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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
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Ethical Encounter
The Depth of Moral Meaning
Christopher Cordner
Lecturer in Philosophy
University of Melbourne
Australia
© Christopher Cordner 2002
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by
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To my parents
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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(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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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