job:LAY00 12-10-1998 page:5 colour:1 black±text Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory ✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥ edited by JANE ADAMSON, RICHARD FREADMAN, DAVID PARKER job:LAY00 12-10-1998 page:6 colour:1 black±text published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge cb2 1rp, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, United Kingdom 40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011–4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia © Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, David Parker 1998 ‘‘The Literary Imagination in Public Life’’ is from Poetic Justice by Martha Nussbaum © 1995 Martha Nussbaum, reprinted by permission of Beacon Press. ‘‘Ethics in Many Different Voices’’ is reprinted by permission of the publisher from Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics by Annette Baier, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, copyright © 1994 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. ‘‘Martha Nussbaum and the Need for Novels’’ by Cora Diamond is from Philosophical Investigations, vol. 16, no. 2, April 1993, and is reprinted by permission of Blackwell. This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1998 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeset in Palatino 10/12.5 pt [vn] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 0 521 62079 1 hardback isbn 0 521 62938 1 paperback job:LAY00 12-10-1998 page:7 colour:1 black±text ✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥ Contents ✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥ Introduction: the turn to ethics in the 1990s page 1 david parker I: ETHICS, LITERATURE, AND PHILOSOPHY 1 Deepening the self 21 The language of ethics and the language of literature simon haines 2 Martha Nussbaum and the need for novels 39 cora diamond 3 The concept of dread 65 Sympathy and ethics in Daniel Deronda lisabeth during 4 Against tidiness 84 Literature and/versus moral philosophy jane adamson II: ETHICS AND AGENCY 5 What differences can contemporary poetry make in our moral thinking? 113 charles altieri vii job:LAY00 12-10-1998 page:8 colour:1 black±text Contents 6 Moral luck in Paris: A Moveable Feast and the ethics of autobiography 134 richard freadman 7 The unseemly profession 161 Privacy, inviolate personality, and the ethics of life writing paul john eakin 8 The patient writes back 181 Bioethics and the illness narrative john wiltshire III: POLITICS AND ETHICS 9 Literature, power, and the recovery of philosophical ethics 201 c. a. j. coady and seumas miller 10 The literary imagination in public life 222 martha c. nussbaum 11 Ethics in many different voices 247 annette c. baier 12 Common understanding and individual voices 269 raimond gaita Index 289 viii job:LAY01B 12-10-1998 page:3 colour:1 black±text 1 ✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥ Deepening the self The language of ethics and the language of literature ✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥ SIMON HAINES After twenty-five years of confusion and denial, literary criticism in English is starting to rediscover literature as a distinctive mode of thought about being human, and to regain confidence in itself as a manner of attending to that thought. Valuable support in this process of recovery has come from the diverse group of moral philosophers surveyed in this chapter, who have been critical of the dissociated conceptions of language and the self delivered to us, or imposed on us, by the Enlightenment. Even these philos- ophers, however, have too seldom seen that, and hardly ever shown how, it is literature which has actually been the principal mode of thinking about this problem since the seventeenth cen- tury. For thirty or forty years now there has been a steady flow of criticism from a group of English-speaking moral philosophers, directed at what they see as the two dominant and interlocking traditions in modern Western moral philosophy. The first of these traditions, predominantly Anglo-Saxon, empirical and utilitarian, derives from Bacon, Locke, and Bentham. It has been represented this century by G. E. Moore and his various ‘intu- itionist’ and ‘emotivist’ inheritors, especially H. A. Prichard, David Ross, C. L. Stevenson, and R. M. Hare. The other tradition is principally a Continental European one, deriving from Descartes and Kant, with its own twentieth-century incarnations, especially in existentialism. The origins of the modern group of moral philosophers critical 21 job:LAY01B 12-10-1998 page:4 colour:1 black±text Simon Haines of these two traditions lie, I believe, in three seminal essays: ‘Fallacies in Moral Philosophy’, by Stuart Hampshire;1 ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, by Iris Murdoch;2 and ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, by G. E. M. Anscombe.3 But there are now many philosophers who in their various ways have worked and are still working within a territory first sketched out in the aforemen- tioned essays. A list only of the most eminent would include Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, Annette Baier, Martha Nussbaum, and Raimond Gaita. All, however, express the same frustration at our having been told for nearly a century (Moore’s Principia Ethica came out in 1903) that in ethics the important things are the ones we cannot speak about; or that to speak about them is simply to say ‘boo’ or ‘hurrah’ with rhetorical embellishments; or that the moral questions which really matter are not ‘How should one live?’ or even ‘What should I do?’, but ‘What kind of thing is a moral judgment?’, and ‘What kind of concept is ‘‘good’’?’ Be- tween them, these recent thinkers have helped to restore to philos- ophy this lost and vital language of the self: although many novelists and poets, and some critics, might say that for them it has never been lost at all. The philosophers we are concerned with argue, first, that philos- ophy since the Enlightenment has never thought historically enough, and that this failing has been deeply damaging this century, not just to our philosophical moral thinking but to all our moral thinking, and therefore not just to our thinking but to our very lives. Secondly, they believe that modern moral philosophy, and again, therefore, our lives, are partly grounded in an impover- ished and blinkered philosophy of language,this century’s inherit- or of a correspondingly inadequate Enlightenment philosophy of mind. Thirdly, they are saying that these philosophies of mind and language spring from – indeed partly constitute – a certain picture of the human personality or sense of the self; and that this picture or sense is, again, both attenuated and deracinated. The logician W. V. O. Quine once joked that there are two kinds of philosopher: historians of philosophy, and philosophers. In Iris 1 In Mind, 58 (1949), reprinted in Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philos- ophy, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre (Indiana, 1983). 2 In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume xxx, (July 1956). 3 In Philosophy, 33.124 (January 1958). 22 job:LAY01B 12-10-1998 page:5 colour:1 black±text Deepening the self Murdoch’s suggestion that ‘morality must, to some extent at any rate, be studied historically’ (‘Vision and Choice in Morality’) we can hear the beginnings of a rebuttal of that deep twentieth- century prejudice. G. E. M. Anscombe’s paper two years later argued much more fully that when nowadays we speak of ‘obliga- tion’ and ‘duty’, or of what is ‘morally’ right or wrong, or of a ‘moral’ sense of ‘ought’, we are relying on ‘an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives’. That special modern sense of the word ‘moral’, implying an implicit compulsion to act in a certain way, depends, Anscombe argues, on the survival of a law conception of ethics, and ultimately a divine law conception, which only made sense within the now-collapsed Judeo-Christian framework. But we go on keeping a flavour of special compulsion – not always a particularly pleasant one – by preserving a founda- tional concept like ‘morally wrong’ to explain a supposedly non- foundational concept like ‘unjust’ or ‘unchaste’. The very fact that her second example may already sound quaint to some ears lends weight to Anscombe’s contention that our blindness to the history living within moral concepts leads us to truncate them, to reduce all of them to a few elementary common denominators. We have suffered a real ‘loss of concepts’, in Murdoch’s phrase: and there- fore a dilution of experience. Anscombe’s paper was important because in it a mainstream philosopher was thinking both historically and critically about philosophical concepts. Major recent works in this vein, such as Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1989) or Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), with their repeated references to ‘simulacra of morality’ or ‘conceptual impoverishment’, are likewise both his- torical and critical: whereas traditional histories of philosophy, including – in this field – Mary Warnock’s excellent Ethics Since 1900 (1960), or even MacIntyre’s Short History of Ethics (1966), are historical and descriptive. For Anscombe and her fellows, key moral concepts, in general as well as professional contemporary use, can only be fully understood historically. As Taylor would say, history is constitutive of those concepts. They do not have a lightweight lexicographical component of passing antiquarian interest, and then the real, lean and mean, heavyweight, analytical component. In the words of the American pragmatist Richard Rorty, ‘phil- osophy needs to relive its past in order to answer its questions’: 23 job:LAY01B 12-10-1998 page:6 colour:1 black±text Simon Haines although surely the fuller claim is that philosophy needs to live its past in its present simply to understand its questions.