requirements are conditioned by love, and also reflect upon a possibility of terrible conflict which that can generate. According to Nussbaum, Plato thinks that the philosopher achieves an ‘order, stability and insight’ which makes compelling claims upon us. Nussbaum thinks Plato equates this philosophical achievement with realization of the good. The claims upon us of this philosophicalmoral achievement are then recognized by Plato, says Nussbaum, as seriously in tension with the claims of the body and the value of individual love. Nussbaum is herself taken with this picture of our human situation. One thing which makes her approach especially interesting is that she does not assert the need to replace one conception or outlook or way of thinking of what we most deeply are by another – a ‘rationalistic’ conception by a more ‘human’ one. Instead she recognizes – and in this passage sees Plato as making a case for recognizing – that what we truly are cannot be accommodated by either such conception to the exclusion of the other. With Plato, Nussbaum presents us with a picture of ourselves as creatures radically and tragically divided in our simultaneous and inescapable allegiance to two different and incompatible ‘visions’. We cannot jettison the claims of our individual loves upon us without jettisoning understandings of others and of ourselves which are crucial to what we are, any more than we can

Goodness and Vulnerability 167

jettison the aspiration to a perspective defined by moral or philosophical order and stability. And we cannot solve, or even reduce the urgency of, the problem by oscillating between these mutually exclusive perspectives. Our situation is not well imaged by Jastrow’s ambiguous duck-rabbit figure, which can be seen alternately as a duck and as a rabbit. In a sense the duck-picture and the rabbit-picture exclude one another: when we see one we cannot also be seeing the other. But in another sense they are not exclusive of one another in that we can readily live with this oscillation between them. There is no pressure on us, so to speak, to combine the two aspects into a single coherent moment. Confining each to its context, we can just serially add one to the other in our experience. And while seeing one ‘aspect’ we can recognize that the other aspect is readily available. While the two aspects cannot be simultaneously realized by us, there is no incompatibility, or even tension, between them as severally realized. The perspectives Nussbaum claims to identify are, by contrast, radically exclusive of one another. Internal to the very meaning of each is the unacceptability of the other. They mark a tragic division in us which puts us constantly at risk of anguished loss of ourselves as one or other possibility is disowned by us to preserve the ineliminable understanding afforded by the other. So while each perspective radically excludes the other, there is at the same time a constant unrealizable aspiration to assume both into a single overarchingly coherent orientation. This is a suggestive variation of the terms of a vigorous recent debate. Even so, Nussbaum’s way of formulating it has serious limitations. That is in good part because of how she conceives the relation between the requirements of moral order and stability, on the one hand, and the claims of individual love, on the other. The sense of that ‘order and stability’ and what it demands of us Nussbaum represents as exclusive of – as what it is wholly independently of – our individual loves. The picture of ethics and its relations with ‘the human’ which I hope has emerged from this essay is rather different from that which shapes the moves, finally including even Nussbaum’s novel moves, in this recent debate. If one of my themes has been the interdependence of the ethical and the human, I have not meant that there can be no conflict between them. On the contrary, I think the most terrible and tragic conflict is still possible. About that Nussbaum is right. But I do not think that Nussbaum’s picture of mutually exclusive perspectives, both of which seriously claim us, is able clearly to reveal the character of this conflict. In this chapter I want to reflect on the character of at least one important kind of such conflict, and to reflect also on what,

168 Ethical Encounter

if anything, that conflict shows about the ‘limits’ of moral claims upon us. I want to make it still clearer that, and how, my emphasis on love and responsiveness in individual encounter is neither an emphasis on something external to acknowledgement of ethical requirement, nor even just the site of one kind of manifestation of a sense of ethical requirement. On the contrary, the character of ethical requirement is conditioned by what is realizable only in such encounter. But that fact, in turn, is the source of an ever-present possibility of terrible conflict in our lives – between moral requirements and the affections that partly condition them. Recall the father and daughter discussed in Chapter 5. Suppose this father could save his sick daughter only by secretly arranging for the taking of a kidney from a homeless orphan, at risk of the orphan’s life. Suppose also that nothing in the world is dearer to her father than this child. Even so, he might reject the offer of such help, out of an understanding of the terrible injustice he would be doing the orphan. The empirical facts of a father’s thinking of the terrible injustice which accepting that offer of help would perpetrate on the orphan, and therefore refusing the help, could of course have a number of significances. He might be scared of getting caught, or worried about what the neighbours would think, or just be someone who ‘wouldn’t do that sort of thing’. (That last phrase might mark a thoughtlessly or at least shallowly conventional response, but it need not do so.) One kind of significance which a father’s refusal of help might have could find expression in these terms: ‘I couldn’t let it be done; there (meaning the orphan) but for the grace of God goes my child.’ Instead of ‘the grace of God’ another might speak of chance or fate: ‘there but for chance goes my child’ (or perhaps ‘my child might have been in that position’). While there are differences between what is said by one who speaks that way and one who uses the religious formulation, the significance I am pointing to could be sustained by either way of speaking. If the father were to say ‘There but for the grace of God goes my child’, or ‘My child might have been in that position’, we could understand his words as elaborating his sense of why he could not accept the offer of the kidney. A similar thought finds expression in an episode in the film Gone With The Wind. Melanie and Scarlett are tending soldiers with appalling wounds in a military field hospital. Scarlett has had enough and is about to leave. She asks Melanie how she can bear to stay. Melanie replies: ‘They all could be Ashley!’, Ashley being her husband who is away at the war. But if we try to reflect on how Melanie’s thought can elaborate her sense of the requirement upon her to stay

Goodness and Vulnerability 169

and help, it can seem very puzzling. After all they are not Ashley, and he is the one she loves. Likewise, it can seem puzzling how the father’s thought – ‘There but for the grace of God (or chance) goes my child’ – could elaborate his refusal to accept someone’s offer to seize a kidney for his child from a homeless orphan. Can we regard the thoughts of Melanie and the father as tracing back their sense of requirement to a personal attachment each has – Melanie to Ashley, the father to his child? That is to say (speaking about the father now), he cannot do this to another child since his own child might have been in this situation and he could not do such a thing to her. But it is clear that the step in thought introduced by the word ‘since’ in that last sentence is not explained just by his antecedent attachment to his own child. For she is not in the orphan’s position; and she will in fact die if she does not get the orphan’s kidney. So far as the counterfactual thought about his daughter – ‘There but for the grace of God … ’, or ‘My daughter could have been in that position’ – does help elaborate the father’s sense of the terrible injustice he would be doing in taking the kidney, it is not by grounding his sense of the requirement upon him in an independently identifiable ‘personal’ attachment to his child. ‘Well of course that is so’, it may be replied. ‘What you have just said simply acknowledges that the father’s personal attachment to his daughter and his sense of ethical requirement are independent of one another, and that is what makes for the possibility of conflict between them.’ But that cannot be right either, if we can indeed make sense of what the father said as elaborating his sense of the ethical requirement upon him (and of what Melanie said to Scarlett as elaborating her sense of the ethical requirement upon her). For in making that sense of his remark we are thereby ‘bringing into relation’ the father’s personal attachment to his daughter with his sense of the ethical requirement upon him. (To be more precise: we are both ourselves discovering that we find it intelligible that these things be found in relation, and also recognizing that he so finds them.) And the question is what sense we can make of this relation into which they are brought. One way of putting what we recognize the father finds is to say that his sense of the requirement upon him is informed by the character of his love for his daughter. Putting the point slightly differently: when the father thinks ‘There but for the grace of God goes my daughter’, his thought is as much ‘about’ the orphan as it is about his own daughter. Of course it is ‘about’ his daughter – that she might have been in this situation – but it also registers his compassion for the orphan. He sees the orphan in the light of his sense of how terrible it would be for his

170 Ethical Encounter

daughter to be thus orphaned, abandoned, and vulnerable. Similarly, Melanie sees the soldiers she tends in the light of what it would be like for Ashley to be in their situation. The father sees the orphan in the light of his love for his daughter, as Melanie sees the soldiers in the light of her love for Ashley. And the sense each has of the requirement upon her in relation to these strangers is informed by her so seeing them. Can we say more clearly how that phrase ‘seeing in the light of’ is to be understood here?3 The father’s sense of the orphan locates her in a web of human meaning. She is someone’s daughter. Of course in a sense she no longer is so because she is an orphan. But he understands her orphaning and abandonment as deprivations precisely because his understanding of her is as woven into such a web of meaning. His sense of the terrible injustice he would be doing her in taking her kidney is informed by this sense of the girl. But his sense of that web of meaning is in turn shaped and energized by his particular love for his own child. His lived experience of that bond of love is a crucial determinant of his understanding of that web of meaning. This does not mean that anyone who is not a parent can have no understanding of the injustice which taking the kidney would perpetrate on the orphan. But it does mean that such a person can fully understand this only so far as he or she can imaginatively participate in that web of human meaning. And a condition of anyone’s doing that is an imaginative appreciation of the bonds of familial love in human life. In this way, dimensions of the father’s personal love for his child inform his sense of the orphan and of what justice to her requires of him, just as dimensions of her love for Ashley inform Melanie’s sense of the soldiers and of her obligation (her bond or tie) to them. This suggests an intimate, if indirect, connection between justice and love, a connection worlds away from most contemporary thinking about justice. But acknowledging that connection does not involve denying the possibility of deep conflict between the father’s love for his child and his sense of what he morally must do – even his sense of what justice requires – in this situation. A determinant of his sense of the web of meaning I spoke of just is his particular lived relatedness with this child, with all the natural ligatures of affection thus formed. That history not only reaches out, in the way described above, to inform his sense of the orphan and of the injustice he would be perpetrating in taking her kidney, but also means that what he finds he must do here will be devastating for him. The father who finds he must not take that step to save his child here may be forever after heartbroken. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose the love of such a father for his

Goodness and Vulnerability 171

daughter less intense or deep than the love of a father who would accept the offer of the kidney without a moment’s hesitation or guilt (or less intense or deep than the love of a father who did hesitate and then guiltily gave in to the temptation to accept the kidney). Yet he may be thus heartbroken without ever thinking he could have done otherwise than refuse that way of saving his daughter’s life. That this orientation can be the expression of a deep, lucid and inescapable moral understanding shows only that life can be appallingly cruel. One objection to making love of individuals the sovereign concept of morality is that love can be the occasion of evil as well as of good. The present discussion shows clearly that an intensely personal love of another can indeed be the occasion of a terrible deed, though here not because of defects common in our loving (such as selfishness, vanity, obsessiveness) but for reasons which reflect depths in the love. (The deed in this case would be the father’s sanctioning the murder of an orphan to secure her kidney for his dying child.) Iris Murdoch is right to say that ‘Good is sovereign over Love, as it is sovereign over other concepts, because Love can name something bad.’ But while the ‘something bad’ might owe to serious defects all too common in our loving – selfishness, vanity, obsessiveness – it need not do so. It might instead owe to a deep love of one’s child, say, of the kind which might find guilty expression in a father’s taking the offer of the kidney. Here love finds expression in ‘something bad’, but it can hardly be thought a self-absorbed or obsessive love. I have nowhere denied that love can be the occasion of evil as well as good; and I have not argued that the concept of love can replace that of the good, nor that it affords an analysis of the good. Rather, various forms of love are indispensable media of an ethical understanding and responsiveness which cannot be reduced to those forms of love.4 So when the father in my example discovers that it is morally impossible for him to save his daughter in that way, no elaboration on his love for his daughter, and no love for the orphan who would die were he to agree to take her kidney, explains that discovery. But it does not follow, and is not true, that his appreciation of the moral requirement upon him is independent of ordinary human love of individuals, or independent even of his human love of individuals. On the contrary the intelligibility of such a requirement is conditioned by (various forms of) such love in ways I have tried to describe. This example also helps press my critique of Kant a little further. I dwelt on how Kant’s emphasis on distinctively moral motivation distorted the response of the father who continued reading to his

172 Ethical Encounter

daughter in very difficult circumstances. The different situation of the father here seems to give Kant his strongest case, since not only is his deepest personal love not celebrated in his deed, but he is agonized by the terrible consequence for one he deeply loves of what he finds he morally must do. Here, if anywhere, one might be tempted to find a motive of ‘duty for duty’s sake’. But we need not be tempted, and our discussion shows why. Although it is true that no elaboration on his love for his daughter explains his finding he cannot agree to take the kidney, still his appreciation of that impossibility is conditioned, in the ways I described, by various forms of (let us call it) ordinary human love. To think of his motivation as ‘duty for duty’s sake’ is to forget or overlook or exclude this background to the situation the father finds himself in. That the attitude of the father himself is not well-described that way shows in his thinking, for example, how terrible it would be for him to sacrifice the life of that innocent orphan. Then she, rather than duty (let alone duty for duty’s sake), remains at the centre of his response. Thus linking morality with love does not reduce it to love. It does not do that even when it is allowed that love has its requirements, since you don’t get to the father’s refusal to take the kidney by talking about his obedience to love’s requirements. Yet, love and its requirements still do condition the moral understanding which thus transcends them. Here we can see clearly displayed, then, both what is true and also what is limited in the claim that morality is autonomous with respect to our affections. This line of thought gives us a critical perspective on attempts to humanize ethics by focusing on love and care. The language of justice, obligation and respect is conditioned by our loves in ways I have been trying to draw out in this discussion as well as in Chapter 8. Summarily put: love and justice – even ‘impartial’ justice – are not simply exclusive of one another. I say ‘not simply exclusive’ just because, as the example I have been discussing brings out, there is an evident sense in which they can exclude one another. The father recognizes that justice requires him not to take the orphan’s kidney, he dearly loves his daughter who will die, and he does not love the orphan. But my present point is that one can acknowledge all that, and still recognize how – in ways I have described – the sense of justice on which the father draws in thinking that way is informed by his loving. (We can then both see why Murdoch speaks of ‘the individual thought of as knowable by love’ as ‘the central concept of morality’, and also acknowledge that the figure of ‘centrality’ here risks being misleading.)

Goodness and Vulnerability 173

There is in fact a reciprocal determination here. If aspects of our personal engagements – our particular loves – thus condition the sense of the ethical concepts we employ in giving expression to ethical demands, those concepts also deepen the significance of our personal attachments. (As we saw in Chapter 3, it can be part of the sense of one’s love, for example, that its requirements include the requirement to love justly.) Is this circular? Well, it is either circular or spiral; but there is nothing vicious here. Appreciating this reciprocal determination, we discover an ethical orientation different from that which marks much of the ethics of care, and also different from what is allowed for in the exclusive alternatives recognized by Nussbaum. We do this holding to, but transforming, her insight that tragic conflict between the ethical and the human is an ever-present possibility in our lives. One lesson of this reciprocal determination is that it may obscure as much as it reveals to talk flatly about morality rightly ‘overriding’ our other dispositions, or, conversely, about morality at a certain point ‘reaching its limit’ against those dispositions. Sometimes that first way of speaking is right enough – for example, when the conflicting dispositions show greed or cowardice or cruelty. Then it seems plausible to say that if she were to come to understand her disposition truly – as greedy, cowardly or cruel – she would indeed be ‘unified’ in her moral refusal to take the greedy, cowardly or cruel course. (I do not say it is obvious that this must be so.) As John McDowell says, following Aristotle, the disposition athwart the ethical demand is then not just outweighed but silenced. But things are less straightforward when the disposition which runs counter to the ethical demand is itself far from simply vicious – as the father’s desperate wish to save his daughter is. Then McDowell’s Aristotelian formulation may be found wanting. It seems unable to answer to the thought (which is in my judgement true) that even the best person might be torn apart by his obedience to the moral demands upon him. The thought might be stronger than that: not just that the best person might at the limit find his loss unbearably hard, but that it is a condition of his not lacking something humanly very important that he be at least at risk of being thus torn apart. This does not mean that he must waver in his obedience. He need not, but such wavering is not the only expression of a sense of the cost of one’s obedience. One might recognize that doing what one must will cause one unbearable pain and grief, destroy something crucial to the meaning of one’s life, yet for all that find oneself absolutely bound to do it. This could be so with the father in my example.

174 Ethical Encounter

In that case Nussbaum is mistaken to say that recognition of tragic conflict here must ‘make us see … clearly that we cannot choose anything’. For even while acknowledging the tragic conflict we may indeed ‘see clearly’ that we have to choose something which may well irreparably maim us by destroying something crucial to the meaning of our life. That may be a greater cost even than laying down one’s life for one’s friend or cause. For while the cost is then one’s life, it may be that nothing central to its meaning is destroyed. Indeed its deepest meaning may even be affirmed. It is worth reflecting on Aristotle in the light of that last thought. He acknowledges several ways in which we are vulnerable to contingency. One might suffer illness or death from an accident, or be enslaved. Such contingencies may test one’s patience and courage but need not destroy them and will not do so in a genuinely virtuous person. Differently, there are dangers which even the bravest cannot face. Again, this does not call into question the courage of even the bravest. It marks not a limitedness in their courage, but the limits, so to speak, of courage itself. Beyond this, Aristotle recognizes that virtue itself can make one vulnerable in a way one who lacks virtue is not vulnerable. The coward does not risk his safety or his life, in circumstances in which the courageous person does just that. But Aristotle never considers the possibility that acting virtuously could itself destroy something crucial to the meaning of one’s life (in the sense of my example). That one’s very virtue makes one vulnerable to the destruction of something crucial to the meaning of one’s life, in a way in which those lacking virtue are not vulnerable, shows a kind of subjection to contingency which Aristotle does not acknowledge. Neither, for that matter, does Plato acknowledge it, though for a different reason. Aristotle’s view would seem to be that nothing which resulted in such destruction could count as a requirement of virtue; whereas Plato’s is that obedience to the good realizes by far the deepest meaning our lives can have, so that real despair can be experienced only by those who fail in that obedience. That is at least part of what Plato meant by saying that the good man cannot be harmed. Bernard Williams’ view is close in spirit to Aristotle’s. Williams speaks as if it could only be pathological to find oneself ethically compelled to do what destroyed something crucial to the meaning of one’s life; as if one who was clear-sighted here would recognize that the only ‘reasonable’, ‘sensible’, ‘sane’ thing to do is recognize that morality has indeed reached its limit against one of his ‘ground projects’, and that it can properly be repudiated.5 But Williams gives no reason for supposing that it must be possible, for anyone whose outlook is not pathological,

Goodness and Vulnerability 175

to repudiate the ethical demand here without that itself destroying a condition of the deepest sense he can make of his life. Why must there be a way in which things can turn out ‘all right’ in such circumstances? Sometimes, if you are unlucky enough, there will be no such way. One thing this shows could be put by saying that aspects of the ‘natural’ features of our life which condition our ethical concepts remain not wholly assimilated, as it were, by those concepts. The point can be well expressed in the terms of Plato’s Symposium, if not quite by Nussbaum’s reading of it. The progressive ascent of love towards its most compelling objects (the Symposium picture) leaves some residue, so to speak, at every stage of the ascent. Not everything of the particular, the partial and the personal is aufgehoben – gathered up into – ethical responsiveness. Elements which are surd, ethically speaking, remain in the particular relationships whose particularity conditions the deepest ethical understanding which also takes us in one sense beyond them. Those surd elements do not drop out as unimportant for one who finds ethical requirements not only serious but finally compelling. Even for such a person those elements can remain deep and urgent. More than that, as I suggested before, anyone in whom they ceased to be so perhaps thereby shows himself to be less than fully humanly responsive. In this way, elements of that very particularity which conditions our ethical concepts can also, at the limit, press against the demands enshrined in our answerability to those concepts. Hence the appalling possibility of finding ourselves, if we are unlucky enough, compelled to respond to an ethical demand, when doing this will maim a deep attachment of ours of a kind which partly conditions the demand. Here is a sense – not quite the same as Hegel’s or Alasdair MacIntyre’s or even Nussbaum’s – in which the possibility of tragedy is ineliminable from the world of one in whom ethical requirements go deep. Sometimes a conviction that there is a moral order can help sustain complacent illusions.6 The complacency may show itself clearly in a person’s responses to blows dealt him by fate. Resentment at a world which gives you lung cancer when you have never smoked and have lived a ‘good’ life, for example, might express a sense of betrayal of an expectation of a certain kind of ‘ultimate justice’ – a justice which matches worldly goods to virtue. However humanly understandable such resentment might be – and it is surely common enough – it does reveal a relatively shallow sense of justice and of what it is for there to be a moral order. If we describe acknowledgement of the absolute or categorical nature of ethical demands as expressing a sense of a moral order, this has nothing to do with supposing a match between one’s

176 Ethical Encounter

virtue and how the world will treat one. On the contrary, something which it is natural to call a deep sense of moral order itself opens up the possibility of the kind of appalling outcome I spoke of. If the father in my example had not found himself encountering in the orphan an absolute barrier to his will he could have saved his child, and thereby himself from the devastation of her loss. I have been reflecting on something lying in the background of a sense of moral order which can introduce such tragic possibilities: namely, the way our moral understanding is conditioned by affections which it can transform and deepen but which resist full incorporation into it. The deepest ethical understanding is not only compatible with this resistance but also implies appreciation of it, and thus always sustains a recognition of our perpetual susceptibility to the kind of appalling outcome mentioned. These complexities in what we can call the relation between the moral and the human are, I think, missed by the way in which both Nussbaum and Williams speak about it. In extreme situations, then, deep loss can mark our ethical path precisely because we find ourselves inescapably answerable to certain ethical requirements. That this is so may make us wonder how we could possibly be creatures who on such occasions can still find themselves ineluctably moved to think and do what they know will deprive their life of something crucial to its meaning. One answer – in effect Bernard Williams’ in the essay referred to above – is simply that sometimes our attachments can be pathological, and our being moved to think and act in that way shows our attachment to ethical demands then to be pathological. I have argued that philosophy cannot show that we have to believe this if we are not to be irrational or pathologically selfdestructive. It must also be acknowledged that philosophy cannot demonstrate that one who refuses the tragic possibility I spoke of is therefore irrational. (That it cannot do so is not a failing or limitation of philosophy either.) Even so, it can ‘preserve a space’, as Raimond Gaita puts it, for acknowledgement of the kind of self-understanding displayed by the father in my example as ethically compelling. And further: it can, I believe, shape a persuasive picture of ourselves as creatures partly defined by such a self-understanding. But even if it succeeds on both these counts philosophy does not thereby defuse a wonder that we could be creatures who find themselves partly defined by such a possibility. Not only does it not explain that fact away, in one sense it does not even try to explain it. Such a philosophical picture gives us, rather, a ‘perspicuous representation’ in which we may recognize aspects of what we are.

Goodness and Vulnerability 177

Wonder at our human life being like this can remain at a reflective level even in one who finds himself defined by this ethical self-understanding. (I made this point in a slightly different context in Chapter 7.) That this is so testifies to a certain doubleness of our being. It can find very poignant expression. The father in my example might even say to himself: ‘Why can’t I just consent to this orphan being seized and having her kidney taken from her to save my child? I don’t even know her. What is she to me? She has not even got any parents or family who will miss her!’ This anguished cry could express genuine astonishment that he could find it impossible so to consent, even while he does not waver at all in his refusal to consent. That very astonishment or wonder can then testify to a kind of doubleness of what we are: beings who can in anguish register both how such a refusal (say) will lacerate us and also the absolute necessity of refusing. The doubleness can be genuine because acknowledging such necessity need express no pathological ethical commitment. It can instead register an understanding of ourselves and of our life which goes as much to our very core as does the love with which it is in deep conflict. This doubleness is not quite what Nussbaum meant by ‘mutually exclusive varieties of vision’. Her formulations implied two externally related imperatives. By contrast I have spoken of a doubleness which is compatible with recognizing that our ethical being is interdependent with and conditioned by our ‘natural’ being even as it involves a perpetual transforming and transcending of that (as well as occasional intransigent opposition to it). Ethical life involves conflict with elements of what we are which also inform what sometimes must oppose them. That shows why we simultaneously need two different figures here – that of the doubleness of the self, on the one hand, and that of its expansion and deepening on the other, if we are to speak truly to what we are.

Notes Introduction 1. Thus Simon Blackburn: ‘ … it is not our enjoyments or approvals which you should look to in discovering whether bear-baiting is wrong (it is at least mainly the effect on the bear)’. ‘Errors and the Phenomenology of Value’, in T. Honderich ed., Morality and Objectivity (London: Routledge, 1985) p. 6. Blackburn says ‘mainly’ the effect on the bear: the context makes it pretty clear that the qualification is there to let in such things as the effect on the baiters, and perhaps the effect on public morals. It is not there to accommodate what I go on to characterize in the text. 2. S. Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 89. 3. The word ‘sense’ here marks not a perceptual awareness, nor what philosophers usually mean by belief, nor a combination of those. Exploring just what ‘sense’ in this (and other related) connections does involve is a main theme of this book. 4. Op. cit., pp. 89–90. 5. G. Warnock, The Object of Morality (London: Methuen, 1971), p. 26. 6. A fourth reason operating here is that the experiences I mentioned are often assumed to depend on religious convictions – belief in a wrathful God whose divinely imposed order has been upset. The thought is that what is important in morality – and what therefore lies within the purview of moral philosophical reflection – cannot depend on religion since people without religious convictions can evidently take morality and its demands fully seriously. But even if that is true, it does not warrant setting aside the experiences I spoke of. Even if they often have been accompanied by such religious convictions those experiences are possible without the convictions. (A further point: when the experiences do go with such convictions the question of the relation between the experiences and the convictions still remains. The convictions do not have to be thought of as ‘grounding’ the experiences. They may instead be thought of as further articulations of the sense of the experiences.) 7. For different versions of this view see J. L. Mackie, Ethics (New York: Penguin, 1977), Ch. 1; and S. Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 8. Here theses about supervenience complicate the picture I am sketching, but do not basically alter it. 9. Those who have defended a view of moral concepts as ‘response–dependent’ may think they can recognize their view in these sentences. They are right. Such a view does indeed supersede some versions of the subjectivism– objectivism debate. Even so, in my judgement it is too general a view to cast much illumination on moral judgement and response. (It casts no light, for example, on the distinctively personal character of much moral thinking. See below.) 178

Notes 179 10. In Chapter 4 I say more about the interdependence between ‘presence’ and radical ‘otherness’ that is touched on here. 11. J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), Part Three. 12. I do not suggest that sexually charged erotic love affords the deepest disclosure of human Otherness. Plato was right, I believe, to emphasize that it does not. But still it marks a humanly important way in which others can become present to us. (I touch on this issue again later.) 13. Here I register its extension to murder – another terrible deed. But it is extremely important, as we shall see, that these points about meaning also apply to what can be realized in various forms of love. Then we are involved in depths of goodness, as well as of evil. 14. There can also be great differences in the ethical significance of different deeds of murder, and even of rape. Nothing I have said contradicts that. One might even find oneself driven to conclude that one had to murder someone – the stepfather, or even father, who is cruelly abusing one’s sister, for example. (Also see the remarks below about the police shooting a man holding others hostage.) Of course there is still the further question, in each case, of how the murderer is ethically to come to terms with what he has done. That he found he had to do it does not of itself mean he has nothing to atone for, or seek forgiveness for. 15. Good and Evil (London: Macmillan, 1991 – now Palgrave) Ch. 4 16. Foucault’s retelling, in Ch. 1 of Discipline and Punish, of the execution of the regicide Damiens makes one feel that gravity, that weight (even though that is not his purpose). Against that, Kundera’s much-vaunted ‘unbearable lightness of being’ strikes one – strikes me – as a modern pathology, and a rather self-indulgent one at that. 17. There may seem to be a slide in the thought of this paragraph. If killing someone is awful then surely killing someone by lethal injection is so; and in that case my analysis of the practice does not even get going. But that is too quick. That killing human beings is awful in the way it is depends in part on background facts about how physically difficult it commonly is, the kind of force commonly required to do it. Partly against that background (among much else) all killing of human beings is awful, even when achieved quietly and apparently ‘easily’. But it is also true that a killing of the latter sort can cloak its awfulness, not enable that to be fully manifest. (These remarks evidently have implications for how euthanasia needs to be thought about.) 18. These are distinguishable dispositions, even if their boundaries are often blurred. Roughly, utilitarian thought manifests the first disposition, and Kantian thought the second. Kant takes himself to be re-expressing, in philosophically clarifying ways, what is implicit in the common moral consciousness. That is rational reconstruction. Utilitarians commonly take themselves to be winnowing out what is mere prejudice or illusion in our moral thinking, and preserving what is left – which they suppose to be only what can be quantified or measured. 19. Of course there are various ways of going on from that recognition. The ‘anti-theory’ moral philosophers in the analytic tradition – centrally including Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams – have explored

180 Notes

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

some of them. Many of their criticisms of moral theory I share, as I also share a good deal of what each of them has to say in place of it. But I touch below on a significant difference from all of them in my basic orientation, a difference which informs the rest of this essay. Adding evaluative or ‘response-dependent’ properties to what belongs to the world does not help make room for this thought either. What is at issue here is illuminated by Kant’s distinction, in the Critique of Judgement, between two modes of judgement that he calls ‘determinant’ and ‘reflective’. (See Chapter 7 below.) Kant says of reflective judgement that it is ‘subjective’ and ‘universal’. By ‘subjective’ he means roughly what I mean above by ‘personal’ (which I think a less misleading term in this context). One way of diagnosing the cramped character of much philosophical discussion of moral thinking is to say that it conceives of all judgement as what Kant calls ‘determinant’. (As noted earlier, talk of the ‘responsedependence’ of moral concepts falls short of this personal dimension of moral judgement and response.) That was already only one lesson of the episode of the boys and the birds. Beyond that lay the question of the depth of meaning of what resists (more than one kind of ) reduction. Edmund Husserl introduces the concept of the life-world in his The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). The concept brings Husserl into relation with the ‘anti-theorists’ I mentioned in Note 19 above, though none of them shares his transcendental phenomenology. (Habermas also uses the concept of the life-world.) The phrase comes from the final sentence of Murdoch’s essay ‘The Idea of Perfection’, in her The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970). The relation, as Plato thinks of it, of his experience of that conviction to rational reflection upon it is then akin to Hampshire’s understanding of the relation between those reactions to which philosophy so often condescends and our deepest moral attitudes. Emmanuel Levinas also belongs here. See his Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). What I later call ‘absolute Otherness’ also echoes Levinas. I return to aspects of Kant’s moral thought several times, at greatest length in Chapter 5.

1. Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond 1. On hearing such a claim some defenders of Aristotle will reach for Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, with its talk of contemplation. For why I do not think anything in Book 10 contradicts the claim, see Note 25 below. 2. Reductionist or instrumentalist interpretations of Aristotelian ethics, and more generally of the virtues, are common. Among them are: Terence Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), and Aristotle’s First Principles (Oxford University Press, 1988); James Wallace, Virtues and Vices (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1978); (sometimes) Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978); Kathleen Wilkes, ‘The Good

Notes 181

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

Man and the Good for Man’, in A. Rorty ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (University of California Press, 1980), esp. pp. 354–6; and (sometimes, and quite subtly) Richard Kraut, Aristotle and the Human Good (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989). I am indebted here, as more generally, to Raimond Gaita’s discussion of Aristotle in Good and Evil, especially pp. 87–91. Another recent reading of Aristotle from which I have also greatly benefited is to be found in: John Casey, Pagan Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). The background, here and elsewhere, to my use of ‘we’ (and of ‘our’) is a historically seminal, though also unstable, orientation of Western life. But the claims made using ‘we’ and ‘our’ are to be understood as containing an invitation to agreement by the reader, whoever he be. Aristotle’s Rhetoric has some discussion of pity, but not in terms that qualify the absence noted here. In Chapter 6 I say a little more about the significance of some of these specific absences. Bernard Williams’ Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) is an interesting and complex exception to my charge against some recent moral philosophy. Williams’ broad project is to revive the claims of shame (by contrast with guilt) as a pre-eminent ethical concept. This involves him in showing that the resources of shame, so to speak, are much greater than is usually acknowledged since those resources are usually identified through the distorting lenses of what Williams calls the ‘morality system’, with its preoccupation with guilt. Then shame appears to be the expression of a heteronomous self-conception, and to involve a concern only with the appearance of virtue and not with its reality. I agree with much of what Williams says in rejecting such an understanding of shame. More generally, Williams wholly avoids the relatively superficial endorsement of Aristotle which I have criticized, and he brings out very well the errors in thinking of Aristotle (and of wider Greek thought) as embracing either a ‘heteronomous’ or an ‘egoistic’ conception of moral virtue. Still, I think Williams mistaken in supposing that we share with the Greeks their sense of the centrality of shame as against guilt, and in holding that it is only because of our corruption by the ‘morality system’ that we wrongly think we do not share this with them. My disagreements with Williams on this matter I present briefly below. Sarah Broadie, in Ethics with Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) p. 93, writes: ‘The agent who does A because it is noble to do it does A as one who, by the doing of this independently right action, renders himself noble or fine.’ The trouble with this is that it tells us nothing – and Broadie does not elsewhere enlighten us – about what A thus renders himself as, in rendering himself noble. How, for instance, does it differ from his rendering himself morally good? (I argue below that one who aims at the noble is essentially concerned to appear before others in a certain way.) In Chapter 6. In this connection see also Howard Curzer, ‘A Great Philosopher’s Not So Great Account of Great Virtue: Aristotle’s Treatment of “Greatness of Soul”’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 20, 4 (December 1990), 517–38. 1095b24–30. All quotations from Aristotle are from the J. A. K. Thompson translation of the Nicomachean Ethics (Penguin Classics, 1976).

182 Notes 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

Op. cit., 1095b27–30. Op. cit., 1123b23–5. Op. cit., p. 147. Op. cit., 1125a21–4. Op. cit., 1116a27–9. Op. cit., 1116a18–20. Op. cit., 1117a16–18. Op. cit., 1116b19–21. Op. cit., 1116a28–9. John Casey (op. cit.) is the only contemporary writer who comes even close to endorsing this valuation of courage. Op. cit., 1115a25–36. If that is so, then when Wallace (op. cit., p. 77) says of courage that it ‘is not a motive’ he is speaking of a modern idea significantly different from Aristotle’s. (Wallace does not claim to be elucidating Aristotle’s idea.) Even Urmson stumbles here, in his admirable Aristotle’s Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). Noting astutely that ‘valour’ is a better translation of andreia than ‘courage’ is, Urmson comments only that ‘Aristotle’s concept is narrower than ours’. His discussion misses the larger significance of that narrowness – the essential connection, for Aristotle, between andreia and the noble, which includes a proper concern with appearing before others in a certain sort of way. Kraut, op. cit., pp. 336–7. That life may indeed be wholly independent of the moral virtues. Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics makes it clear that the life of contemplation as the gods live it has no room for the virtues of justice, courage and temperance. And Aristotle does not say that the life of contemplation as human beings might aspire to it requires them to be or ever to have been just, courageous and temperate. His thought seems to be that contemplation takes one to a level at which those moral virtues are simply not in play. Attempts – such as Kraut’s in the sentence quoted in the text – to interpret Aristotle as holding that the moral virtues find their truest and best expression in the life of contemplation then seem extremely implausible. If they are so, then my account of Aristotle’s picture of the moral virtues is not plausibly undermined by the importance Aristotle gives the life of contemplation in Book 10. A different explanation of Aristotle’s ignoring of (for example) facing grave illness as an occasion for courage would be that, because one is just ‘lying there’, the occasion does not allow sufficient scope for the exercise of practical reason. Perhaps this thought is discernible in Aristotle’s text (though if so then in conjunction with the themes I have been discussing rather than to the exclusion of them). But even if it is not discernible there, it could (and arguably does) come into play in other versions of virtue ethics. I take up an aspect of what is at issue in this thought in Chapter 6. As far as I can determine, this dimension of what Aristotle takes to be involved in the exercise of practical reason is recognized, among contemporary commentators, only by Casey and Gaita in the works cited above. Op. cit., 1124b11–1125a15.

Notes 183 29. Utilitarianism and Moral Self-Indulgence’, reprinted in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 45. Williams’ discussion of moral self-indulgence is not concerned with Aristotle. 30. We might equally say ‘unworldly’. The contrast in the text brings out a subtlety which is usually missed in discussion of whether Aristotle’s ethics are egoistic. We can elicit it by considering remarks of Sarah Broadie’s: … the implicit claim, made in acting like this, that a good person acts like this (in this situation), is impersonal and universal (apart from reference to this). The action is a sort of ostensive definition of what it is to be a fine…person, and a definition does not ascribe the definiendum to any subject in particular. (Op. cit., p. 95.)

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

This captures why it is wrong to think of Aristotle’s ethics as egoistic. For Aristotle the proper self-concern of the virtuous person is – it sounds, but is not, paradoxical – of an impersonal kind. In seeking honour the virtuous man seeks to instantiate a kind of ethical being whose value is impersonal and universal. His own seeking of honour is therefore at the same time and in itself also a confirming, even a celebrating, of the worth of his ethical community. But that seeking still involves a worldly self-concern just because – in the way I tried earlier to describe – a requirement of the particular instantiating is that the virtuous person seek and take pride in the honour owing to him as one who is virtuous. That self-concerned preoccupation remains internal, on Aristotle’s picture, to the (unegoistic) realisation of impersonal ethical value. This element of Aristotelian virtue – which Broadie seems to miss – is absent from the selflessness of the widow. So, to defend Aristotle against the charge of egoism is not thereby to cancel the distance between an ethical orientation which requires (as Aristotle’s does) a certain kind of worldly self-concern and pride, and one which is free of those. This catalogue of the errors of the morality system comes from Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana Books, 1985), p. 196. Shame and Necessity, pp. 72–4, 84–5. Ibid. I do not insist that this must have been what actually led to this youth’s suicide (though I think it did), but only that we can readily make sense of its having done so. Ibid. I do not ascribe this assumption to Williams since he has explicitly criticized it. But it is an assumption often made (as Williams points out) and which would lend support to his resistance to thinking that Ajax’s orientation is susceptible of adverse moral evaluation. Perhaps I should add ‘in a modern sense of “psychologically”’. Understanding the psychological simply as whatever belongs to the logos of the psyche, Plato would say that even the most depraved person is psychologically capable of appreciating the force of any compelling ethical judgement about him, since the human psyche is essentially constituted by its answerability to such judgement. While in fact I think there is good reason for speaking this way, here I do not rely on doing so, since current usage is better respected by the way I have put things in the text.

184 Notes 38. Let me repeat that saying this is compatible with recognizing a great deal that is impressive and admirable there too. 39. This is a different incompatibility from that remarked by Williams when he writes that ‘in leaving behind Aristotle’s cosmology the modern world has left behind elements necessary to making his style of ethical theory as a whole plausible’. J. E. J. Altham and R. Harrison eds, World, Mind, and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 201.

2. Altruism and Moral Meaning 1. ‘Egoism and Altruism’, in B. Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 263. 2. L. A. Selby-Bigge ed., Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 271. 3. ‘Utilitarianism and Moral Self-Indulgence’, reprinted in Moral Luck, p. 47. 4. The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 164. 5. It is not finally clear to me just what status Nagel thinks his claim about the central problem of ethics has. Here I am resisting one way of thinking of its status. 6. Bernard Williams and Charles Taylor have made this point forcefully. 7. Charles Taylor has been instrumental in bringing a concern with moral meaning back into ethics. (And Heidegger is a presence in Taylor’s thought.) Arguably, the metaphysical divide between sentiment and desire on the one hand, and reason on the other, on which Hume’s and much subsequent moral philosophy depends, disappears with recognition of the need to talk in these terms. But I do not press the thought in that direction here. 8. For a similar response to Nagel, see Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 245–51. 9. Not always, since ethical response can also be habitual, straightforward and not at all momentous. But it is so only against the background here mentioned. On this theme see Chapter 8. 10. Problems of the Self, p. 250. Evidently, neither this paper nor his book Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) represents Williams’ own most recent views on ethics. In particular, Williams has since often inveighed against a philosophical tendency to isolate some feature or aspect of human life – actions, principles, obligations, states of mind, even traits of character – as if it was the key to ethics. My specific criticism here of isolating ‘wanting to help’ as having that place is therefore out of date as a criticism of Williams. I nevertheless focus here on these writings of Williams for three reasons. First, they crystallize what has widely been, and still very often is, taken to be a crucial difference between two main kinds of conception of ethics. Secondly, while the eventual scope of my critique is much broader than the concept of altruism, reflection on that concept proves a good way of launching the critique. Thirdly, I think that some main aspects of the views which I criticize here still do exist as limitations (by my lights) in Williams’ later work. But again, my interest is not primarily criticism of Williams. His work is in many respects the best and subtlest exemplar of one kind of (for want of a better phrase) ethical naturalism

Notes 185

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

which excludes much that in my judgement needs acknowledging (even while I share Williams’ opposition to much else). Responding across several fronts here to these pieces of Williams’ relatively early work best enables me to introduce some of my own themes without (I think) those distortions which Williams in his later work claims any such themes import. Op. cit., p. 265. Morality, p. 24. Op. cit., p. 25. Op. cit., p. 26. I made this point in another context in Chapter 1. And there are other aspects of it. The crucial point may be held to be that the amoralist thinks of himself as outside that territory. That calls for two comments. The first is that it is actually extremely hard to find an example of someone who seriously thinks this. (Plato’s Thrasymachus and Callicles do not: they quickly show how shallow their protestations are. Even Dostoevsky’s ‘nihilistic’ characters do not succeed in thinking it.) The second, and more important, point is that even if success were possible here and someone achieved it, there is as yet no good reason why anyone else should take that to warrant him or her treating the person as outside that territory. Op. cit., p. 25. David Wiggins, Marcia Baron, Barbara Herman and Christine Korsgaard, among others, have recently re-explored this territory. Some of what I go on to say in criticism of Williams – and more generally of the ‘Humean’ tradition out of which he is working – is close to Baron and Herman. But the significance of the examples I discuss, by which in part I measure that tradition and find it wanting, lies (I think) also beyond the reach of what both Baron and Herman would oppose to it. I discuss them further in Chapter 5 when I consider whether my critical response to Williams does indeed commit me to Kant or ‘Kantianism’. In the passage I quoted earlier from ‘Egoism and Altruism’ Williams does call altruism ‘a general disposition to regard the interests of others … as making some claim on one’ (my italics). But the resonance of the italicized phrase – the suggestion that it is then the other who limits one – is never explored. In two later papers Williams does attempt to explain the sense of being ethically ‘compelled from beyond’ in terms compatible with his (broadly) Humean orientation. The papers are ‘Practical Necessity’ reprinted in Moral Luck, and ‘Moral Incapacity’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1993). It is not just an efficient-causal consequence of recognition of such a demand. The possibility of such remorse for one’s failure is a condition of the intelligibility to one of such a demand.

3. Altruism and ‘the Other’ 1. My contrast between Paul and Peter recalls Kant’s reflections on the ‘friend of man’ he presents us with in Chapter 1 of the Groundwork. But there turn out to be significant differences between my contrast and Kant’s. 2. Though as I said it cannot prove this.

186 Notes 3. This is the meaning Nietzsche understood resentment as having. Acceptance of the doctrine of eternal return centrally involves overcoming resentment, expressive as resentment is of the illusion-ridden conviction of such an ‘order’. 4. More precisely, between two orientations which Peter and Paul as described can be acknowledged as exemplifying. 5. The observation in the previous paragraph about the difference in the source of the energies informing their compassion does not contradict this. Paul’s ‘wanting to help’ has no ulterior motive; it is not self-serving, not even surreptitiously so. His ‘thought’ in wanting to help has no ‘I-content’ (to use Williams’ phrase). For all that, his compassion is relatively shallow, in the way described. 6. ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’, reprinted in L. Trilling ed., The Experience of Literature (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), p. 97. 7. Op. cit., p. 96. 8. Op. cit., p. 98. 9. Op. cit., p. 100. 10. The phrase is from Judith Andre, ‘Role Morality as a Complex Instance of Ordinary Morality’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 28, 1 ( Jan 1991), 73. 11. See Chapter 6 for further discussion bearing on what is at issue here. 12. A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edn (Notre Dame University Press, 1984). 13. Compare Gaita, op. cit., pp. 84–5. 14. A MacIntyrean point might be urged against me at, so to speak, a higher level here. In the Introduction I said that I was appealing, in this essay, to an orientation, a way of thinking of the ethical, which has historically marked Western culture. Doesn’t that mean that this orientation is indeed ‘contained’ in the resources of certain culturally defined practices and traditions – for instance a tradition of (Christian) marriage in the case of Ivan Ilych and his wife? ‘Contained’ there? Not so. Those practices and traditions define each of us as going beyond whatever is contained in them. Part of their point is to help orient us to that ‘beyond’. Putting it slightly differently: full appreciation of those cultural practices and traditions – some philosophers also speak of ‘narratives’ at this point – depends upon, and constantly returns one to, a kind of experience which can never be wholly contained within them, even though it is nourished by such practices, traditions, narratives. (Of course sometimes these practices, traditions and narratives have been put in an explicitly religious context. But neither they nor the experiences I have been speaking of need be so placed, and I have not presented them in such a context.) For further discussion of what is at issue just here see Chapter 4 below, and also my ‘Honour, Community and Ethical Inwardness’, Philosophy, 72, 281 ( July, 1997). 15. That possibility is not exactly realized in the play (even in the figure of Cordelia). But the marvellousness of the play turns in part on that being the ‘sense’ imaginatively enlivened in us, the audience. See also the reflections on tragedy below, which are informed as these remarks are by Stanley Cavell’s essay on King Lear, ‘The Avoidance of Love’ in his Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 16. As the context suggests, ‘sense’ here does not mean semantic content. It has an experiential component – as when we speak for instance of our sense of

Notes 187

17.

18. 19.

20.

a meeting, or of the sense that another is unhappy, or hiding something from us. That might sound like Kant, but it is different. Kant famously distinguishes hypothetical and categorical imperatives. According to him, only the latter – expressed by means of an ‘ought’ whose force is wholly independent of our psychological make-up – register genuine normative requirement. Obligation is all or nothing. Something Christine Korsgaard says in qualification of Kant is closer to what I have been saying. Of a Mafioso who stiffens his resolve to be strong and ‘honour-bound’ when he is tempted not to be she says that there is a sense in which this obligation is real ‘not just psychologically but normatively’ (The Sources of Normativity, p. 257). But Korsgaard also says that the Mafioso has an obligation to be a good person and that this obligation is ‘deeper than his obligation to stick to his code’. While I would not say flatly that he ‘has’ two ‘obligations’, the underlying point – that a sense of normative requirement can be more or less deep – I endorse. See also the discussion of some so-called ‘other-regarding virtues’ in Chapter 6, which develops the above themes in a slightly different way. There are of course differences and gradations between those examples, which in another context it might be important to explore. To mention one such difference: I should say that Ivan Ilych shows himself more brittle, and more radically cut off from others, than Lear shows himself in the passage I discussed. Conversely, though, there is perhaps more active work of avoidance (to use Cavell’s word) of disclosure of himself to others being undertaken by Lear than by Ivan Ilych who strikes one, before his transformation, as colder than Lear. The point is not that everything in those ‘accounts’ of ethical worth I have just been criticizing is valueless. But they are all insensitive to a background to what they speak about, which partly conditions its significance. Appreciation of that background does suggest, moreover, that the categories and concepts employed in those accounts are less fundamental than their authors have thought, but this does not mean they have no place in our ethical understanding.

4. Absolute Otherness and Common Humanity 1. What I say here in one way resembles Christine Korsgaard’s remarks, in the closing pages of The Sources of Normativity, on more and less deep obligations. (See also Note 17, Chapter 3.) In her terms obligations reflect our practical identity. Only the deepest obligations – those she thinks are rightly called moral – reflect a practical identity constituted by acknowledgement of the moral law. I think, however, that her Kantian terms limit her appreciation of what is at issue here. That is a long story, but one aspect of it is reflected in the following difference in our views about what distinguishes (to put the issue in Korsgaard’s terms) the deepest obligations from those that go less deep. My emphasis is on a difference between ways in which the other can be registered, while Korsgaard highlights a difference between ways someone can think of himself. (That is what she thinks distinguishes the practical identity of the Mafioso from that of the morally good person. The encounter with

188 Notes

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

the other then seems, on her view, to be a dispensable spur to the ethical ‘moment’ rather than a crucially necessary occasion of it. Note that the difference in depth of the sense of ‘being bound’ is not necessarily directly paralleled by difference in empirical likelihood of a person’s acting in accordance with that sense. Shallowness and depth are not markers of psychological commitment. For various reasons someone with a relatively shallow ethical sense may stick to what he thinks is required of him, while another with a deeper sense may, again for various reasons, falter. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 190–1. Norman Geras, ‘Richard Rorty and the Righteous among Nations’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 12 (1995). Cavell op. cit., p. 338. Compare Cavell again: ‘But if I do nothing because there is nothing to do, where that means … that I am in awe before the fact that I cannot do and suffer what it is another’s to do and suffer, then I confirm the final fact of our separateness. And that is the unity of our condition. The only essential difference between them [those on the stage] and me is that they are there and I am not.’ Op. cit., p. 339. I use ‘rational’ to refer to human beings qua possessors of Reason, and ‘Rationality’ to name the capacity human beings have qua possessors of reason. See Chapter 5 for discussion of what is right and wrong in Kant in relation to this theme See also Levinas: ‘The Other is not other with a relative alterity. … The alterity of the other does not depend on any quality that would distinguish him from me, for a distinction of this nature would precisely imply between us that community of genus which already nullifies alterity.’ Totality and Infinity, p. 194. I am not sure that Levinas quite acknowledges this. I mean that it is a conceptual truth that a blessing is not impotent. But neither logic nor the world can force someone to acknowledge the concept of a blessing as one which he or she needs to use. Compare Paul Hamilton: ‘Imaginative generosity in the conception of a person involves, for Wordsworth, a sympathy which exceeds the power to help them.’ P. Hamilton, Wordsworth (Harvester, 1986), pp. 22–3. Here a question arises about Levinas’ reflections on ethics. His arguably exclusive emphasis on the radical Otherness of the other risks making the discovery of oneself as bound in response to the other merely senseless: if the other is only absolutely Other, how can he be anything to me? Or rather – since it is exactly not a matter of finding or recognizing a feature of the other which I then respond to – if the other is compelling for me this shows my connectedness with him. Our connectedness – commonness – is a commonness of absolute Otherness. The end of Chapter 6 and also Chapter 8 bring out further aspects of this human commonness which Levinas perhaps (I am not sure) misses. In the remarks which follow I am drawing heavily on Raimond Gaita’s exploration of remorse in Good and Evil, especially Ch. 4. Zossima becomes a monk, but we should not misinterpret the significance of that. It does not mean that any force the example of Zossima has depends

Notes 189

16.

17.

18.

19.

on Christian assumptions and convictions. Zossima himself is not initially moved by the ‘cultural narrative’ of Christianity, but by a certain experience he comes to have of another human being. And that experience is not recognized or defined by him in Christian terms when he is moved by it. To be sure, Zossima is then moved to ‘adopt’ the Christian ‘narrative’ (he becomes Christian). He finds that of all ‘narratives’ it makes best sense of that experience. But it does not follow, and is not true, that the experience is derivable from the narrative. On the contrary, appreciation of the narrative depends upon a kind of experience which can never be wholly contained within it, though the narrative may (for some people but not all) speak to the experience and help articulate its significance. ‘For some people but not all’ just because it is possible to find Zossima’s response expressive of a powerful, even compelling, ethical understanding without finding oneself moved to speak the distinctively religious language of Christianity. It is true that in Western culture that language has afforded the most eloquent and compelling articulation of the kind of ethical orientation I have been speaking of. But that does not mean that the orientation depends upon Christian convictions, and I have tried to convey its power without even covert reliance on such convictions. (Compare Note 14, Chapter 3.) In fact I think the need to do this is culturally the more urgent because of the decline of Christian adherence. (Here I am indebted to Gaita’s discussion in Ch. 12 of Good and Evil.) Yeats’ remark about tragedy which I discussed presumably is meant to include Greek tragedy. But I have invoked it to illuminate a background to ethical responsiveness which I said much Greek thought did not appreciate. Have I implicitly contradicted myself? No, for three reasons. First, I have focused not directly on the tragedies, but on what Williams finds in one of them, and have explored what is omitted from or distorted by that, which I think we cannot but find important. Secondly, what the authors and audience of those tragedies appreciated in and of them may well not include all of what Yeats, and we, discover there. Thirdly, I believe there is in Plato, though not Aristotle, an appreciation of a good deal of what I have been trying to get at. In the following chapter I suggest that (in some respects) Kant himself may not be as far from what I have been arguing as he first appears to be, and as the usual readings of him would suggest him to be. At present I am speaking of Kant as he is usually understood. McDowell uses this Wittgensteinian phrase in Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). It suggests – in my view rightly, though the claim is tendentious – that the world-disclosing character of experience is the necessary background to any understanding of illusion and mistake. My language here is, like McDowell’s, anti-Cartesian. While that raises philosophical issues, it begs no questions relevant to the point being made here, which concerns a contrast with mundane experience that could also be drawn within a Cartesian framework. In ‘The Prelude’ Wordsworth writes, of his encounter with the blind beggar: And, on the shape of that unmoving man, His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed, As if admonished from another world. (Bk VII,ll. 646–9) The ‘as if’ is as necessary for Wordsworth as the language that follows it.

190 Notes 20. Among very many, and each with slightly different emphasis: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue; Bernard Mayo, Ethics and the Moral Life; Edmund Pincoffs, Quandaries and Virtues; James Wallace, Virtues and Vices.

5. Duty and Ethical Motivation 1. For the moment I speak in the terms of most of Kant’s commentators. Later in the chapter I return to reflect on the significance of the fact that Kant speaks of actions done not ‘from the motive of duty’, but only ‘from duty’. 2. Marcia Baron, ‘On de-Kantianizing the Perfectly Moral Person’, Journal of Value Inquiry, 17 (1983), 281–93; ‘The Alleged Moral Repugnance of Acting from Duty’, Journal of Philosophy (1984), 197–220; Barbara Herman, The Practise of Moral Judgement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). See also Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity. 3. ‘On de-Kantianizing the Perfectly Moral Person’, p. 290. 4. ‘The Alleged Moral Repugnance of Acting from Duty’, pp. 219–20. 5. Compare Levinas: ‘It is not possible that responsibility for another devolve from a free commitment, that is, a present; it exceeds every actual or represented present.’ Beyond Essence; Or Otherwise than Being, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 51. 6. M. Baron, Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology (Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 167. 7. It is already distorting things to say, as Baron does, that ‘her needs’ make a claim upon him, rather than that she claims him in response. 8. Many philosophers will find this use of ‘true’ jarring, because the word is not predicated of a proposition. But that is not the only use of the word. A friend is true mainly not because she utters true propositions (still less because she is one!) but because she is true to the friendship. One’s aim (at the target) can be true, and a true champion is the real thing. These uses of ‘true’ are not simply different from ‘true’ as predicated of propositions either. They all mark a genuineness, of which propositional truth can be thought of as a species. 9. Of course if a conception is too perverted or shallow or otherwise inadequate it may cease to be a genuine conception of what is morally required. But the fact of its being perverted or shallow enough to issue in morally terrible deeds does not by itself establish that it is not such a conception. It establishes only that it is not a morally good conception of what is morally required. 10. The passages are all from ‘Integrity and Impartiality’, reprinted in B. Herman, The Practise of Moral Judgement, p. 12. 11. Op. cit., pp. 13–14. Herman says that the moral rightness of what is done must be the agent’s reason for acting. That is a tighter requirement for an action’s being done from duty than Baron’s ‘general commitment’ to doing what is right. 12. Of course there remains the difficult question of how the noumenal Will can have empirical effects.

Notes 191 13. This points to a limitation in Kant’s distinction between inclination and duty. If someone’s ‘idea that helping is morally required’ is held complacently or condescendingly, it is misleading to assimilate that reason for acting to what Kant commonly means by ‘inclination’. It is a very different kind of reason, after all, from someone’s helping another only because he wants to curry favour with her. (It is something like a flawed attempt to act from duty.) Inclination and duty do not seem to exhaust the possibilities here. Relatedly, I think it mistaken to suppose that every failure to treat another as an end in himself involves treating him as merely a means. 14. Recognition of such a distortion has partly motivated the attempt by various philosophers to replace morality by ethics. They take it to be part of the concept of a morally compelling requirement that its morally compelling character stand as an object of thought for the person who is moved by it. They then hold that this object of thought gets in the way of a humanly direct and attentive response because attention is too much on the idea of moral requirement and not enough on the human beings or other creatures who are the subjects of what is done. This is one obvious path by which ‘desires’ or ‘feelings’, supposedly not thus obstructive, come to be held the true substance of ethical response. 15. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), Ak. 407. 16. Perhaps there is a formal similarity here with Popper’s famous claim that scientific theories are falsifiable but not verifiable – we can discover for sure that theories are false but not that they are true. 17. A main theme of the later Wittgenstein is various limitations of those models, and how to go beyond them. 18. This is a familiar Wittgensteinian theme. 19. Marcia Baron makes this point but she draws a rather different moral from it. Op. cit., pp. 188–93. 20. Paton also translates Kant at one point as saying that action having moral worth is done ‘for the sake of duty’ (op. cit., Ak. 398). ‘For the sake of’ risks carrying the misleading suggestion I am arguing against in the text: that morally good action must be brought about by the conscious thought of one’s duty providing one’s reason for acting. In the interpretation I am sketching a question arises as to how one is moved by duty, if no desire or thought is sufficient to do the mediating work, as it were, between duty and us without collapsing back into phenomenal consciousness. Kant tries to answer this question by characterizing duty as ‘the necessity to act out of reverence for the law’ (my emphasis). For duty to be one’s motive is then just for one to be moved by reverence for the law. Unfortunately, Kant gives no real substance to this rhetorical flourish. 21. My distinction between motives and reasons is close in some respects to Barbara Herman’s distinction in ‘Integrity and Impartiality’, but she does not put the distinction to quite the same use as I do. In particular, what Herman says does not invite the kind of contrast between the motive of duty, specifically, and other motives, which I indicate below. (That limitation, as I see it, is of a piece with my earlier criticism of what she says about the motive of duty.) 22. Given the above disambiguation of ‘motive’, this thought need not, on Kant’s view, therefore be the person’s reason for acting.

192 Notes 23. Two further responses can be made to what I have been arguing here. First, what if he ceases to love his daughter? Surely he might still recognize moral requirements on him in relation to her. But in that case it is not obvious that love has the seminal ethical importance I seem to be according it. I discuss this question in Chapter 8. The second response arises from the fact that, as we saw, there may be various obstacles in the way of the father’s rising to the normative requirement to help his daughter. Her testiness and his own marital problems may test his patience and attention to her. But, rather differently, other serious moral claims may in some circumstances make it morally impossible for him to give that help to his daughter. Suppose his daughter needed a new kidney which could be got only from a black market in kidneys supplied from murdered street children. Then arguably no elaboration on his love for his daughter, nor any love for those street children, will help to explain his discovery of the moral necessity not to help her in that way. In that case we may seem to invoke a moral understanding lying outside those terms of love and the requirements internal to it that have shaped my discussion of the father and daughter above. What is right and wrong in this thought I discuss in the final chapter.

6. Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue 1. It is a further step to hold, as has sometimes been held, that ‘what it is good to be’ has a place not alongside, but prior to, what it is right to do. Then the very concept of right action is held to be recessive in relation to that of good character. Not only will the person of good character do what is right, but ‘right action’ will be defined as what is done by such a person. 2. Moral Action and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 142. 3. Summa Theologica, 1a, 55.1. 4. Unless of course the list of virtues includes one that reflects the importance of presenting oneself to others in a certain way. But there seems no compelling reason to think that any list of virtues must contain such a member. 5. Christine Korsgaard speaks of one’s ‘practical identity’ as what is given through the conceptions of oneself which ‘govern’ one. The Sources of Normativity, Ch. 3. Charles Taylor speaks in similar vein. Will the good person be concerned to sustain his practical identity, even if he is not concerned with flourishing as I described it? I do not think so. I see a person’s practical identity as properly belonging to those background conditions which make it these rather than those people and circumstances that claim her in response, and which can also shape the kind of thing she does in response, and the way she does it. Because she is a teacher, these are the circumstances which, and the particular others who, present her with (some of) her obligations; and many of the details of the way she responds to those obligations will be shaped by her sense of herself as a teacher. A mode of attention to others expressive of what I called goodness can still show itself in the comportment of one who thus understands herself as a teacher (or as a parent). It is a mistake to suppose that such goodness can show only in one who,

Notes 193

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

because she takes herself to be committed to the ‘impartial maximization of good’, does not understand herself under any such restrictive practical identity as ‘teacher’. Of course, so far as our practical identity depends on circumstance and contingency – that I became a teacher, that these are my children – we also cannot exclude the possibility that our moral identity will demand of us a response that is devastating to something deep in that practical identity. I explore essentially this possibility (though without using the phrase ‘practical identity’) in Chapter 9. But not a perfect image. After all, we can speak of even the naive poet as being ‘at the height of her powers’. But it could be only parody to speak of someone by whose goodness we were struck as being ‘at the height of her powers’! This is very different from Uriah Heep’s self-proclaimed humbleness. That involves his continued insistence that he is a ‘humble man’, and this is in him a form of self-assertion that is not humility at all. I am indebted here to Raimond Gaita’s remarks about Mother Teresa in Ch. 11 of Good and Evil. I am of course now imagining one possible continuance of what I saw. Here we again come, from a slightly different angle, at something at issue in the passages from Baron discussed in the previous chapter. No elaborating on the formulation ‘doing what it is right because it is right’ answers to what it is for which the husband might be most grateful, and by which I was most moved. Perhaps it would be possible for someone to feel gratitude to ‘the world’ (so to speak) for having in it such a thing as courage (as one can feel gratitude for the beauty of the world). But if that is possible it is still not gratitude to the other for her courage. At this point a defender of Aquinas might try to argue that Aquinas’ virtue of charity can fill the gap I have claimed to identify in Aristotle and Aquinas. Charity, which Aquinas defines as ‘friendship with God’, is a kind of spirit in which, and out of which, all of our deeds must be done if they are to realize the Good. And perhaps the beneficiary of another’s good deed could be grateful for the spirit in which it was done over and above his gratitude for whatever material benefit he received. I do not see that this spirit involves the kind of attentiveness to the individual being of another that I think is involved in goodness. But perhaps that could further be argued to be implicit in Thomist charity. I doubt it, because of the absence from Aquinas’ writings of the specific forms of love I have focused on. If it can be argued, the categories of virtue ethics will have been transformed. Unless justice is conceived of, as Simone Weil conceives of it, as a deep need of the soul, in the way sketched above. Then the exercise of justice, too, can realize such an individualizing attention. But neither Aristotle’s understanding of justice nor a modern understanding of it readily lends itself to this interpretation. The weave is admittedly tighter in some than in others. I am not saying that a concern with practical charity is distinctively modern. Of course it is not. What is distinctively modern is the political dimension of the concern – that it is embodied, or at least that we try to embody it, in political institutions and policies.

194 Notes 16. ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974) pp. 1–25. 17. Strawson’s main concern – to suggest a different way of thinking about freedom and its relation to determinism – is of course different from mine. 18. Presuppositions, plural, because of the (at least) formal possibility of holding that although there is an ethical essence of human beings it cannot be known. 19. The human essence is an ideal, precisely because it is teleological, a goal to be reached. 20. This picture is slightly complicated by two features of Aristotle’s thought. First, according to Aristotle someone badly brought up may come to have an unchangeably bad character. Then there is a sense in which there is no longer a ‘best self’ – defined by the virtues – which such a person might possibly realize, or even to which he might aspire. Yes, but the character he now has is still defined by its relation to such a best self. He is cowardly and servile, for example. In those respects he fails to realize what he – yes, even he – essentially is. This person is, on Aristotle’s picture, unchangeably, though not essentially, bad. Secondly, the best self of women and ‘natural’ slaves is not, on Aristotle’s view, what it is for (other) men. Women and natural slaves were never even candidates for realizing the telos that becomes inaccessible to the man badly brought up. Their deficiencies are inherent, and not the contingent result of bad upbringing. But they can still be judged by the canons applicable to (other) men. So they are deficient, for example, in lacking various forms of courage and intelligence that are necessary for the best human life. At the same time, they can also be measured as doing better and worse against the different and lower standards that mark their reduced possibilities of ‘living well’. They can thus be judged along two different continua. 21. Though see the discussion of Hume below. 22. What about the need for judgement in particular cases, the importance of which is often supposed to be implied by Aristotle’s emphasis on phronesis, practical wisdom? That is not the kind of individualizing attention I have been speaking of. The precise space to be filled by the conclusions of such judgement is already fixed, in Aristotle’s picture, by the pattern of determinate virtues – identical from one life or situation to the next – he has already specified. His ‘attention to particulars’ takes place within a classically fixed (and pretty narrow) understanding of the possibilities the particular might be discovered to instantiate. 23. In various places Martha Nussbaum has explored some of the themes of this discussion. In ‘Love and the Individual’ she glancingly registers the limitation in Aristotle discussed above: ‘But Carrington knows that in the sense that counts for loving, there is not such another character as Lytton…Sameness of species might be good enough for Aristotle; it is not what she wants. It is that exact thing, unique and (as she too well knows) transient.’ R. Lamb ed., Love Analysed (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), p. 7. See also Nussbaum’s ‘Love and Vision; Iris Murdoch on Eros and the Individual’, in M. Antonaccio and W. Schweiker eds, Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 24. ‘Universalisability’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 55 (1954–5), p. 310.

Notes 195 25. In Chapter 4 I said that such presence is correlative with an absence, a ‘moreness’ which can never be possessed. Then our sense of the individual other expresses what Iris Murdoch calls the belief that ‘we live in a world whose mystery transcends us’. The individual other is a ‘moment’ – a locally intensifying moment – of that mystery. 26. Doubtless his wife knew and loved the idiosyncratic him, unlike the policemen and I. But that difference between her and us does not, I think, affect the point at issue here. I explore the significance of such a difference further in Chapters 8 and 9. 27. The word is inadequate, for reasons mentioned below. 28. I explore this ‘conception’ of individuality further in the following chapter. 29. L. A. Selby-Bigge ed., op. cit., p. 267. The passage comes at the end of the section entitled ‘Of Qualities Immediately Agreeable to Others’. S. L. Goldberg quotes it in Agents and Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). I am indebted to his remarks about it, as well as more generally indebted to him for illumination on some of the themes of this chapter. 30. Moreover, this individualizing will ‘catch the affection’ of some but not others. And this will be because the individualizing answers to this other individual way of being alive in and to the world, and not to that one. This person’s peculiar grace attracts me, but not you. 31. Certainly such ‘lack of fit’ can induce ‘discontent’, perhaps it even usually does, but I do not myself see that it must, nor that repression has to be the mode of dealing with it. 32. Some philosophers turn here to talk of ‘aspects’ as what are thus ‘seen’. That move is better than the fall-back to subjectivism or projectivism, but it does carry a good deal of baggage of its own. I unload a little of it (but not much) in Note 1, Chapter 7 below. 33. Given his rejection of any significant distinction between moral and other virtues Hume would not put the point in quite this way. 34. Cora Diamond also explores the phenomenon, in her reflections on different responses to the life and death of Hobart Wilson. See her ‘Moral Differences and Distances: Some Questions’, in L. Alanen, S. Heinamaa and T. Wallgren eds, Commonality and Particularity in Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1998 – now Palgrave ), pp. 197–234. 35. The claim about Aristotle may need qualifying in the same way as the claim about Hume. Goldberg (op. cit. pp. 270–1) argues plausibly that megalopsychia oscillates in Aristotle’s handling of it as I say grace oscillates in Hume’s reflections on it. 36. I am not, of course, making a blanket generalization about everyone in the eighteenth century. Neither does my discussion apply only to that period. 37. I explore some of the relations between individualizing affection and ‘moral’ understanding further in Chapter 8.

7. ‘Romantic’ Love 1. At this point some philosophers have invoked ‘seeing an aspect’ as an illuminating model. See e.g. Lloyd Reinhardt, ‘Warranted Doability’, Philosophy,

196 Notes

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

63, 244 (March 1988). The model can be helpful in suggesting a way of thinking about an achievement of seeing that is not merely a visual remarking of properties. You do have to see the duck-aspect and the rabbit-aspect of the ambiguous figure. Aspect-perception also involves a kind of activity that ‘ordinary’ seeing does not, in that it is usually subject to the will. I can switch aspects at will. But that kind of activity is different from the activity in Florizel’s mode of registering, which talk of ‘seeing’ fails to capture. The way he is moved to speak of Perdita is not subject to the will in that sense. He could not suddenly switch to another way of speaking which would do just as well. He finds he must speak that way. A second limitation of the model is that aspect-perception is indeed an achievement – something which has been done. Once you have seen it there is nothing more to discover or to wonder at. Part of the character of Florizel’s orientation, by contrast, is that it is open-ended. Its openness and incompleteness are internal to the kind of registering it is, as also is the sense of wonder involved in it – discussed below. These elements of an orientation like Florizel’s are linked to the possibility of the progressive deepening of such a sense of another. Aspects, by contrast, are all or nothing. (I discuss this dimension of Florizel’s response shortly.) Relatedly, aspects remain radically discontinuous with the backgrounds against which they appear. By contrast, while Florizel may initially be ‘hit’ unexpectedly by Perdita, the way he sees her then organizes his life around it. Aspects, as these have been discussed by philosophers, are not embedded in a life and capable of transforming it in the way the forms of experience I have been discussing are. In these ways, at least, aspect-perception does not answer to the kind of orientation I am concerned with. This characterization includes, but evidently also goes beyond, Hume’s point about grace. The ‘extra’ it registers individualizes both the object and the subject of the experience more radically than does the experience of Humean grace. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1976 – now Palgrave), B171. I. Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 18. Kant distinguishes two species of reflective judgement: aesthetic judgement of beauty and teleological judgement. In my view Kant’s category of reflective judgement has much wider application than he allows. Kant would say that I am blurring the boundary between aesthetic and moral judgement. But I think the Critique of Judgement itself invites this blurring. Heidegger’s gelassenheit could also be mentioned here – a ‘letting be’ which again is not a mere passivity in the face of what is encountered, but a mode of responsiveness in which one’s own being is similarly thus open to resolution. I owe this phrase to Tom Pataki. The Sovereignty of Good, p. 84. Here I pass over the differences between the two forms of the Kantian sublime – the dynamical and the mathematical. Kant assumes that beauty and sublimity are essentially distinct. That seems compatible with allowing that some particular experience might draw

Notes 197

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

on both categories (although Kant himself never speaks that way). But my point is more radical: that beauty always stands on the threshold of the sublime. Compare the discussion of absolute Otherness in Chapter 4. In this connection see also the brief comments about Les Miserables at the beginning of Chapter 8. John Donne, ‘Divine Poems’, XIV. We must beware of being too dismissive of such adolescent love, though, for reasons touched on in the Introduction. The shock of response is an awakening to a new reality. The delicate human difficulty is that the dramatic intensity of the shock increases our vulnerability to obsession, distortion, illusion, fantasy, in the way we live, and live through, our experience of it. Kant also insists on a reciprocity of transcendence, but he thinks of it as the rationality one shares with others. The word ‘rationality’ is evidently inadequate to characterize that out of which Florizel is able to register the ungraspable Otherness of Perdita, and also to enact his own. His ‘whole soul of man’, including his deepest capacities of feeling and desire, is engaged by what he encounters in Perdita. See the following chapter for further reflection on the aptness of the name. Orthodoxy (London and Glasgow: Fontana Books, 1961), p. 52.

8. Liking, Loving and Respecting Others 1. Perhaps that is a little too strong. The plight of Dostoevsky’s Under-ground Man in relation to the prostitute Liza is similar, and he manages to stumble on. 2. Apparently Lawrence Blum’s. See his Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 3. ‘The Idea of Perfection’, in The Sovereignty of Good, p. 43. 4. Op. cit., p. 44. 5. Blum (op. cit.) also tends to picture this relation as one of oscillation rather than interdependence. 6. Neither am I simply excluding animals from being respectworthy, though of course Kant does so. But my main point can be made more clearly (and still without distortion) by here restricting attention to respect for human beings. 7. This echoes a main theme of the discussion of altruism in Chapter 3. 8. In the final chapter I say a little more about what is involved in seeing others in the light of this. Note that the point here is not that someone’s respect for distant others is guaranteed to be deep by the fact that he sees them as ‘like us and ours’ in the ways I described. That is not guaranteed because there may be serious limitations – whether cultural or individual – in the way someone ‘understands’ those he thinks of as ‘us’. The intelligibility to her of those forms of encounter I have described is normative for her respect being able to have a real depth and richness. Moreover, the fact that she herself encounters some others in such ways does not necessarily mean that she will show such respect for distant others, since she still may not see them in the

198 Notes

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

light of what is disclosed in those encounters. (It is a further question just how her failure to take that imaginative step is best described.) In Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) Charles Taylor distinguishes two ‘senses’ of respect, corresponding roughly to what I am calling a less and a more substantial conception. Because it is hard to see how what he calls the first sense could retain any force at all unless backed by the second I think it better to see these as two aspects of a single idea than as two distinct senses of respect. An intelligible object, to accommodate Kant’s point that we might still be able to recognize another as able to be wronged by us if our affective responses (including our capacity for remorse) had, for some contingent reason, gone dead. Then if we were to wrong her, the other might still be an intelligible, although not an actual, object of our remorse. (See below for further discussion of the Kantian point.) And conversely: only those with the power thus to show up our lives do we genuinely acknowledge as belonging to the same domain of meaning as ourselves. But this point has to be expressed carefully. Cortes and his men were apparently horrified by the Aztec practice of human sacrifice to the gods. But there is no reason to think that the Spaniards regarded their own conceptions as called into question by this Aztec practice so radically different from their own. Does this mean that, in my terms, they did not acknowledge the Aztecs as participant in the same domain of human meanings as they? No it does not mean that. The character of their horror was itself testament to their so acknowledging the Aztecs. For it presupposed that the sacrifice of those people was a terrible violation, and that presupposition manifests a sense of them – sacrificers and victims alike – as belonging to the same domain of meanings as they themselves did. Otherwise the sacrifice would not have horrified them in the way it did. (It would have instead been ‘just the sort of thing one expects mere savages to do, and anyway it was only other savages who were sacrificed’.) But their sense of the Aztecs as belonging to the same domain of meanings as themselves entails the possibility of their finding their lives to be shown up, called into question, in indefinitely various ways by the Aztecs, even if the Aztec practice of human sacrifice did not bring that about. See e.g. Beyond Good and Evil (London: Penguin Books, 1990), Part Nine: What is Noble. Nietzsche’s views have affinities with both Hegel’s and Sartre’s master-slave dialectics (though there are differences too). The provocative inadequacy of Kant’s moral philosophy makes itself felt here too. For Kant himself brings reverence and awe into close connection with respect. The problem lies in his appeal to Reason as the really deep ground and occasion of those attitudes. (That colours his sense of reverence and awe too, of course, which is different from Nietzsche’s sense of those things, and from the sense of those things that I have tried to elicit.) Of course there will be differences here between dogs and stones (and perhaps even between stones and trees as well as between trees and dogs). A dog can be contingently deprived of participation in its distinctively doggy life; and we can have a kind of pity for it which reflects our sense of that. In the absence, of course, of any special story – for example of a religious kind – that would discover a special significance in such creatures.

Notes 199

9. Goodness and Vulnerability 1. The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 201. 2. Op. cit., pp. 197–8. 3. The following remarks take part of Chapter 8’s discussion a little further. 4. That is compatible with acknowledging that love is itself always open to a deepening which it may not get, and against which much in our circumstances and psychic make-up often conspires. 5. ‘Persons, Character and Morality’, in Moral Luck. Pressing the claims of our personal projects and attachments against the imperialist demands of morality conceived of as an impartial system, Williams there writes: … somewhere … one reaches the necessity that such things as deep attachments to other persons will express themselves in the world in ways which cannot at the same time embody the impartial view, and … they also run the risk of offending against it … unless such things exist, there will not be enough substance or conviction in a man’s life to compel his allegiance to life itself. Life has to have substance if anything is to have sense, including adherence to the impartial system; but if it has substance, then it cannot grant supreme importance to the impartial system, and that system’s hold on it will be, at the limit, insecure. (p. 18) Williams sees our deep attachments to other persons – and more generally those ‘projects and categorical desires’ which make fundamental sense of our lives – as at the limit in deep and essential conflict with ‘the impartial system’, that ‘system’ which demands of us that we commit ourselves to ‘the impartial good ordering of the world of moral agents’ (p. 14). He seems to think that unless at certain moments of crisis our deepest personal attachments win out against those requirements, we will be cut off from the human sources of energy necessary for us to give any allegiance at all to ‘impartial’ morality. It is admittedly not entirely clear whether Williams here aims only to mark out the rationalistic distortion involved in thinking of morality simply as an impartial system. If so, then he might also hold that when morality is not conceived of as an impartial system someone may ‘grant supreme importance’ to moral or ethical claims without thereby depriving his life of ‘substance’. But his formulations suggest a stronger thesis: even when ethical claims are not understood on the model of such an impartial system – and indeed however broadly the idea of such claims is understood – they can still have only a limited purchase on us when they conflict with deep personal attachments if our lives are to continue to have any substance. 6. Nietzsche thought that any such conviction expressed complacently selfserving illusions. Nussbaum edges towards this thought too when she introduces The Fragility of Goodness thus: ‘This book will be an examination of the aspiration to rational self-sufficiency in Greek ethical thought: the aspiration to make the goodness of a good human life safe from luck through the controlling power of reason.’ This registers the desire to make ourselves

200 Notes secure as the motive for our recognizing absolute demands upon us. Nussbaum makes the point more explicitly later in the book: ‘… Plato’s elaboration of radical ethical proposals is motivated by an acute sense of the problems caused by ungoverned luck in human life…the elimination of this luck is a primary task of the philosophical art as he conceives it.’ (p. 90) Nussbaum also speaks of philosophy as a response to the ‘positive draw of transcendence itself’, but this motivation to philosophy seems incompatible with philosophy being conceived of as a projection of a psychological need to minimize the power of luck in our lives.

Bibliography Alanen, L., Heinamaa, S. and Wallgren, T. eds, Commonality and Particularity in Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1998 – now Palgrave) Altham, J. and Harrison, R. eds, World, Mind and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Andre, J. ‘Role Morality as a Complex Instance of Ordinary Morality’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 28, 1 (Jan 1991) Antonaccio, M. and Schweiker, W. eds, Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) Aquinas, T. Summa Theologica, Vol. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, Inc, 1947) Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. Thompson (Penguin Classics, 1976) — Poetics and Rhetoric, trans. T. Moxon (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1955) Baron, M. ‘On de-Kantianizing the Perfectly Moral Person’, Journal of Value Inquiry, 17 (1983) — ‘ The Alleged Moral Repugnance of Acting from Duty’, Journal of Philosophy (1984) — Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology (Cornell University Press, 1995) Blackburn, S. ‘Errors and the Phenomenology of Value’, in T. Honderich, ed. (1985) — Essays in Quasi-realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) Blum, L. Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Broadie, S. Ethics with Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) Casey, J. Pagan Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) Cavell, S. ‘The Avoidance of Love’, in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) Chesterton, G. Orthodoxy (London and Glasgow: Fontana Books, 1961) Cordner, C. ‘Honour, Community and Ethical Inwardness’, Philosophy, 72, 281 (July 1997) Curzer, H. ‘A Great Philosopher’s Not So Great Account of Great Virtue: Aristotle’s Treatment of “Greatness of Soul ”’ , Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 20, 4 (December 1990) Diamond, C. ‘Moral Differences and Distances: Some Questions’, in L. Alanen, S. Heinamaa and T. Wallgren, eds (1998) Dostoevsky, F. The Brothers Karamazov, trans. D. Magarshack (Penguin Classics, 1970) Foot, P. Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978) Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) Gaita, R. Good and Evil (London: Macmillan, 1991 – now Palgrave) — A Common Humanity (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999) Geras, N. ‘Richard Rorty and the Righteous among Nations’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 12 (1995) 201

202 Bibliography Goldberg, S. Agents and Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Hamilton, P. Wordsworth (Harvester, 1986) Hampshire, S. Morality and Conflict (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) Hare, R. ‘Universalisability’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 55 (1954–5) Herman, B. The Practise of Moral Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) Honderich, T. ed., Morality and Objectivity (London: Routledge, 1985) Hugo, V. Les Miserables (Paris: Gallimard, 1951) Hume, D. Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966) Husserl, E. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970) Irwin, T. Plato’s Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) — Aristotle’s First Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) Kant, I. Critique of Judgement, trans. J. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952) — Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964) — Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1976 – now Palgrave) Korsgaard, C. The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Kraut, R. Aristotle and the Human Good (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989) Lamb, R. ed., Love Analysed (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997) Levinas, E. Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) — Beyond Essence; Or Otherwise than Being, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981) McDowell, J. Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) MacIntyre, A. After Virtue, 2nd edn (Notre Dame University Press, 1984) Mackie, J. Ethics (New York: Penguin Books, 1977) Mayo, B. Ethics and the Moral Life (London: Macmillan, 1958 – now Palgrave) Murdoch, I. The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970) — Existentialists and Mystics, ed. P. Conradi (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997) Nagel, T. The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) Nietzsche, F. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1990) Nussbaum, M. The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) — ‘ Love and Vision; Iris Murdoch on Eros and the Individual’, in M. Antonaccio and W. Schweiker, eds (1996) — ‘ Love and the Individual’, in R. Lamb, ed. (1997) Pincoffs, E. Quandaries and Virtues (University Press of Kansas, 1986) Plato Gorgias, trans. W. Hamilton (London: Penguin Books, 1960) — Symposium, trans. W. Hamilton (London: Penguin Books, 1951) Porter, J. Moral Action and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Reinhardt, L. ‘Warranted Doability’, Philosophy, 63, 244 (March 1988)

Bibliography 203 Rorty, A. ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) Rorty, R. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Sartre, J.-P. Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (London and New York: Routledge, 1989) Strawson, P. ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974) Taylor, C. Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) Tolstoy, L. ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’, reprinted in L. Trilling, ed., The Experience of Literature (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1967) Urmson, J. Aristotle’s Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) Wallace, J. Virtues and Vices (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1978) Wilkes, K. ‘The Good Man and the Good for Man’, in A. Rorty, ed. (1980) Warnock, G. The Object of Morality (London: Methuen, 1971) Williams, B. Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) — Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) — Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) — Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985) — Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) Wordsworth, W. ‘The Prelude’, Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchison (London: Oxford University Press, 1966)

Index altruism, 46–7, 69, 72, 85 common understanding of, 46 contrast with egoism, 46–7 ethical limitations of, 48–69 Williams on egoism and, 53– 4 amoralist, Williams’, 54 –8, 185n16 lacks sense of injustice, 57 lacks sense of requirement, 57 Andre, J., 186n10 appearance and reality, various contrasts between, 13–14 before one’s peers as a condition of virtue, 27–32 Aquinas, St Thomas, 105–6, 111–13, 147, 193n12 Arendt, H., 128 Aristotle contrast between egoism and altruism of no concern to, 32– 4, 183n30 ethical distance of, from here, 21–3, 42– 4 ethical outlook of, misses goodness, 42, 108, 109–10, 113, 128 has a rosy view of ethical life, 124 –5 limiting classical assumptions of ethics of, 117–20 misses important dimensions of human reality, 19, 42, 108–10, 112–13, 116 on contingency and vulnerability, 174 on courage, 27–30; and the noble, 24, 27, 34 –6; and valour, 29; in battle, 27–8 on honour, 24 –7 on the limits of courage, 174 on the megalopsychos, 25–6, 30 –2, 35, 130 –2 on phronesis and particulars, 66, 194n22 on shame, 26, 27, 40, 41

on virtue and contemplation, 21, 28–9, 182n25 reasons for popularity of ethics of, 19–20 worldliness of ethics of, 23–32, 34, 183n30 autonomy, denial of, 4 does not explain violation in rape, 5–8 awe, 14, 18, 93, 138, 144, 158 Baron, M., 86–93 beauty, 6, 133–7 and harmony, 133–5 cancels narcissism, 135 related to the sublime, 137–8, 196n10 shock of, 136 benevolence, 46 Blackburn, S., 178n1,7 Blum, L., 197nn2,5 Broadie, S., 181n7, 183n30 Casey, J., 181n3, 182n20, 182n27 Cavell, S., 76–8, 186n15, 188n6 Chesterton, G. K., 144 Christianity, 15, 22, 164, 188n15 and absolute Otherness, 185n15 ethos of contrasted with Aristotle’s ethics, 21–3 Coleridge, S., 12, 18, 135 common humanity, sense of, 72, 73, 76–81, 84 compassion, 61– 4, 69–70, 72, 81, 111, 113, 115, 116 power of, to realize another, 64 shallower and deeper forms of, 62–3, 71 Curzer, H., 181n9 death penalty, 10 Dennett, D., 72 Diamond, C., 195n34

204

Index Donne, John, 197n13 Dostoevsky, F., 14, 82 duty, 87–101 action for the sake of, 172, 191n20 conception of, as reason for acting, 93– 4, 99–100 Kant on, 96–101 Kantian, outreaches all conceptions of it, 93, 94 –6 mistranslation of Kant on, 98, 191n20 (See obligation) egoism, 32, 33, 34, 46–8, 51, 52, 53 end, treating another as an, 4, 73 Foot, P., 180n2 Foucault, M., 10, 49 Freud, S., 124 –5 Gaita, R., 8, 15, 83, 90, 107, 158–9, 176, 181n3,182nn14, 27, 186n13, 188n14, 189n15, 193n8 generosity, 35 gentleness, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 Geras, N., 76–8, 79 Goldberg, S., 195nn29,35 Gone With The Wind, 168–70 goodness and Aristotelian and Humean virtue, 22, 109–10 and humility, 108 and individualizing attention, 108, 112, 120, 133 and love, 108–9, 115, 171 and vulnerability, 173–6 beyond virtue, 105–15, 120, 128 does not involve perfecting of powers, 106, 110 revelatory power of, 128 Good Samaritan, 84 grace of manner, Humean, 122, 123, 125, 126 gratitude, 111–14, 193n1 and resentment, Strawson on, 115–17 for material benefit, 111 for the spirit of another’s attention, 111–13

205

Hamilton, P., 188n12 Hampshire, S., 2, 144 Hare, R., 119–20 hatred, 142, 147–9 Heidegger, M., 196n6 Herman, B., 86, 87, 93– 4 hero as ethical figure, the, 30, 35, 40, 41 honour, 24 –7 hope, 97 Hugo, V., 147 Hume, D., 109–10, 118, 122–8 limiting classical assumptions of ethics of, 123, 125, 127–8 ethical outlook of, misses goodness, 109–10, 127–8 on grace of manner, 122, 123, 125, 126 humiliation, 40, 41, 116 humility, 97, 108 Husserl, E., 180n23 individuality, 119–29 impersonal dimension of, 113–14 one form of, realized by some forms of love, 109, 112–13, 115, 116, 119 three conceptions of, 120 –1, 128–9 Irwin, T., 29, 180n2 Ivan Ilych, 65–8, 95 judgement, determinant and reflective, 132– 4, 139– 40, 180n21, 196n5 justice, 113–14, 122, 136, 137, 168, 175 and love of individuals, 168–73 as a need of the soul, Weil on, 193n13 Kant, I. on beauty, 133– 4, 138 on determinant and reflective judgement, 132– 4, 139– 40, 132– 4, 180n21, 196n5 on duty and inclination, 96–103, 191n13 on the ‘friend of man’, 162–3 on the Moral Law, 101–2

206 Index Kant, I. – Continued on moral worth, 92, 94, 95–6 on motives and reasons, 99–100, 191n13 on Reason and Rationality, 8–9, 17, 50, 79, 198n13 on reverence, 102, 191n20, 198n13 on self-love, 96 on the sublime, 93, 137–8 on treating others as ends, 73, 191n13 on the unique value of human beings, 17 Keats, John, 79, 108, 132–3, 139 killing, awfulness of, 9–11 even when morally necessary, 9 not always manifest, 179n17 kindness, and kinship, 69, 71–2 deeper and shallower forms of, 71, 72 King, Martin Luther, 50 –1 Korsgaard, C., 184n8, 187n17, 192n5 Levinas, E., 77, 103, 180n26, 188nn9,10,13, 190n5 life-world, 13–15 and meaning of actions, 13 different realizations of, 13, 15, 16 limits of morality, Williams on, 174 –5, 176, 199n5 love adolescent, 6, 8, 143, 197n14 and compassion, 61– 4, 72, 81 and illusion, 145 and infatuation, 6–7, 143, 197n14 and justice, 172 and obsessiveness, 141, 171 and reverence and wonder, 85, 139– 44 erotic and sexual, 78, 145, 146, 179n12 gentleness and tenderness as forms of, 108–9, 110, 111–13 impersonal dimensions of, 153 of individuals, how related to respect, 154 –5, 156–8, 162 parental, 13, 89–91, 155

response to the requirements of, 90 –1, 168–71, 192n23 Romantic, 130, 145 Luke’s Gospel, St, 35, 141–2 MacIntyre, A., 67–8, 186n14, 190n20 Mackie, J., 178n7 Mark Antony, 34 –6 Marvell, A., 105 Mayo, B., 190n20 McDowell, J., 84, 173, 189n18 morality, habitual aspects of, 18, 151–3 moral order, shallower and deeper sense of, 175–6 motive ambiguity of concept of, 99 contrasted with reason for action, 99–100, 191n21 murder poverty of much philosophical reflection on, 8–10 terribleness of, 8–11 variable ethical aspects of, 179n14 Murdoch, Iris, 16, 107, 108, 130, 134 –6, 145, 146, 147, 151– 4, 171, 172 Nagel, T., 48–52 naturalism, ethical, 21 necessity, ethical, 70 –2, 90, 91, 188n2 Nietzsche, F., 159–60, 161, 186n3, 199n6 noble in Aristotle, the, 24, 27, 34 –6, 181n7 and honour, 24 –6 contrasted with the good, 24, 27 virtuous action for the sake of, 23 Nussbaum, M., 165–7, 175, 177, 194n23, 199n6 obligation, 187n17, 187n1, 192n5 (See duty) Oedipus, 15 otherness, and beauty, 136 and estrangement, 142 and hatred, 147–9

Index otherness, – Continued and sense of common humanity, 76–82, 84, 137–8 and the sublime, 137–8 absolute, 76–83, 143 Reason as inadequate for realizing, 79, 197n15 relative, 75–7 Pataki, T., 196n7 Paton, H., 191n20 Pincoffs, E., 104, 118, 190n20 Plato, Gorgias, 16–17 Phaedrus, 145–6 Symposium, 90, 166–7, 175 the good man invulnerable, 174 Porter, J., 105–6 presence, and absence, 131, 132, 137, 141, 143 of one person to another, 68, 70, 128 projectivism, 3– 4 quantifying, modern preoccupation with, 9, 11 rape, meaning of, 4 –8 Rawls, J., 72 reductionism, 20 Reinhardt, L., 195n1 remorse, 8, 37, 41–2, 70, 82–3, 116, 117, 158 resentment, 61, 64, 117, 175, 186n3 respect, 18, 154 –8 and forms of individual encounter, 154 –63, 197–8 and reverence, awe and fear, 158–62 combines seemingly incompatible elements, 161–2 contrasted with tolerance, 157–8 ethical limits of, 163– 4 Nietzsche on, 159–60 not a master concept in ethics, 163– 4 psychological conditions of, 162–3

207

relation of to love of individuals, 154 –5, 156–8, 162 universal scope of, 154 –5 response-dependence of moral concepts, 178n9 reverence, 15, 18, 102, 144, 158, 159 rights, 18, 72, 150, 157, 163 roles, 66, 74 –5 Rorty, R., 58, 85 Sartre, J. -P., 7, 198n12 Schiller, J. C. F., 108, 138 selflessness, 36, 45 Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra, 34 –5, 36 King Lear, 68–71 King Lear, 70, 78 The Winter’s Tale, 130 –2, 137, 138– 44, 145 shame, 26, 27, 40, 41, 142 and honour, 26–7 and humiliation, 40 –1, 116 contrasted with remorse, 37, 40, 41–2, 116 Singer, P., 58, 85, 150 slave-owner, 158–9 Sophocles’ Ajax, Williams on, 37– 43 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 127 Strawson, P. F., 115–17, 194n17 subjectivism, 12 sublime, the, 93, and absolute Otherness, 137–8 related to beauty, 137–8, 196n10 Taylor, C., 72–3, 104, 114 –15, 184n7, 198n9 tenderness, 108–9, 111–13 Tolstoy, L., 65 trust, 97 Urmson, J., 182n23 utilitarianism, 3, 9, 46, 179n18 valour, 29 violation, 2, 6, 7, 12, 15 depth of, in rape, 5–8 virtue and flourishing, 22, 105–6 and vulnerability, 174

208 Index virtue – Continued concept of, archaic, 107 dual meaning of, in Aquinas, 105 ethics of, 20, 21, 104, 114 goodness beyond, 105–15, 128 heroic conception of, 24, 30 involving the perfecting of powers, 105 Wallace, J., 180n2, 182n20, 190n20 Warnock, G., 3 Weil, S., 72, 111, 113, 193n13 Wiggins, D., 185n18 Wilde, Oscar, 15 Wilkes, K., 180n2 Williams, B., 36– 40, 43– 4, 46, 53–8, 59, 174 –5, 176, 179n19, 181n6,

184n39, 184n10, 185n19, 186n5, 199n5 Wittgenstein, L., 49, 189n18, 191nn17,18 wonder, 15, 17, 85, 139– 44 and estrangement, 142 at the refusal to act unjustly, 177, 189n19 contrasted with curiosity and puzzlement, 141–2 everyday life transformed by, 85 Wordsworth, William, 81–2, 189n19 Yeats, W. B., 78, 79 Zossima, the Elder, 82–3, 116–17, 188n15n