More in response to Hamilton's review

Hamilton writes that:

Christensen follows thinkers such as Nussbaum, Murdoch and others in telling us that we have to develop our faculties of moral discernment, overcome our egoism, avoid wishful thinking etc. (88-9). This is all very well, but…

Christensen is less preachy, it seems to me, than this might make her sound. As the back cover says, what she is doing is “to present an understanding of descriptive moral philosophy,” which is not the same thing as “telling us that we have to” engage in such a project. On the other hand, it would be hard to argue that “adequate moral attention” (Christensen p. 88) is not desirable. The overcoming of “egoistic tendencies to wishful thinking” (Christensen p. 89, paraphrasing Murdoch) is necessary for an “accurate understanding of moral life,” Christensen says (p. 89). It is not something that she presents as a categorical imperative. Her focus is on what we will need to see things adequately, accurately, and “in their proper perspective” (Hannah Arendt, quoted on p. 90), as well as how we can understand “what will best serve the other person” (K. E. Løgstrup, quoted on p. 90). Hamilton seems to object not so much to the goal of seeing things accurately and in the right perspective—how could he object to that?—as to the emphasis on helping others. But Christensen’s focus is much more on the former than the latter, and she is detailing what we need if we want to do these things far more than she is recommending that we do them. Perhaps the objection is that she presupposes that we want to help others, but it’s hardly unreasonable for a book on moral philosophy and moral life to assume that its readers want to be moral. Or perhaps it’s the very reasonableness of the project that annoys Hamilton, but I find that I cannot imagine philosophy that doesn’t aim at being either reasonable or rational. And rationality without reasonableness seems worse than the kind of work that Christensen is doing and recommending to her readers.

It is also relevant that Christensen talks about exploring “different ways of living and thinking” (p. 90), so she is not committed to an exclusive concern with comfortable lives, even if she is perhaps writing primarily for (or talking to) people who live such lives. Hamilton’s examples of people who do not lead such lives reminded me of Hobart Wilson, whose story is told and discussed in Cora Diamond’s “Moral Differences and Distances: Some Questions.” Implicit in Christensen’s work, it seems to me, is the suggestion that we find out about lives such as his, and bring appreciation of them into our lives. None of us knows Wilson, who died in 1981, but we can know the version of his life told by Chip Brown. Of this person, Stephen Mulhall writes:

Brown’s Hobart Wilson is someone whose inextinguishable vitality is capable of inducing a conversion in others—of suddenly revealing (surprisingly, even shockingly) that what I had hitherto regarded as morality’s unquestionable priority over non-moral values and interests was in fact a deeply constricting refusal on my part to appreciate the turbulent heterogeneity—the sheer unruliness—of our experience of one another and of the world we share. [Maria Balaska, ed., Cora Diamond on Ethics, p. 184]

Mulhall’s reaction is exactly the kind of thing, I take it, that Christensen is trying to encourage and enable us to have. She isn’t writing for people like Wilson, as far as I can see, but then he would hardly be likely to read a work of philosophy at all, even if it were written in a very different style. Is she perhaps guilty of writing without awareness of non-moral values? Well, maybe. Given the title of her book, naturally she focuses on moral values. But I don’t see that she rules out the existence of other values. Indeed, as I say, she provides very thoughtful and insightful advice on how to attend not to morality but to reality in precisely the kind of way that might best make one aware of non-moral values. So the criticism really seems to come down to the fact that Christensen did not write some other book on a different subject. And that just isn’t really a criticism that can be taken seriously except as an invitation to write another book. Which is no criticism at all.