Nordic Wittgenstein Review 5 (No. 1) 2016 BOOK REVIEWS Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought by Alice Crary Stina Bäckström Crary, Alice (2016). Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought. Harvard University Press. We treat animals deplorably. Images will focus on the two perhaps most from inside a chicken factory farm, important claims: 1) humans and for instance, are gut-wrenching. What non-human animals are equally inside sorts of consideration should be ethics in that they have observable allowed into our calls for change? moral characteristics, 2) we should This is the central concern of Inside look to disciplines inside ethics, such Ethics. Crary’s contention is that the as literature and the arts, for debate about the rights and welfare empirical descriptions of human and of animals has been hampered by a animal lives relevant to ethical widely shared assumption: human considerations. (Two terminological beings and other animals do not notes: Crary uses ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ possess observable moral interchangeably, and she uses characteristics. To dislodge this ‘animal’ and not, say, ‘non-human assumption and show by example the animal’, to refer to animals of the reasoning that then becomes non-human variety. I will follow her available is Crary’s main aim. usage.) Inside Ethics is directed both at Why is it, Crary wonders, that professional philosophers and others many philosophers and non- who share the concerns of the book. philosophers invested in the ethical In this regard, it is exemplary. It standing of animals, think that the brings philosophy to bear on facts relevant to this debate need to practical issues, while also making be themselves normatively neutral? contributions to philosophy. There The answer, Crary argues, is that are many controversial points in the there is a widely shared metaphysical book that deserve discussion, but I assumption according to which 131 Book Reviews CC-BY moral values are not features of the the idea that the psychological objective world. This assumption is significance of human and animal supported by a particular conception behavior comes into view within an of what objectivity requires: in order ethical conception of the kind of to be objective, empirical animal in question. By ‘ethical descriptions cannot contain conception’ Crary means a concern references to our responses. On this for what matters in the life of the conception, objectivity needs to live animal we’re interested in. up to an abstraction requirement, Psychological properties are, for according to which what is objective Crary, examples of empirical, is what is left once we have observable, phenomena that become abstracted from subjectivity. She calls available given “ethically loaded this the ‘narrower conception of understandings of the lives of the objectivity’. Using resources from the creatures” to whom psychological later Wittgenstein and John concepts apply (62). Psychological McDowell, Crary argues that the thought is thus, for Crary, essentially abstraction requirement is a a kind of ethical thought. Since Crary philosophical myth. Strictly thought finds no persuasive argument to the through, not even the most effect that we should discredit the paradigmatic cases of objective most obvious and unproblematic thought (such as arithmetic) stand for cases of attributions of mental it. Thus, she argues, there is no properties, she argues that such reason to discard the idea of thinking is also cognitively objective, observable, moral authoritative. Crary’s view “invites us properties just because their to conceive our categories for availability depends on us having the thinking about psychological qualities right modes of responsiveness to as ethically inflected categories” and them. Rather, the right way to ensure at the same time “it asks us to objectivity is to ask whether the understand these categories as properties in question can “survive essentially matters of sensitivity to critical scrutiny and establish how things really are” (37). themselves as authoritative” (82). According to Crary, seeing Something that has survived such animal life in psychological categories critical scrutiny has, as Crary puts it, means, for instance, noting that cognitive authority, and this notion is certain things are dangerous for the the core of the wider conception of animal whereas others are desirable; objectivity that Crary herself that some things need to be espouses. protected and others are to-be- By turning to philosophy of befriended, and so on. This mind, Crary argues that moral perspective is one from which the properties are objective in this wider world is value-laden. Importantly, the sense. In one of the most interesting world is given in terms of values not sections of the book, Crary defends 132 Nordic Wittgenstein Review 5 (No. 1) 2016 only for the animals, but also for us. Since disciplines inside ethics – Crary says: disciplines that do not set aside any ethical concerns but allow themselves Our ability to recognize a full use of moral imagination – are creatures as possessing the ones within which ethical [psychological] characteristics objective characteristics are allowed presupposes that we have at to come most clearly into view, Crary least imaginatively adopted an argues that ethics should look to attitude towards them as them for empirical guidance. She beings who are caught up in thinks science legitimately sets aside such lives [where things are, ethical concerns of the sort she has in e.g., dangerous] and who mind, and that this makes the accordingly, in appropriate empirical descriptions science yields circumstances, merit specific ill-suited for subsequent ethical modes of concern and reflection. In literature and the arts, attention. […] Despite the by contrast, ethical concerns are general philosophical antipathy allowed to inform the accounts and to the idea of objective moral the emanating descriptions are values, these values are therefore more valuable in ethics. embedded in pervasive and entirely unmysterious features Thus Crary arrives at the of animate life. (p. 88) thoughts that human beings and animals have observable moral The step taken in this passage is properties and that we should look to important, because it is what makes disciplines inside ethics for empirical thinking about what matters in the guidance. Let us begin our reflection life of an animal a kind of ethical on these claims by asking whether thinking. That is, unless such there is not a tension between them. thinking had immediate bearing on In my summary of Crary’s argument how we should treat the animal, we against the narrower conception of would be left with normative objectivity, I noted that she does not assessments falling short of being think that this conception is a ethical normative assessments. That is, sensible ideal for any discipline or we would be in a position to say intellectual endeavor, not even for whether individual animals are doing what is sometimes called the “hard well or badly with respect to what sciences”. Moreover, she argues that matters in their lives, but such even such mundane observable assessments would not speak to what phenomena as expressions of joy or we should do. In taking this last step anger in dogs, small children, or adult Crary’s account departs from the, in human beings come into view within some respects closely related, ethical an ethically inflected mode of seeing. naturalisms of Philippa Foot and In the light of this, we might wonder Michael Thompson. (I will come why she insists on still placing back to this issue.) scientific approaches to human 133 Book Reviews CC-BY beings and animals “outside ethics”, of Emotion in Man and Animal”, and humanistic and literary where animals are portrayed as approaches “inside ethics”. Given expressive agents, capable of choice that it is an ambition of some and possessing a rich experiential life. branches of science to understand Crist relates, for instance, how precisely the psychological and social Darwin describes joy as giving rise to lives of animals, it appears as if “various purposeless movements” in Crary’s argument would make it both humans and animals. Darwin imperative for them to recognize the continues, “We see this in our young ethical backdrop against which their children, in their loud laughter, data can emerge, rather than allowing clapping of hands, and jumping for them to think that they are outside joy; in the bounding and barking of a ethics. dog when going out to walk with his Crary’s own answer to this worry master; and in the frisking of a horse is that moral concerns are when turned out into an open field” legitimately bracketed in scientific (Quoted in Crist 2000: 24). It seems practice, whereas in literature the full clear to me that such depictions use of moral imagination is exemplify precisely the sort of imperative. One example she morally involved perspective that discusses is the practice of coding Crary is advocating. But Crist’s expressive behavior in empirical analysis does not give us reason to psychology, i.e., the attempt to isolate think that Darwin’s perspective and correlate discrete physical stands in conflict with his scientific configurations and behavior. As she aims. To the contrary, Crist wants to herself notes, however, coding is question precisely this inference. One parasitic on and beholden to a thing that emerges in Crist’s study is conception of the role of different a sense for what, from a scientific psychological phenomena and standpoint,