Review of Moral Philosophy and Moral Life by Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen, Oxford University Press, 2020
I
was hoping that someone would ask me to review this book, but they didn’t, so
I’m just reviewing it for my own sake. If I read a book without writing about
it, it tends to go in one ear and out the other. I’d like this one to stay in
my head.
Roughly speaking, the book is a kind of synthesis of all the best work (e.g. by Iris Murdoch, John McDowell, Alice Crary, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Cavell, and Cora Diamond) that has been done in the last seventy years or so on what moral philosophy (aka ethics) is and should be. This makes it sound like a compilation, which in a way it is, but only in the sense that the great pyramids are piles of rocks. Christensen seems to have read everything worth reading on the subject (which is a lot), understood it all (which is rare), and seen how best to fit it all together, including where to make necessary cuts, additions and adjustments. Respect for Christensen (and myself) requires critical engagement with her ideas and arguments, so I’ll try not simply to agree with everything she says, but I can’t muster much disagreement. In what follows I’ll try to provide a sense of what the book is about by questing, Quixote-style, for something to take issue with. Or, to put it perhaps less absurdly, I will try to apply some Cartesian acid of doubt and see what remains. The bottom line is that it is very acid-resistant. The second to bottom line is that I am going to get very nit-picky at times, but you should remember if you read on that my attempts to find fault all fail. In short, it’s a very good book indeed.
The
nature of the work is reflected in the cover, which shows what I think is EgonSchiele’s “House with Shingles”. The house looks as though it has been added to
over time, perhaps by different owners, so that there is a sense of the work of
construction’s having been done collectively and not all at once. It is a large
and appealing house. Similarly, Christensen’s work brings together ideas and
arguments from various philosophers, mostly from recent years but going back as
far as Aristotle. She combines them to create a capacious and attractive
account of what moral philosophy should be, and how it can relate to our moral
lives.
Christensen’s
goal, which is in some ways more modest than her title might suggest, is “to
present a suggestion for a renewed conception of moral philosophy
that is valuable in its own right and may also influence debates about the role
of moral theories and moral philosophy in relation to our moral lives.” (p. 3) What
her book is responding to, without necessarily claiming to provide a complete
response, is: “The challenge […] to present a substantial alternative that can
replace the twentieth-century view of moral philosophy as a theory-developing
science. “ (p. 6)
Instead
of telling us what to do, or providing some sort of mechanism for producing such
instruction, moral philosophy should be descriptive, she argues. This might
seem disappointingly unhelpful, but she offers a nice description of how moral
philosophy could be useful even while being purely descriptive and (in some
sense) leaving everything as it is:
philosophy
works on our attention, to give us a clearer view of moral life but also to
bring us to notice what we tend to overlook, or what we have never before
noticed as being of moral importance. Moral philosophy aids our orientation in
moral life in a way that is somewhat similar to the way that for example maps,
roads signs, aerial photographs and written descriptions may help our
orientation in a landscape, and a descriptive approach is in this way meant to
enable an understanding of moral life that reveals its many different features
and their vital importance to us. (p. 10)
Later
she says that “there are at least three ways in which descriptive moral
philosophy is practical, namely in furthering our moral orientation, our moral
attention, and our moral development” (p. 201) Such description is not neutral,
as might be thought. It is itself a moral task, requiring a sense of what
matters to moral thinking and moral life.
Her
argument for rejecting the idea of moral philosophy as (nothing but) normative
theory begins with the fact that both Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe posed
serious challenges to this conception of moral philosophy in the 1950s (specifically
Murdoch’s “Vision and Choice” in 1956 and Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” in
1958). Summarizing what she sees as the key points of these papers, at least as
far as her immediate project goes, Christensen notes that:
both
Murdoch and Anscombe criticise contemporary moral philosophers for being unduly
generalising, for reacting to the lack of an authoritative moral framework by
seeking a foundation where no foundation is available and for simply dressing
up their own favourite moral prejudices and conventions as moral theories.
These criticisms have resounded through moral philosophy since the two
pioneering articles were published (p. 19)
The
fact that criticisms have been made does not mean much on its own, of course,
but the response has not been sufficiently impressive. Martha Nussbaum’s
defence of moral theory, or moral philosophy as moral theory, for instance, fails
to address some criticisms of moral theory, instead focusing on what would
amount to criticisms only of bad theory. Or so Christensen argues. For
instance, Nussbaum mentions the criticism that moral theory offers crude
guidance, which Christensen seems to take to mean that theory allegedly gives
bad advice, which it sort of does, but I think maybe Nussbaum’s idea, or the
idea she is trying to capture and defend theory against, is that theory gives
overly simple or insufficiently nuanced advice, such as never lie or always
return weapons you have borrowed to their legal owner. Some critics of moral
theory think it is in the nature of a moral theory that it will always be
liable to problems of this sort, which involve undesirable inflexibility in
response to the details of particular circumstances. In this sense, allegedly,
even the best moral theory—not only a bad one—will give crude advice. (Whereas
Christensen writes that: “Nussbaum says that moral theory is criticised for
giving ‘crude guidance’, but it seems unlikely that this point would be raised
by theory-critics; it is rather a point of criticism that a proponent of one
theory would raise against another, different and competing theory” (p.33.)) So
it is possible that Christensen has misconstrued Nussbaum’s point here—though
also possible that she hasn’t (it might just as well be me who is misconstruing
Christensen)—but Christensen has much more to say against Nussbaum’s defence of
theory, and she takes up (and defends) precisely this kind of concern about
inflexibility later in the book. In other words, if she is wrong here then it
doesn’t matter in the end.
The
strongest pro-theory kind of view “allows theory to require revisions in our
moral understanding if such an understanding does not correspond to the
theory’s requirements” (p. 37) Against this view, Christensen draws on the work
of Bernard Williams, who:
opposes
the strong view of the authority of moral theory on the grounds that we cannot
provide a universally justified foundation of theory that would authorise a
revision of our moral convictions, to which he adds the stronger point that the
aim of moral thought is not to live up to certain theoretical requirements, for
example that of internal consistency, but to allow us to build a framework for
a liveable life. (p. 37)
To
this she adds a point from Julia Annas:
we should
be very sceptical of any conception of morality according to which what is
required of us morally is that we should act or think in accordance with
standards imposed on us from outside. This idea is problematic because it
misconstrues a basic feature of the moral, namely that we always ourselves bear
responsibility for making our own judgements, and thus it seems likely to
impede the development of our own abilities of moral discernment, judgement,
and critique. (p. 37)
I
wasn’t immediately sure that I agreed with Annas about this. It’s true that we
are responsible for making our own judgments, but must we be very skeptical of conceptions of
morality that see standards as being imposed on us from outside? For instance,
as being commanded by God? Or as being required by what we might call the
nature of things? Where, for instance, does the idea come from that I must not
thwart your will for the sake of my own? Perhaps ‘nowhere’ is the right answer
(we shouldn’t be looking for a place if we want to understand the source of
ethics), but ‘from our community’ or ‘from your reality as a fellow being’ seem
like reasonable attempts at an answer. Christensen shows considerable sympathy
for the former of these answers (‘from our community’), at least, so once again
I don’t think I’m seriously disagreeing with her here. A lot probably depends
on exactly what meaning, or what weight, we put on the words ‘standards’ and
‘imposed’. To the extent that I adopt a standard, I don’t get to use the excuse
that it was imposed on me by my parents or society (or God). And, even more in
Annas’s and Christensen’s favor, Annas is talking about the kind of moral
theory that offers a decision procedure to tell you what to do. (See Annas p.33, here.) So it’s a particular kind of standard imposed from
outside that she is arguing against (or a particular sense of ‘outside’, one
enabling the shifting of blame or shirking of responsibility, that is
problematic), and this is the very kind of thing that Christensen is arguing
against too. So, once again, there is nothing to disagree with here after all.
Another
point I wondered about is Christensen’s use of Lars Hertzberg’s argument against
moral expertise:
a moral
question—Hertzberg’s example is that of a woman considering whether she should
have an abortion—is always a question for a particular person in a particular
situation, and the answer will always have to consider this context. In the
example, the woman’s answer will have to take into account her specific moral
commitments and her particular situation, and her decision should be shaped by
the way she relates to this type of moral question as well as her commitments
and values. This also means that even if the woman finds that she has reached
the right decision about what to do, we will find it understandable if she is
still reluctant to claim that her reasons are valid or authoritative for other
women facing a similar choice. Even if another person finds that the woman’s
decision is the right one, she may still not be able to make the same decision,
to integrate it into her own life, to live that kind of life. (p. 39)
I
agree that, “Because of the normative character of moral questions, the answers
to such questions are to be judged by moral standards, for
example whether our answers express something that we are seriously committed
to and that we have integrated into our moral lives.” (p. 39). And the idea
that a moral question is always a particular question for a particular person
sounds right. But can’t we, nevertheless, oppose all actions of a certain kind
(slavery, torture, etc.)? At least in advance of finding ourselves in some
especially terrible situation that makes us question even our most basic moral
commitments? For instance, isn’t it possibly commendable for someone to be
committed to the Ten Commandments in a way that resists adding anything to them
about context?
Take
the examples of being committed never to lie and being committed never to
discriminate against a member of a disadvantaged minority on the grounds of
race. (See, e.g., Roger Teichmann here.) It is true that exactly what one does will always
take into account the particular situation one is in. How could it not? But if
we were to add words like “always taking the specific context into account” to
these commitments the effect would seem to be either nothing at all (in which
case why add them?) or else a dilution of the commitment itself, as if an
excuse for breaching it were being built in. Which is not to say that either
Hertzberg or Christensen is wrong, but it is to say something about how I think
their points ought to be taken. We need to contextualize contextualization,
perhaps, or at least not take arguments for considering things in context out
of the context in which those arguments occur.
With
that in mind, maybe I should address the original example of abortion. I have
introduced other examples because I agree with Hertzberg and Christensen when
it comes to abortion. But I think this means that I disagree morally with pro-life people on this issue,
not that they are missing some general, purely philosophical, point about the
importance of context.
Still,
I agree with Hertzberg’s and Christensen’s larger point that, “The idea of
moral expertise seems attractive to us, because it allows us to engage in a
form of moral escapism by offering us a way in which we can
avoid confronting our fundamental moral responsibility for our decisions.” (p.
39) And since the example of the woman wondering about having an abortion was
brought up precisely in order to support this idea about moral expertise, I
don’t think I count as really disagreeing with what Christensen is saying here
at all.
She
has more to say about general moral principles later in the book: “Even if
general principles play a role in coming to the right moral understanding of a
situation and thus to the right moral decision, the application of moral
principles will always rely on some form of judgement of the particular case at
hand.” (p. 77) It is clear that she does not at all deny that general
principles have a role to play. Her point is much more that they alone are not
enough. And that seems right.
But
this is a difficult kind of truth to handle without doing damage, I think, so I
want to say a bit more about it. (I don’t think I will be contradicting
Christensen here, but the discussion might show what she is doing in a non-obvious
and therefore possibly useful light.) What she says about general moral
principles makes me think of two examples from Elizabeth Anscombe. One is her
saying that “if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is
open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of
the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue
with him; he shows a corrupt mind.” (“Modern Moral Philosophy”) The other is
the story that Rosalind Hurtshouse relates about Anscombe describing a
real-life case of a woman hiding Jewish people from the Nazis when the SS came
to the door. “Clearly, she must not lie,” Anscombe says, shockingly. (The woman
feigned madness so as to embarrass the young SS officer, thereby saving her
guests and avoiding the sin of lying. See my Anscombe’s Moral Philosophy pp. 21-22 for more.)
So
does Christensen come too close to showing a corrupt mind by saying that “the
application of moral principles will always rely on some form of judgement of
the particular case at hand”? Does her saying this somehow undermine, if only a
little bit, the impressive force of Anscombe’s “Clearly, she must not lie”? (In saying that I think there is
impressive force in what Anscombe says I don’t mean that I agree with her. For
better or worse, it isn’t clear to me that one must not lie to the SS in those
circumstances. But I certainly don’t want to rule out a view like Anscombe’s as
somehow illegitimate either morally or philosophically.)
Anscombe’s
idea seems to be that a morally healthy mind will not only be guided by certain
principles, such as “Thou shalt not bear false witness” and “it is disgraceful
to choose an unjust action” (another example from “Modern Moral Philosophy”),
but also that it will rely on such ideas as what we might call primary guides.
A person with such a mind will not only find that general principles play a role in their moral thinking,
albeit one that is informed by personal judgments about particular cases. These
principles will likely be the first
things that come to mind when she faces a moral problem, and they will be
regarded as beyond doubt. They are authoritative, understood as either the
literal command of God or at least something analogous to it. Any suggestion
that the agent’s own judgment might play a role or that the details of each
situation will need to be taken into account, however true the suggestion might
be, could be regarded as likely to have a corrupting influence, if only on the
philosophically unsophisticated. The uneducated and the insufficiently ethical
might be best kept away from any suggestion that God’s commandments are not
enough to guarantee right action. This is the kind of truth that Averroes
thought best kept to philosophers.
But
philosophers are the audience that Christensen is addressing, so I think she is
not guilty of the charge of corruption that I am considering here. In fact,
Anscombe’s story about how to deal with the SS without lying might be exactly
the kind of imaginative thinking in context that Christensen is pointing to
when she says that “the application of moral principles will always rely on
some form of judgement of the particular case at hand”.
The
point of this detour, apart from helping me think things through, is to bring
out the fact that Christensen’s work itself needs to be understood in a certain
context and as an intervention in, or contribution to, a particular debate
rather than as a flat statement of a-contextual truths. Her skepticism about
general principles is skepticism about over-emphasis on the importance of
general principles in moral philosophy. It is not primarily about the use of
such principles in moral life. And to the extent that it is about such use (I
don’t know her views on this), Christensen would admit that this is a moral
view of hers, not something that is delivered up by neutral, objective,
impartial philosophical reasoning.
Let’s
move on to see if there is anything else one might reasonably disagree with. Christensen
says that, “According to Kant, theory has authority over our moral commitments
only insofar it explicates what we in fact already adhere to. This
means that moral theory cannot test or correct moral practice” (p. 40) But if a
theory designed to explicate what we already adhere to finds—or rather,
reveals, to our satisfaction—one of our commitments to be out of step with the
others, couldn’t this at least suggest that we might reconsider that one
commitment? Isn’t this part of the idea of reflective equilibrium, which Christensen
endorses early in the book? It turns out that the answer is Yes.
On
reflective equilibrium, she goes on to say: “the method of reflective
equilibrium is not a method for awarding any kind of impersonal authority to
anything, instead, it must begin from authorities I already recognise, and it
only awards the result the authority that I reached this result by a process of
reflection (a process of reflection that other people might or might not
acknowledge to be authoritative for them)” (p. 42) This seems right to me.
Another
question I had concerns this claim, in chapter 4: “For moral reasoning to be
successful, we need a comprehensive understanding of the good life of human
beings, as stressed by Aristotle and McDowell…” (p. 89) Maybe we need some
vague idea of the good life in order to engage in moral reasoning, but do we
really need a comprehensive understanding? Well, to answer my own question,
what do we (want to) mean by ‘successful’? And by ‘moral reasoning’? What about
the person who does not go in for philosophy but thinks that it cannot be
anything but shameful to prefer an unjust course of action to a just one? He
will therefore do what (he believes) is just, even if it might have bad
consequences. Whether this counts as successful will depend at least in part on
whether we agree with his choice of action. Which will depend on us and on the
particular situation he is in. But we might also say that this does not count
as moral reasoning, because he in a sense rejects the idea of reasoning about
what to do in this (kind of) case. He does think a bit, but perhaps not enough
for what he does to count as moral reasoning.
Once
again, I think there will only seem to be a problem here—if there does seem to
be a problem—if we take this quotation out of context. What Christensen is
doing is making a list of features that the ideal moral reasoner will have. The
list includes an understanding of the good life for a human being, the ability
to perceive without prejudice or selfishness, and imagination. She does not
imply that no one could ever think well about a given ethical question unless
they had all of these desirable qualities to the highest possible degree.
She
has a lot more to say about all this, though, and it is worth looking at some
of it here:
We require
of sound and reflective moral reasoning that it arises from a coherent
understanding of how to live to which the person in question is implicitly or
explicitly committed. It is however important not to confuse the criteria
for consistency with those of coherence. Where consistency requires
generalisation and complete uniformity, coherence can allow for gradations and
context-dependence, and moral reasoning can involve descriptions, narratives, metaphors, exemplary experiences, and so on, as that which
establishes the coherence of a view of life. The criteria for sound moral
reflection are not formal or theoretical, but rather themselves moral, and
standards not just of the coherence but also of the sensitivity and
conscientiousness of the judgements which flow from this form of reflection.
Moreover, as these criteria concern a person’s ‘understanding of how to live a
moral life’, they also allow for considerable individual variety with regard to
what is given weight in moral reflection... (pp. 92-93)
My first reaction to this is to
ask, do we require this? That sounds a bit demanding. But then “arises from” allows
for some wiggle room. And to be implicitly
committed to an understanding of how to live also allows for some
interpretative maneuvering or difference of understanding. There’s something
slightly mercurial here, but I think maybe she’s right, and that getting the
truth right here just does inevitably involve a kind of oscillating movement
that might seem deceptive to unsympathetic or insufficiently careful readers.
We do require coherent understanding of some kind, at least in the sense that
incoherence and misunderstanding are certainly undesirable. What might seem
evasive is perhaps just a recognition of what exactly this means—partly, of how
little it means. It isn’t nothing, but it doesn’t involve the onerous
commitment that it might sound as though it brings. As Christensen says, the
criteria are themselves moral, so they are no more demanding than morality
itself. And there isn’t some neutral, objective thing called philosophy that
dictates what they are or ought to be
This subtle, dialectical motion
between something that sounds rigorous or demanding and recognition of
flexibility and variety is something that Christensen is explicit about, and it
is reflected in the way she writes. She often uses the first person singular,
but she also uses the plural, and often writes in an impersonal way (e.g. “The work done in this chapter is in line with this
criticism, but the main aim is to move beyond criticism and provide a sketch
of how and to what extent particular features of our moral
lives take on moral importance,” p. 103). This could no doubt be solely for the
sake of variety, but it also reflects what she calls “the Wittgensteinian idea that
moral philosophy develops in a movement back and forth between the general and
theoretical on the one hand and the particular and concrete on the other” (p.
105). There is the work, there is our work, and there is Christensen’s
work, each of which is the same project, but seen from different points of
view. The reader is invited to join in, as happens in Plato’s, Descartes’s, and
Wittgenstein’s work, albeit with little chance of going off in a different
direction. That’s books for you, of course, but it’s also because the argument
is a very strong current to swim against.
Even
so, surely I disagree with Christensen when she disagrees with me? Here’s where
that happens:
In a
conversation with the Vienna circle, Wittgenstein commented on his own ‘A Lecture
on Ethics’: ‘At the end of my lecture on ethics I spoke in the first person. I
think that this is something very essential. Here is nothing to be stated
anymore; all I can do is to step forward as an individual and speak in the
first person’ (WVC 117). Some interpreters have taken this remark as a
rejection of the possibility of doing philosophical work with regard to the
moral, but this conclusion is premature.[footnote] What
Wittgenstein is saying is rather that when we leave moral
philosophy, that is, the philosophical activity of trying to describe morally
relevant ways of talking, which he is doing for most of the lecture, it is
important to change perspective from the third to the first person, because we
then turn to an exploration of actual moral importance that is tied to the
positions of actual human beings. (p. 112)
The footnote mentions me as an example of such an interpreter.
In
my defence, when Wittgenstein engages in the philosophical activity of trying
to describe morally relevant ways of talking he concludes that it can’t be
done, or perhaps rather that morally relevant ways of talking are all
nonsensical. To try to talk ethics is to talk nonsense, he says, and to talk
about ethics is to point this out. He might be wrong, and his later self might
have disagreed with what he said here, but I don’t think the author of the
Lecture on Ethics thought there was anything more to be said about ethics.
There’s no sense in that lecture that if only he had more time he could say a
lot more. At least it doesn’t seem so to me.
But
I agree with the last sentence quoted above. He has been doing moral philosophy
for most of the lecture, diagnosing ethical talk (or whatever we want to call
it) as nonsense. And then he talks in the first person. He does not consider
this to be doing philosophy. Perhaps he should, but he doesn’t. So then I think
the disagreement is that I have said that nothing
can be said about ethics, that no
moral philosophy can be done, according to the author of the Lecture on Ethics,
and Christensen is pointing out that the lecture itself is surely intended to
be a work of moral philosophy. And I think I have to agree with that.
Most
of her argument is presented by way of other people’s views, carefully
explained and quoted, (she even presents some of her own ideas by way of a
discussion of Oskari Kuusela’s similar thinking), but she also offers
criticisms of her own of people she largely disagrees with (e.g. Onora O’Neill
and Martha Nussbaum on theory) and people she mostly agrees with (e.g. Margaret
Urban Walker).
One
of the people she mostly, but not entirely, agrees with is Raimond Gaita. In a
discussion about how a slave owner might some to see a slave as fully human
(rightly correcting Gaita’s apparent overlooking of this possibility),
Christensen says that the slave owner’s wife might become jealous (the owner
has raped the slave) and her jealousy could “open the slave owner’s eyes to how
the slave is indeed an intelligible object of love and thus an intelligible
object of jealousy” (p. 164). The idea seems to be that the slave owner thinks
something like: if my wife is jealous of the slave I have been raping then that
slave must be an intelligible object of love. This does seem possible. And that
is all that Christensen claims.
But,
if I can respond to what I think she might seem to be implying, I don’t think
the possibility of jealousy necessarily implies the possibility of love. The
slave owner and his wife might agree that of course he could never love the
slave, and yet the slave owner’s wife might still feel jealous. She might dimly
sense some possibility of love even while denying this possibility. Or she
might think that some feeling that is not quite love could exist between them,
this feeling being too close to real love for her comfort. Still, as I say, to
say this is not to contradict what Christensen actually says. And it pales into
complete insignificance against the achievement of improving on work as good as
Gaita’s. (Stanley Cavell gets similar treatment too.)
Christensen says at the end of the book that she feels unable to summarize what she has done in it, and I sympathize. It’s a very careful thinking through of a large body of already very thoughtful work, a thinking through that combines synthesis, criticism, and construction. It’s very hard to disagree with any of it, but it also isn’t really the kind of thing you can just agree with and then leave behind. It’s a work that delivers not results so much (e.g. proven theories) as a clearer vision of what moral philosophy ought to be, what it means to live a moral life, and how the two relate to each other. Agreeing with it means henceforth going on in a certain kind of way when one does ethics and attempts to live ethically. We’ll see how that goes.
