Moral Articulation: On the Development of New Moral Concepts 9780197691571, 9780197691588, 9780197691595, 9780197691601, 0197691579

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Moral Articulation

Moral Articulation On the Development of New Moral Concepts M AT T H EW C O N G D O N

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2024 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Congdon, Matthew, author. Title: Moral articulation : on the development of new moral concepts / Matthew Congdon. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2023017589 (print) | LCCN 2023017590 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197691571 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197691588 (epub) | ISBN 9780197691595 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197691601 Subjects: LCSH: Language and ethics. Classification: LCC BJ44 .C66 2024 (print) | LCC BJ44 (ebook) | DDC 170—dc23/eng/20230628 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017589 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017590 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197691571.001.0001 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

For K and T, with love.

In a transitional age, when many qualities are changing their value, new words, to express new values, are much to be desired. —​Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1966: 176) Moral tasks are characteristically endless not only because ‘within’, as it were, a given concept our efforts are imperfect, but also because as we move and as we look our concepts themselves are changing. —​Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection” (1971: 27)

Contents Acknowledgments 

ix

Introduction 

1

1. Changing Our Concepts 

18



28 37 45 52



1.1. Discursive Breakdown  1.2. Meaning and Discourse  1.3. The Discursive Theory of Meaning as a Questionable Supposition of Much Contemporary Ethical Theory  1.4. Changing Conceptual Schemes  1.5. The Expressive Logic of Articulation  1.6. Conclusion 

19 23

2. Thinking Beyond Language 

56

3. Creative Resentments 

89



2.1. Concepts and Language  2.2. Concepts and Reality  2.3. Dissonance in the Space of Reasons  3.1. The Problem  3.2. Norm-​Creative Resentments  3.3. The Prior Norm Requirement  3.4. The Articulation Model of Emotion  3.5. Conclusion 

57 71 85

92 96 100 105 117

4. Is Morality Loopy? 

119



125 130 143 152 161



4.1. A Problem in Critical Social Philosophy  4.2. Hacking on Child Abuse: A Case Study in Causal Discursive Construction  4.3. Rational Discursive Construction  4.4. From Intimate Articulation to Moral Articulation  4.5. Some Formal Features of Moral Articulation  4.6. Conclusion 

121

viii Contents

5. Changing Our Nature 

163

6. Moral Progress and Immanent Critique 

196

Conclusion 

223

Bibliography  Index 

225 239



5.1. The Immutability Thesis  5.2. Human Natural History  5.3. Articulating Our Nature  6.1. An Inescapable Circularity?  6.2. Five Theses on Moral Progress 

164 171 182 196 198

Acknowledgments I have been continually grateful for the support of many friends, family members, colleagues, teachers, and students who helped and encouraged me as I wrote this book. The idea for this project first began to conglomerate while I was living in New York City and Berlin, first as a graduate student at the New School for Social Research and then at Humboldt-​Universität zu Berlin with the support of a DAAD research fellowship. I thank my teachers and mentors at those institutions who guided this project through its initial stages. Alice Crary’s unwavering support as an advisor, along with the philosophical inspiration provided by her teaching and writing, shaped this book in more ways than I can say. I am especially fortunate that today, years later, she is not only a mentor but a friend and collaborator. Jay Bernstein’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit have never been far from my mind in writing this book, and his generous mentorship has continued to the present, discussing iterations of this project at nearly every stage over the years. I am grateful to Linda Martín Alcoff for the insight she provided on earlier versions of the material presented here. Rahel Jaeggi, my host while at Humboldt, not only gave me the opportunity to test out some of these ideas in her Colloquium for Social Philosophy but was the first to suggest that I turn to Charles Taylor’s notion of articulation to express ideas I was then trying to formulate. Writing in earnest began as I started a new job in the philosophy department at Vanderbilt University. I thank my colleagues there for a warm welcome and their ongoing encouragement. I received valuable institutional support from Vanderbilt while writing this

x Acknowledgments book, including being granted a research leave in the 2022–​2023 academic year, giving me time to complete the final manuscript, and funding from the College of Arts & Science Dean’s Research Studio, which came at a crucial time in the revisions process. My thinking on several of the issues discussed here was shaped by discussions in my graduate seminars on moral psychology and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. I thank the students in those classes for their insight and lively conversation. I also wish to thank the past and current members of our department’s ethics reading group, Ethcetera, and especially my co-​organizer and friend, Diana Heney, for many additional inspiring conversations. As I revised the final manuscript, I was fortunate to be able to work with the critical feedback of several colleagues and friends who generously read the penultimate draft, including Jay Bernstein, Alice Crary, Miranda Fricker, Jonathan Gingerich, Robert Gooding-​Williams, Francey Russell, and Robert Stern. I am also grateful to many friends and colleagues who, whether through conversation, encouragement, or critical feedback on individual chapters, contributed to improving the book. This includes Scott Aikin, Roy Ben-​Shai, Dick Bernstein, Jacob Blumenfeld, Kenneth Boyd, Susan Brison, Janna van Grunsven, Logi Gunnarsson, Hilkje Hänel, Sally Haslanger, Diana Heney, Thomas Khurana, Lukas Kübler, Elijah Millgram, Charles Mills, Andreja Novakovic, Lucius T. Outlaw Jr., Dirk Quadflieg, Eva von Redecker, Matteo Santarelli, Justo Serrano Zamora, Rob Talisse, Paul C. Taylor, Daniel James Țurcaș, Tullio Viola, Margaret Urban Walker, and Rocío Zambrana. Thanks, as well, to the members of an online Iris Murdoch reading group, organized by Mark Hopwood, which provided crucial intellectual community during the early phases of the pandemic. Most of what follows is published here for the first time. An exception is Chapter 3, which includes a reworking of material originally published as, “Creative Resentments: The Role of Emotions in Moral Change,” Philosophical Quarterly 68, no. 273 (2018): 739–​ 757. Chapter 5 contains overlap with my argument in “Changing

Acknowledgments  xi Our Nature: Ethical Naturalism, Objectivity, and History,” Philosophy 98, no. 3 (2023): 297–​326. Thanks to the journals for permission to reuse this material. I am grateful to my editor at Oxford University Press, Lucy Randall, for expertly guiding me through the publication process. Thanks, as well, to Katherine Pier, for her research assistance and help in compiling the index. This book would not have been written without the love and support of my family, especially my parents, Bill and Suzanne, who have encouraged and inspired me by their example from day one. I thank Julia for being a wonderful sister, as well as Rose and David for providing help and cheer when it was most needed. I also want to express gratitude to my friends, whose company buoyed me through this book’s completion, especially Pav Aulakh, Alex Dubilet, Jen Fay, Brendan Fernandes, Marlon Fisher, Jessie Hock, Donny Hodge, Scott Juengel, Tom Krell, Shauna Kushner, Josh Pineda, Lauchie Reid, Sean Roman, Bill Stratton, and several others whose names are already mentioned above. The gratitude most difficult to express here is due to my partner, Karen Ng, and our son, Theo, whose love and companionship underlie every page of this book. Karen remains my favorite philosopher, my best critic, and my best friend. Theo spoke his first words as this book was being completed and his continually expanding powers of articulacy astonish me every day. This book is dedicated to them, with love.

Introduction Moral language is constantly changing. In the twentieth century alone, a striking list of new moral terms entered mainstream discourse. The English word “racism,” following the slightly earlier appearance of “racisme” in French, emerged around the turn of the century. Yet it was only in the 1930s that it came into widespread use as a pejorative, primarily to condemn anti-​Semitism in Europe. The term “genocide” did not exist until 1942, when it was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who fled Nazi occupation. He was motivated by the conviction that existing terms, like “mass murder,” “atrocity,” and “war crimes” failed to capture distinctive aspects of the horrors of the Armenian Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust. “Sexism” was not coined until the 1960s, overtaking the popularity of earlier phrases like “male chauvinism” and “male supremacy.” Its coiners—​Pauline M. Leet in a 1965 speech at Franklin and Marshall College and, in print, Caroline Bird in a 1968 essay—​both introduced the neologism by way of analogy with the existing term, “racism.” Bird’s editors initially objected because they could not find the word in the dictionary. The invention of the term “sexual harassment” would have to wait another full decade. Its coinage in the mid-​seventies is usually attributed to a consciousness-​raising group in Ithaca, New York, and, according to some sources, was first used on a placard at a political demonstration. “Hate speech” is younger still, first introduced by legal scholars only in the late 1980s. To this list we

Moral Articulation. Matthew Congdon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197691571.003.0001

2  MORAL ARTICULATION could add many others, including “child abuse,” “domestic violence,” and “climate crisis.”1 None of these terms were in wide circulation a century ago. Measured against the history of the human linguistic capacity, they are in their infancy. Yet our contemporary moral vocabularies would be unrecognizable without them. The development of new moral terms points to a fundamental condition of our lives with language, namely, that to possess a language is to be continually invested in expanding its powers of articulacy. In the moral domain, this becomes vivid when we recognize that our descriptions of actions and events—​like “sexual harassment” and “hate speech”—​are not ready-​mades standing by to be incorporated into maxims, but must be fashioned, developed, and refined by us. Yet what exactly are we doing when we bring ethically significant phenomena under new descriptions? Are we naming moral realities that already exist, fully formed and intact, prior to their expression in language? Or do ethical phenomena bear a more sensitive relation to the descriptions under which they fall, such that developments in moral language help constitute the objects they bring to light? The project of this book is to identify a conceptually distinctive way in which language shapes morality, by arguing that a certain kind of exercise of our linguistic capacities simultaneously reveals and reshapes the objective layout of ethical life. I call this moral 1 On the history of the term, “racism,” see Frederickson 2002. On Raphael Lemkin and the coining of the term “genocide” see Hinton 2002; Korey 2001; Power 2013; and Irvin-​ Erickson 2017. On “sexism,” as well as many other linguistic innovations of women’s social movements from the nineteenth century up to the 1980s, see Schapiro 1985. On “sexual harassment,” see Brownmiller 1990: 279–​94 and Freedman 2002: Ch. 12. Brown 2017 cites Matsuda 1989 as the first use of the phrase “hate speech” in print. The term “child abuse” was introduced in 1961 in Denver, Colorado, by C. Henry Kempe at a meeting of the American Academy of Pediatricians (Hacking 1999: 125). Modern use of the phrase “domestic violence” (along with related terms like “domestic abuse” and “intimate partner violence”) arose in the seventies (Jackson 2007: xix; Javier and Herron 2018: xvii–​xxi; Lockhart and Danis 2010). “Climate crisis” emerged in the 1980s and has been cited by defenders as an improvement over the earlier label, “global warming,” for better encompassing the myriad persistent changes to the environment linked to a rise in the Earth’s average temperature, adding the sense of emergency or tipping point connoted by “crisis.” (Jaskulsky and Besel 2013).

Introduction  3 articulation, the development of new moral concepts to express initially inchoate moral experiences, transforming one’s latent sense of moral significance into a discursively articulable moral claim. I argue that moral articulation follows an expressive logic, according to which acts of expression help constitute the realm of value they simultaneously bring to light. On the one hand, the picture defended here is realist, holding that struggles to articulate new moral concepts like ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘hate speech’ are rationally answerable to real, value-​laden moral phenomena that preexist their expression in language.2 On the other hand, the picture is historically dynamic, holding that moral language is not merely a tool for expressing independent moral truths, but shapes and reshapes the moral phenomena it is brought in to express. The result is a historically sensitive yet objective picture of morals, which emphasizes the role of linguistic expression in developing the ethical form of life we share.3 The task will be to outline the stages of moral articulation from the inchoate experiences that serve as its impetus to the newly refined claim-​making capacities that serve as its telos. To elaborate this process is to emphasize that the labor of bringing experiences under new descriptions, of piecing together a coherent picture of just what, exactly, has happened, is an ethical task in its own right. This idea is often underplayed in contemporary moral theory, 2 Generally, I use double quotation marks when referring to a word or linguistic phrase (e.g., the neologism, coined in 1942, “genocide”) and single quotation marks when referring to concepts expressed by such words and phrases (e.g., historically developing and contested concepts of ‘genocide’). This convention faces difficulties in some discussions, particularly where both a linguistic phrase and a concept are at stake simultaneously. In those cases, I rely upon signposts in the text to indicate what is at issue. 3 While some moral philosophers employ a technical distinction between the ethical and the moral, I use them interchangeably throughout this book. Bernard Williams (1985: 6–​11; Ch. 10, passim), for example, works with an open-​ended conception of the ethical that includes a broad range of considerations pertaining to the question, “How should one live?” He reserves the term “morality” for a modern offshoot of ethics that focuses more narrowly upon specialized notions of obligation and blame. While Williams’s distinction is useful in the context of his critique of “the morality system,” my own argument does not rely upon such a distinction. Hence, I use both terms in ways that correspond, roughly, with Williams’s more capacious sense of the “ethical.”

4  MORAL ARTICULATION which focuses more attention on assessing situations whose descriptions are already given and analyzing moral judgments and concepts that have already been formed than the process of forming those descriptions, judgments, and concepts in the first place.4 In a rush to answer questions of justification and legitimacy, to establish right procedures, ideal contracts, formal standards, rules, and action-​guidance, moral theory tends to pass over a question that necessarily arrives a step before the task of justifying a moral judgment, namely, through what process of articulation has a particular experience arisen to the level of expression such that it can be taken as an object of moral judgment at all? Perhaps this tendency is underwritten by a supposed dichotomy between descriptive and evaluative discourse, which implies that simply to describe an experience or event is neither, as such, to evaluate it, nor to adopt a practical stance toward it, and thus not within the ambit of ethics proper.5 Whatever the explanation, this book is motivated by the conviction that contemporary moral theory too often focuses its attention solely upon forms of ethical thought and meaning that have already assumed propositional or sentential shape, thus leaving unconsidered the activities of mind and socio-​epistemic practice through which such thoughts—​along with the value-​laden pictures of the world they express—​are pieced together in the first place. This book is a work in moral psychology, yet I wish to emphasize that this does not imply an individualistic approach, as if moral psychology were concerned solely with the intra-​psychic dynamics of particular agents, ignoring the social and historical 4 I substantiate this claim with examples in §§1.2 and 1.3 in Chapter 1, below. 5 A dichotomy embraced as a methodological starting point by, for example, the classical emotivists, like A.J. Ayer (1952) and Charles Stevenson (1937). Views that endorse this dichotomy are alive today, for instance, in the ongoing debate over whether “thick” moral concepts, like courage, can be reductively analyzed as combining a “thin” evaluation, like good, plus some non-​evaluative descriptive content (see, for example, Elstein and Hurka 2009), as well as in contemporary defenses of expressivism in metaethics, which requires “the disunity of evaluative and descriptive language” (Franzén 2020: 1097). For criticisms of the dichotomy, which provide inspiration in what follows, see Murdoch 1971 and 1992; Cavell 1971; and McDowell 1998.

Introduction  5 contexts within which they have their home. A number of social-​ philosophical concepts are central in what follows: notions of ideology, epistemic injustice, social critique, counterpublics, moral subcultures, and the trans-​individualist idea of a life-​form. Though moral articulation has important beginnings in individual experience, the process itself is irreducibly social, as any effort to express moral significance to others invokes the idea, if only in aspiration, of a community with whom that significance can be shared. This is similar to what Kant calls, in the aesthetic context, a sensus communis, the hopeful anticipation of communal meaning built into every evaluative judgment.6 In some cases of moral articulation, and especially in the early stages, the community will be a narrowly defined “counterpublic,” for example, the likeminded members of a feminist consciousness-​ raising group, workers joined in solidarity by a labor struggle, or fellow organizers in an anti-​racist social movement.7 New moral concepts and claims often emerge within a moral avant-​garde that may not initially reach—​or even be concerned to reach—​a broader audience. Yet in other contexts, and especially in the later stages of moral articulation, the community invoked may be open-​ended. This happens when the members of a moral avant-​garde bring their newly forged concepts and claims to a broader social sphere and propose for them a universal status, as when consciousness-​raising groups first began to promote ‘sexual harassment’ as a concept that can and should be grasped by anyone, including those who had not directly experienced the form of violation it names; or when the term, “genocide,” initially coined to articulate a specific set of moral horrors in the twentieth century, became a globally recognized name for a moral evil cutting across time and place, such that it could be used 6 See Kant 2000 (1790): Ak. 5:293–​5. For an interpretation of Kant’s sensus communis along these lines, see Cavell 1997. 7 On the idea of a “counterpublic,” see Fraser 1990 and Haslanger 2017b: 11, Mills’s notion of a “black alternative public sphere” (Mills 2017a), and my discussion of moral subcultures in Chapter 6 (§6.2, point [iii]), below.

6  MORAL ARTICULATION to name atrocities that occurred well before the invention of the term, as in the genocide of Indigenous populations under colonialism.8 At its most open-​ended, moral articulation aims to address all fellow members of one’s life-​form, a term of art with Aristotelian origins that I will discuss later (Chapter 5) but which for now may be understood roughly as an ethically saturated counterpart to the biological concept of a species.9 Given these preoccupations with the essential sociality, or trans-​individuality, of moral thought and expression, it may be more accurate to classify this book as falling somewhere on the border between moral psychology and social philosophy. The genealogical tradition stretching from Friedrich Nietzsche to Michel Foucault offers a well-​known philosophical precedent for the view that morality evolves historically. For many, the attraction of the genealogical method lies in its ability to demonstrate that values previously thought eternal, immutable, or true a priori are, in fact, historically contingent, thereby deflating moralizing fantasies of purity and self-​certainty by revealing that seemingly immaculate ideals can have dubious origins in power, violence, and the will to dominate.10 A genealogical approach might appear particularly apt with respect to the concerns of the present book, not least of all because its proponents routinely give pride of place to language in tracing the genealogy of morals (see, especially,

8 Both of these examples receive extended discussions in the chapters that follow. On the case of the concept, ‘sexual harassment’, see §§1.5, 2.1, and 3.2; on the case of the concept ‘genocide’, see §6.2, thesis (iv). For historical references, see the footnotes in those sections and footnote 1, above. 9 Chapter 5 develops this notion by drawing on the works of Philippa Foot (2001), Michael Thompson (2004, 2008) and Rosalind Hursthouse (1999), though the Marxian notion of species-​being (Gattungswesen) is relevant here, as it provides a model for a historically dynamic yet objectively real constraint upon the possibilities for human flourishing and suffering (Marx 1988). 10 Or, perhaps, in sheer contingency. In this spirit, Foucault writes that a genealogy of values reveals “that there is ‘something altogether different’ behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms” (Foucault 1984: 78).

Introduction  7 Nietzsche’s emphasis on etymologies and the “lordly right of giving names” and Foucault’s notion of “discursive formations”).11 Nevertheless, this method faces limits in light of our present aims, at least insofar as the genealogy of morals has the ambition to explain morality “from the outside,” so to speak, that is, to treat moral phenomena as explicable in non-​moral terms. This will be the case, at least, if we consider versions of the genealogical approach that treat the struggles and acts of creativity that give birth to new values and new moral conceptions ultimately as expressions of power.12 We need not deny that this is a helpful diagnosis in many cases, and with respect to Nietzsche’s texts it is important to keep in mind that he restricted his genealogical critique to one very specific, albeit pervasive, modern paradigm of Judeo-​Christian morality. Yet if we were to generalize this to the reductive thesis that all moral values and concepts are, at bottom, expressions of power and nothing more, we would embrace a view that obscures the possibility of judging whether some historically emergent value or concept can be credited as rational and objective or, by the same token, irrational and distorting. Given our present aims, we should be cautious about adopting an approach that, as a matter of sheer method, gives up on the very possibility of distinguishing between a new moral concept’s being a mere expression of power and its being a rational effort to express something real. 11 In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes, “The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rulers: they say ‘this is this and this,’ they seal every thing and event with a sound and, as it were, take possession of it” (Nietzsche 1989: First Essay, §2). The notion of “discursive formations” is central in Foucault’s the Archaeology of Knowledge (2002: see esp., Ch. 2). 12 Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the “slave revolt in morality” exemplifies this thought: “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values” (Nietzsche 1989: First Essay, §10). Like Nietzsche, I think that emotional responses to wrongdoing can be creative of new values, and that resentment (though perhaps not the envy-​infused form of vengeful anger Nietzsche called ressentiment) is one of the forms in which this can occur. Unlike Nietzsche, however, I am interested in the notion that value-​creative resentments can be a rational and healthy response to wrongdoing and injustice (see Chapter 3, below).

8  MORAL ARTICULATION Throughout the book I make use of a notion of articulation inspired by the work of Charles Taylor—​an influence reflected in this book’s title and central concept.13 Articulation refers to an activity of conceptualization that strives to be faithful to an object that it simultaneously transforms. We may contrast descriptions, which predicate objects that are, so to speak, indifferent to the ways we speak about them (as when I say that “The Earth is round” or “has a surface area of 196.9 million miles”) with articulations, which are directed at features of ourselves such as our desires, emotions, and inchoate senses of importance, which can grow and shift as we find new frames to think and speak about them.14 These latter sorts of ‘objects’ are sensitive to the concepts and terms under which they fall, such that they become what they are, in part, through their conceptualization and expression in language. Compare a description of the sea as “tempestuous” with an articulation of one’s own emotional state as “tempestuous.” Our descriptions may alter our understanding of the sea, but not the sea itself. Yet a self-​interpretation of one’s own feelings through the metaphor of a violent, unpredictable storm may cast a new light on those very feelings, in ways that are apt to alter their felt quality and significance. Like descriptions, our articulations of what is important, valuable, and meaningful strive to be faithful to something real. There is the prospect of one’s articulations ranging from the discerning to the deluded, as, perhaps, the tempest metaphor might fail to enunciate some nuance of one’s emotional state. In this respect, our articulations are appropriate targets of epistemic criticism, for they can get things right 13 Taylor’s discussions of articulation extend across many decades, spanning his writings on language, human agency, and mind, as well as his engagements with historical figures, particularly G.W.F. Hegel, Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Maurice Merleau-​Ponty. See, especially, Taylor 1985 (Essays 1, 2, 3, and 9); 1989 (esp., Part I); and, most recently, 2016. I also draw from Taylor’s related notion of reasoning through transitions (see Taylor 1995) as part of my discussion of moral progress in Chapter 6, §6.2, below. 14 This has resonances with Ian Hacking’s distinction between “indifferent kinds” and “interactive kinds” (Hacking 1999: 106). I discuss the relation between articulation and Hacking’s notion of discursive construction in Chapter 4, §4.2, below.

Introduction  9 or wrong. Yet the ‘object’ of articulation is not itself unchanged by our efforts to grasp and express it in language.15 The feeling one interprets as “tempestuous” does not stand there, self-​sufficient and wholly intact, like a planet waiting to be discovered, but becomes something new in light of its expression. Articulation follows what I shall refer to as an expressive logic: it alters the very object it brings to light.16 My claim is that the historical development of new concepts and vocabularies to give expression to inchoate senses of ethical 15 In this respect, my use of the term “articulation” differs fundamentally from Eli Alshanetsky’s use of the term in his recent book, Articulating a Thought (2019). Alshanetsky uses the term to refer to a particular kind of struggle to articulate what one is thinking, where the process of articulation preserves, rather than develops or transforms, one’s original thought. The movement of “articulation” in Alshanetsky’s sense is from implicit to explicit knowledge. By contrast, moral articulation is a movement in the direction of development, refinement, and maturation—​all of which involves the idea that the results of articulation are not merely preservations, but transformations, of the feelings and thoughts that prompted it. 16 Henry S. Richardson’s insightful book, Articulating the Moral Community (2018) makes comparable use of the term “articulation” as part of an account of moral innovation, though not in reference to Taylor. Richardson foregrounds the productive ambiguity in the term, “articulation,” which may refer both to the “metaphor of voice” and the “metaphor of flexible movement allowed by partial independence of internal parts” (Richardson 2018: 13). He also shares this book’s aim of defending a picture of morality as simultaneously objective and subject to historical development. There are, moreover, details of his account that are consonant with the approach adopted here, for example, his insistence that we need not conceive of moral inquiry as aiming at some fixed or fated “endpoint” (39) and his concern to maintain a historical conception of morality without lapsing into a crude “decisionism” (160). However, our projects depart from one another in significant respects, which I note here briefly (some of which I elaborate in later chapters). (i) My emphasis on articulation is meant to highlight the theme of the relation between moral phenomena and language, a theme that is not explored in its own terms in Richardson. (ii) Richardson’s account of moral historical change is comparatively restrictive. He remains friendly to the idea that morality bears an “invariant core” (21) containing the “eternal grounds of morality” (187) while urging that human activity contributes to “filling in the gaps” of indeterminacy that lie at its periphery. By contrast, the notion of moral historical change I defend in this book runs deeper, challenging the notion that objective morality requires an ahistorical core (see, esp., Chapter 5, below). (iii) Richardson defends a picture of the universal scope of morality as extending to all persons, whereas I defend an Aristotelian account of universality rooted in a shared life-​form (on the significance of this distinction, see §5.2, below). (iv) On his pragmatist account, moral progress is not a matter of “enhancing our grasp of the truth in any straightforward way” but of “reducing morality’s indeterminacy” (153). By contrast, the form of realism I pursue here retains the notion of truth in ethics as central (see, e.g., §2.2, below).

10  MORAL ARTICULATION significance, as in the invention of terms like “sexual harassment” and “hate speech,” follows, at least in many significant cases, the expressive logic of articulation rather than the straightforward logic of description. Moral articulations strive to express objective features of ethical life that preexist their expression in words, while simultaneously bringing about deep changes in ethical life’s objective layout.17 The philosophical interest of this claim, we shall see, lies in its challenging two assumptions that structure much of contemporary ethical theory. The first is a methodological approach in ethics that treats the discursively formulable judgment or proposition as the minimum unit of moral meaningfulness. The assumption that moral significance is, as I shall put it, discursive all the way down, leaves out of consideration, as a matter of method, the idea that the activities of rational moral thought extend beyond such discursively explicit moves as endorsing, rejecting, and inferentially relating moral judgments, and include the prior activity of piecing together, from the fragments of inchoate experience, a discursively articulable picture of the world in the first place. The early chapters of this book (Chapters 1, 2, and 3) are directed primarily at criticizing the exhaustively discursive picture and advocating a broader view of moral meaning and rationality. The second is the assumption, at work in both defenses and critiques of objectivity in ethics, that, if objective moral grounds exist, they must be (traceable back to grounds that are) immutable. Against this idea, which I shall call the immutability thesis, this book explores the viability of a historicized variation of moral realism that can accommodate 17 As a term of art, “ethical life” has Hegelian origins as the standard English translation of Sittlichkeit (see, e.g., Hegel 1977: §§443–​82). Without wishing to overburden my occasional use of the term with exegetical concerns, I want from it the idea of a domain of rational requirements that is simultaneously natural and social, as well as both objective and historical. I also want to maintain a capacious notion of what is included in ethical life, understood as a broad domain of values, norms, social practices, and relations of recognition, which Hegel contrasts with a more narrowly circumscribed domain of “Moralität,” focused solely on abstract imperatives and laws (though I do not systematically employ a corresponding distinction between “ethics” and “morality”; see footnote 3, above).

Introduction  11 the idea of moral grounds that are simultaneously rationally objective and historical in a deep sense.18 The view I defend is historicist in a twofold sense: (i) as a thesis about moral epistemology, it holds, roughly, that our apprehension of moral truth is invariably mediated by our historically and culturally concrete situations; and, (ii) as a thesis about moral ontology, it holds, roughly, that moral values themselves are the results of historical development and subject to ongoing alteration, albeit within certain bounds. Though this concern with historicism runs throughout the book, it receives special attention in the latter half (Chapters 4, 5, and 6). Moral articulation begins with an experience of the failure of our received discursive repertoires in the face of an experience we nevertheless apprehend as meaningful. Chapter 1 explores examples of, as I shall put it, discursive breakdown, finding that, far from being a mere cognitive and linguistic dysfunction, the experience that one cannot satisfactorily encompass some object in language and thought can be the mark of a rational confrontation with that very object. Though such experiences resist expression in discursive terms, they nevertheless bear organization and form, a point I elaborate by defending a notion of proto-​discursive meaning. As the central sections of this chapter are devoted to substantiating, a prominent, if often tacit, conception of meaning in contemporary philosophical thought rules out as incoherent the very idea of proto-​discursivity. This is the idea that 18 Attempts to combine realism and historicism in ethics, though heterodox, have some precedent. Hegel and Marx, for example, have both been described as “historicized realists” about ethical value (Wood 1990: 33–​5). MacIntyre (2008), Taylor (1989), Lovibond (2002), and Honneth (2002) defend similar views, from a combination of Aristotelian, Hegelian, and Wittgensteinian perspectives. From a pragmatist perspective, Kitcher (2011) argues that a story about the Darwinian evolution of ethics over tens of thousands of years is consistent with notions of ethical truth and ethical knowledge; and Richardson (2018) argues that objective morality can change over time as a result of our constructive efforts to address morally indeterminate situations (though see footnote 16, above, for a comparison between Richardson’s approach and my own). Raz (2003) defends a historicized, practice-​based account of value, focusing primarily on aesthetic values. The question of the historicity of objective moral value is distinct from questions concerning how conventional moral practices and beliefs undergo historical development. For discussions of the latter, see, for example, Appiah 2010 and Bicchieri 2017.

12  MORAL ARTICULATION the minimum unit of meaningfulness is the proposition or the discursively formulable judgment, an idea that, we shall find, also structures much of contemporary ethical theory. After casting doubt on the idea that the proposition or discursively articulable evaluative judgment should serve as our sole model for moral meaningfulness, the remainder of the chapter asks whether the expressive logic of articulation might provide a suitable alternative. Chapter 2 turns to some social epistemological issues raised by the claims of the preceding chapter, specifically the idea that moments of discursive breakdown can bear rational and cognitive content despite their simultaneously standing as dissonant frustrations of the discursive intellect. I argue that a conceptualist picture of moral experience is key here, according to which even low-​level perceptions, memories, and modes of practical response are thoroughly mediated by concepts. This means that the articulation of new moral concepts in the face of initially inchoate and elusive experiences never begins from a bare, nonconceptual “given,” but always works from within a culturally and historically specific conceptual inheritance. I make two broad points in this chapter that are intended to clarify the form of conceptualism I defend. First, I offer a flexible account of conceptuality according to which an experience may qualify as conceptually mediated without the experiencer being in a position, even upon reflection, to make that experience discursively explicit. Second, I argue that the thoroughgoing conceptual mediation of experience is not only compatible with, but required by, the idea that moral thought is responsive to objective features of the world. I approach this question, in part, by raising the issue of ideology, understood in the pejorative sense as the conceptual dimension of injustice and oppression. The result of my discussion is an ambivalent depiction of our condition as moral articulators: the fact that we always encounter the world from within a historically and culturally concrete conceptual inheritance makes us permanently susceptible to ideology, systemic ignorance, and stubborn recalcitrance to moral change. Yet it simultaneously

Introduction  13 provides rational resources that make counter-​ideological acts of moral articulation possible. In Chapter 3, I turn to the cognitive role that emotions can play in the process of moral articulation. This allows me to draw out some moral psychological consequences of the view developed in the preceding chapters. I focus specifically on the case of resentment, understood as a paradigmatic moral emotional response to perceived wrongdoing or injustice. I find in philosophical discussions of resentment, from early modernity to the present, two claims that can appear to be in tension with one another: first, that resentments are grounded in the resenter’s received normative outlook as it stands and, second, that resentments can play a creative role, not only shoring up one’s received normative expectations, but creating new ones. I show that, with the help of the expressive logic of articulation, we can accommodate the intuitions that drive both theses within a unified account of resentment and suggest that this can form the basis for a more general view, which I call the articulation model of emotion. Though this falls within the family of so-​called cognitive-​evaluative theories of emotion, I show how adopting this model requires revisions to dominant versions of this approach, exemplified by Martha Nussbaum’s work on emotion. Exploring the specific case of resentment allows us to offer a case study of the emotional dimensions of moral articulation, demonstrating emotions’ simultaneously cognitive and transformative potential. While the first half of the book (Chapters 1–​3) focuses primarily upon the transformative effects moral articulation has at the moral psychological and socio-​epistemic levels, the latter half (Chapters 4–​6) turns its attention to the level of moral ontology, asking whether moral articulation’s effects extend, not only to our conceptions of moral value, but to values themselves. I begin this inquiry in Chapter 4 by taking up the notion of discursive construction as used by social philosophers like Ian Hacking and Sally Haslanger. I suggest that a distinction between merely causal and rational

14  MORAL ARTICULATION forms of discursive construction helps us see how moral facts might be discursively constructed while nevertheless maintaining their objectively rational credentials, in ways that allow them to underwrite ethically oriented social criticism. As part of this chapter’s discussion, I elaborate two features of moral articulation that become particularly important for the arguments of the chapters that follow: moral articulation is purposively oriented toward the dual aims of illumination and maturation. This adds a crucial element to my earlier characterization of the expressive logic of articulation: moral articulation transforms shared ethical life not in just any direction whatsoever, but in ways for which metaphors of growth and maturation are apt. Chapter 5 continues this argument by proposing that a historicized variation of Aristotelian ethical naturalism, of the sort defended by Philippa Foot, provides the right ethical framework within which to pursue a picture of morals as simultaneously historical and objective. Here I make explicit and discuss the seeming philosophical attraction of the immutability thesis, which holds that the very idea of objective moral grounds requires the idea of grounds that transcend history. After considering a powerful argument in favor of the immutability thesis from Kant, the rest of the chapter is devoted to showing that an Aristotelian picture of ethical objectivity is conceptually innocent of this assumption and can get along well without it. Here I show how a deep form of historicism is already implicit in existing defenses of ethical naturalism. Yet I also attempt to push the historicizing elements of this picture further, by arguing that we may think about our historically evolving linguistic efforts to express the conditions of human flourishing as articulating, rather than merely describing, those conditions. Throughout this book, the theme of moral progress looms, albeit often only in the background. Chapter 6 makes this theme explicit, assembling the materials from the previous chapters in order to provide an account of the moral epistemology of judgments

Introduction  15 of moral progress that has emerged. Moral articulation seems to implicate itself in a circle: it is a process that helps create and reshape the very conceptual resources that will be used to assess its own successes and failures. My conviction is that this circularity ought to be embraced as endemic to our condition as moral agents, rather than as a philosophical problem to be overcome. As such, my efforts in this final chapter are to show how the preceding chapters allow us to see our morally articulated, historically and culturally concrete outlooks as already containing the rational resources we need to make judgments of moral progress. The point, then, is not to escape the circle but to show how it can take a non-​vicious form. In doing so, I embrace a conception of judging moral progress that follows a model of immanent critique. I draw inspiration from many historical and contemporary authors in the pages that follow. Although my aims are not primarily exegetical, one might see in the following chapters the outlines of a loose-​knit philosophical tradition that embraces a historical yet objective picture of morals. This includes several interwoven lines of inheritance. There is, first, a recurring Hegelian influence in the theme of a historical picture of ethical life and the immanent form of critique this picture demands. There is also a recurring conviction, inspired by Wittgenstein, that language is not merely a tool for communicating ideas or labeling objects but plays a constitutive role in shaping our forms of life. We shall also see a recurring effort to retain a roughly Aristotelian picture of the objectivity of ethical demands while giving it a historicist turn. To these we may add the work of critical social philosophers coming from feminist, anti-​ racist, and Marxian perspectives who have emphasized the role of creating new words, concepts, and narratives as central to ethical and political struggle.19 My point in bringing these strands together is neither to impose upon them a common doctrine of “moral 19 A non-​exhaustive list of figures who synthesize two or more of the overlapping lines of inheritance just mentioned, and who have influenced the historicized moral realism defended here, includes Iris Murdoch (1971, 1992, 1997), Charles Taylor (1985,

16  MORAL ARTICULATION articulation” nor to elide their important differences. It is, rather, to suggest that we may find subtle historical threads woven together into a quiet tradition that views ethics as at once deeply historical and objective, while placing ongoing struggles of expression at the heart of shared ethical life. The main aim of this book is to explore the idea that the creation of new moral concepts and languages contributes to the historical development of morality itself. To my mind, there is much to be gained by embracing a thoroughly historicized conception of objective morality, in no small part because it frees us from a challenge that has shaped much of modern moral philosophy, namely, identifying and proving the validity of a principle, value, or moral law that is trans-​historically intelligible and authoritative, independently of its historically concrete contexts of application.20 The thought that we might locate the rational grounds of ethical criticism within our culturally and historically specific forms of life, rather than from a standpoint that leaves them behind, is part of what motivates my investigation into the historical dynamics of moral articulation. Admittedly, moral articulation is just one avenue into the question of the historicity of morals, and it would be reductive to say that language is the sole driving force in transforming the objective layout of ethical life. Since, according to the Aristotelian tradition I ally myself with here, the rationality of moral thought is grounded in the sorts of living creatures we are, a full account of the historicity of morals would require not only a discussion of language but a much broader range of material

2016), Bernard Williams (1985), Sabina Lovibond (2002), Alasdair MacIntyre (1977, 2008), John McDowell (1996, 1998), Allen Wood (1990), Axel Honneth (1995), Rahel Jaeggi (2009, 2018), Linda Martín Alcoff (2007, 2018), Miranda Fricker (2007), Robert Gooding-​Williams (2021, forthcoming), Alice Crary (2007, 2016), and Charles Mills (1997, 2007). 20 I discuss examples of this tendency in modern moral philosophy in Chapter 5, §5.1, below.

Introduction  17 conditions that can alter the shape of our life-​form. Yet if it is right to think that language and expressivity are not merely contingent features of our life-​form but essential to who we are, exploring the historical dynamics of moral articulation will be a good place to start. For the capacity to articulate what is meaningful is not just one capacity among others but pervades and transforms everything else that belongs to a human life.21

21 This last point resonates with the idea, defended by Boyle (2016) and McDowell (1996: Lecture VI) that a creature’s capacity for discursive rationality is not merely “additive” with respect to its other animal capacities, but “transformative.”

1 Changing Our Concepts Why can’t I ever say what I really mean? —​Johnny Utah in Point Break (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 1991)

Let us begin very generally, with an experience familiar to any language-​user: the experience of one’s words failing to articulate what one wants to express. You are struck by a work of art and want to share your sense of its beauty with a friend. You say something about its “balance” and “harmony,” but the words are too generic to convey the complexity of your response. In another situation, you decide to declare the depths of your love to your beloved. You are embarrassed when the speech you hoped would capture the singularity of your relationship tumbles out in a string of clichés. In a third situation, an interaction with your boss leaves you feeling angry, yet you cannot say why. Your latent sense of violation is met with confusion as you try to voice it to a co-​worker. Such experiences can leave us feeling that the meaningfulness of the world outstrips what we can presently put into phrases. Suppose we take this to be a basic condition of our lives with language. What follows? What is the relationship between meaningful experience and language such that the former can overflow the latter? Moral articulation begins with an experience of the limits of language, the sense that one’s received discursive repertoires fail to make sense of some feature of ethical life. Elaborating the experience of discursive breakdown, as I shall name it, provides a Moral Articulation. Matthew Congdon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197691571.003.0002

Changing Our Concepts  19 good starting point for our discussion. For not only is discursive breakdown the first stage of moral articulation, but exploring its phenomenology and structure offers an entry point into the more fundamental questions raised in the Introduction concerning the relation between language and ethical life. I shall begin by characterizing the contents of such experiences as proto-​discursive (§1.1) before sketching a tendency in philosophical theories of meaning in general (§1.2) and in ethics in particular (§1.3) that makes the ideas of discursive breakdown and proto-​discursivity difficult to see. Setting the stage in this way will allow me to give a preliminary overview of the picture of conceptual change on offer in this book (§§1.4 and 1.5).

1.1.  Discursive Breakdown The first thing to note is that such experiences, despite their resistance to discursive expression, nevertheless bear some degree of organization and form. There is in each case an intentional object of awareness—​this work of art, this relationship, this social interaction with your boss—​that has been carved out of the sensible manifold as a distinct phenomenon inviting expression, even if accompanied by a sense of elusiveness. This point is basic: a minimum degree of organization and form is necessary for any experience whatsoever, for an experience of pure formlessness or total disorder would be no experience at all. This organization and form, moreover, cannot be something we receive from the world purely passively, but must already involve the contributions of our own activity of organizing and forming a meaningful picture of the world. For when something in experience presents itself as meaningful—​as beautiful, as beloved, as morally injurious—​it offers itself as an opportunity to respond, inviting judgment and practical response without automatically determining what exactly that judgment or response must be. There is, in other words, space for freedom in one’s receptivity

20  MORAL ARTICULATION to the meaningfulness of things, whether in the play of imagination that attends contemplation of an artwork, the spontaneity of an expression of love, or the creativity required in formulating a moral protest.1 In this respect, receptivity to meaning cannot be a purely passive affair, but involves the mediating work of our own agency. I shall express this combination of ideas—​(i) that such experiences bear at least a minimum degree of organization and form and (ii) that this organization and form is at least partially attributable to agents’ activities of organizing and forming pictures of the world—​ by saying that such experiences are, despite their resistance to discursive expression, always conceptually mediated.2 Next we may note that experiences of discursive breakdown are accompanied by a latent sense that the elusive object contains depths of meaning not fully fathomable by one’s existing discursive powers. It is not simply that something’s meaning eludes one, but that one perceives something’s meaning as elusive. There is an important difference between, for example, (a) the boss insulting you without your recognizing any insult at all (and so the meaning of the act simply eludes you); and (b) your harboring a cloudy sense 1 The idea that a combination of spontaneity and receptivity go into the realization of any potential experience of meaningfulness traces back to Kant. For a canonical statement, see the Critique of Pure Reason (2007: A51/​B75). My way of putting the point here is indebted to John McDowell’s elaboration of the point in Mind and World (1996) and elsewhere (see, esp. 2009: Essays 1, 2, 3, 5, and 14). This is closely related to a recurring theme in Iris Murdoch, namely, the idea that moral experience involves a combination of creative conceptualization and exposure to a reality that transcends us (see, e.g., 1997: 95). 2 This notion of conceptual mediation receives extended discussion in Chapter 2, though it may be helpful to anticipate two points I defend there. First, this notion of conceptuality is emphatically social. By the time one experiences the artwork, the beloved, or the social interaction as meaningfully engaging one’s agency, an entire history of development, education, socialization, and conversation with others will already have been at work behind the scenes, forming and organizing the frame within which experiences like this can occur at all. Second, this use of “conceptual” is heterodox insofar as it leaves space for the possibility of experiences that are conceptual yet not discursive. Discursive here refers to the form some bit of meaning must take into order to be expressible in language (even if it is not actually so expressed). Conceptual here refers to the minimum unity and form an experience must have in order to strike consciousness as bearing any organization and form at all. As I argue below, such unity and organization need not take discursive form (see, esp., Chapter 2, §2.1).

Changing Our Concepts  21 that the boss has done something insulting that you cannot quite pin down (and so you experience the meaning of the act as elusive). Notice that (b) involves a form of self-​consciousness or reflexivity absent in (a), for the relevant quality of elusiveness functions as what we might call a self-​conscious predicate. While non-​self-​conscious predicates are ascribed directly to objects, self-​conscious predicates make explicit features of one’s subjectively mediated relation to those objects (compare “The cardinal is red” with “The cardinal is blurry from this distance”). Thus, to experience some phenomenon as eluding one’s discursive grasp means that one’s consciousness has shifted its focus from an initial intentional object (the social interaction with one’s boss) to the quality of one’s conscious relation to that object (in this case, the inadequacy of one’s modes of discursive apprehension with respect to that social interaction). One is thrown back upon oneself, catching a glimpse of one’s own discursive powers as having broken down, as needing to change or grow if the elusive object is to be more satisfactorily understood and communicated to others. That instances of discursive breakdown involve a moment of heightened reflexivity invites a conclusion that can initially appear paradoxical: under certain circumstances, the feeling of being thrown from one’s capacity to grasp a feature of reality in language and discursive thought can be credited as a rational confrontation with that feature, insofar as the experience reveals something true about the limits of one’s existing discursive powers.3 By hypothesis, 3 This is a recurring theme in Murdoch’s ethical writings, where a person’s openness to discursive breakdown is portrayed as essential to the ongoing process of moral growth. In an early essay, “Thinking and Language,” Murdoch writes that “Language and thought are not co-​extensive. That this is so is obvious if we consider the experience of attempting to break through a linguistic formulation grasped as inadequate in relation to an obscurely apprehended content” (1997: 35). Her claim comes as part of an attack on the view that mental activity loses its title to genuine cognition when it cannot be readily reconstructed in clear propositional form. Alasdair MacIntyre makes a related claim in his discussion of “epistemological crises”: “The agent who is plunged into an epistemological crisis knows something very important: that a schema of interpretation which he has trusted so far has broken down irremediably in certain highly specific ways” (1977: 458). That certain experiences of breakdown or felt dissonance can be, for

22  MORAL ARTICULATION the person in case (b) is sensitive to something important that the person in case (a) has missed, despite the fact that it is the person in (a) and not (b) who experiences their discursive powers as functioning smoothly. The upshot is this: rather than being a mere cognitive dysfunction, experiences of discursive breakdown can provide the spark for discursive growth, precisely because they involve a shift into a higher reflexive gear. Prompted by such experiences, one might set out to learn, for instance, to speak about art more eloquently, find new and poetic ways to express one’s love, or create new moral concepts that transform inarticulate suffering into articulate protest.4 We could formulate this by saying that such experiences are, while not yet discursive, proto-​discursive, striking one as bearing significant organization and form, yet in a manner that stands in tension with the discursive frameworks one habitually turns to in order to make sense of things. Finally, we may note a third point about such cases, namely, that their phenomenology involves a distinctive sort of dissatisfaction or felt dissonance that calls for transformation. We may therefore contrast them with cases that, though they represent limits to one’s discursive capacities, are not experienced as dissonant in the relevant sense. Many experiences are difficult to put into words yet involve no dissatisfaction with one’s present discursive repertoire, for one feels that the phenomenon is known or grasped well enough anyway. Borrowing a pair of examples from Iris Murdoch: the smell of the Paris Metro or what it is like to hold a mouse in one’s hand may strike someone as difficult to describe without repeating the words appropriately positioned agents, epistemically beneficial is also a recurring theme in various strands of feminist epistemology (see, e.g., Jaggar 1989; Fricker 2007: 40–​1, 166–​8; Medina 2013) as well as recent social-​epistemological readings of W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness” (see, e.g., Mills 2007: 15). I discuss this notion of dissonance at more length in Chapter 2 (§2.3). 4 We should be careful not to ascribe any necessity to such positive developments. Experiences of discursive breakdown may equally lead to defensiveness, repression, retreat, complacency, and other forms of avoidance. Yet if we lacked experiences of discursive breakdown altogether, we would lose a powerful catalyst for expanding our powers of articulacy.

Changing Our Concepts  23 already involved (Murdoch 1997: 46). In a similar spirit, Ludwig Wittgenstein offers “what a clarinet sounds like” as an example of something one might know without being about to say what one knows (2009: §78). These are cases in which something strikes one as meaningful, knowable, or cognizable in ways that outstrip one’s powers of discursive expression. Yet they do not include the relevant sort of dissatisfaction or dissonance: one’s frustrated feeling of having failed to articulate something important that strikes one as demanding expression, whether the beauty of the artwork, the singularity of one’s love, or the wrongness of the boss’ behavior. The proto-​discursive meanings at work in experiences of discursive breakdown are accompanied by an uncomfortable sense that one’s discursive repertoires chafe against one’s experience, actively working to suppress the experience’s nascent meaning. Under the right conditions, this dissonance can be sharpened into a conviction that the failure in question must be overcome by revising or expanding one’s discursive means.

1.2.  Meaning and Discourse There is a widely held conception of meaning that makes the idea of proto-​discursive experience look confused, even self-​contradictory. I want to consider and criticize this theory at a general level before returning (in §1.3) to the question of how it constrains our thinking about the possibilities for moral meaningfulness in particular. I have in mind the view that the minimum unit of meaningful awareness is the proposition, an assertible, endorsable, inference-​ ready bit of content that can be made explicit in language.5 I shall refer to such views as discursive theories of meaning. 5 This view is sometimes attributed to Kant, Frege, and Wittgenstein, among others. Kant expresses a version of this principle in the Critique of Pure Reason, where he rejects the notion that concepts have any use for discursive creatures like us other than judgment-​formation: “the only use which the understanding can make of concepts

24  MORAL ARTICULATION This conception of meaning has been defended in a number of ways—​most systematically as part of Robert Brandom’s “inferential semantics” (1994; 2000)—​but the general features of the view are tacitly held by many and include the following sorts of ideas. To attribute meaning to x (an experience, feeling, thought, or anything else we might take as meaningful) is to ascribe to x a rational role within discursive practices of asserting, inferring, justifying, questioning, and related activities. So, in attributing meaning to my experience of the cardinal as red, I ascribe to my experience a discursive role: it underwrites assertions (“The cardinal is red”), exclusions (“The cardinal is colorless”), and material inferences (“The cardinal is the same color as the ladybug”). We cannot attribute significance of this sort to an experience, feeling, or thought unless it already bears the logical form of a judgment, a form that is in principle expressible in discourse. Another way to put this is through a notion of publicity. Meaning is essentially public. Its publicity consists paradigmatically in its communicability in language person-​to-​person, or more broadly in its use in social practices of asserting, criticizing, and justifying what one says. If the meaning of an experience coincides with (or consists in) its shareability and use within social discursive practices, then the idea of meaningful yet non-​discursive experience can be attacked on two grounds, one ontological and one pragmatic: such experiences (i) do not exist and (ii) even if they did, they would be of no use, for there is nothing we could do with such an experience in social discursive practice. This means that any significant bit of thought-​about content, whether explicitly voiced or tacitly contemplated, must already bear the sort

is to form judgments by them” (Kant 2007: A68/​B93). In Frege, the source usually cited to support this reading is the so-​called context principle in his Foundations of Arithmetic: “never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition” (Frege 1980: x). Wittgenstein echoes this principle in the Tractatus: “Only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have meaning” (Wittgenstein 2001: §3.3). For more recent discussions of this view, see Sellars (1997), McDowell (1996, 2009), and Brandom (1994, 2000, 2009).

Changing Our Concepts  25 of logical form that renders it susceptible to communication in discursive terms. Hence, meaning is discursive all the way down. This is true (this line of thought continues) of even the most basic perceptual episodes, at least insofar as they can be credited as meaningful. For in purporting to reveal something about how things are, a perceptual episode, though not itself a literal claim, already has the shape of a claim, appearing to ‘say’ something like, “This is how things stand.”6 An experience lacking this claim-​shaped (hence, discursive) form could not provide the experiencing agent with a basis for asserting anything about the world one way or the other. Indeed, we should be skeptical about whether anything meaningful could be said about a non-​claim-​shaped and thus non-​assertible bit of content. For if one could say what that meaning was, it would thereby be revealed as, precisely, assertible. Brandom, speaking on behalf of Kant, says, “the fundamental unit of awareness or cognition, the minimum graspable, is the judgment” (Brandom 1994: 79), and elaborates the notion of judgment in terms of propositional content: “all our cognitive activity consists of judgment and aspects of that activity. Any content that can be discerned in any category is derivative from the content of possible judgments, that is, from propositional content” (Brandom 2000: 80; cf. 160). For concept-​ mongering creatures like us, there is no ‘raw’, un-​interpreted, pre-​ discursive consciousness. The attempt to “break out of discourse to an arché beyond discourse” (Sellars 1997: §63) is motivated by a philosophically hopeless Myth of the Given. If the claim-​shaped character of experience is understood in terms of its bearing propositional content, and if all propositional content is wholly discursive (meaning that it is already fit for expression in discourse without

6 This is the phrase Wittgenstein identifies as the general form of a proposition in the Tractatus (Wittgenstein 2001: §4.5). The theory under review in this section holds that this is also the general form of a meaningful experience. In this spirit, Wilfrid Sellars defends a view of perceptual episodes as already making or containing “claims” in his famous essay, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1997: §16). For a discussion, see McDowell 2009: Essay 5.

26  MORAL ARTICULATION remainder), then this conception of meaning rules out a priori the idea of proto-​discursive experience. Brandom’s phrase for this view is the priority of the propositional (Brandom 2000: 13; 1994: 79–​85; and 2009: chap. 1), though I shall focus on the more general view that meaning is discursive all the way down. One who holds that meaning is discursive all the way down would have to account for cases of discursive breakdown without appealing to the notion of proto-​discursive experience. For example, one could characterize discursive breakdown as a contradiction between (i) the discursive content of an experience and (ii) the discursive forms imposed upon that experience by existing conventional discursive frameworks. Sometimes this kind of explanation might work. For it may be that some cases of discursive breakdown are adequately explained in wholly discursive terms as a contradiction between one’s already discursively articulable experience and the discursive repertoire one brings to bear upon that experience. An example would be an instance in which one has a discursively articulated apprehension of an experience of moral injury yet is forced to speak within a language-​game that does not allow one to do justice to that apprehension—​say, a plaintiff forced to articulate an experience of assault within a legal vocabulary that fails to capture its wrongness. A kind of discursive breakdown takes place here: there is a dissonance between what one wants to articulate and the discursive means one is—​we may imagine in this example—​ pressured by the weight of social convention to employ.7 Yet here we have a case that is the result of a conflict between competing discursively articulated contents, rather than a tension between a proto-​discursive experience and one’s received repertoires of discursive expression. What discursive theories of meaning have difficulty explaining, however, and what I am urging is better explained by a theory 7 This is a recurring theme in feminist work on the socially imposed obstacles to testimony of sexual assault. See, e.g., Brison 2013 and Alcoff 2018.

Changing Our Concepts  27 allowing for proto-​discursive experience, is discursive breakdown that results not from contradiction but from a phenomenon’s elusiveness. Recall the distinction between (a) the meaning of an event simply eluding one and (b) one’s experiencing the meaning of an event as elusive. Discursive theories introduce a gap between the discursive and the non-​discursive according to which events are either discursively articulable or not registered by consciousness as meaningful at all. Events either simply elude us or else bear a determinate, propositionally articulable meaning with no middle ground. There is no room for the possibility of (b). Of course, phrases like “X is elusive” are discursive. We may even become quite discursively articulate about experiences of the elusive, as sometimes occurs in poetry and literature.8 Yet to think this speaks in favor of the wholly discursive view misses the point. All it reveals is that we are capable of using language to gesture toward language’s limits, that we are capable of the higher-​order reflexive act of discursively articulating that we have confronted a bit of meaning we are presently incapable of discursively articulating. If this is right, then we ought to leave space not only for cases of 8 Consider, for example, the following passage from Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own: Thought—​to call it by a prouder name than it deserved—​had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until—​you know the little tug—​the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. . . . But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind—​put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. (1957: 5–​6) Woolf ’s narrator has an intimation of something worth expressing while simultaneously realizing that she is not in a position to say satisfactorily, either to herself or others, just what that something is. Proto-​discursive experiences, in the sense I am developing here, share the “mysterious property” Woolf describes in this passage: an intimation of something that, though we cannot say in advance what it is, nevertheless invites our curiosity and engagement.

28  MORAL ARTICULATION contradiction-​based discursive breakdown, but also elusion-​based discursive breakdown. The cases with which §1.1 began seem more naturally to fit the latter, elusion-​based model: the aesthetic significance of the artwork, the singularity of one’s love, one’s dissonant sense of anger at one’s boss. These are unlike the case of the plaintiff forced to speak within a legal vocabulary they already know is inferior to another existing vocabulary, for the former are all cases in which it is not yet clear to the speaker what might constitute the relevant improvement to their discursive repertoire. The needed discursive transformation is not that of a transition between two language-​games one already knows, but of coming to inhabit (perhaps even create) a new language-​game for the first time. In such cases all one has to go by is a tempting yet by itself unsatisfying intimation that something meaningful is there to be explored, combined with a sense of its dissonant relation to the discursive repertoires one presently inhabits. If this is right, and if such cases exist, then we seem to require the notions of elusiveness and proto-​discursive experience I have been outlining here. This means rejecting the view that meaning is discursive all the way down.

1.3.  The Discursive Theory of Meaning as a Questionable Supposition of Much Contemporary Ethical Theory How does this bear on ethics? My contention is that we need a moral philosophy that can accommodate this experience of discursive breakdown if we are to understand how a certain fundamental sort of moral conceptual development is possible—​one exemplified by the historical development of new moral concepts like ‘genocide’, ‘racism’, ‘sexual harassment’, ‘hate speech’, and the others mentioned at the beginning of the Introduction. Moral concepts are not timeless givens but historical results, and the experience that something morally important eludes our inherited conceptual schemes

Changing Our Concepts  29 provides an important initial spark for the critical assessment and historical alteration of those schemes. Rephrased in the terminology I wish to adopt here, elusion-​based discursive breakdown is, in many cases at least, an important early stage in the process of moral articulation.9 If this is right, then a theory of meaning as discursive all the way down unduly obscures a crucial role that discursive breakdown can play in processes of moral conceptual development.10 A survey of representative trends in contemporary ethical theory reveals that a (usually tacit) commitment to the discursive theory of meaning is presupposed in discussions of moral language, moral concepts, and—​more broadly—​the morally meaningful. My task in this section is to substantiate this exegetical claim with some examples. The view I go on to sketch in §§1.4 and 1.5—​ and then defend over the course of the rest of the book—​draws its philosophical interest, in significant part, from the fact that it rejects this widely assumed picture of moral meaning. To begin with, we find widespread—​albeit usually implicit—​ commitment to this conception of moral meaning in metaethical debates. It would not be difficult to construct a fairly comprehensive narrative of metaethics over the past century that took as its central theme the problem of how to respond to the apparent fact that the surface grammar of moral discourse is that of a descriptive, property-​attributing language.11 Whether or not G.E. Moore himself would have approved, the analysis of ‘good’ offered in Principia 9 A point I elaborate and defend further in Chapter 2 (see, esp., §2.1). 10 Someone committed to the discursive theory could defend a certain picture of moral conceptual development rooted in discursive breakdown, but only in its contradiction-​based form. One could, for example, develop a roughly Hegelian picture of “determinate negation” that involves moving from a contradiction between the discursive commitments within a closed-​system of discursive rationality to the higher-​order resolution of those commitments through a critical transformation of the system itself. Although this might be an appropriate characterization of moral conceptual development in some cases, my view is that it would too quickly rule out, as a matter of methodological fiat, the possibility of cases of development prompted by intimations of elusive meanings. 11 For an account of post-​Moorean twentieth-​century metaethics that takes this theme as central, see Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton 1997.

30  MORAL ARTICULATION Ethica (1903) inaugurated over a century’s worth of attempts to formulate and solve philosophical puzzles concerning the meaning and truth-​conditions of sentences that make use of explicitly normative words—​‘good’ being paradigmatic, along with others like ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘permissible’, ‘ought’, and so on. By mid-​century, one of the dominant approaches (in Anglophone philosophy, at least) held that, as R.M. Hare succinctly put it, ethics is ultimately “the logical study of the language of morals” (Hare 1952: iii). Thus, as a sheer matter of method, the only forms of moral meaning appropriate for moral philosophy to investigate were those expressed by a special class of sentences. It is not so much that philosophical arguments were made against notions of proto-​discursive or pre-​ linguistic forms of moral meaning, as it was that they were simply left out of consideration before the moral philosophy proper even got started.12 Though today many moral philosophers would agree that the days of overly narrow linguistic analysis are over and that we are better off for it, the tendency to focus solely on discursive forms of moral meaning is no mere historical relic. Today, the most persistent debates in metaethics (whether moral discourse is cognitive or non-​cognitive, whether it refers to natural or non-​natural properties, whether the primary semantic role of moral discourse is descriptive, prescriptive, or otherwise) continue to concern problems that only arise once moral thought takes (or purports to take) discursive shape.13 Particularly striking for present purposes 12 Of course, there are dissenters throughout this period, one of them being Murdoch (see, e.g., her early essay “Thinking and Language,” collected in Murdoch 1997). Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics” gives us a particularly striking image of the difficulty of reducing matters of value to propositional form: “I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world” (Wittgenstein 1993: 40). 13 Once again, there are exceptions. A striking example is the debate, primarily within virtue theory, over whether the premises at work in a practical syllogism are necessarily “codifiable” (see, e.g., McDowell 1998: 27–​9, 30, 34–​5, and 65–​9; Hursthouse 1999: 56–​ 62; and Hursthouse 2011). As McDowell reads Aristotle, the premises that the virtuous person acts upon are not susceptible to definitive codification. They can, at best, be

Changing Our Concepts  31 is the nearly universal assumption that moral thought’s claim to rationality stands or falls with the question of whether it can be understood as taking genuinely propositional or discursive form at all.14 These trends are with us today in characterizations of moral truth as the successful representation of moral facts by moral sentences15 and in characterizations of the work of normative judgment as taking exclusively sentential form.16 Parallel tendencies are found in influential lines of thought in moral psychology. If all intentional action is, as Elizabeth Anscombe famously put it, intentional under some description (Anscombe 2000: §6), then to be rationally aware of some event as a piece of intentional action—​say, as morally injurious—​is to be aware of something that has already taken discursive shape.17 A similar point goes for philosophical theories of motivation. In “Internal and External Reasons” (1981) and its sequel, “Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame” (1995), Bernard Williams expresses the influential view that an agent has reason to ϕ only if the conclusion to ϕ can be summed up as defeasible rules of thumb. See also Dancy (2004: chap. 10 and 11), who holds that knowledge of the practical purport of a concept involves a form of competent judgment that is not articulable in propositional terms, because it does not involve the application of a general rule. 14 This is a common way of stating the dispute between cognitivists and non-​ cognitivists, where the former affirm and the latter deny the existence of substantial truth conditions for moral sentences (see, e.g., van Roojen 2015: 5). 15 Take for example, standard accounts of the debate between moral realism and anti-​ realism. The current Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on “Moral Realism” defines it as the view that moral assertions purport to report facts about reality, that such assertions are true in virtue of their getting the facts right, and that at least some of these assertions are true (Sayre-​McCord 2015). In the same vein, it is typical to find the phrase, “moral fact,” defined as a feature of the world that (i) makes the content of moral sentences true and (ii) can be represented by moral sentences (cf. Cuneo 2006: 36). Such characterizations imply that the objective layout of ethical life is, ultimately, a matter of what can be truthfully represented in sentential or discursive form. 16 For example, a recent defense of error theory defines a normative judgment as a mental state that “can be expressed with a sentence that conceptually entails that something satisfies a normative predicate” (Streumer 2017: 2). 17 Though Anscombe herself holds in Intention that we can ascribe intentions to creatures who lack discursive capacities (2000: §47, p. 86). I am not claiming here that Anscombe held the discursive theory of meaning, but that her “under a description” doctrine can easily be taken to imply it. For Anscombe’s own elaboration of her use of the phrase, see Anscombe 1979.

32  MORAL ARTICULATION reached via a “sound deliberative route” from some member of the agent’s existing desires and commitments. Though Williams himself was explicitly critical of the restriction of moral meaningfulness to that which can be made explicit by “discursive rationality,”18 this has not prevented many contemporary Williams-​inspired theories of moral motivation from characterizing one’s subjective motivational set in wholly discursive terms. An example is Kate Manne’s depiction of serious pain states as already embodying the discursive form of an “imperative” (Manne 2017), as well as her account of all desires as embodying a “call for action” structure that can be expressed formally as Subject S would be willing for agent A to X in service of some end of S’s E (Manne 2014). Though a theory of this sort does not require that desiring agents themselves actually apprehend or express their own desires in precisely these discursive terms, it nevertheless presupposes that desire in general takes the logical shape of a proposition that can, from the theorist’s perspective at least, be definitively spoken or written down. Once again, it is not that time is taken to argue against the notion of proto-​ discursive moral meaning; rather, it is that the very possibility of such meaning is left out as a matter of method. Finally, the discursive theory of meaning underwrites all philosophical depictions of moral thought that take as paradigmatic the application of discursively formulable moral rules to cases. The tendency is to treat a special type of discursive unit, the moral judgment, as the basic building block of ethical thought and practice in a way that parallels the thesis of the priority of the propositional in semantic theories. In this context, a “moral judgment” refers to a predicative act ascribing moral values or properties to an object (e.g., an action-​type, disposition, or social structure). This predicative act can be made explicit with moral words like “good,” “ought,” 18 For example, in the Preface to Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Williams writes that, “certain interpretations of reason and clear understanding as discursive rationality have damaged ethical thought itself and distorted our conceptions of it” (Williams 1985: viii).

Changing Our Concepts  33 or “wrong,” and the resulting propositions are suitable for serving as premises in chains of practical reasoning: “x is a good trait to cultivate in a human life,” “People ought to y under such-​and-​ such conditions,” “Complicity in social arrangement z is wrong.” The aim of moral thought, then, is to inferentially combine overt moral judgments like these with morally relevant descriptions of situations—​“Here is an opportunity to cultivate x”; “I am facing such-​and-​such conditions”; “I am complicit in z”—​in order to yield recommendations about how to live and act. The result is an exercise of practical reasoning that is discursive without remainder. The model is simple yet powerful. For it provides a clear picture of the rational criticism of ordinary ethical reflection, insofar as traditional canons of logical and epistemic assessment unambiguously apply. It is also remarkably flexible, for the moral judgments serving as the first premise can range over a wide spectrum of abstraction and concreteness, from, say, purportedly universal moral principles like Kant’s formula of humanity and the principle of utility to highly contextual moral judgments about the rights and wrongs of particular situations.19 On this conception, then, moral thought consists paradigmatically in discursive activities like the endorsement, rejection, and assertion of moral principles; the derivation of secondary or intermediate principles therefrom; the endorsement of relevant descriptions of particular situations; and applications of principles to those descriptions.20 19 In fact, even some forms of particularism could, in theory, adhere to the wholly discursive view, as long as they held that the basic unit of moral meaning was a discursively articulable judgment concerning the morally salient features of a situation. 20 A relevant area of debate here is the so-​called problem of relevant descriptions, which concerns how best to supply the content in a Kantian maxim of action (see, e.g., O’Neill 2013: chap. 2; Herman 1993: chap. 4; and Kitcher 2003). A classical formulation of the problem comes from Anscombe, who complains that “[Kant’s] rule about universalizable maxims is useless without stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it” (1958: 2). To the extent that the participants in this debate typically characterize the agent’s predicament as that of having to choose among competing (and thus already discursively articulate) descriptions of an act, rather than the struggle to forge and find the concepts that make up those descriptions in the first place, it remains comfortably within the constraints of the discursive theory of meaning. Mark Timmons, for example, describes the problem as

34  MORAL ARTICULATION Thus, it is fair to conclude that an often-​tacit commitment to a conception of moral meaningfulness as discursive all the way down has significantly shaped trends in metaethical, moral psychological, and normative registers of contemporary ethical theory. Substantiating this exegetical claim was the main aim of this section. Much of this book will be devoted to recovering a notion of moral meaning that moves us beyond this frame. Before moving on, however, let me indicate in a more gestural way what I find suspect about the tendency in ethical theory I have been foregrounding. The wholly discursive view of moral meaning leads to a certain ideal of agency. The ideal agent is one whose practical deliberations can be made explicit in discursive terms as a set of sound principles of action combined with accurate descriptions of the situations over which the agent deliberates. Their intentions could be captured in maxims that could be, ideally, definitively written down, and the resultant actions would fall under descriptions that wholly capture the moral meaning of what they do.21 Enjoying flawless discursive capacities, if anyone failed to understand their utterances about moral matters, the fault would lie entirely on the side of the hearer. Of course, no one thinks this ideal is attainable, including its defenders. But that is what ideals are for, to give us a vision of perfection worth striving for, even as we continually fall short.

that of “specifying which descriptions of one’s action and circumstances are relevant for purposes of moral evaluation and which of them, consequently, should be reflected in one’s maxim” (1997: 399). 21 See, for example, Railton’s idealized agent, “A+​,” who has “complete and vivid knowledge of himself and his environment, and whose instrumental rationality is in no way defective” (Railton 1997: 142). Closely related is Korsgaard’s characterization of the ideal sort of moral agent in her book, Self-​Constitution, when she writes that “On certain occasions, the people with other [non-​ideal] constitutions fall apart. For the truly just person, the aristocratic soul, there are no such occasions. Anything could happen to her, anything at all, and she will still follow her own principles—​and that is because she has universal principles, principles that can consistently be followed in any case (2009: 180). What I am suggesting here is that this sort of invulnerability to “falling apart” in the face of reality can, in certain circumstances, be a serious moral deficiency, insofar as it forecloses the possibility of moral change.

Changing Our Concepts  35 I want to argue, however, that this ideal is false. I do not mean merely that it is unrealistic or that we never actually attain it, for that sort of objection would leave untouched the notion that this picture of agency is worth striving for as a regulative ideal. Rather, I think this simply should not be our ideal, regulative or otherwise. This purportedly ‘ideal’ agent would never experience curiosity or wonder in the face of an elusive intimation of value. They could experience neither hopeful anticipation as they tested new concepts against their elusive experience nor the distinctive pleasures that can accompany resolving a difficulty or seeing oneself through a conceptual confusion. They would be without the satisfactions that come from viewing one’s own narrative as one of maturation. Such a conception of ideal agency relegates the phases of childhood through which one continually grows out of existing conceptual frames and develops new ones as a necessary non-​ideal stage, and not one to be valued as part of our ideal picture of agency itself. If one could whisper an incantation that allowed one magically to skip the process of learning and upbringing, jumping straight to discursive perfection, nothing valuable would be lost. This conception of ideal agency assumes, moreover, that discursive breakdown and elusive meaning are never constituents of experiences that are valuable in themselves, as is often held to be the case in certain forms of aesthetic experience (cf. Murdoch 1971 and Adorno 1991). In short, never to experience discursive breakdown and elusive meanings would leave us without a great range of human goods. It is, at the very least, an open question whether a life without such goods is one we actually want, let alone one we ought to regard as a regulative ideal with philosophical backing. It is, therefore, at least questionable whether we should valorize the ideal agent who comes along with the discursive theory of meaning. In contrast with this view, I hold that a good life is one that is continually open to the possibility of deep transformation and growth, and so the best sort of agent will be one who works hard to develop a rational vulnerability to the experience of discursive breakdown,

36  MORAL ARTICULATION and who reshapes their schemes of concepts in the right ways, at the right times. This is especially urgent for humans like us who inhabit bad forms of life, who must cope with unjust social institutions, and who are forced to develop moral understandings under conditions of ideology that make suffering and injustice difficult to see clearly.22 Yet even if our form of life were good, even if we lived in a decent, just, non-​ideological society, it would still be true that living well would involve, at its heart, continual confrontations with discursive breakdown and the forms of moral articulation it calls forth. For moral growth is not merely a necessary means to a good human life but an essential part of that very life and its goodness.23 We therefore inherit a distorted vision of moral thought and practical reason when we hold it to an ideal of discursive completeness. For, on the view I defend, discursive breakdown and proto-​ discursive experience are constitutive of moral thought, not only as non-​ideal instances in which we fall short of discursive perfection, but as healthy and productive instances in the ongoing ethical task of seeing the world clearly.24 This task is never finished because of the historically dynamic nature of ethical life, and its continual 22 This is related to Adorno’s insistence that the “wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (2005: 39). It is especially under the conditions of a “wrong life” of unjust social institutions and ideology that we should not strive for an ideal of agency free of discursive breakdown. 23 There is a resonance here with what Talbot Brewer calls “dialectical activities”: “Dialectical activities are a familiar part of almost any human life. The category includes all those activities whose point lies in an intrinsic goodness that is to some considerable degree opaque to those who lack experience with the activity, but that tends to unveil itself incrementally as one gains first-​hand experience with it” (Brewer 2009: 39). The activity of moral articulation—​which involves confronting discursive breakdown in the face of an elusive importance, striving to find new concepts and words to articulate it, and remaking oneself in the process—​is a “dialectical activity” in Brewer’s sense. For illuminating discussions of Brewer that are relevant to this point, see Bennett (2022) and Stern (unpublished). 24 My point here parallels Bernard Williams’s critique of a similarly false ideal of epistemic agency, namely, the ideal of an agent who has, once and for all, overcome all error and ignorance: “Not to know everything is . . . a condition of having a life—​some things are unknown, for instance, because they will form one’s future. If you cannot coherently want to know everything, then you also cannot coherently want never to be in error. . . . [Y]‌ou must make errors, and recognize them, if you are going to extend such knowledge as you have” (1985: 57–​8).

Changing Our Concepts  37 resistance to any final, conceptual articulation, even as its conceptual articulation proves to be something we cannot do without.25 As we move and as we look, the landscape of ethical life is changing, and so our concepts try to catch up. If that is right, then a moral agent immune to discursive breakdown would miss something ethically important about the world—​perhaps the world itself. That, at least, is one of the major themes sounded in this book.

1.4.  Changing Conceptual Schemes I have been arguing that certain cases of discursive breakdown involve confrontations with meaningful experiences that bear some degree of organization and form, despite their resisting discursive apprehension and articulation, and that such experiences are crucial for moral growth. When we consider these claims in relation to the discursive theory of meaning, we face a choice: explain away the phenomena of discursive breakdown and proto-​discursive experience or reject the theory that would have us explain them away. So far, my exploration of discursive breakdown has tried to lend support to the latter option. In this section, I want to strengthen my claim that the discursive theory should be rejected by arguing that a certain kind of change in our discursive repertoires requires, as a necessary condition for its possibility, notions of elusion-​based discursive breakdown and proto-​discursive experience. I do so by developing some ideas in Iris Murdoch about the role of conceptual change in moral growth.26 A core idea here will be that, in the cases 25 This anticipates claims I defend at more length in the chapters to come. Though a historically dynamic picture of ethical life recurs throughout the book at a whole, it receives sustained defense in Chapters 4 and 5. I return to the idea that moral articulation is perpetually ongoing in Chapter 6 (§6.2). 26 For the purposes of the present section, I shall treat cases of conceptual change and discursive change more or less interchangeably. That is, I shall temporarily focus upon cases in which a transformation in an individual or community’s scheme of concepts goes hand in hand with a transformation in the ways they use language to express those concepts. This is required, in part, to incorporate Murdoch’s preferred language

38  MORAL ARTICULATION I discuss, the needed form of conceptual change is not only a matter of inventing new concepts that “fill in the gaps,” so to speak, within an existing conceptual framework, but of a more fundamental transformation of our conceptual frameworks themselves, whether that means transforming a framework substantially from within or transitioning to a different framework altogether.27 The intelligibility of such transformations, I argue, presupposes the notions of elusion-​based discursive breakdown and proto-​discursive experience I have been outlining. In her essay “The Idea of Perfection,” Murdoch offers an example of individual moral transformation, which begins as follows. A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-​in-​ law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-​hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, of “conceptual schemes” into our present discussion of discursive breakdown. In fact, however, the situation is more complex. As I shall argue in Chapter 2, there exists an important range of cases in which conceptual change must get started without the help of simultaneous transformations in one’s discursive repertoires. To explain such cases, we need a flexible notion of conceptuality that does not necessarily take discursive shape (see, esp., §2.1). 27 The examples of new moral concepts invoked at the beginning of the Introduction—​ ‘sexual harassment’, ‘hate speech’, ‘child abuse’, etc.—​are sometimes described as conceptual innovations that fill in “gaps” or “lacunas” within existing moral vocabularies. For example, Miranda Fricker (2007: chap. 7) sometimes speaks this way in her discussion of “hermeneutical injustice.” Her leading example is the case of someone who experiences what we are now in a position to name ‘sexual harassment’ in a time and place still lacking the critical concept. In describing this sort of case, Fricker returns to the metaphor of “gaps or lacunas” in a community’s shared set of conceptual resources, or as she also puts it, “blanks where there should be a name for an experience which it is in the interests of the subject to be able to render communicatively intelligible” (160). Though taken by itself this metaphor need not commit Fricker to an atomistic view of conceptual change, this picture of the problem can lead to a complementary picture of the sort of conceptual change that would serve as the solution, and thus some theorists, following Fricker, describe the required task as that of “fill[ing] in the gaps” (Maitra 2018: 1). An atomistic view is also implied in some places by Richardson, who embraces the idea that morality bears an invariant moral core, yet which contains indeterminacies that require “filling in.” For instance, Richardson writes that new moral norms, “simply fill in the gaps left by the preexisting objective moral principles” (2018: 185).

Changing Our Concepts  39 always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him. (Murdoch 1971: 16–​7)

Though Murdoch does not use words like “class” in her telling of the story, a natural reading of the example is that M’s disapproval of D is the result of her imprisonment within a mid-​century British bourgeois picture of class hierarchy and the social ranking it entails. This culturally learned framework of interpretation prevents the attainment of a just, loving, and clear-​sighted vision of D, reducing her to a stereotype. Yet M is not a static character and the story does not end here. Murdoch goes on to describe a transformation of M’s vision of D: Time passes, and it could be M settles down with a hardened sense of grievance and a fixed picture of D, imprisoned . . . by the cliché: my poor son has married a silly vulgar girl. However, the M of the example is an intelligent and well-​intentioned person, capable of self-​criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: “I am old-​fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-​minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again.” . . . [G]‌radually her vision of D alters. . . . D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on. (17)

We can think of M’s initial perception of D as having been shaped by a more general cognitive orientation toward the world, one that includes, among other things, a tendency to sort people by perceived social class. Murdoch sometimes describes a person’s cognitive orientation toward the world in terms of their inhabiting a particular “scheme of concepts” or “conceptual scheme” (see, e.g.,

40  MORAL ARTICULATION 1971: 31, 43).28 M’s initial descriptions of D—​that she is “vulgar,” “undignified,” “noisy,” etc.—​express concepts belonging to one such scheme, which shapes her habits of perception. The mediating role of M’s conceptual scheme runs deep, helping to shape not only her explicitly avowed judgments (“My son has married beneath him”) but also subtle perceptions on the edge of consciousness (M’s dislike for D’s accent). If M’s initial vision of D is shaped by a conceptual scheme in this way, then a transformation of vision, such that M comes to view D “justly and lovingly,” as Murdoch puts it, will require a transformation of conceptual scheme. The point I wish to highlight is that coming to see D justly and lovingly is not a matter of simply noticing details about D that M had previously missed, and so “filling in the gaps” of her existing conceptual scheme, but of changing her concepts in a more thoroughgoing way, of coming to understand—​if only vaguely—​the distorting effects of her initial conceptual scheme and subjecting that scheme itself to critical scrutiny. To foreground the sort of conceptual change needed here, notice a distinction between two ways M might criticize and revise her own assessment that D is, socially speaking, “beneath” her son. (i) On the one hand, she might come to believe that D possesses features that reveal her initial judgment to be false. She comes to believe, for instance, that D’s parents are in fact wealthy and descended from nobility, that D was educated at the best schools, that she was just putting on that accent and wearing those clothes as a joke, and so on. This would be to revise her initial judgment (“My son has married beneath him”) while respecting the conceptual scheme in which it was formed. People are still to be ranked according to socio-​economic class, and features like dress and accent are reliable markers of how they are to be ranked, but the way she ranked D was

28 The notion of a “conceptual scheme” is, of course, controversial (see, especially, Davidson 1973). I discuss this notion, defending a version of conceptualism in Chapter 2.

Changing Our Concepts  41 mistaken. (ii) On the other hand, she might question whether D (or anyone, for that matter) is best judged within the terms of this conceptual scheme at all, and, moreover, whether D possesses qualities that this conceptual scheme obscures. This would be to scrutinize not only her initial judgment but also the conceptual scheme in which it was formed. While both sorts of self-​criticism challenge M’s initial judgment of D, it is the latter that is required for seeing D justly and lovingly, and so serves for Murdoch as the model for a deeper sort of moral change that cannot be achieved via minor additions to one’s conceptual schemes, but only through a more thoroughgoing transformation, perhaps even wholesale rejection, of those schemes themselves. Let me add a second example that illustrates the difference between voicing a grievance within a conceptual scheme and raising a grievance about a conceptual scheme. In a society that organizes life around a conceptual scheme of private property, it is easy to identify certain kinds of action, like theft and property damage, as wrongs. It is more difficult, and requires a shift of perspective, to claim the existence of wrongs inflicted by the conceptual scheme of private property itself.29 This difficulty is vividly portrayed in Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 film Bicycle Thieves. The film follows a destitute working-​class man, Antonio, and his son, Bruno, as they search the streets of post–​World War II Rome for a stolen bicycle, which Antonio needs for his new job of posting ad bills around the city. His wife, Maria, pawns the family bed sheets to pay for the bicycle only for it to be stolen on the first day of the job. As father and son travel from one social institution to another—​the police, his 29 This is one of Jean-​François Lyotard’s examples of a differend, a conflict which occurs when one is morally injured in a way that is neither recognizable nor reparable under current conditions, given the lack of a moral or legal framework shared by the injured party and the person or community to whom the injured party appeals. He writes, “economic and social law can regulate the litigation between economic and social partners but not the differend between labor power and capital” (Lyotard 1988: §13). I discuss Lyotard’s views in relation to some of the concerns raised in this chapter in Congdon 2016.

42  MORAL ARTICULATION workers’ union, the market, a church, their home—​Antonio is only ever able to articulate that he has been the victim of a theft. What remains unspoken, yet which is tragically manifest in Antonio’s decision to steal a bicycle of his own at the film’s end, is the more fundamental injustice of a socio-​economic order in which poor people must steal from each other in order to survive.30 What I want from this example is a case in which a kind of discursive limit is reached in the face of injustice, which results not from a gap within an otherwise satisfactory conceptual scheme, but from a more thoroughgoing failure of that conceptual scheme, such that it must either be subjected to deep structural transformation or replaced by a different scheme altogether. Specifically, a conceptual scheme organized around concepts like theft and private property has swallowed up, so to speak, Antonio’s interpretation of the injustice he suffers. He knows he has been wronged, and he turns to this framework to articulate a grievance. The concept of theft suggests itself, and he applies it appropriately and without error. For it is true that his bicycle has been stolen, and so his grievance can be voiced authoritatively as long as it remains within this conceptual framework. If we focus solely upon Antonio’s ability to name and identify the wrong of theft, then we shall find no discursive breakdown.31 When making a grievance about theft, one can do so within the conceptual scheme of capitalist property relations. But what if the grievance one wishes to make is against the conceptual scheme of capitalist property relations itself? What if what is needed to articulate the conditions of crushing poverty that the film depicts cannot be provided by filling in the gaps of the existing framework? 30 Here I am following André Bazin: “The thesis implied [by Bicycle Thieves] is wondrously and outrageously simple: in the world where this workman lives, the poor must steal from each other in order to survive. But this thesis is never stated as such, it is just that events are so linked together that they have the appearance of a formal truth while retaining anecdotal quality” (2005: 51). 31 Earlier I drew the distinction between the meaning of an event simply eluding one and one’s experiencing some event as elusive. As I read the film, Antonio focuses so exclusively on the wrong of theft that his condition is closer to the former. Yet it may provoke for the viewer an experience closer to the latter.

Changing Our Concepts  43 Suppose we gradually conclude that conceptions of exploitation, alienation, and domination are better equipped to articulate the deeper injustice Antonio faces. Are we simply adding new concepts to the initial scheme? Or has our conceptual scheme undergone a more fundamental shift? I think the latter better captures the case at hand, for without a thoroughgoing transformation of conceptual scheme, Antonio will be forced to speak within the terms of the very social structures that wrong him. Once we notice the basic distinction between challenging a claim within a conceptual scheme and challenging the conceptual scheme itself, it is not difficult to find examples of it everywhere. It is the difference between challenging the claim that a woman is “unchaste” by arguing that she is, in fact, chaste and challenging the paradigm of morality that requires chastity as a virtue. It is the difference between challenging a denunciation of Cézanne’s portrait of Hortense for failing to resemble the actual Hortense by arguing that the actual Hortense really did look just like that and rejecting the conceptual scheme of photorealism as a way of appreciating a Cézanne. It is the difference between revealing that Antonio was not, in fact, the victim of a theft (imagine that, years from now, a bit of lost footage reveals that the bike was only borrowed by a friend and happily returned!) and criticizing the conceptual scheme of theft for deflecting our attention from systemic and crushing poverty. In short, the distinction arises wherever there is not just one scheme of evaluation with respect to a particular object, but potentially many, leading to the possibility that up for evaluation is the scheme of evaluation itself (cf. Murdoch 1997: 81). We are now in a position to draw a connection to our earlier discussion of discursive breakdown (§1.1). I said that the experience of discursive breakdown can, under certain circumstances, be more than just a moment of cognitive dysfunction, insofar as our consciousness shifts into a higher reflexive gear, moving from the object itself to the quality of one’s discursively mediated relation to the object. We can now think of this in terms of the shift from

44  MORAL ARTICULATION attending to an object within a conceptual scheme to the higher-​ order scrutiny of the conceptual scheme itself. I also spoke earlier of proto-​discursive meanings that elude discursive expression yet bear structure and invite further exploration. When the conceptual schemes we presently inhabit strike us an inadequate, and so require some sort of structural transformation, proto-​discursive experience is one of the key resources we have to work with. For the transformation must involve a transitional moment in which one does not yet clearly apprehend what a new and improved conceptual scheme would involve, yet glimpses something elusive and important from within one’s existing schemes, if only darkly and distortedly. That this is so in many cases of individual moral conceptual growth seems inevitable, for the work of coming into language in early childhood, as well as ongoing growth and maturation in adulthood, never ceases to present us with experiences, feelings, and challenges from others that disrupt and frustrate the limits of our conceptual powers as they stand. Yet it also appears to be applicable to larger-​scale social cases of conceptual change, where we wish to speak not merely of individual proto-​discursive experiences had by isolated agents, but socially repeated patterns of proto-​discursive experience that call out for the expansion and transformation of shared conceptual schemes. Consider some of our earlier examples. When you feel an inchoate sense of anger at your boss, the experience is characterized not only by the felt limits of your discursive means, but also the faint apprehension that something is there to be pursued and more clearly formulated. If we imagine this example takes place prior to the mid-​seventies, perhaps what is needed (among other things) is the development of a new conceptual scheme that includes the concept, ‘sexual harassment’. This latter thought can be nourished if your experience turns out not to be an idiosyncrasy of your own individual life situation, but part of a socially repeated pattern of proto-​discursive experience that can be shared, explored, and developed in solidarity with others, say, in the context of a feminist

Changing Our Concepts  45 consciousness-​raising group. At both the individual and social levels, the initial proto-​discursive experience occurs prior to the existence of the new conceptual scheme in which it can be, retroactively, clearly articulated. In a similar spirit, we need not suppose that a viewer of Bicycle Thieves knows exactly what the right conceptual scheme for articulating Antonio’s suffering might be, even as they apprehend that there is something crucial that the conceptual scheme of theft misses. But if that apprehension occurs, it must occur prior to (because it is a precondition for) the development of a new and better conceptual scheme. It is these sorts of intimations that something important lies just beyond one’s discursive grasp that I am calling “proto-​discursive.” My claim, then, is not just that our picture of moral meaningfulness needs to be expanded to include forms beyond the discursive, but that certain proto-​discursive forms are, at least in the cases we have considered, preconditions for the development of moral discourse itself. For the cases of moral conceptual growth I have been tracking begin with and depend upon an engagement with proto-​discursive meanings. This means rejecting a picture of moral meaningfulness as discursive all the way down.

1.5.  The Expressive Logic of Articulation Let me sum up my argument so far. Certain experiences of discursive breakdown confront us with proto-​discursive meanings, that is, forms of meaning that cry out for discursive articulation even as they confound our received discursive frameworks (§1.1). To say this much already raises controversy, for the very idea of proto-​discursive experience requires that we challenge a theory of meaning as discursive all the way down (§1.2), a theory that tacitly shapes significant portions of contemporary ethical theory (§1.3). This leaves us with a choice: we must either explain away the phenomenon or reject the theory that would have us explain it away.

46  MORAL ARTICULATION The previous section (§1.4) made a case for the latter by arguing that certain instances of moral conceptual growth that involve fundamental transformations in our received conceptual schemes are best explained via a picture of meaning that includes the notion of proto-​discursive experience. In order to solidify this thought, we need an alternative to the theory that models moral meaning on the logical form of a discursively formulable proposition. The alternative model I sketch in this section, and go on to develop in this book as a whole, is centered on the concept of articulation. I have in mind Charles Taylor’s (1985; 2016) use of the term, “articulation,” to refer to the activity of expressing inchoate experiences of significance—​unformed desires, cloudy senses of what is important, unstructured emotions—​in ways that reshape experience and create new meanings. Explaining this idea will allow us to provide a preliminary sketch of the central concept on offer in this book, moral articulation. To get into this idea, we may begin, as Taylor does, by distinguishing articulations, directed at ourselves, our feelings, and our evaluations, with descriptions, which target more or less stable external objects. In seeking to express one’s inchoate sense of an artwork’s beauty, one’s feelings of love, or one’s angered sense of violation, we seek out words or images that place our feelings in a certain light, that help us make sense of our experience. As the discussion of the previous section suggests, this may mean either developing new concepts that transform a conceptual scheme from within or, more radically, seeking out new conceptual schemes altogether. A sustained effort to articulate a latent sense of meaningfulness often does more than simply lift an obscure feeling into the light of discursive clarity. Rather, as one interprets one’s own feelings, seeking out new conceptual schemes within which they can make sense, those feelings are shaped, leant fresh determinacy and structure, such that the ‘object’ of articulation can become something different than it was prior to one’s efforts of self-​ interpretation. To work upon a vague feeling of affection and seek

Changing Our Concepts  47 out words for it, or to give sustained interpretive attention to a dissonant feeling of anger and agitation at one’s boss, is apt to transform the very feelings one seeks to interpret. This is unlike simple descriptions of self-​standing objects, as when we say that “Mars has an iron-​rich surface” or “is 4,208 miles in diameter.” While such descriptions may transform our understanding of Mars, they do not transform Mars itself. Yet insofar as one’s self-​understanding is part of who one is and who one is becoming, a transformation in one’s self-​understanding is, ipso facto, a transformation of oneself. The aim of articulation is not only to discover oneself, but to become oneself, through self-​interpretive activity. The point in claiming that articulation has this transformative power is not to argue that, in articulating the meaning of one’s own desires, feelings, and inchoate evaluations, the self-​interpreter is free simply to make things up as they go. In articulating an elusive experience of meaning, Taylor writes, “it is not exactly that I have no yardstick, in the sense that anything goes, but rather that what takes the place of the yardstick is my deepest unstructured sense of what is important, which is as yet inchoate and which I am trying to bring to definition. I am trying to see reality afresh and form more adequate categories to describe it” (Taylor 1985: 41–​2). The proto-​discursive meanings we have been discussing—​a latent sense of beauty, an elusive feeling of love, a rush of dissonant anger—​ preexist one’s explicit efforts of articulation, and those meanings purport to reflect features of the world which we do not simply will into existence or will away. Thus, there is a genuine sense in which articulation must strive to be faithful to an ‘object’ that precedes it and, hence, can range from the discerning to the deluded. One can give a false or distorted interpretation of the nature and sources of one’s own anger, one can misconstrue one’s own feelings of love, and one can do a better or worse job of articulating an experience of an artwork. In such ways, misarticulations are possible. Yet at the same time, the ‘object’ of articulation is not something fully formed and intact prior to its expression in language, in quite the same way

48  MORAL ARTICULATION as a planet waiting to be discovered. Articulation follows an expressive logic, meaning that what it expresses is not something wholly determined in advance of expression, but rather comes to be what it is at least partially as the result of its own expression.32 Articulation has this structure: it brings something to light, just as it develops what it brings to light. My thesis here is that the expressive logic of articulation is at play when we work to expand and revise our evaluative vocabularies. For example, suppose I value courage but understand it in an immature way: I think courage is the elimination of fear (and cowardice fear’s presence). Time goes on and I work to articulate why courage is important to me, gradually realizing that there exist situations in which the absence of fear is not a manifestation of human excellence but recklessness or hubris. Suppose, moreover, that this insight comes along with refinements in my evaluative vocabulary, as I acquire a new word, “rashness,” to name reckless and hubristic instances of fearlessness. The introduction of the new term changes my evaluative vocabulary, not only in the obvious sense that a new term has been introduced alongside the old, but also in the more holistic sense that the appearance of the new term alters the sense of the existing terms. Once rashness is part of my conceptual scheme, courage, if it is to remain the name of a virtue, can no longer mean 32 By calling this “expressive” I have in mind a line of thinking about language found in figures like Herder, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, who urge in different ways that the human life-​form is so deeply entwined with language and expressivity that we, to a significant extent, become who we are as a result of expressing who we are. See, e.g., Herder’s writings on the origin of language, in which he urges that language, along with the special form of reflection language enables, is “essential to [our] species” (2002: 87). In Hegel, see his Anthropology’s treatment of the notion that expressions of spirit (Geist) are not external to the thing they express, but constitute spirit’s actual development (2007: §383). From Wittgenstein arises the tradition of “ordinary language philosophy,” a central tenet of which is that language is not just a tool for communication, but constitutive of a “form of life” in which shared meanings and practices take on actuality (see, e.g., 2009: §19). This use of “expressive” should be carefully distinguished from any reference to the family of non-​cognitivist, anti-​realist positions in metaethics sometimes called “expressivism” (see, e.g., Gibbard 2003 and Schroeder 2008). For the expressive tradition Taylor builds upon holds out for the possibilities of both the knowledge and existence of value in the world.

Changing Our Concepts  49 the “elimination of fear,” just as cowardice can no longer simply mean its presence. Though the same word, “courage,” was used both before, during, and after this process of articulation, what I value now is different from what I valued at the beginning.33 And yet it is nevertheless part of a continuous arc of self-​interpretation, and so the sense of ‘courage’ I end up with is a result of my efforts to articulate an intimation of the value of ‘courage’ I had at the beginning. I have not merely described my initial, inchoate sense of the importance of courage—​I have articulated it.34 I can, moreover, misarticulate it, which means not only getting that initial sense wrong, but also shaping that sense in potentially distorted ways. In misarticulating the importance of courage, say, by attaching it to a macho ideal of unwavering self-​confidence, I risk not only deluding myself about the value this virtue may play in my life, but actively shaping aspects of myself and, potentially, social reality around me, in morally pernicious directions.35 As Taylor puts it, “articulations are attempts to formulate what is initially inchoate, or confused, or badly formulated. But this kind of formation or reformulation does not leave its object unchanged. To give a certain articulation is to shape our sense of what we desire or what we hold important in a certain way” (Taylor 1985: 36). The object of articulation, in our case, a proto-​discursive experience in the midst of discursive breakdown, is not a self-​standing object already fully intact and normatively determinate, but is shaped, its significance deepened, by our very efforts to express it. 33 Cf. Murdoch: “Words may mislead us here since words are often stable while concepts alter; we have a different image of courage at forty from that which we had at twenty. A deepening process, at any rate an altering and complicating process, takes place” (Murdoch 1971: 28). 34 As this example indicates, understanding and evaluation are inseparable in articulation. Coming to understand an experience is to evaluate it in some way, such that a transformation in understanding is, ipso facto, a transformation in valuing. 35 As Taylor writes, “Because of this double fact, because an articulation can be wrong, and yet it shapes what it is wrong about, we sometimes see erroneous articulations as involving a distortion of the reality concerned” (1985: 38). This will be a theme in Chapter 4, when I discuss such misarticulations in connection with the idea that unjust ideologies not only get reality wrong, but shape reality in their image.

50  MORAL ARTICULATION We can connect this with the previous section’s discussion of cases in which what is needed is not just the filling in of this or that concept, but a more radical overhaul of one’s received conceptual schemes. While we might initially be tempted to think of the invention of new moral concepts like ‘sexual harassment’ as atomistic additions to an existing moral vocabulary that otherwise remains unchanged, we often do better to view them as part of broader, holistic transformations of our received conceptual schemes.36 Writing about the case of sexual harassment, Linda Martín Alcoff describes the transformation in terms that fit the expressive logic of articulation: [O]‌ur ability to name experiences can in some cases change their shape and their affective texture. Consider again the case of sexual harassment, in which the term we use to classify the experience changes it from amorphous or generic aggravation to a specific and remediable injustice, or from ‘women’s lot in life’ to communally sanctioned harm. There is a rather sensitive relationship between the way life appears and feels, and the conceptual repertoire we have available to us to describe it. And changes in the terms by which we bring experiences under a description can affect the actual things themselves—​especially in so far as these are experiences—​that are referred to by the terms. (Alcoff 2010: 136)

To try to understand such conceptual shifts on the model of straightforward description would be to ignore the transformative 36 We need not rule out cases in which the development of a new concept comes closer to “filling in gaps.” Some cases may be more transformative than others. Arguably, for example, the development of the term ‘cyberbullying’ in the late 1990s left existing notions of ‘bullying’, ‘harassment’, and related concepts relatively unchanged, simply updating our vocabulary to reflect a new way that technology mediates our capacity to wrong one another. Yet the cases that form my paradigm in this book are better understood as involving the more holistic transformations described above. I develop this point at more length, focusing again on the case of the concept ‘sexual harassment’ in Chapter 2, §2.1.

Changing Our Concepts  51 aspects Alcoff alludes to here. Her point is not the anti-​realist claim that the invention of terms like “sexual harassment” bring into existence forms of wrongdoing that did not exist prior to their expression in discourse. Rather, it is the more subtle, expressive thesis that attempts a careful balance between (i) the idea that terms like “sexual harassment” refer to real and morally significant experiences of suffering and (ii) the idea that acts of conceptualization and naming can have deeply transformative effects upon those very experiences. In order to understand such a shift in our ethical conceptual schemes, therefore, we should adopt the model of articulation. With this in place, I want to take a step back and restate the general aim of this book. My aim is to explore the process of moral articulation, the dynamic activity of forming new words and conceptual schemes in order to bring previously inchoate, unprecedented, or marginalized forms of moral experience to expression, in ways that allow the sharing of moral meanings for a broader collective. This will involve tracing the process of new moral concept development through the stages I have briefly indicated in this chapter: the experience of discursive breakdown in the face of a morally significant reality; the transformation of our historically inculcated schemes of concepts; and a renewed expression of the object of articulation, in the double sense that the object is both brought to light and developed anew. Though in practice the process of moral articulation may not neatly follow these steps in precise order, they give us a formal picture of the historical process under investigation. My contention is that the historical development of new moral concepts follows, at least in many significant cases, the expressive logic of articulation: they purport to be faithful to intimations of value that precede their expression in language, yet simultaneously have transformative effects, such that the ‘object’ of moral articulation is not left unchanged, and the landscape of ethical life is altered. Just how this alteration occurs and the shapes it can take will be the subject of the chapters to come.

52  MORAL ARTICULATION The view that results is a form of historicized moral realism. It is a form of realism insofar as it allows for the notion that the inchoate experiences of moral significance we attempt to articulate are, at least in some cases, modes of rational responsiveness to a value-​laden world. On this view, the forms of suffering and moral injury articulated by terms like “hate speech” and “sexual harassment” were already imbued with ethical meanings that called for acknowledgment and response long before their expression in language with these precise labels. These are meanings we are free neither to will into existence nor will away. Yet unlike variations of moral realism which posit an immutable ethical foundation or a special domain of unchanging moral facts, this is a historicized variation of moral realism in a dual sense: (i) first, at an epistemic level, it holds that our modes of access to this value-​laden world are invariably mediated by our historically and culturally concrete conceptual schemes and situations; and (ii) at an ontological level, it makes room for the idea that the ethical life-​form we bear is itself a historical result, at least in significant part, of our ongoing efforts to articulate it. For as I shall argue in later chapters, the conditions of human flourishing are themselves articulated, and thus are not necessarily left unchanged, by their expression in language. That, at least, is the picture I make a case for in the chapters to come.

1.6.  Conclusion Let us return to the more local problem we have been tracking in earlier sections. How does the expressive logic of articulation bear on the question of proto-​discursivity? The theory of meaning discussed in §§1.2–​1.3 gives us one model for the logical form of moral meaning: i.e., the discursively articulable proposition. In the grips of the idea that x is meaningful only if x’s meaning can be said or asserted, it will be difficult to see what an alternative to this model might be. One of the salutary aspects of the expressive

Changing Our Concepts  53 logic of articulation is that it provides us with a potential alternative, one that is unconstrained by the discursive theory of meaning. It provides us with a model for understanding the cognitive work of moral judgment that includes not only the endorsement, assertion, and inferential manipulation of meanings that have already taken discursive shape, but also the earlier step of piecing together, from the fragments of elusive experience, those very discursive shapes themselves. To be sure, the process of articulation is also a discursive affair: it is the process of working upon an experience, interpreting it, such that it can be expressed intelligibly and with authority. Yet at the core of the notion of articulation is the idea that this process begins with the experience of meanings that elude our existing discursive powers. It thus provides us with a model for thinking of rational discursive awareness as having proto-​ discursive preconditions. It is a model for a form of moral thought that, rather than beginning and ending within discourse, forges the connection between proto-​discursive experience and its discursive expression in language to others. It is worth asking, “If the earliest stages of articulation are not yet discursive, why go on insisting they reflect ‘rational’ or ‘cognitive’ modes of engagement with the world? Why not go further and say the sorts of meaning in question here are not only non-​discursive, but non-​rational and non-​cognitive as well?” My answer is that there are advantages to working with wider notions of rationality and cognition, such that they extend beyond the discursive.37 To be sure, our discursive practices of asserting, inferring, and so on are essential for linguistic creatures like us to be rationally aware of a meaningful world. Yet the logically prior activity of articulation shares several hallmark features of rationality, and so has good claim to be considered an operation of reason or cognition, from its earliest proto-​discursive beginnings to its explicit discursive results: (i) articulation is end-​directed or purposive, in that it aims

37 I borrow the metaphor of a “wider” notion of rationality from Crary 2007 and 2016.

54  MORAL ARTICULATION at the dual ends of illuminating and maturing features of ethical life (see §4.3); (ii) it is normative, in the sense that it admits of degrees of success and failure, and so is the sort of activity one can hold to standards of criticism; (iii) it is self-​reflective, in the sense I flagged in §1.1 with the metaphor of shifting to a “higher reflexive gear”; and (iv) it is something for which one may take responsibility and be held to account by others through rational forms of criticism.38 All four are hallmarks of traditional conceptions of both theoretical and practical rationality (a distinction that, incidentally, the activity of articulation blurs39). They are, moreover, all essential to the activity of moral articulation. By widening our view of moral meaningfulness and cognition—​stepping back from the moves we make within an already established discursive space and exploring the processes of articulation whereby we stitch together that moral discursive space in the first place—​we encounter a deep and necessary role for proto-​discursive experience.40 In this chapter I have focused on the first stage of moral articulation, discursive breakdown, arguing that we require a notion of proto-​discursive meaning to make sense of it. So far, this has

38 Speaking in favor of the primacy of the propositional, Brandom writes, “Judgments are fundamental, since they are the minimal unit one can take responsibility for on the cognitive side, just as actions are the corresponding unit of responsibility on the practical side” (Brandom 2000: 160). By suggesting that we can be held accountable for our activities of articulation, I am suggesting that responsibility can come in a step earlier than the endorsement of a judgment: i.e., the formation of the discursive space within which judgments may be formed at all. On this point, see Taylor: “our articulations, just because they partly shape their objects, engage our responsibility in a way that simple descriptions do not” (Taylor 1985: 38; cf. Murdoch 1971: 34–​40, 64, 65). 39 A classic formulation of the distinction between theoretical and practical rationality is in terms of “direction of fit,” where theoretical rationality aims to conform contents of one’s mind to features of the world and practical rationality aims to conform features of the world to contents of one’s mind (a view sometimes attributed to Anscombe [see 2000: §32]; for a critical discussion, see Frost 2014). We shall find that articulation cannot be sorted neatly into either option without remainder, because both aims are inseparably at stake. Moral articulation is, we could say, simultaneously world-​disclosing and world-​making. 40 I emphasize that “in the first place” here refers to a logical, not temporal, priority. We need not assume a temporally identifiable “first” moment in which moral discourse is stitched together and a “second” moment in which it is complete.

Changing Our Concepts  55 been a formal claim and defended mainly negatively by arguing that there are limits to a wholly discursive view of moral meaning. The following two chapters offer a more constructive picture of proto-​discursive moral meanings by turning to the social epistemology and moral psychology of ethical experience. In Chapter 2, I do this by digging deeper into the notion of conceptuality that I have been assuming here, asking specifically about the relations between concepts, language, and reality. In Chapter 3, I turn to the role emotions play in the process of articulating proto-​discursive meanings, focusing on the case of resentment. Taken together, these chapters begin to sketch the social epistemological and moral psychological background of moral articulation.

2 Thinking Beyond Language There are situations which are obscure and people who are incomprehensible, and the moral agent, as well as the artist, may find himself unable to describe something which in some sense he apprehends. —​Iris Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality” (1997: 90)

We began our exploration of moral articulation by painting an impressionistic portrait of discursive breakdown, the dissonant experience of apprehending something important that exceeds one’s powers of discursive expression. Moral articulation begins with an experience of language’s limits in the face of an inchoately apprehended moral reality. But what does it mean to say, as I did toward the end of Chapter 1 (§1.5), that such experiences can qualify as rational and cognitive, despite their confronting the agent as a dissonant defeat of the discursive intellect? The idea that moral experience engages our cognitive capacities can be elaborated in a number of ways, yet I shall pursue the idea that the thoroughgoing conceptual mediation of moral experience is key here. I use this phrase in a fairly broad and flexible sense, such that an experience may qualify as conceptual or conceptually mediated whether or not the experiencing agent is in a position to put that experience into clear discursive terms. Working with this picture of conceptuality will entail that the articulation of new moral concepts is never a matter of starting from a bare, conceptually schemeless given, but Moral Articulation. Matthew Congdon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197691571.003.0003

Thinking beyond Language  57 always a matter of working from within historically and culturally local frames of intelligibility. Although I shall argue that the conceptual mediation of moral experience is, precisely, what provides moral agents with the rational resources for criticizing and improving their existing moral discursive repertoires, the picture of conceptual mediation that results is a double-​edged sword. For on the view that will emerge, it is part of our predicament as moral agents that all our struggles for moral conceptual growth take place from within a conceptual inheritance that renders us perpetually susceptible to systemic ignorance, false belief, and recalcitrance to moral change. My purpose in emphasizing this, however, will not be to embrace a pessimistic or conservative view about the possibilities for moral articulation. On the contrary, set against the backdrop of this predicament, we will be in a better position to see what is so remarkable about moral articulation when it succeeds: it breaks through the limits of a received conceptual inheritance while working within its very terms.

2.1.  Concepts and Language Let us begin by clarifying the flexible notion of conceptuality just mentioned. In §1.1 I said that experiences of discursive breakdown are, despite their confounding the limits of one’s discursive capacities, conceptual or conceptually mediated. I used these phrases to refer to a combination of two ideas, namely, that (i) such experiences bear at least a minimum degree of organization and form and (ii) their organization and form are at least partially attributable to agents’ socially mediated activities of organizing and forming pictures of the world. Now, the very idea of non-​discursive yet conceptually organized experience can sound like an oxymoron, at least according to a prominent line of thinking about the nature of concepts and their relation to language. For many hold that concepts have sense only in light of the potential roles they can play

58  MORAL ARTICULATION in the wider context of propositions or judgments.1 If this is true, and if propositions or judgments are themselves necessarily discursive in shape, it will follow that an experience’s being conceptual entails its being discursive, in the sense that, even prior to its actual expression in language, it already bears a logical form susceptible to expression in propositional terms.2 Thus I need to clarify what I mean by “conceptual” such that this implication does not hold. This will pave the way for the idea, central to this book, that the work of moral cognition goes beyond discursively explicit moves like endorsing, querying, and inferring evaluative judgments, and includes the prior, proto-​discursive activity of piecing together a discursively articulable picture of the world in the first place. In calling x “conceptual” or “conceptually mediated,” I mean, first of all, that x bears the minimum form and organization required to strike consciousness as meaningful at all. What does “form and organization” mean here? We can elaborate this idea by saying that, when a creature acquires concepts, they have acquired a range of cognitive capacities to apprehend patterns of difference and unity in the world. On the side of difference, it is through the acquisition of conceptual capacities that a world of distinct phenomena confronts our rational awareness. On the side of unity, it is through the acquisition of concepts that objects in the world strike consciousness as internally organized wholes, bearing qualities that constitute what they are in a positive sense. These two sides are dialectically related, as the “negative” capacity to discern x as distinct from non-​x’s is impossible apart from the “positive” capacity to discern qualities that 1 Kant (2007: A68/​B93); Frege (1980: x); Wittgenstein (2001: §3.3); and Brandom (1994: 79 and 2000: 80 and 160). See also §§1.2–​3, above. 2 For a defense of this claim with respect to the logical form of experiential episodes, see Sellars 1997. In some places, McDowell follows Sellars in viewing all “experiences as containing propositional claims” (Sellars 1997: §16), for example, in his Woodbridge Lectures (reprinted as the first three essays in McDowell 2009). However, some later writings are open to the idea that sensible intuitions are conceptual prior to their being discursive (see, especially, “Avoiding the Myth of the Given,” in McDowell 2009: 262–​4). See also Crary (2016: chap. 3), who defends a picture of nonhuman animal experience (focusing on the case of dogs) as conceptually mediated yet non-​discursive.

Thinking beyond Language  59 render x a unified object unto itself. Differentiation and unification are two sides of the same activity, namely, the conceptualization of a world that bears meaning. This capacity to discern patterns of difference and unity is, moreover, not merely descriptive, but potentially evaluative as well. Here idea (ii) is particularly salient. Because meaningfully organized experience is not something we passively receive from the world, but already involves the contributions of our own subjective agency, we encounter a world of objects as mattering to us, viewed not from an impersonal and abstract standpoint, but a concrete, human standpoint shaped by evaluations, emotions, culture, and history.3 Call this standpoint a normative outlook, one in which descriptive and evaluative takes on reality merge. That the conceptual mediation of experience always begins from a normative outlook is important to emphasize in what follows. For the sorts of new moral concepts that are our focus, like ‘sexual harassment’, ‘child abuse’, ‘hate speech’, and beyond, purport not only to help us to notice patterns of difference and unity in the social world, but to adopt appropriate evaluative stances and practical responses to those patterns. Part of what it means for a creature to acquire concepts, then, is their having developed a range of cognitive capacities to discern patterns of difference and unity that disclose a value-​laden world in the light of a normative outlook. Through concepts we see the world in ethical color (more on this, particularly its ambivalent nature, in §2.2, below).4

3 On the emotional constitution of a normative outlook, see Chapter 3. On its being shaped by a historically and culturally mediated life-​form, see Chapter 5. 4 This is not to say that every concept is an “ethical” or “moral” one, nor is it to conflate the acquisition of concepts with the acquisition of an ethical sensibility. Under many circumstances, it is innocuous to say of certain new concepts that they are simply labels for newly discovered empirical or social phenomena, e.g., ‘texting’. I do hold, however, that the development of an ethical sensibility is impossible apart from the acquisition of concepts and that, given the holistic nature of a conceptual repertoire, we should be wary about drawing too clear a line between concepts that concern ethical matters and those that do not. On this last issue, see Diamond 2010.

60  MORAL ARTICULATION In many cases, the acquisition of a new conceptual capacity is closely associated with a growth in one’s linguistic competences. Recall our earlier example (§1.5) of one whose understanding of the meaning of ‘courage’ matures as they come to recognize that courage is not simply and always the suppression of fear in the face of danger, but a virtuous disposition to feel fear in the right ways, at the right times, and toward the right objects. As part of this maturation, we may imagine that one gains an understanding of how the word “rashness” is used in a linguistic community, learning to deploy it to describe and criticize instances in which the suppression of fear is not virtuous but foolhardy or hubristic. In such cases, moral concept acquisition goes hand in hand with a newly developed grasp of how words are used in a language-​game, and so we may say that, at least sometimes, conceptual growth and discursive growth are two aspects of a single activity. Notice how the twin functions of differentiation and unification work in a case like this. One who has learned how the word “rashness” is used in this language-​game is in a better position to differentiate between a virtuous overcoming of fear and a vicious insensitivity to real danger, while the agent who lacks this capacity may see in both cases only cowardice’s virtuous opposite. This newly acquired capacity to differentiate the two cases, moreover, is only possible if learning the new concept, ‘rashness’, involves the positive capacity to recognize unity in the heterogenous cases of action that qualify as rash.5

5 Neither here nor elsewhere do I assume that this unity must be capturable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. For it is possible that concepts allow us to see “family resemblances” between the instances they encompass, where the features in question need not be present without fail or in the same way in every instance. This is how Wittgenstein famously suggests we should think of the unity of the concept, ‘game’, in light of the apparent lack of necessary and jointly sufficient qualities that appear without fail in all games: “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family—​ build, features, color of eyes, gait, temperament, and so on and so forth—​overlap and criss-​cross in the same way.—​And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family” (Wittgenstein 2009: §67).

Thinking beyond Language  61 Similarly, if we picture a linguistic community in which a relatively mature notion of ‘sexual harassment’ is already available and encoded in its language, then the process whereby new generations learn its meaning will go hand in hand with developing a mastery of the way the phrase, “sexual harassment,” and related terms like “quid pro quo” and “hostile work environment,” are used in practice. Once again, learning new nuances in language will be closely associated with the development of new cognitive capacities to discern morally meaningful patterns of difference and unity in the social world. On the side of difference, those who gain mastery of the phrase will develop a new cognitive capacity to differentiate a serious form of moral violation from superficially similar forms of innocuous behavior, whereas those who lack a sufficiently mature understanding of how the phrase is used in the language-​game will be at a serious disadvantage in seeing the relevant difference, perhaps seeing only innocuous behavior—​“flirtation,” “flattery,” “banter”—​in both cases. On the side of unity, mastery of a language of sexual harassments puts one in a position to apprehend instances of unwelcome sexual attention not only as different from other sorts of behavior, but as manifesting a single, unified, and purposive action-​type. To apprehend some bit of behavior as a manifestation of an action-​type is to apprehend a succession of otherwise disparate phenomena—​this remark about one’s appearance, this look, this invitation, this exploitation of a power imbalance, etc.—​in their plot-​like unity.6 It is, moreover, to recognize it as repeatable. A quid pro quo case of sexual harassment in, say, an academic setting might look in its particularities very different from a hostile work environment case of sexual harassment in a service industry job. Yet the concept, ‘sexual harassment’, has allowed many to see, across these and other manifestations of unwanted sexual attention, a pattern 6 For a classical statement of the idea that plot captures the basic form of human action, see Aristotle 2013: 1450b25. For a reading of Aristotle’s Poetics as a theory of action, see Rorty 1992. For a roughly Aristotelian account of action consonant with the point made above, see Anscombe 2000.

62  MORAL ARTICULATION of injustice that simultaneously feeds upon and reinforces gender-​ based oppression, where previously, if these instances were visible at all, they may have been viewed as disparate, isolated, and anomalous instances of harm.7 Part of the power of concept acquisition, then, lies in its synthesizing capacity to track unity across instances that would otherwise strike us as merely heterogeneous. As I have depicted both of our examples so far, the acquisition of new conceptual capacities is accompanied by, and takes place in large part through, learning how words are used in practice. The concepts in question are acquired by the agent in ways that already bear neat linguistic labels (“rashness” and “sexual harassment”) and can be elaborated in discursively explicit terms. We may imagine, for example, that our agent is capable of thinking and saying things like, “ ‘Rashness’ means a vicious and irrational insensitivity to the presence of real danger,” and elaborating further if queried or challenged. This portrayal of moral concept development as already wholly or primarily a linguistic affair makes sense in many contexts, particularly when the concept in question already exists and has been made discursively explicit as part of a linguistic community’s history yet is new for some agent within that community. Prior struggles for moral articulation have already gone into forging, refining, and solidifying the meaning of the concepts, ‘rashness’ and ‘sexual harassment’, so that, by the time our agent learns them, their acquisition is already accompanied by—​and may take place in large part by learning—​norms concerning how words are used. In such cases, moral conceptual development and learning a language go hand in hand.8

7 For historical background on this point, see the references in footnote 13, below. 8 This is how McDowell sometimes speaks of the link between learning a language and inheriting a conceptually mediated standpoint in the space of reasons: “In being initiated into a language, a human being is introduced into something that already embodies putatively rational linkages between concepts, putatively constitutive of the layout of the space of reasons, before she comes on the scene” (McDowell 1996: 126).

Thinking beyond Language  63 Yet this is not always the case. Sometimes the development of conceptual capacities must occur without the advantage of already existing linguistic labels or discursively articulate elaborations of the patterns of difference and unity in question. The moral agent apprehends something as bearing organization and form in ways that qualify as conceptual in the sense I have been outlining, yet without being able to say, write down, or otherwise discursively formulate what, exactly, they apprehend. Recall our earlier example of anger at your boss for a nebulously apprehended moral violation. In §1.1, I noted that there is an important difference between (a) the boss insulting you without your recognizing any insult at all (such that the act’s meaning simply eludes you); and (b) your harboring an inchoate sense that the boss has done something insulting that you cannot quite pin down (and so the act’s meaning is experienced as elusive). Now, suppose a type-​b case occurs as a response to sexual harassment prior to the mid-​1970s, such that neither you nor anyone to whom you issue a grievance possesses a satisfactory discursive vocabulary for talking about sexual harassment. There is something with at least a minimally intimated form and meaning here. It may be no more than a nagging sense of violation, a realization that heading to work regularly comes with anxiety, or a recurring feeling of agitation that pushes to the surface anytime you think about, interact with, hear, or see your boss. You sense these things, and you can put these feelings into words well enough, perhaps using the very descriptors just mentioned: “violation,” “anxiety,” “agitation.” And yet, we may imagine, these discursive efforts are accompanied by the disturbing idea that they fail to capture the whole of what has gone wrong. They strike you, rather, as only the beginnings of intimations of something that requires further work to articulate. Your initial feelings, though describable as far as they go, point beyond themselves to something you cannot yet articulate satisfactorily to yourself or others. Insofar as your initial experience involves a range of feelings along these lines, the elusive experience qualifies as conceptual in the sense sketched just now. Yet it is not

64  MORAL ARTICULATION (or not yet) fully discursive, insofar as part of the force of the experience is its pushing you to a reflective awareness of the limits of your discursive modes of apprehension and expression as they presently stand. This sort of case—​in which moral conceptual development cannot occur by learning the way words are used in an existing language-​game—​calls for examination. To get the phenomenon in view, consider a modified version of our ‘rashness’ example, this time in the context of a highly simplified and closed linguistic community that does not initially possess either a concept or word for rash behavior. Let us imagine that this community possesses a crude conceptual scheme of ‘courage’ and ‘cowardice’, within which the former is understood only and always as a disposition to suppress, and the latter a disposition to feel, fear in the face of danger. This community is not static, however, and engages in critical self-​scrutiny, improving its conceptual schemes and moral vocabularies over time in response to new and initially inarticulate moral experiences. Suppose some of its inhabitants gradually come to realize, after some needless and preventable injuries and deaths of those they traditionally praised as “courageous,” that failing to experience fear in the face of danger can, in certain cases, reveal a deficiency of character. The articulation of a new concept for this deficiency will not be possible apart from a more fundamental transformation of this community’s moral conceptual constellation. For the very notion of a vicious form of fearlessness cannot so much as be entertained without modifications to the meanings of surrounding concepts, at a minimum, the meanings of ‘courage’ and ‘cowardice’ (and, by extension, the broader notions of ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ under which they fall). The community’s previously held understandings of these concepts played a structural role in rendering this idea incoherent, for if fearfulness is, by definition, a vice (“cowardice” in the community’s initial, immature argot), then there is no room within this unrevised conceptual scheme for the thought that “rashness” expresses.

Thinking beyond Language  65 This means that any agents who apprehend the sort of moral phenomenon being obscured here can only begin with an inchoate apprehension of a new moral idea—​or, perhaps negatively, a cloudy intimation that their present framework leaves out something important.9 For on the assumption that such rogue apprehensions do not instantly bring with them the entire surrounding conceptual constellation that would render them wholly intelligible and speakable, but rather enter the space of reasons gradually by fits and starts, there must be a transitional phase in which those agents’ initial apprehensions are proto-​discursive. The eventual articulation of a conceptual scheme for thinking and speaking about rash behavior, then, does not merely make explicit a bit of propositional content that was hitherto unasserted yet in principle assertible within the structure of moral intelligibility as it stood. Rather, the newly articulated concept requires a newly transformed framework of moral intelligibility that can serve as its home.10 Its initial, inchoate apprehension is, therefore, conceptual without yet being discursive, even though the agent can discursively express its meaning retrospectively once “rashness” has been morally articulated. Between the two extremes of initial inchoate apprehension and eventual discursive expression we should expect, moreover, not an instantaneous shift from one state to the other, but a gradual and difficult struggle, during which the apprehension one is trying to articulate develops a more satisfactory form and organization by a matter of degree. 9 These agents also have, beyond their own inchoate experiences, each other. We can imagine in our example that the development of the new notion of ‘rashness’ occurs within a “counterpublic” of likeminded agents before being brought into the mainstream. Yet in order for this counterpublic to arise in the first place, proto-​discursive experiences had by individual agents are required. More on this in §2.3, below. 10 This has resonances with McDowell’s discussion of forms of creativity capable of “warping a prior conception of the topography of intelligibility” (McDowell 1996: 157). He writes that a certain kind of creative discursive act “is not just a move hitherto unimagined but still within the possibilities as they were already comprehended, at least in general terms. (That is how it is with even the most radical innovation in chess.) Rather, the remark changes a hearer’s conception of the structure that determines the possibilities for making sense” (187).

66  MORAL ARTICULATION Now let us see how the same point is at work in a more complex, because historically actual, example. Many feminist theorists and historians have emphasized that the struggle to articulate new ways of naming and criticizing forms of gender-​based violence, as in the development of terms like “sexual harassment,” “domestic violence,” and “date rape,” as well as struggles to reinterpret and refine older terms and concepts like “consent” and “coercion” in their light, are cases in which linguistic innovation is not a side issue but central to feminist ethical practice and political movements (see, e.g., Freedman 2002: chap. 13 and Brownmiller 1999: 279–​94). In this spirit, Linda Martín Alcoff writes that the “struggle around sexual violence has played out perhaps most significantly in our linguistic environments, changing both our legal terms and everyday discourse, the way we name and categorize our experiences, and the way we classify and prosecute offenses” (Alcoff 2018: 13). This is important to keep in mind, as it cautions us against treating the invention of individual new terms, like “sexual harassment,” as atomistic additions to an otherwise unchanged conceptual and discursive landscape.11 Rather, we do better to think of struggles to develop new concepts and terms for gender-​based violence as impossible apart from a much broader sea change in shared frames of moral intelligibility and speakability—​one that challenges, in particular, the historical and persistent influence that patriarchal oppression has had on the ways we speak (and fail to speak) about gender, sex, and violence. As such, the emergence of an individual term like “sexual harassment,” “domestic violence,” or “date rape” is both made possible by, and helps to bring about, this broader shift of a community’s conceptual constellation and moral language as a whole.12 11 See my discussion of the metaphor of “filling in the gaps” of a shared interpretive resource in Chapter 1 (§1.4), above. 12 It is important to acknowledge that changes in the conceptual repertoires we have for naming sexual harassment and other forms of gender-​based violence occur not only diachronically, over time, but also synchronically, across cultures and social locations (for a discussion, see Alcoff 2018: chap. 5). Though my focus in this book is

Thinking beyond Language  67 In our artificially constructed and simplified ‘rashness’ example, we saw a small-​scale version of this basic transformative logic: the new concept cannot enter moral conceptual space without making an impact that reverberates throughout the existing conceptual constellation, developing the meanings of other existing concepts, in that case, minimally, ‘courage’, ‘cowardice’, ‘virtue’, and ‘vice’. Assuming that the new concept and the newly transformed constellation in which it is fully intelligible do not emerge all at once, but must be painstakingly forged gradually over time in ways that admit of missteps, false advances, and backtracking, it follows that the initial apprehensions that spark this case of moral articulation must be, for at least much of this process, not yet discursive, and that the ensuing process of moral articulation creates new discursive forms that were not available, even in implicit form, previously. In the case of a new term like “sexual harassment,” the same transformative logic is at work, albeit in a much more complicated fashion, involving an array of reverberating effects that overlap and interact in complex ways. What sorts of reverberating effects? Here is a non-​exhaustive list of changes that are reported in historical, legal, and philosophical accounts of the invention of both the concept and vocabulary of sexual harassment in the United States in the mid-​1970s13: (i) transformations of concepts and tropes previously used to interpret unwanted sexual advances (e.g., a previously historically dominant

diachronic moral conceptual change, the ongoing need to tailor our moral concepts and vocabularies to culturally concrete contexts across the globe, as well as the need to negotiate between the differing conceptual schemes and vocabularies across those contexts, are reasons for seeing moral articulation as a perennial task. I return to this issue in Chapter 6, where it is part of my argument that, although the picture of moral articulation defended here presupposes an idea of moral progress, it need not presuppose that all morally progressive shifts in moral language are drawn toward a single, universal telos or endpoint that would rule out synchronic diversity in our moral vocabularies (§6.2, point [v]‌). 13 The following points in this paragraph draw from literature on sexual harassment, gender-​based violence, and feminist political struggles including Alcoff 2018; Anderson 2006; Brison 2002; Brownmiller 1999; Crary 2007: chap. 5; and Freedman 2002.

68  MORAL ARTICULATION notion of “seduction” that portrays women’s resistance to, and refusal of, sexual advances as trials to be overcome by the “seducer” with persistence and force, as well as concepts previously used to frame sexual harassment as innocuous or even admirable, such as “flirtation,” “banter,” being a “player,” a “ladies man,” a “Don Juan,” etc.); (ii) transformations of existing notions of ‘discrimination’ and ‘equality’ (the earliest promotors of the idea of ‘sexual harassment’ argued that the sexual harassment of women in the workplace and academic settings constituted a form of gender-​based discrimination under existing U.S. law, and drew important precedent from Black-​led anti-​discrimination campaigns the decade prior,14 meaning that the development of the concept would require an expanded conception of the sorts of behaviors that qualify as discriminatory generally and the forms of treatment that are needed to respect a person as a moral and legal equal); (iii) expansions of existing notions of ‘harassment’ (the very idea that harassment could take a distinctively sexual form, in ways that turn unwanted sexual attention, wittingly or unwittingly, into a weapon of patriarchal domination, was not already encoded in received notions of ‘harassment’, which therefore required a widened extension15); (iv) discrediting of certain narratives as sexist ideology (e.g., fatalistic tropes like “boys will be boys” and the idea that unwanted sexual attention is just “women’s lot in life” would be exposed not as received wisdom but ideological underpinnings of patriarchal domination); (v) centering of certain previously marginalized narratives (e.g., the writing, public dissemination, and believing

14 Specifically, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, in the case of sexual harassment in academic settings, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972. Importantly, the moral category of ‘sexual harassment’ goes beyond its strictly legal variant in several respects, including its extension beyond workplace and academic settings, including public streets, places of worship, doctor’s offices, etc. For two early accounts by feminist activists, which helped promote the phrase “sexual harassment” to a broader audience, see Farley 1978 and MacKinnon 1979. 15 For a philosophical discussion of this point in the context of expanding our conception of the workings of ethical thought, see Crary 2007: 166–​71.

Thinking beyond Language  69 of survivors’ narratives16); and (vi) the ongoing development of subclasses of sexual harassment, whose refinement and expansion alter the original concept of ‘sexual harassment’ in a feedback loop (e.g., recent work on the harms of sexual harassment has widened the typology of its forms well beyond the quid pro quo and hostile work environment varieties,17 including ‘gender harassment’ [harassment toward women occupying stereotypically ‘male’ jobs, such as firefighting], ‘gender policing’ [verbal and physical harassment of effeminate men, masculine women, and other gender non-​ conformists], ‘sexual orientation/​ identity harassment’ [harassment of employees for being homosexual, trans, or queer], ‘horseplay’ [male-​on-​male bullying and hazing, which may involve sexual behavior such as genital exposure, mock rape, and taunting], and the ‘pornographic workplace’ [workplaces filled with sexually objectifying representations of women]). My point in listing these transformations is not to claim that each of them has fully or satisfactorily taken place, for they may be, at best, only partially achieved and thus remain aspirational. The point, rather, is that they exemplify aspects of the large-​scale shift in conceptual practices that would need to take place for a sufficiently mature and nuanced notion of ‘sexual harassment’ to reach fruition in one particular historical and cultural context. They illustrate, in other words, that the development of a single concept like ‘sexual harassment’ cannot occur in a vacuum, so to speak, but requires the support of a broader conceptual constellation that is hospitable to it. If this is true, and if the conceptual constellation in question does not come into existence all at once, but rather is developed painstakingly by fits and starts, then we are justified in thinking of transitional moments in which the

16 On the epistemic, moral psychological, and political importance of survivors’ narratives in the aftermath of sexual violence, see, esp., Brison 2002 and Alcoff 2018. 17 The following is a partial list of new categories of sexual harassment discussed in Anderson 2006.

70  MORAL ARTICULATION violence of sexual harassment is apprehended in the manner I have been calling proto-​discursive—​i.e., apprehended in underdeveloped ways that, nevertheless, help reveal the limits of one’s received discursive means. Though the broader conceptual constellation has not yet been brought into being, there is still the possibility of a rogue moral apprehension, one that operates outside dominant frames of speaking about gender, sex, and violence, and—​in the kind of case we have been considering—​ without the support of an already existing moral vocabulary that could do the job satisfactorily. Moral articulations, therefore, do more than merely make explicit in language a moral claim that has hitherto gone unsaid yet was always within the bounds of the sayable given our frameworks as they stood. If that were the only sort of creative expression that moral articulation amounted to, then innovations in moral language would be like previously unbuilt structures, constructed with the same set of building blocks one had always worked with in the past. Retrospectively, someone familiar with that set of blocks could see that the possibilities for those structures were there all along, without requiring any alteration or expansion of the building blocks at hand. But the conceptual space of ethical life is not, I am urging, a limited set of building blocks that can be arranged in indefinitely many new permutations. On the contrary, moral articulations can take a more radical form, striving to change a community’s conception of the horizon within which moral meaningfulness takes place. If this sort of creativity is possible—​which is how I am suggesting we interpret large-​scale historical shifts in the ways we speak about gender-​based violence—​then it cannot be the case that all our encounters with moral meaning are already in fully discursive shape, just waiting to be put into phrases. For sometimes putting moral meaning into phrases involves transformations of the very frames within which discursive moves can be made.

Thinking beyond Language  71

2.2.  Concepts and Reality Our discussion so far has concentrated on the first of the two ideas supposed in characterizing x as “conceptual” or “conceptually mediated,” namely, (i) that x bears the minimum degree of organization and form required to strike our rational awareness as meaningful. My purpose in the previous section was to elaborate this idea outside the frame of an exhaustively discursive theory. Now I turn to the second idea, namely, (ii) that the organization and form of x is at least partially attributable to agents’ socially mediated activities of organizing and forming pictures of the world. According to this idea, meaningfully organized experience is not something we receive from the world purely passively, but is jointly constituted by the contributions of our own agency. To experience some instance of reckless fearlessness as rash, or some interpersonal behavior as sexual harassment, requires that one occupy a point of view shaped by emotions, evaluations, culture, and history that help constitute those very experiences as meaningful and value-​laden in the ways that they are. Ethically meaningful phenomena like rashness and sexual harassment bear the moral significance they do, not from an impersonal and abstract point of view, but from a concretely human perspective that includes broader background conceptions of what it is to suffer, flourish, and live a meaningful life. Earlier, we called this perspective an experiencer’s normative outlook, a vantage that is at once individual, in that it is the ongoing result of one’s idiosyncratic biography, such that even two individuals who share very similar upbringings and socializations can have non-​identical normative outlooks, and emphatically social, in that one’s moral education, socialization, inheritance of overlapping cultures, participation in shared practices, ongoing dialogue, and other forms of sociality contribute to its formation. The concepts inherited by successive generations—​which, as we saw in §2.1, need not be fully discursive—​offer an initial orientation in a world of organization and form, one that is built, in large part, upon prior generations’

72  MORAL ARTICULATION received wisdom concerning what is meaningful, what is important, and what is reason for what (cf. McDowell 1996: 126). As this indicates, the concepts one inherits may be operative in experience both actively or passively. One need not be aware of one’s conceptual inheritance as shaping one’s perceptions, memories, and judgments in order for such conceptual mediation to be operative. This brings us quickly to the theme of ideology.18 That our normative outlooks are deeply dependent upon a world of others—​both our contemporaries and past generations—​ renders us permanently susceptible to deep running and systemic forms of prejudice, ignorance, and false belief, such that our conceptions of what is important, meaningful, and true are sometimes shaped more by reigning forms of power than good epistemic and ethical practice. Theories of ideology have been discussed in many ways, but one contemporary discussion that is both illuminating and especially pertinent to our present aims is Charles Mills’s work on the socio-​ epistemic dimensions of racism and white supremacy (1997, 1998, 2007, 2017a). One reason it is pertinent to our present discussion is that Mills holds a version of the view, endorsed in §2.1, that experience and thought are pervasively conceptual, joining philosophers like Sellars and McDowell in rejecting the idea of a “raw perceptual ‘given,’ completely unmediated by concepts” (Mills 2007: 24). For Mills, embracing the view that even low-​level, pre-​reflective perceptual engagements with the world are conceptually mediated helps explain the deep ways in which race-​based prejudice can embed itself in our thinking, distorting even basic instances of empirical claim-​making, memory, and belief-​formation. As Mills elaborates the point,

18 I mean “ideology” in the pejorative sense that refers, roughly, to the conceptual and epistemic dimensions of injustice. For background, see Geuss 1981; Jaeggi 2009; Haslanger 2012 and 2017b; and Gooding-​Williams forthcoming. I discuss Haslanger’s conception of ideology at more length in Chapter 4, below.

Thinking beyond Language  73 Perceptions are in general simultaneously conceptions, if only at a very low level. Moreover, the social dimension of epistemology is obviously most salient here, since individuals do not in general make up these categories themselves but inherit them from their cultural milieu. . . . [I]‌f the society is one structured by relations of domination and subordination (as of course most societies in human history have been), then in certain areas this conceptual apparatus is likely going to be shaped and inflected in various ways by the biases of the ruling group(s). So crucial concepts may well be misleading in their inner makeup and their external relation to a larger doxastic architecture. (Mills 2007: 24–​5)

The result is what Mills calls an “epistemology of ignorance” (Mills 1997: 18) or, elsewhere, simply, “ideology” (2017a). An example Mills gives is the role played by the concept, ‘savage’, in the justification of European imperialism. The concept, ‘savage’, frames Indigenous populations as inherently inferior, without history, and incapable of self-​regulation by morals or law. It belongs within a wider conceptual array according to which ‘civilized’ is its opposite, and which takes European norms and traditions as its paradigm.19 Crucially, though the ‘savage’/​ ‘civilized’ conceptual opposition purports to do epistemic work, representing the relation between colonized and colonizer, its underlying aim is not the promotion of knowledge but the maintenance of power by promoting systemic ignorance about colonialism’s brutal realities. Mills explains, 19 Cf. Gooding-​Williams’s discussion of the role that “constitutive distinctions” play in sustaining racist ideology and anti-​Black concepts (forthcoming). In our example above, the savage/​civilized opposition is playing such a role. In Gooding-​Williams’s discussion, the primary example is Frederick Douglass’s analysis of the language used by slaveholders in My Bondage and My Freedom (1987). He writes that “For Douglass, the practice of treating human beings as animal property is constituted by several constitutive distinctions—​that is, by several internally related roles and statuses, as well as by the omission of several internally related roles and statuses” (forthcoming). Such constitutive distinctions include, for example, the oppositional pairings that establish the hierarchical social practices of the plantation: not only master/​slave, but also overseer/​slave and master/​overseer. Gooding-​Williams draws the notion of “constitutive distinctions” from Taylor’s classic essay, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” (1971).

74  MORAL ARTICULATION In the classic period of European expansionism, it then becomes possible to speak with no sense of absurdity of “empty” lands that are actually teeming with millions of people, of “discovering” countries whose inhabitants already exist, because the nonwhite Other is so located in the guiding conceptual array that different rules apply. Even seemingly straightforward empirical perception will be affected—​the myth of a nation of hunters in contradiction to widespread Native American agriculture that saved the English colonists’ lives, the myth of stateless savages in contradiction to forms of government from which the white Founders arguably learned, the myth of a pristine wilderness in contradiction to a humanized landscape transformed by thousands of years of labor. In all of these cases, the concept is driving the perception, with whites aprioristically intent on denying what is before them. So if Kant famously said that perceptions without concepts are blind, then here it is the blindness of the concept itself that is blocking vision. (Mills 2007: 27)

The conceptual array structured around the ‘savage’/​‘civilized’ opposition, though cognitively dysfunctional given its divergence from the world it claims to illuminate, plays psychologically and socially functional roles in upholding the worldview of European imperialism. Mills urges that even if many today would explicitly reject the myth of the ‘savage’, new forms of racist ideological conceptual arrays have taken its place, for instance, in the notion of ‘colorblindness’, which involves the formal recognition of the moral and legal equality of all coupled with an inability or willful refusal to recognize a past history of racism and its persisting effects (Mills 2007: 28). The idea that our normative outlooks are susceptible to ideology in this way raises questions concerning the rational resources available to us for its critique. If our concepts are doing more to distort than disclose morally salient features of the world, what methods and practices are there for the sort of critical self-​scrutiny required

Thinking beyond Language  75 here? While there are many possible answers one might offer, Mills suggests a general epistemological form such answers might take when he writes, “this means that the conceptual array with which the cognizer approaches the world needs itself to be scrutinized for its adequacy to the world, for how well it maps the reality it claims to be describing” (Mills 2007: 24). Yet this form of answer raises special difficulties for anyone who holds (as Mills does) the sort of account defended in §2.1, according to which all experience and thought are pervasively conceptual. For Mills’s “mapping” metaphor suggests a dualistic relation between concepts and world such that we may criticize some conceptual array as ideological by showing how it fails to “map” accurately the world it putatively describes. Yet if we take seriously the pervasiveness of conceptual mediation in experience, it will not be the case that we can test the accuracy of our conceptual arrays by comparing them with how things really are, because our picture of “how things really are” will itself take place from a conceptually mediated point of view. Borrowing an image from Iris Murdoch, we may say that the temptation here is to think that an objective take on reality must involve the ability to “crawl under the net” of the conceptual schemes we use to make sense of the world, so that we may finally make undistorted contact with the Real (Murdoch 1954).20 If we take this requirement to be imposed upon us, two equally troubling pictures of our epistemic condition emerge as the only apparent alternatives, one optimistic and the other pessimistic. On the one hand, and in an optimistic mood, we may hold that “crawling under the net” is, in fact, epistemically possible and that what we 20 The titular phrase of Murdoch’s novel, Under the Net, occurs as the narrator reads a line from his own work of fiction, titled, The Silencer: “All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net” (Murdoch 1954: 80–​1). The use of the “net” metaphor is itself a reference to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “The different nets correspond to different systems for describing the world” (Wittgenstein 2001: 6.341). The temptation to crawl under the net, as I use the image here, is a version of what Wilfrid Sellars famously calls the “Myth of the Given” (1997: §10).

76  MORAL ARTICULATION find there is an undistorted view of reality that can serve as an indubitable foundation for ethical knowledge. We may set aside the burden facing advocates of this approach of identifying a method whereby epistemic agents achieve this conceptually schemeless standpoint. For regardless of one’s proposed method, they face the more fundamental challenge of showing how a perspective that lacks even the minimal sort of conceptual organization outlined in §2.1 could have any bearing on our rational awareness. For a conceptually schemeless perspective really is no perspective at all, as it lacks the most basic elements of form, difference, and unity that lay the basis for any meaningful experience whatsoever. The optimistic approach, moreover, faces a second and equally important challenge as well, rooted in the importance we ascribed just now to the idea of a normative outlook. For they must explain how a take on reality purportedly uninformed by, and bearing no relation to, the antecedent structure of the experiencer’s own normative outlook could matter to the experiencer, that is, could strike one as somehow morally important, whether that means finding it worth, for instance, protesting, resenting, caring for, loving, esteeming, being in solidarity with, or showing due respect.21 For we wanted a picture that could explain how experiences of reality can play a

21 An issue that stands at the heart of the debate over the possibility of “external reasons,” as Bernard Williams famously put it (Williams 1981, 1995; see also Korsgaard 1986; McDowell 1998: Essay 5; Markovitz 2011; Manne 2014). An internal reason for action is one that can be reached, via a sound deliberative route, from an existing feature of one’s subjective motivational set. An external reason would be one that is not constrained by this requirement. Williams famously denied the existence of external reasons—​which one might connect with the idea, defended here, that something can only appear to us as mattering and as engaging our practical agency, if it is mediated by a “normative outlook.” Though for reasons of focus I shall not enter substantially into this debate here, my suspicion is that there remains a sense in which the view of moral articulation I defend is compatible with the existence of external reasons. The process of moral articulation could be understood as one that, when it is successful, enables agents retrospectively to appreciate that reasons which are now “internal” for them were, before this process, “external”—​meaning that they still carried rational force despite their previously leaving one cold, motivationally speaking (this, I think, is one way of extending McDowell’s defense of the possibility of external reasons in “Might There Be External Reasons?” [1998: Essay 5]).

Thinking beyond Language  77 disruptive role with respect to our previously existing frameworks of moral intelligibility, allowing us not only to discern patterns of difference and unity in the world, but to adopt appropriate evaluative stances and practical responses to those patterns. Absent any relation to an existing normative outlook, it is unclear how a conceptually schemeless experience could disclose anything of value-​laden importance to us. Both challenges point to the same conclusion, namely, that the idea of a conceptually schemeless foothold in reality cannot do the foundational work it was meant to do. Crawling under the net of conceptuality, even if it were possible, would only serve to deprive us of the organization, form, and value-​ laden meaningfulness we require as resources for criticizing and improving our existing moral discursive repertoires.22 On the other hand, and in a pessimistic mood, we may conclude that our epistemic condition is such that we are permanently confined to the ‘unreal’ side of the net. To adopt this stance is to view ourselves as irrevocably cut off from the world as it really is, perpetually trapped within so many conceptual schemes that we understand to be illusions yet which we can never finally overcome. The pessimistic view, however, faces the same objection as the first. What it mourns as forever cut off from us is an epistemologically hopeless standpoint that, even if it were attainable, could not do the foundational work ascribed to it. So, both the optimistic and pessimistic standpoints share the same mistake. One celebrates while the other mourns a putative standpoint that is useless for the sort of critical work it was hoped to underwrite.23 The task of a critique of ideology, then, cannot be to get beneath our concepts, not because it is impossible to reach the other side of the net, but because the very idea of there being an “other side” is confused. The task, rather, must be to improve the concepts we 22 This runs parallel to McDowell’s criticism of the idea of a nonconceptual “Given” as “useless for its purpose” (McDowell 1996: 7; cf. 23 and 26). 23 This way of putting the point is indebted to Crary’s critique of a “narrower conception of objectivity” in Crary 2007 and 2016.

78  MORAL ARTICULATION have and, where necessary, create new ones. To do this, we must be able to view our existing conceptual repertoires and the interpretive practices they enable, not as a finite stock of fixed meanings, but as an open-​ended source of potential new meanings.24 It must be possible to locate sources of dissonance or friction, which are potent for the purposes of critique, not in a mismatch between the concepts in question and a non-​conceptual reality, but within our conceptually mediated experiences of the world themselves. But what, exactly, can serve as a normative guide for the task of conceptual innovation that follows, if not a putative correspondence to a non-​conceptual reality? One sort of response, which I do not embrace here, recommends that we turn away from talk of reality as a normative guide altogether in favor of standards that arise immanently from our own social practices of concept-​use. Thus runs a certain kind of anti-​ realist pragmatist response to the line of thought sketched so far.25 Even if, in attempting to improve our moral concepts and discursive repertoires, we are not answerable to a conceptually schemeless world, we may still be answerable to each other and the normative standards to which we implicitly commit ourselves when we engage in practices of concept-​use with others. An often-​cited example of such a standard is coherence.26 An inherited conceptual 24 For some helpful formulations along these lines, see Fricker 1999. 25 Harvey Cormier (2007), for example, criticizes Mills’s realism, advocating a form of coherentism in its place. Susan Dieleman (2017) similarly criticizes the realism found in Mills, Alcoff, and an earlier version of my argument here (Congdon 2015) from a pragmatist perspective inspired by Richard Rorty. Closely related here are pragmatist accounts of moral progress that attempt to show how evaluations of social change are possible without appeal to objective values (see, e.g., Anderson 2014 and 2015 and Wilson 2019). Brandom’s social inferentialism (1994, 2000), as well as Robert Pippin’s extension of the former as part of a reading of Hegel’s practical philosophy (Pippin 2008), can be viewed as an anti-​realist contrast with the (roughly, McDowellian) realist version of conceptualism I have been defending here. For background on some of the relevant issues, see McDowell’s exchange with Pippin, which includes “Leaving Nature Behind” and the “Postscript” in Pippin 2005; McDowell’s replies (2002 and 2009: Essay 10), and a further reply from Pippin (2007). 26 See Cormier 2007: 69, who draws upon Davidson’s view that, “nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief ” (Davidson 1986: 310).

Thinking beyond Language  79 constellation or discursive repertoire can be scrutinized for how well it hangs together as a whole, and criticized for harboring implicit inconsistencies, ambiguities, and contradictions—​without invoking any reference to a non-​conceptual reality that lies beyond, and serves to justify, the object of critique. In some cases, this standard may genuinely help us articulate something worth criticizing, for instance, if one notes an incoherence within a country’s legal system for publicly avowing an ideal of “equality before the law” yet, in its concrete practice, sustaining a racist history of inequality (cf. the notion of contradiction-​based discursive breakdown in §1.2, above).27 Taken as a model for morally progressive conceptual innovation generally, the image would be one of slowly ironing out contradictions and incoherencies in the application of concepts and norms already internal to the system. Yet coherence is insufficient. For it is precisely under conditions of systematic ignorance that potentially subversive perceptions, memories, and histories are filtered out as “incoherent” (Mills 2007: 25). The fact that a particular web of beliefs is productive of oppression is not, at least on the face of it, incompatible with the internal coherence of that web. Even if someone in the grips of racist ideology comes to recognize a contradiction in their view between, say, (a) an avowed commitment to the moral equality of all human beings and (b) an implicit commitment to the lesser moral worth of a certain subset of human beings, the standard of coherence does not, by itself, inform the racist whether it is (a) or (b) they should rethink.28 That sort of deliberation requires a morally substantive 27 See the discussion of internal versus immanent critique, which draws upon Jaeggi (2018), in Chapter 6, §6.2, below. 28 On this point, see Mills’s argument that there is no inherent contradiction between Kant’s racism and his formula of humanity since Kant is free to define the moral concepts of “humanity” and “person” in ways that exclude non-​white subjects (Mills 2017b). See also Jaeggi’s discussion of the limits of a form of internal criticism that focuses upon contradictions between a community’s explicitly held norms and their actualizations in practice. As she urges, even supposing that there is “a (recognized) contradiction between the norms that apply in a community and a social practice: Is it really so obvious that in such cases the practice should be brought into line with the norm rather than vice versa, that the norm should be adapted to the existing practice?” (2018: 186).

80  MORAL ARTICULATION normative basis that runs deeper than coherence, consistency, or non-​contradiction. So, a coherence-​based approach cannot provide the entirety of the critical force needed to serve as a normative standard for moral conceptual improvement.29 Understanding this, the anti-​realist pragmatist can point out that coherence is, in fact, not the most fundamental standard available when we view our social practices of concept-​use as providing their own immanently arising normative standards. Really, what is at stake in the anti-​realist pragmatist approach is embracing the view that our conceptual schemes and discursive repertoires are social technologies, tools we create and manipulate to pursue our ends as the sorts of embodied, social animals we are, whatever those ends might be.30 As such, at the most fundamental level, our concepts ought to be assessed, not in terms of their representational accuracy of an independent world, nor their internal coherence, but their usefulness.31 Indeed, one might urge that a robust criterion of coherence, as opposed to mere logical consistency, depends upon a more fundamental notion of usefulness. For we cannot 29 The question of how this relates to variations of “coherentism” is complex, for there exist many internal differences between the views falling under that label. Addressing this issue head-​on would require a separate discussion. My criticism above is directed solely at someone who thinks the coherence of a candidate “fact” within a broader system of beliefs can be made the sole criterion for truth. I need not disagree with someone who thinks coherence plays a necessary yet non-​exclusive role. See Stern 2004 for a helpful discussion of variations of coherentism from F.H. Bradley to contemporary epistemology. On Stern’s reading, Bradley defends a version of coherentism according to which “there must be a role for coherence as a test in determining how things are, and that [coherence] is an indispensable part of our cognitive method” (Stern 2004: 305). Nothing I say here requires that we reject a form of coherentism with this degree of flexibility, particularly insofar as it characterizes coherence as one test for truth amongst others, and not as what truth or justification is substantively. 30 A view invited, for example by J.M. Balkin’s metaphor of “cultural software” for the underlying cultural information that makes shared understandings possible (1998). Haslanger borrows this image as part of her theory of ideology (2017b). 31 I say “at the most fundamental level” because representational accuracy and coherence can become normative standards within this view, so long as they are deemed “useful” in the pragmatist’s required sense. The point of emphasizing “usefulness” is, on this view, not to rule out other ways of formulating what our normative standards are, but to explain why those standards have the normative force they do, a force that derives from the uses we can make of them.

Thinking beyond Language  81 judge whether the elements that comprise some system qualify as “coherent” except in light of some conception of the ends toward which that system aims. In this way, an appeal to coherence rests upon much more than the law of non-​contradiction, for it draws its deeper normative force from the aims, ends, and priorities of the systems we are subjecting to critical scrutiny. Here is how Susan Dieleman puts a version of this idea, as part of her defense of a “Rortyan pragmatist” approach: [I]‌t would be a mistake to think that one vocabulary would better represent the “reality” of race relations as they are or as they should be in, say, the United States. There is the vocabulary that we choose, given our priorities and its usefulness in helping us achieve our priorities; once that vocabulary is chosen, then the world appears to us and influences us in particular ways. By changing the vocabulary, new and different aspects of reality become salient, conditioning our language and practices. (2017: 135–​6)

The proposal is that we give up reference to a non-​conceptual reality “under” our conceptual schemes and discursive repertoires, yet still subject them to normative critique by making usefulness our criterion for judging the progressiveness of shifts in our moral vocabularies. I share Dieleman’s skepticism of the idea that, in any complex area of human ethical life, there is only one vocabulary we ought to use.32 Yet the appeal to usefulness appears no better off than the standard of coherence as long as the category of usefulness can refer as much to what aids, for example, white supremacy and colonialism as to what aids the progressive political movements that struggle against them. More fundamentally, the criterion of usefulness tacitly presupposes a more fundamental 32 Later I put this point by saying that success in moral articulation is “multiply realizable” (Chapter 4, §4.5). See also Chapter 6, §6.2, point (v).

82  MORAL ARTICULATION realist commitment. Dieleman writes that “we justify our choice of language by pointing to that language’s usefulness in helping us cope with the world, given the ends we have” (2017: 136). This presupposes we already have an accurate vision of what our ends are, how well we are coping, and the role our language is playing in helping us cope. These are all things about which one may be more or less deluded. If I cannot see these conditions clearly and objectively, it is unclear why or how the test of usefulness can provide a justificatory standard worth following. Realist considerations underly its success. Fortunately, we do not need to embrace these sorts of anti-​realist maneuvers, even once we have given up as epistemically hopeless the goal of “crawling under the net” to make undistorted contact with the real. The key is to maintain a firm grip on a simple point, namely, that our conceptually mediated normative outlooks can disclose, even if they may also distort, reality—​such that conceptually mediated experiences need not stop short of the world itself.33 The pervasiveness of the sorts of ideologies Mills describes do not entail that we are irrevocably cut off from reality, or that there is no reality to strive to articulate, but only that getting a clear view of reality can be immensely difficult, and that the struggle to do so is itself an ethical task that is mediated by concepts (cf. Murdoch 1997: 215; McDowell 1998: 72). Though one might think we have an opposition here between two incompatible views—​on the one hand, the sort of conceptualism embraced in §2.1, which emphasizes the role of concepts in making objective, world-​guided thought possible and, on the other, the sort of conceptualism embraced by Mills, which emphasizes the role of concepts in distorting agents’ abilities to apprehend the world clearly—​it is crucial for our present account to see that the views are entirely compatible and, indeed,

33 Cf. Wittgenstein 2009: §95. This is a core claim in McDowell 1996. It is also, in a different way, a recurring theme in versions of feminist standpoint epistemology (see, e.g., Crary 2002).

Thinking beyond Language  83 complementary. Mills’s conceptualism is meant to emphasize the ways in which the conceptual mediation of experience renders us permanently susceptible to systemic and deeply footed forms of ignorance, ideology, and false belief. If we focus solely on this point, then concepts will look only like a distorting lens. Yet this is, crucially, only one side of the story. Since, according to our account in §2.1, x’s being conceptual means that it bears the minimum organization and form required for x to strike consciousness as meaningful at all, conceptualism is not just compatible with realism, but required by it. For we could not have an experience of any object whatsoever without conceptual mediation. If we combine these thoughts, then our inheritance of a conceptual repertoire is simultaneously a condition of possibility of objective thought and a condition of possibility of structural ignorance and false belief.34 The fact that it is always both is part of our predicament as moral agents, and part of what makes moral articulation a perpetual task.35 The upshot is that that talk of reality, objectivity, ethical truth, and the world as it really is remains philosophically innocuous even once we have embraced a picture of experience as thoroughly mediated by concepts. What this means for our efforts to criticize 34 To say that the conceptual mediation of experience is double-​sided in this way is not to suggest that all situations will share both sides in equal measure. Bernard Williams’s “hypertraditional society,” for example, understood as a “society that is maximally homogeneous and minimally given to general reflection” (1985: 142–​8) may produce agents with experiences that are more firmly in the grips of ideology than they would be in a society that includes the possibility of heterogeneous perspectives, the formation of counterpublics, and other resources for critical reflection. 35 Given the complementary nature of these two sides of conceptualism, it is unsurprising to find that Mills and others writing in this strand of critical social epistemology consistently characterize their positions in realist terms, seeing no conflict between realism and their commitments to the deeply socially, historically, and conceptually mediated nature of all thought and experience (see, e.g., Mills 1997: 18 and 129; Mills 2007: 15; Alcoff 2007: 55–​7; Fricker 2007: 3). Mills is explicit that his realism includes the possibility of moral knowledge. He writes that the kinds of race-​based ignorance concerning him are “not merely ignorance of facts with moral implications but moral non-​knowings, incorrect judgments about the rights and wrongs of moral situations themselves” (Mills 2007: 22). For a discussion, see Congdon 2015. Haslanger (2015) defends a view that maintains reference to “moral facts” while insisting on their historical and cultural mediation. I discuss Haslanger’s view further in Chapter 4, below.

84  MORAL ARTICULATION our received conceptual schemes and discursive repertoires is that, although we cannot start anywhere other than where we are, namely, within a historically and culturally concrete normative outlook, it is precisely within that outlook and not beyond it that we find resources for achieving a clearer view of forms of suffering and injustice that our prior frameworks obscured. To illustrate this point, we may turn once again to Mills, who offers a striking example of how a thoroughly conceptual and socially mediated perspective can gain a critical and objective vantage upon morally important features of reality.36 Mills refers to a “black alternative public sphere” that emerged in the late nineteenth century and continued to develop into the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries (Mills 2017a: 106). The enforced segregation of Black communities saw the establishment of Black newspapers, scholarly journals, art, literature, and other arenas in which anti-​hegemonic conceptual schemes and discursive repertoires could be developed, tested, and put to work. Mills explains, At the end of the day, blacks are returning to black households. And in the days, when not working in Jim-​Crowed jobs, they are going to black churches and black barbershops and black colleges and black organizational meetings, because though whites want to keep them under control, they emphatically do not want to mix with them. (Mills 2017a: 106)

Mills argues that the cultivation of an “black alternative public sphere” within these spaces had the potential to promote a deeper critical awareness of the existence and nature of racial oppression on the part of those socialized within this sphere than those 36 Though I make this point with reference to Mills, both out of consistency with my previous discussion and because Mills is explicit about his conceptualism, the spirit of the point is voiced in many ways by the tradition of standpoint epistemology, which has Marxian, feminist, and anti-​racist roots. For background, see the works collected in Harding 2004.

Thinking beyond Language  85 (particularly non-​progressive whites) who could afford to remain happily outside it. Mills is describing a historical situation in which critical practices are developed immanently within a particular social milieu, yet which help bring into view real features of the social world that others miss or willfully ignore.37 Such critical practices are unintelligible if we view them in abstraction from the normative outlooks of their participants, for they involve modes of critical thought invariably shaped by emotional dispositions, imaginative capacities, and evaluative points of view that arise within historically concrete forms of life. Mills’s idea of a “black alternative public sphere,” in these respects, exemplifies the sort of space within which a conceptually mediated yet objectively critical vantage can be achieved.

2.3.  Dissonance in the Space of Reasons The upshot for our notion of moral articulation is that its initial beginnings in elusive experience can be credited as conceptually mediated confrontations with reality, despite their confounding the limits of the experiencing agent’s discursive powers. Such rogue apprehensions of moral significance are possible if we can make room for the idea of non-​discursive yet conceptual experience (the thesis of §2.1) and if we view the thoroughgoing conceptual mediation of experience as complementing, rather than ruling out, the possibility of world-​guided thought (the thesis of §2.2). Taking these claims together offers a model for explaining how a fragmented, uncanny experience of being shouldered out of one’s capacity to encompass something in language and thought can qualify as epistemically valuable. This takes us some way toward 37 That the features in question are “social” makes them no less real, on this account, than features that are not dependent for their existence upon human social practices. I discuss the reality of socially constructed features of the world further in Chapter 4, in connection with the work of Ian Hacking and Sally Haslanger.

86  MORAL ARTICULATION answering the question, raised at the outset of this chapter, of how it is that experiences of discursive breakdown can sometimes qualify as “cognitive” and “rational.” In a discussion of the social epistemology of consciousness raising, and in connection with the development of the concept, ‘sexual harassment’, Miranda Fricker (2007) suggests that we think of such experiences as generating an epistemically productive form of dissonance, a metaphor that, I think, nicely fits the sort of proto-​discursive experiences of reality that I have been exploring here. Writing about the case of someone who suffers sexual harassment in a time and place that still lacks the critical concept, she describes “a sense of dissonance between an experience and the various constructions that are ganging up to overpower its nascent proper meaning” (Fricker 2007: 166). We might rephrase the aim of this chapter as that of elaborating a notion of conceptuality that can embrace the sort of rationally and epistemically productive experiences of dissonance Fricker describes. For if we hold a view of conceptual thought and awareness as dealing solely in propositional terms, it will be difficult to see how such experiences of dissonance can make an appearance in the space of reasons.38 This, in turn, makes it difficult to see how our received conceptions of the layout of the space of reasons could be subject to rational criticism in light of the (uncanny, dissonant) experience of their limits in the face of surprising and unfamiliar forms of moral meaning. Our considerations in §2.1 were meant to elaborate a notion of conceptuality that works outside an exclusively propositional or discursive frame. In its light, it is possible to see experiences of dissonance not only as occurring within the space of reasons, but as essential to the ongoing project of criticizing and refining our going 38 At best, such dissonance could be explained in terms of contradiction between discursively articulable propositional attitudes occurring within a single experience. This returns us to the argument in Chapter 1 (see, esp., §§1.2–​4) that contradiction-​based discursive breakdown is only one important type of discursive breakdown, and that its elusion-​based counterpart is required to explain many cases of moral conceptual growth.

Thinking beyond Language  87 conceptions of its complicated and historically changing topography. For cultivating a rational vulnerability to such experiences of dissonance is one way to counteract our tendencies toward stubborn recalcitrance to moral change. Our realist considerations in §2.2 come to the fore when we consider this experience of being thrown from one’s capacity to encompass something in language and thought as itself, in at least some cases, a mark of a genuine confrontation with reality, such that to lack or explain away the sense of dissonance would be to miss something important. This is a dissonance to be nurtured rather than smoothed over, and here we see the special place of social practice in productively cultivating a shared sense of dissonance within a trusting community of others. In this spirit, Fricker connects the metaphor of dissonance with the practice of consciousness raising: The sense of dissonance, then, is the starting point for both the critical thinking and the moral-​intellectual courage that rebellion requires. That, I take it, is part of the mechanism of consciousness raising. Put a number of people together who have felt a certain dissonance about an area of social experience, and factor in that each of them will have a different profile of immunity and susceptibility to different authoritative discourses, and it is not surprising that the sense of dissonance can increase and become critically emboldened. (Fricker 2007: 167–​8).

Both in Fricker’s example here and in Mills’s notion of a “black alternative public sphere,” we find the idea that the extremely difficult task of apprehending ethically laden features of reality is enabled, even as it is in other respects hindered, by a conceptually mediated and emphatically social perspective. What’s needed is not to get under the net of our concepts, but to refine the concepts

88  MORAL ARTICULATION we have and, where necessary, invent new ones. A shared experience of dissonance can, therefore, play a cognitive and rational role in the cultivation of a group’s shared activity of piecing together their understanding of an inchoate sense of moral importance—​ or what amounts to the same thing, their shared activity of moral articulation.

3 Creative Resentments Is there a transgression where there is no law? a vice which cannot be defined? —​Bishop Joseph Butler, “Upon Self-​Deceit” (2006: 106)

The dissonant apprehension of elusive meaning that I have been calling proto-​discursive can take the form of an emotional response. This was implicit in our earlier examples of discursive breakdown: a love one cannot put into words, an unspeakable awe in the face of beauty, and an inchoate anger at an offense one cannot quite pin down (§1.1). Such examples invite us to conceive of emotions, not as non-​cognitive attitudes or merely subjective states of consciousness, but as, at least sometimes, subtle modes of sensitivity to value-​ laden aspects of reality that our received discursive repertoires fail to disclose. Yet the role that emotions play in processes of moral articulation is not, in fact, confined to such initial moments of apprehension, for emotional engagements with ethical phenomena suffuse and inform the process of moral conceptual development from beginning to end. Eventually arriving at a well-​articulated vocabulary of sexual harassment, for instance, does not necessarily put an end to the anger that stood as its impetus, but indeed may sharpen its cognitive focus and clarify its normative convictions. And if it is right to say that moral articulation always proceeds from, and evolves within, a historically and culturally concrete normative outlook (§§2.1 and 2.2), one that consolidates the evaluative attitudes, affective dispositions, and routes of feeling that have been Moral Articulation. Matthew Congdon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197691571.003.0004

90  MORAL ARTICULATION fostered by one’s history, then moral articulation will be thoroughly bound up with our emotional lives. Yet what exactly is the role of emotion in this diachronically extended process? While there are surely many possible answers worth our consideration, in this chapter I shall focus on the cognitive work of emotions in moral articulation. On the picture that emerges here, moral articulation is thoroughly an emotional process, not merely in the sense that the cognitive work of forging new moral concepts is accompanied by emotion, but in the stronger sense that emotions themselves are actualizations of that very cognitive work. In this fashion, the view I endorse here falls within a broader family of cognitive-​evaluative theories of emotion.1 However, fully appreciating the cognitive role of emotions in moral change will require that we challenge a key premise in dominant versions of the cognitive-​evaluative approach, namely, that the cognitive contents of emotions are modeled on evaluative judgments, understood as propositionally formulable appraisals of one’s situation. To the extent that cognitive-​evaluative approaches accept this premise, they attempt to work within the constraints of the discursive theory of meaning challenged in Chapter 1. The right model, I shall suggest, is rather that of a diachronically extended articulation, which involves the expressive logic of simultaneously illuminating and developing its object, in this case, proto-​discursive meanings that initially strike one as elusive. Though my aim in this chapter is to explore the role of emotions in moral articulation generally, my strategy shall be to focus upon a specific emotion, namely, resentment (or, as I will sometimes write, anger), understood as an emotion of protest grounded in the emotional agent’s perception that a moral wrong or injustice has occurred.2 A full accounting of the emotions that go into any 1 For references, see footnote 9 below, and the discussion of Nussbaum’s cognitive-​ evaluative theory of emotion in §3.4. 2 A note on terminology: In what follows I use “resentment” and “anger” interchangeably, as this allows me to synthesize discussions from various authors who are, at least at a general level, discussing the same emotional phenomenon with differing vocabulary.

Creative Resentments  91 particular struggle for moral articulation would, of course, include many others. Perhaps it would include the work of grief in piecing together the meaning of losses suffered, or roles for joy and love in sustaining ruminations about newly discovered forms of connection and solidarity. Though working with a wider range of emotions would have its advantages, I have found it helpful to focus in this chapter on a single sort of emotional response for the following reasons. First, given the great diversity of emotions in human life, it quickly becomes challenging to investigate their cognitive structure by discussing emotions in general, in abstraction from the concrete cognitive patterns associated with particular emotions. We do better to explore how the expressive logic of articulation is at work in a particular case, and then (only at the end, in §3.5), assess what generalizations can and cannot be made on its basis. Second, although I think we should be cautious about too quickly dividing emotions neatly in “moral” and “non-​moral” categories, resentment has the advantage of being easily recognizable as having an explicitly moral point. Resentment is, at least according to a long philosophical tradition, a paradigmatic emotional response, not to just any sort of misfortune, harm, or setback, but to those perceived

I use both terms to refer to an emotion of protest grounded in the emotional agent’s perception that a moral wrong or injustice has occurred. In doing so, I set aside several well-​ known terminological distinctions in the literature on emotion. Strawson, for example, reserves the term “resentment” for a distinctively second-​personal emotional response to wrongdoing, in which the resenter perceives themselves as having been wronged by the resented (2008). He distinguishes resentment in this specific sense from “indignation” (15), which is a vicarious form of anger felt on behalf of others one perceives as having been wronged. Though Strawson’s distinction is helpful in other respects, my argument does not touch upon the second-​personal/​third-​personal distinction, and thus I use “resentment” as a catchall that includes both Strawsonian resentment and Strawsonian indignation. Nussbaum prefers the term “anger” over “resentment” for the emotional response to perceived wrongdoing that is my focus here (her terminological choices are discussed in Nussbaum 2016: Appendix C, 261–​4). Many accounts treat resentment as a species of anger (e.g., Walker 2006: 110), one that involves a judgment or perception of wrongfulness. Since Nussbaum argues all anger contains a judgment of wrongfulness, she sees no use for the genus-​species distinction (Nussbaum 2016: 262). Since my argument does not rely upon any version of the genus/​species distinction, this gives me additional reason to use “anger” and “resentment” interchangeably.

92  MORAL ARTICULATION as somehow wrongful or unjust.3 The relevance of our discussion of resentment to the broader phenomenon of moral articulation can, therefore, be seen more easily. Third, there already exists an illuminating body of philosophical literature, largely from feminist approaches in epistemology and moral psychology, urging that resentments can play an important norm-​creative role. This, too, shall allow us to draw the connections more easily to our broader theme of the articulation of new moral concepts and discursive repertoires. However, as I spell out in the next section, a prominent strand of philosophical thinking about emotion in general and resentment in particular makes it difficult to see how emotions like resentment can be creative in the relevant sense. Thus, a central task of this chapter is to carve out conceptual space for a theory of emotions that can explain the cognitive and creative role of emotion in moral change.4

3.1.  The Problem There is a distinguished tradition extending from British sentimentalism to contemporary moral psychology of defending resentment as a rational, even healthy, social emotion by connecting it to a sense of wrongdoing and a call to others for acknowledgment.5 While recognizing the many ways resentments can go awry (Adam Smith 3 I offer some examples of moments in this tradition in §3.1, below. For the moment, suffice it to recall an illustration from Strawson: “If someone treads on my hand accidentally, while trying to help me, the pain may be no less acute than if he treads on it in contemptuous disregard of my existence or with a malevolent wish to injure me. But I shall generally feel in the second case a kind and degree of resentment that I shall not feel in the first” (2008: 6). 4 What follows in §§3.1–​5 updates and expands an argument originally presented in Congdon 2018. 5 For eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century accounts, see Butler 2006: Sermon VIII; Smith 2009; Reid 1843; and Mill 1969: Ch. 5. More recently, see Strawson 2008; Rawls 1971: 475, 484, and 533; Murphy’s contributions to Murphy and Hampton 1988; Darwall 2006: esp. Ch. 4; Walker 2006: Ch. 4; Bell 2009; Callard 2018; Shoemaker 2018; and Cherry 2021.

Creative Resentments  93 notes we get angry “even at the stone that hurts us” [2009: 113]), this tradition urges that resentment is an essential social emotion, protecting welfare and expressing self-​worth in the face of wrongdoing. A central theme recurring over the centuries is that resentment plays a defensive function. The early moralists expressed this through metaphors of battle: Bishop Butler saw resentment as “a weapon, put in our hands by nature, against injury, injustice, and cruelty” (2006: Sermon VIII, ¶8)6 and Thomas Reid viewed the passion as “a kind of defensive armour, given by our Maker to guard us against injuries and deter the injurious” (1843: 242). Variations on the theme of moral-​emotional defense persist today, though the battle metaphors have been largely replaced with cooler language: resentment defends “normative expectations,” protects the “values of the self,” and upholds “relations of accountability.”7 The defensive theme captures something deep about resentment: in resenting, one refuses to remain merely passive, insisting upon one’s bodily, psychic, and normative integrity in the face of its denial. Yet unwavering attention to resentment’s defensive aspect risks overshadowing a second theme, frequently emphasized in feminist theories of emotion, according to which emotional responses like resentment can play a creative role, not only defending an agent’s already held values and norms, but contributing to the development new ones.8 This chapter seeks to foreground and defend a version of the latter theme, by posing a question concerning its relation to the former: How do the views of resentment as (a) a defensive response 6 More accurately, Butler’s remark refers to what he distinguishes as “settled and deliberate” resentment as opposed to “hasty and sudden” resentment. 7 Walker views resentment as defending the resenter’s “normative expectations” in response to perceived violations (2006: Ch. 4). Murphy views resentment as defending the “values of the self ” (Murphy and Hampton 1988: 18). Views emphasizing resentment’s entanglement with ‘relations of accountability’ are deeply shaped by Strawson 2008 and include Watson 1987; Wallace 1994; and Darwall 2006: Ch. 4. 8 See, for example, Jaggar 1989; Spelman 1989; Meyers 1997; Lugones 2003; and McLachlan 2010. The norm-​transformative potential of emotional responses to wrongdoing is also a central feature of Hegelian recognition theory (Honneth 1995: Ch. 6 and 8).

94  MORAL ARTICULATION to the perceived violation of existing norms and (b) creative of new ones fit together into a unified conception of the emotion? Our problem concerns how best to bring together two claims concerning resentment, which can appear in tension with one another. The first is that (a) feelings of resentment are grounded in the resenting party’s conviction that some portion of their existing normative expectations has been violated. As a response to wrongdoing, resentment appears to be an emotion uniquely bound up with attitudes of protest, sensitivity to norm-​violation, and commitments to norms concerning interpersonal interaction. As a result, a striking consensus has emerged that resentment is best distinguished from other emotions by focusing upon its cognitive content, specifically, a cognitive appraisal that wrongdoing has occurred, which draws upon the resenter’s existing normative expectations as its ground.9 This has led some to hold what I will call the prior norm requirement, which maintains that resentment presupposes the resenter’s prior commitment to norms perceived as having been violated or threatened by some instance of social interaction.10 Resentments, according to this requirement, are emotional defenses of our existing normative expectations in the face of their apparent denial. The second thesis is that (b) resentments can make a rational contribution to the development of new normative expectations, transforming the resenter’s received normative outlook.11 According to this line of thought, frequently voiced in feminist theories of emotion, resentments can arise as what Alison Jaggar calls “outlaw emotions,” emotions that, rather than insisting upon the legitimacy 9 Cognitive theories of emotion urge we should identify and distinguish emotions by their cognitive content rather than differences in subjective feel or physiological change. For philosophical defenses, see Solomon 1993 and Nussbaum 2001. From a psychological perspective, see Lazarus 1991. I discuss Nussbaum’s ‘cognitive-​evaluative’ theory in §3.4, below. 10 In §3.3, I argue the prior norm requirement is at work in Walker 2006 and Nussbaum 2016. 11 On the idea of a “normative outlook,” see §§2.1 and 2.2 in Chapter 2, above.

Creative Resentments  95 of historically inculcated norms, call for the creation of new ones (1989: 160–​4). In some cases, resentment is credited with helping the resenter realize that (or the extent to which) she is being wronged by some social arrangement.12 In others, resentment is figured as a deeper transformation, reworking the resenter’s very conception of what is valuable or important in the first place.13 At work is the thought that resentment has the potential not only to be grounded in and defend existing normative expectations but also to bring about new normative expectations the resenter did not previously possess or fully recognize. Important to this line of thought is the idea that resentment’s role in normative transformation is purportedly rational. The thesis does not bear on whether undergoing emotions like resentment can change a person’s normative outlook in a causal sense, the way dreary weather can make one’s outlook more pessimistic. Rather, the thesis is that resentment can make a rational contribution to processes resulting in new normative expectations. I refer to this idea with the label, norm-​creative resentments. An adequate theory of resentment should, I argue, accommodate both the norm-​defensive and norm-​creative sides of resentment. Yet how can resentments rationally contribute to the transformation of one’s normative outlook if they take that very outlook as their point of departure? One’s outlook must be capable of being transformed “from the inside,” so to speak, but defending this point is notoriously difficult. Moreover, certain ways 12 For example, Nussbaum writes, “a person who is in a hierarchical relationship may not realize how unfairly she is being treated, until she has an experience, or repeated experiences, of anger” (2016: 38). 13 For example, Jaggar writes, “outlaw emotions may . . . enable us to see the world differently from its portrayal in conventional descriptions. They may provide the first indications that something is wrong with the way the facts have been constructed, with accepted understandings of how things are” (1989: 161). Audre Lorde says anger at racial injustice has the power to effect “a basic and radical alteration in all those assumptions underlining our lives” (1997: 280). Alice MacLachlan urges that a narrow conception of resentment as expressing only the resenter’s preexisting moral convictions “limits the function of our emotional expressions to the articulation of already recognizable types of moral claims” (2010: 432–​3).

96  MORAL ARTICULATION of interpreting the prior norm requirement can fund the view that resentment is essentially conservative or “backward-​looking,” concerned primarily with reaffirming the resenter’s received normative expectations.14 At best, this obscures the norm-​transformative potential of resentment and, at worst, rules it out altogether. I begin by clarifying the problem at hand by elaborating the notion of norm-​creative resentments (§3.2) and the prior norm requirement (§3.3). In §3.4, I develop a model for understanding the cognitive structure of resentment that emphasizes resentment’s standing as a cognitively complex process of working through the latent meaning of an experience of violation. I draw upon the notion of articulation introduced in Chapter 1 (§1.5) and develop my alternative as a critical modification of Martha Nussbaum’s influential cognitive-​evaluative theory of emotion. The result is what I call the articulation model of emotion, which explains how emotions like resentment can help transform the very norms upon which they are grounded, and in turn helps clarify how a normative outlook can be transformed from the inside. I conclude in §3.5 by considering how the articulation model can illuminate the more general role of emotion in moral articulation.

3.2.  Norm-​Creative Resentments Consider two examples that invite the idea of norm-​ creative resentments. First, in her memoir of her involvement in the women’s liberation movement, Susan Brownmiller repeatedly stresses the role played by voicing righteous anger and resentment in consciousness-​raising groups. She quotes Naomi Weisstein, a member of one of the first such groups in Chicago in the 1960s: “We talked incessantly. . . . We talked about our pain, we discovered our righteous anger. We talked about the contempt and hostility we felt

14 For examples, see §3.3 below.

Creative Resentments  97 from the males on the New Left, and we talked about our inability to speak in public. But mostly we were exhilarated. We were ecstatic. We were ready to turn the world upside down” (1990: 18, emphasis added).15 Later in her memoir, Brownmiller describes how, in those same consciousness-​raising groups, where resentment could be aired in a trusting environment, new ethical and political norms were invented and introduced into the public sphere. She describes how the critical concept of ‘sexual harassment’ was developed in 1975 in one such group, as the result of women giving angered voice to an experience they had previously viewed as either a personal anomaly or something one simply had to endure, and not as a repeated pattern of moral injury (279–​94).16 In several places, she associates one’s capacity to feel anger with “greater clarity” about the injustice of the as-​yet-​unnamed form of behavior that would later be called “sexual harassment” (286). It would be reductive to say that anger alone was sufficient to give birth to new moral convictions and conceptions, especially if abstracted from the complex combination of organization, legal work, and courage that allowed the first sexual harassment litigants to go successfully to trial in the late seventies. Still, it is possible to view resentment as a powerful resource containing normative and cognitively rich material exceeding existing normative frames and demanding the creation of new ones, in this case, a new language of sexual harassment. As Brownmiller writes, “If conditions are right, if the anger of enough people has reached the boiling point, the exploding passion can ignite a societal transformation” (1). The second example comes from María Lugones’ essay “Hard-​ to-​Handle Anger.” There she writes,

15 For passages stressing the importance of righteous anger in feminist social struggles, see Brownmiller (1990: 1, 11, 60, 148, and 286–​7). 16 For a related discussion, though one that does not focus particularly on the role of emotion, see Fricker (2007: Ch. 7). Fricker takes this case, along with Brownmiller’s historical account of it, as a central example of what she calls “hermeneutical injustice.”

98  MORAL ARTICULATION When I asked a northern New Mexican Chicano what knowledge he had gained from his oppressed condition that he could bring to liberatory struggle, he described this mysterious transformation of fear into anger. He told us that it had been very important to him to know that this happens to him. After the Moly mine closed and he was out of a job, he decided to go back to school on the G.I. bill. The money from the G.I. bill began to run out before he was finished with his schooling. That meant that he had to talk to numerous educated, polished bureaucrats about funds for his education. He entered every one of these situations in fear. Ill at ease because of his lack of polish in these contexts, he experienced both a lack of control over his situation and the total control of the bureaucrat through the latter’s use of language that could be abusively refined. “You Chicanos are all the same” would flow into the bureaucrat’s speech with ease. Reduced to the “mark of the plural,” and invaded by the logic of devaluation, the Chicano found himself at a loss for words, confused, facing the inevitability of the end of his education. At this time, as he had experienced it before, the transformation came. He became self-​ possessed in anger: clear-​headed, no nonsense, going to the core of the racist matter, immovable, determined, his muscles and his voice tense, backing up his words. The logic and weight of oppression no longer determining him. The logic and weight of resistance were fully inspiring. (2003: 112)

Lugones notes that the anger here can be interpreted in two ways, and that perhaps both are right. On the one hand, his anger may be what she calls “first-​order anger,” anger that demands respect from another whose “world of sense” is shared. This kind of anger says, “I am to be treated as an equal, not a subordinate,” tacitly presuming that certain norms of equality are shared between addressor and addressee. On the other hand, his anger may be what she calls “second-​order anger,” anger that rejects the very world of sense of the bureaucrat. In this case, his anger says, “damn your world of

Creative Resentments  99 sense which has my subordination at its core” (113). The first kind of anger provokes others into responding to one’s claims, without requiring a large-​scale structural shift in normative conditions. The second kind of anger is more radical, indicating that a fundamental transformation of the social world is required for this form of anger to gain some satisfaction.17 It is “forward looking,” requiring “new speech for the experience of the angry” (113). It does not simply demand a shift in another individual’s behavior or attitudes, but a deeper transformation, condemning a whole world of sense that has racist subordination as part of its very grammar and demanding the creation of a new world of sense. Note three features common to both examples. First, in both, there is a connection drawn between angered experience and the need for new or alternative modes of normative discourse exceeding hegemony. Second, both preserve a connection between the negating aspect of anger (refusal, protest, damning) and the creative aspect of anger, for in refusing an existing moral discourse or world of sense a new one is gestured toward. Finally, and most importantly for our purposes, both examples invite the interpretation that the sort of anger at work involves not just summing up and expressing the resenter’s existing normative commitments, but the creation and endorsement of new ones. Calling these examples of resentment “norm-​ creative” can seem hyperbolic. How is anger creating new normative expectations in the resenter rather than relying on the resenter’s previous convictions about the injustice of patriarchal or racist hegemony? Why think Lugones’s resenter does not already view the bureaucrat as an agent of oppression, and must arrive at that view through anger? Some qualifications are needed here. First, the point is not that new norms are generated out of nothing, with no precedent or preparatory normative outlook already in place. On the contrary, a 17 Similarly, MacLachlan describes a sort of resentment that “arises in part because the source of that resentment is not currently recognizable as injustice” (2010: 434).

100  MORAL ARTICULATION more or less firm normative outlook must be intact in order for one to experience resentment in the first place (more on this in §3.3). As a result, the creativity at work must begin in medias res, taking aspects of one’s existing normative outlook as its normative starting point, even if it refashions this starting material into new and unexpected forms. Second, the suggestion is that resentments can make a rational contribution to processes of normative transformation, not that resentments effect that transformation by themselves, without the help of other exercises of rationality, broader social enabling conditions, or, indeed, other emotions. The core notion is that resentment plays a rational role in cognitively processing experiences of wrongdoing, a role not restricted to insisting upon the protection and validity of already intact normative expectations. As such, the normative content of one’s resentments might exceed the bounds of one’s normative outlook as it previously stood. This leaves room for the notion that resentment can be creative of new norms, even with the important qualifications that the creativity in question takes place both in medias res and in concert with other creative forces.

3.3.  The Prior Norm Requirement Now we can turn to the prior norm requirement, seeing some examples in recent theory, and how certain ways of expressing it clash with the notion of norm-​creative resentments. A clear expression of the prior norm requirement comes from Margaret Urban Walker, who discusses the roles resentment can play in processes of “moral repair” (2006: Ch. 4). Walker begins from the important observation that serious wrongs, in addition to causing physical and psychological damage, can damage one’s trust and confidence that one is protected by membership within a community of shared normative expectations. This leads her to a qualified defense of resentment as a social emotion that “attune[s]‌

Creative Resentments  101 us exquisitely” to perceived norm-​ violations, contributing to moral repair by calling for reassurance in shared norms (114). Resentment’s value is twofold, involving an evaluative judgment that a norm-​violation has occurred and an interpersonal address seeking reassurance (133). In a programmatic passage, Walker writes: Resentment is best explained as a defensive response of anger (and in some, but not all, cases fear or other negative feelings) to others’ intentional actions perceived as violating boundaries defined by norms and threatening the authority, or the resenter’s presumption of the authority, of those norms in so doing. (123)

Walker conceives resentment as an angered response to the perceived violation of the resenter’s antecedently held normative expectations (see also 114, 125, 126, 133). Walker is clear that the normative expectations are temporally prior: in resenting, we think someone “has made free with what we thought were the rules, crossed boundaries we supposed intact, ignored claims we believed authoritative” (125). We can add that the normative expectations are logically prior as well, for it is only by virtue of one’s occupying a historically inculcated normative outlook that (i) one is vulnerable to experiences of norm-​violation at all and (ii) one enjoys a presumed authority to pass judgment upon perceived offenses.18 Hence, normative expectations must be temporally and logically prior to resentments. Though I will continue to use Walker’s language of “norms” and “normative expectations,” the prior norm requirement is also at work in theorists who prefer different terminology altogether, as in Martha Nussbaum’s account of anger in her book Anger and

18 “[W]‌hen one resents another’s going out of bounds, one is presuming, in effect deriving one’s own authority to pass judgment from, the shared recognition of the norm in play” (Walker 2006: 126).

102  MORAL ARTICULATION Forgiveness. In contrast with Walker, Nussbaum is concerned to criticize anger as conceptually confused and normatively corrupt, given what she sees as anger’s conceptual connection with an unjustifiable desire for payback (2016: Ch. 2). Yet she shares the thesis that episodes of anger presuppose and reflect an agent’s already established normative outlook, phrasing the point in terms inspired by ancient Greek thought: “the appraisals and beliefs involved in anger are what I call ‘eudaimonistic’: they are made from the point of view of the agent, and register the agent’s own view of what matters for life” (16).19 Emotions reflect what an agent has incorporated into their “circle of concern” (16). For instance, anger at a racist comment is possible only in virtue of one’s already incorporated evaluations concerning racial justice. Even if one’s anger is grounded in a principle one takes to transcend one’s personal standpoint—​say, Kant’s categorical imperative—​one’s anger nonetheless reflects the principle’s having been incorporated into one’s conception of a life worth living. Nussbaum’s eudaimonism and Walker’s talk of “normative expectations” share the prior norm requirement. A eudaimonistic vision of a life worth living includes normative expectations concerning how people should act. Anger at the disappointment of those expectations, then, is equivalent to anger at behavior, practices, and social arrangements that threaten one’s eudaimonistic vision. Thus, claiming that an already established “structure of concern” is necessary for anger is another way of expressing the prior norm requirement.20 Now we are in position to see how certain versions of the prior norm requirement stand in tension with the idea of norm-​creative 19 This is an extension of the “eudaimonistic” conception of emotion developed in her earlier book Upheavals of Thought (2001). 20 Nussbaum briefly notes the possibility that a consideration’s “incorporation into the ‘circle of concern’ need not precede the event that triggers the emotion” (16). However, she quickly adds that, without a “firmer structure of concern” in place, “the emotion will be a will-​o’-​the-​wisp.” For the emotion to play a substantial role, the agent must already possess relevant normative commitments.

Creative Resentments  103 resentments. Walker is explicitly concerned to highlight several forward-​looking dimensions of resentment: it issues a call to others, asks for a response, and can promote the rebuilding of community. Yet Walker characterizes resentment’s central aim as seeking reassurance in the legitimacy of norms already held by the resenter: “Resentment and indignation rise to defend normative boundaries when they are seen as threatened by action that is out of normative bounds” (27). This is echoed in her characterization of what outward expressions of resentment seek from others: “what resentment calls out for is assurance of protection, defense, or membership under norms brought into question by the exciting injury or affront” (113). Resentment thus appears conservative in the sense that it aims to conserve just those norms whose perceived violation served as its impetus.21 For Nussbaum, anger’s essentially defensive character takes a more menacing turn, for its forward-​looking aspect is limited solely to thoughts of payback. Anger has as its cognitive content a “belief that the target’s act has wrongfully inflicted damage on something within one’s circle of concern” (2016: 46). Anger entails a move from this belief to a desire for revenge: “anger involves, conceptually, a wish for things to go badly, somehow, for the offender, in a way that is envisaged, somehow, however vaguely, as payback for the offense” (23). Hence, if there is any forward-​looking aspect of anger at all, it is an ethically unjustifiable payback wish, itself rooted in a backward-​looking belief that something or someone within one’s circle of concern has been harmed. Thus, she sees an irresolvable opposition between “backward-​looking angry attitudes” and a “forward-​looking concern for social welfare” (172).22 21 At one point Walker mentions a form of “resentment that is defiant in its understanding that the norms widely shared are wrong” (126). Yet this still suggests one’s defiant normative expectations, though not widely shared, are already in place for the agent. 22 Two qualifications are needed. First, an important exception to Nussbaum’s thesis that anger conceptually involves thoughts of payback is what she calls “Transition-​ Anger,” which has as its entire content, “How outrageous! Something must be done about this” (35). Yet Nussbaum questions whether this really counts as a species of

104  MORAL ARTICULATION Thus, both in defenses and critiques of resentment we see a common move: from an appreciation of the prior norm requirement to characterizations of resentment as essentially defensive of the resenter’s received normative commitments. This, in turn, makes it difficult to see how norm-​creative resentments are possible. Deepening the problem is the fact that at least some version of the prior norm requirement must be correct. Essential to what separates resentment from other emotions is a thought, whether fleeting perception or endorsed belief, of wrongdoing. It is only by virtue of an agent’s historically developed normative outlook that one is capable of perceiving norm-​violations as violations in the first place.23 To deny this, one would have to hold that resentment can involve a spontaneous a sense of wrongdoing unmediated by the agent’s antecedently held normative expectations. Perhaps Butler or Reid held versions of this: resentment is a special sense bestowed by a benevolent maker for the purpose of perceiving injustice, without that perception requiring any prior normative commitments to be effective. Yet this appears implausible, for it relies on the controversial notion of a raw “Given,” somehow imposing itself upon normative thought and playing a role in an agent’s practical reasoning, anger, calling it “quasi-​anger” (35) that is “rare and exceptional” (36). Second, Nussbaum acknowledges certain instrumental uses of anger, including serving as a “signal” that “can make a previously unaware person aware of her values and the way in which another’s wrongful act can violate them” (38). Yet this signal remains “profoundly misleading and . . . to the extent that it makes sense it does so against the background of diseased values” (39). As a result, she does not develop the point. 23 To highlight the second-​personal character of many instances of resentment, we could reformulate this point as follows: it is only by virtue of an agent’s historically developed conception of themselves as deserving or meriting certain forms of treatment and regard from others that one can perceive an instance of injury as a moral injury in the first place. Axel Honneth puts the point as follows: “a physical injury becomes a moral injustice if the person affected has no choice but to view it as an action that intentionally disregards an essential aspect of his or her well-​being; it is not merely bodily pain as such, but the accompanying consciousness of not being recognized in one’s own self-​understanding that constitutes moral injury” (2007a: 133–​4). Following Strawson, Darwall makes a related claim, emphasizing that resentment is a second-​personal moral attitude that presupposes the resenter’s own awareness that they possess “dignity,” i.e., the authority to address others with moral demands (2006: Ch. 4).

Creative Resentments  105 without itself bearing any relation to the antecedent structure of one’s normative thought (in our earlier terminology, to conceive of anger in this fashion is to view it as giving us a glimpse of a normative truth that lies “under the net” of our historically inculcated concepts; see §2.2). If we reject this as untenable, then an agent’s normative outlook must already be suitably constituted by prior commitments to perceive some experience as wrong.24 We should, therefore, reject that an experience can strike one as wrong without bearing some relation to one’s historically developed normative outlook as it already stands. This can seem to lead to the problem of resentment’s conservatism, thereby returning us to the difficulty of reconciling our two theses sketched in §3.1, above: (a) the prior norm requirement and (b) the norm-​creativity of resentments. In the next section, I turn to the positive side of my argument, offering a view of resentment that brings these theses together.

3.4.  The Articulation Model of Emotion What is minimally required of us in holding the prior norm requirement is that an agent’s resentments arise in response to a perceived norm-​violation, where the perception of violation must be intelligible in terms already available within the agent’s received normative outlook. Our problem was that a commitment to this requirement can seem to fund the view, implicit in some defenses of resentment and explicit in critiques of it, that resentment is essentially conservative, primarily or exclusively in the 24 This is true not only of what Bishop Butler called “settled” resentments, in which the thought of wrongdoing is reflectively endorsed, but also of “sudden” resentments, which flash up without conscious endorsement, as in Smith’s example of resenting a rock that injures one (Butler 2006: Sermon VIII, ¶4–​7). Sudden resentments involve at least a momentary perception of wrongfulness, even if unjustified by the resenter’s own lights. That such a perception is possible presupposes relevant normative expectations are in place for the resenter. In Smith’s example, the agent draws upon deeply habituated normative expectations prohibiting interpersonal injury, obviously misapplying them.

106  MORAL ARTICULATION business of insisting upon the legitimacy of one’s already existing normative standards. At best, this obscures our view of the possibility of norm-​creative resentments by focusing our attention solely on resentment’s defensive aspect. At worst, it rules them out entirely, nurturing the one-​sided view of resentment as stubbornly parochial. In either case, it leaves the defender of norm-​ creative resentments with a puzzle concerning their justification: if resentments derive their purported justification from antecedently held normative expectations, how can resentments give rise to new normative expectations that are purportedly justified and more than just novel iterations of old norms? Explaining this requires digging more deeply into the cognitive structure of resentment. A picture of resentment as constrained by the prior norm requirement fits a “cognitivist” theory of emotion, according to which emotions are constitutively bound up with thoughts: fear involves thoughts of danger; grief thoughts of loss; resentment thoughts of wrongdoing. More specifically, and even if we reject her analysis of anger as conceptually involving payback, it appears to fit well with Nussbaum’s cognitive-​evaluative theory of emotion (2001), according to which emotions are evaluative judgments, eudaimonistic appraisals of the meaning and value of things.25 In this section, I develop an account of the cognitive structure of resentment by critically modifying Nussbaum’s view. The resulting conception, which I call the articulation model, will help explain how the norm-​creative and norm-​defensive sides of resentment can be combined into a unified theory. According to this model, norm-​creative resentments can be understood as 25 On this sort of view, the rationality of an instance of anger consists, at least in part, in its being an apt response to an unjust world. Yet we may add that the rationality of anger can be assessed along other dimensions as well. For instance, circumstances may arise in which an instance of anger, though apt, would be imprudent for an agent to express or dwell upon, because doing so poses a danger to the agent. For an insightful discussion of the ways oppressive social conditions can impose such conflicts in a way that constitutes “affective injustice,” see Amia Srinivasan’s essay “The Aptness of Anger” (2018).

Creative Resentments  107 passing through stages: they begin (i) with an initial perception of wrongdoing supported by the agent’s existing normative outlook, which initiates (ii) a process of emotional articulation whereby the meaning of that initial perception is developed, culminating in (iii) a transformation of the resenter’s normative outlook. Nussbaum’s cognitive-​evaluative theory is careful to stress that judging is a dynamic activity, moving to and from its object, in ways that fit the drama of emotion. A judgment, she says, is an “assent to an appearance” (2001: 37). First, one is struck by an appearance of how things are (e.g., a stick submerged in water looks bent, a social situation seems unjustly hierarchical). From here, there are three possibilities: I can embrace the way things look (the stick is bent, this situation is unjust); reject the appearance, embracing the contradictory (the bend is illusory, my sense of injustice was wrong); or let the appearance hang there without committing myself one way or the other (2001: 37). If I take either of the first two routes, I have judged: things are (or are not) the way they look. The central thesis of the cognitive-​evaluative theory is that emotions involve assents to value-​laden (because eudaimonistic) pictures of the world. The drama of emotional judging in the case of resentment, therefore, consists in assenting to a picture of the world that includes the existence of wrongdoing. This is not a simple act, but dynamic and often tumultuous: “Reason here moves, embraces, refuses; it can move rapidly or slowly, it can move directly or with hesitation” (2001: 45). She illustrates the dynamic character of emotional judgment in grief: “In grief, given our propensity to distance ourselves and to deny what has occurred, we may have to go through the act of accepting many times, before the proposition securely rests there; but all this is part of the life of an emotion, just as the initial acceptance and the ensuing retention are parts of the life of any judgment” (2001: 46). Assenting to value-​laden pictures of the world, especially those involving irrevocable loss (as in grief) or wrongfulness (as in resentment), can be difficult, involve stages of denial, taking

108  MORAL ARTICULATION time and effort. Understood in this dynamic sense, emotions are evaluative judgments, assents to value-​laden appearances. Here, however, the cognitive-​evaluative theory requires modification. The activity of “assenting to an appearance” cannot take place without the help of an earlier cognitive operation through which one first assembles the appearance in question. If a judgment is conceived as an assent to an appearance, we must suppose that some appearance, a picture of how things are, is already developed and available for the agent’s consideration. That picture must already be quite complex, presenting one with a norm-​saturated appearance of how things are (in the case of resentment, this can involve ascribing complex features to a situation, like causal connections, attitudes, and social relations of accountability). Given its informational and normative complexity, one’s being struck by a picture of how things are cannot be a sheer given, passively received via experience, but must itself be the synthetic result of prior conceptually mediated activity (see §§2.1 and 2.2). “Assenting to an appearance” is only part of the work of judging, which must also include an earlier stage of synthesizing appearances, rendering them available for assent or rejection. Can emotions like resentment play a role in this earlier stage of cognition, not only assenting to a picture of wrongdoing but helping to form a picture of wrongdoing in the first place? I suggest the answer is “Yes,” yet this requires an expanded notion of the cognitive structure of emotion. To get into this thought, consider the familiar experience that resentments lead us to ruminate, keeping our attention obsessively focused on a perceived wrong for extended stretches of time. The notion that anger and other emotions are frequently characterized by increased cognitive processing and directed focus is widely accepted in empirical research on anger.26 “Rather than shutting down thought,” one group of researchers 26 For helpful overviews, see Wranik and Scherer (2010); Litvak et al. (2010); and David Schultz et al. (2010). Empirical research also suggests anger can limit cognitive processing (Schultz 2010). My argument does not depend on denying this familiar feature of anger, as in cases of “blind rage.” My point is to home in on another familiar pattern of angered response that does involve increased focus and ruminative attention

Creative Resentments  109 writes, “emotions direct attention, memory, and judgment toward the emotion-​eliciting event” (Litvak et al. 2010: 289). What I want to consider in particular is the familiar experience of resentment’s holding our thinking captive, making it difficult or impossible to give sustained attention to anything other than the perceived offense: while getting dressed, while at work, while eating, when we should be sleeping. We replay and reexamine the perceived slight again and again. My suggestion is that what’s going on in many such cases of ruminative anger is not just our assenting, again and again, to a picture of wrongdoing, but our morally articulating a picture of wrongdoing. We are, in the language of earlier chapters, pursuing the elusive, proto-​discursive meaning of an experience, striving to find new conceptual frames that can do justice to our inchoate conviction that something has gone morally wrong. We might think, then, of one of our earlier examples in Chapter 1, namely, your anger at your boss for a difficult-​to-​pin-​down insult, as not only the emotional impetus for moral articulation, but as already having begun that process of conceptual rumination. This familiar phenomenological point about emotional rumination has implications for our understanding of the cognitive structure of resentment. Portraying resentment in the static terms of holding some proposition to be true is, at best, a caricature.27 On the contrary, a single episode of resenting can take us on a bumpy ride upon the offending act. That this is sometimes the case with anger is hardly controversial. Anger can also lead to excessive or biased cognitive processing: e.g., angered subjects sometimes have a heightened propensity to interpret facial expressions in others as angry or hostile (Schultz 2010: 313). Since my claims are not meant as blanket statements about all possible manifestations of anger, but a particular kind that occurs as part of moral articulation, such findings are consistent with the view defended here. 27 Nussbaum is explicit on this point: she writes of her own grief, “Even if its propositional content is, ‘My wonderful mother is dead’, the experience itself involves a storm of memories and concrete perceptions that swarm around that content, but add more than is present in it. The experience of emotion is, then, cognitively laden, or dense, in a way that a propositional-​attitude view would not capture” (2001: 65). The model Nussbaum is rejecting here is one that would remain strictly within the confines of what I referred to in Chapter 1 as the discursive theory of meaning (see §§1.2 and 1.3). Though Nussbaum is careful to avoid this, cognitive-​evaluative approaches that use the discursively formulable judgment as their model for cognition run the risk of elaborating a theory that is

110  MORAL ARTICULATION of ruminative attention that draws multiple cognitive capacities into operation. Here is a partial list: (i) acts of memory (the offense is replayed again and again, from different angles and different perspectives; analogies are drawn to past offenses; contrasts are drawn with past experiences of fairness, cooperation, or care); (ii) acts of imagination (all manner of hypotheticals are tested: how things could have gone differently, how the offender would feel if roles were reversed; one stages mini-​dramas, imagining what one might say to the offender, how the offender might reply; how others might react; fantasies of payback);28 (iii) questions directed outward (what motivated the offense? has this happened before? will it happen again? are others similarly violated? what does this indicate about how others view/​value me?); (iv) self-​questioning/​self-​ interpretation (who am I and what do I value such that this angers me? what do I need from others to feel respected? to feel safe? to flourish? to avoid this offense in the future?).29 That a heterogeneity of cognitive operations like this can be at work in resentment lends support to the notion that resentment involves not only “assenting to an appearance” but, moreover, stitching together a complex narrative aimed at understanding just what has occurred. Though these processes might be thought to be secondary and temporally posterior to getting the appearance in view, we should instead think of appearance-​formation as a more dynamic, diachronically extended process that requires acts of imagination, memory, and interrogation in order to develop. This is especially important when the initial appearance strikes one as inchoate, as when one is struck reductive in this fashion—​even if they do not explicitly avow an exhaustively discursive theory. 28 Nussbaum says imagination typically “accompanies” emotional responses, particularly compassion (2001: Ch. 8). Yet she stops short of the view that imaginative work is constitutive of emotion itself (64–​7). 29 Compare the questions listed under (iii) and (iv) to the “appraisal checks” suggested as part of the cognitive processing of emotion in Wranik and Scherer (2010: 246). The authors note that, because of their recursive structure, the evaluations internal to an episode of emotion can evolve as one continually poses and re-​poses questions to oneself.

Creative Resentments  111 with an initial sense of wrongfulness, yet in a vague, indeterminate way, as in our example of difficult-​to-​pin-​down anger at one’s boss. Thus, my recommendation is that we widen our view of the cognitive work involved in emotion to include this earlier stage of appearance-​formation. In the terminology of the preceding chapters, our emotional engagements with the world often involve conceptually mediated, proto-​discursive apprehensions of elusive moral significance, which they then synthesize in an ongoing process of emotional articulation.30 In order to solidify this thought, we need a more comprehensive model for thinking about emotional cognition, which I will label the articulation model of emotion. Recall the notion of articulation introduced in §1.5. “Articulation” refers to acts of expressing inchoate experiences of significance—​unformed desires, vague senses of what is important, experiences of violation—​and in doing so shaping them in ways that create new meanings (Taylor 1985 and 2016). Following Taylor, I contrasted articulations, directed at ourselves, our experiences, and our senses of importance, with descriptions, which target more or less stable external objects. Offering an interpretation of aspects of one’s own normative outlook is unlike other forms of predication that target a self-​standing object. When one attributes to oneself a certain sense that something is important, one articulates that sense, gives it shape, seeks out a broader framework within which it is intelligible, which can in turn transform the initial sense itself. Giving sustained attention to one’s latent sense of norm-​violation, asking about its causes, asking what normative expectations were threatened, can have a transformative effect upon that initially inchoate sense. This is not the case when we ascribe properties to 30 That is, on this picture, emotions are already conceptual, even if not wholly discursive, modes of responsiveness to the world. This may help clarify the relation between my discussion here and our discussion of conceptuality in Chapter 2. The point is not that there are two things—​concepts on the one hand and emotions on the other—​that can contribute to the process of synthesizing fragments of moral meaning into more integrated, articulate experiences, but that our emotional ruminations are themselves already a form of conceptual synthesizing activity.

112  MORAL ARTICULATION self-​standing objects, as when we say that the Mariana Trench “is 10,920 meters deep at its lowest point” or “is home to several species of amphipod.” Such acts may transform our understanding of oceanography, but they do not transform the object itself. Yet since one’s self-​understanding is part of who one is, a transformation in one’s self-​understanding is, thereby, a self-​transformation. Articulation brings something to light while transforming the thing brought to light. For example, I may begin with a vague sense that I value my autonomy, yet understand this in an immature way: I think it involves repudiating others’ help. Yet as I work to articulate why autonomy matters to me, developing a more complicated sense of the background assumptions against which this makes sense, I may come to understand that the thing I valued, autonomy, constitutively depends upon others’ help and care. Though the same word, “autonomy,” is used over the course of one’s efforts to articulate its importance, what one values now is different from what it was in the beginning. As Taylor writes, “articulations are attempts to formulate what is initially inchoate, or confused, or badly formulated. But this kind of formation or reformulation does not leave its object unchanged. To give a certain articulation is to shape our sense of what we desire and what we hold important in a certain way” (1985: 36). The object of articulation (in our case, one’s latent sense of norm-​violation) does not precede its expression as a wholly intact, determinate object waiting to be expressed (like a natural formation hidden beneath the ocean), but is constituted and made meaningful in part by its very articulation. The articulation model of emotion holds that emotional cognition can involve not only evaluative judgments in Nussbaum’s sense but also the potentially transformative activity of articulation. With its help, we can develop a view of the cognitive structure of resentment, unfolding over three stages. In agreement with accounts like Walker and Nussbaum’s, resentment begins with (i) an initial perception of wrongdoing intelligible to the resenter in terms of their

Creative Resentments  113 received normative outlook. That the perception can be cognitively and normatively complex yet strike one with seeming immediacy is made possible by one’s historically developed normative outlook. Yet we can now add that further cognitive processing may take place beyond assenting to the initial perception of norm-​violation. This is the stage of (ii) emotional articulation, the cognitive processing that holds our attention captive. Powers of memory, imagination, questioning, and self-​interpretation are activated, working to piece together the meaning of the initial experience of violation. It is in this stage that elusive, proto-​discursive meanings are pursued and placed within new, potentially transformative, conceptual frameworks of self-​interpretation. In some cases, this leads to a special form of moral change, namely, (iii) a transformed normative outlook, in which evaluative judgments characterize one’s resentment, yet with an altered sense of the normative expectations that support them. In practice we should expect these stages neither to be clearly distinguished from one another nor to occur in neat succession, yet they provide a helpful framework for understanding resentment’s cognitive structure.31 Consider how this works in an imagined case. Growing up, Oscar developed a love for so-​called nerdy pursuits, preferring calligraphy, birdwatching, and journaling over things that interested other boys his age: cars, sports, girls. This, combined with his weight, coke-​bottle glasses, and effeminate demeanor made him the target of endless ridicule at school and home. Though 31 Someone committed to the fully norm-​conservative view of resentment might push back here, urging that the process described (particularly stages [ii] and [iii]) is not part of resentment, but an effect. This looks compelling if we think of emotions as brief, pre-​reflective bursts of affect, the rest being mere aftermath. Perhaps some emotional episodes are like this (e.g., a sudden fright from a loud, unexpected noise), but emotions generally do not fit this mold, being better conceived as temporally extended processes of engagement with the world: e.g., the grief Nussbaum describes in relation to the loss of her mother or, indeed, the kind of enduring love that makes grief possible. See Solomon (2004), who argues that the judgment involved in emotion “is not a detached intellectual act but a way of cognitively grappling with the world” and that such emotions are often “substantial processes that last a long time—​lifelong love, for instance” (77–​8).

114  MORAL ARTICULATION never comfortable with the harassment, he initially understood it as “a nerd’s lot in life,” certainly lamentable, though not something one could expect to be different. Yet as time wore on, resentments emerged and Oscar gradually came to associate the ongoing patterns of bullying with a bogus notion of masculinity to which he was pressured to conform. Working within Nussbaum’s view, Oscar’s emergent resentments involve his gradually assenting to an appearance, specifically, to a picture of the world that includes his having been wrongfully harmed by bullying underwritten by a pernicious ideology of masculinity. The cognitive-​emotional drama of Oscar’s resentments would consist in an ongoing struggle to assent to this picture. Supplementing Nussbaum’s cognitive-​evaluative theory with the articulation model, Oscar’s emergent resentments involve not only assenting to a picture of the world that includes wrongful harm but also the gradual formation of that very picture. The process begins with initial perceptions of norm-​violation, but ones that are elusive, inchoate, or off the mark, supported by an underdeveloped normative outlook. We can imagine Oscar’s resentments as passing through several phases of maturity: initially, he takes the ridicule to reflect nothing other than the mean-​spiritedness of his tormentors. In a kind of middle-​phase, he has the elusive sense that this explanation is limited, and so he starts to develop the hypothesis that his bullying is rooted in a broader prejudice, an ‘anti-​nerd’ bias widely held by his peers. Though this helps draw certain connections and patterns of abuse, it, too, is revealed through experiences of discursive breakdown as having limits. Finally, he comes to understand that this is itself rooted in an ideology of masculinity, recognition of which can have a profound effect upon Oscar’s normative outlook. Through emotional cognition he develops emergent conceptions of the illegitimacy of the notion of masculinity foisted upon him, the value of his favored projects, and the value he places upon himself, all of which are synthesized into a complex picture of the wrongfulness of his being bullied. In these ways, resentments not only rise to

Creative Resentments  115 defend Oscar’s standing normative outlook, but develop it in new ways.32 In Oscar’s case, we have an instance of individual moral change. We can imagine that critical understandings of the ideology of masculinity in question already exist in the world, yet are new to Oscar. His ruminative resentments contribute to his gradual appreciation of these critical understandings as he brings them to bear upon his own experience. Individual moral change can, in turn, give rise to the broader sorts of social transformations that are of interest when people defend the idea of norm-​creative resentments. In §3.2, we considered the idea that anger played an important role in transforming the experience of sexual harassment from an elusive sense of violation into a clear conviction of wrongdoing, not only for a few individuals, but for a broader collective. Allison Jaggar writes, When [outlaw emotions] are experienced by isolated individuals, those concerned may be confused, unable to name their experience; they may even doubt their own sanity. Women may come to believe that they are “emotionally disturbed” and that the embarrassment or fear aroused in them by male sexual innuendo is prudery or paranoia. When certain emotions are shared and validated by others, however, the basis exists for forming a subculture defined by perceptions, norms, and values that systematically oppose the prevailing perceptions, norms, and values. By constituting the basis for such a subculture, outlaw emotions may be politically because epistemologically subversive. (Jaggar 1989: 160) 32 The point is not that the resenter comes to these new normative conclusions in isolation from others. We can imagine Oscar worked through these ideas in conversation, by enrolling in a Gender and Sexuality Studies class, by reading Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin, or through conversations with friends. The mistake is to think these social forms of cognition take place free of emotion in general and anger in particular. The articulation model is well suited to the idea that emotional cognition takes place in the medium of social interaction.

116  MORAL ARTICULATION Jaggar’s notion of outlaw emotions nicely connects with the phenomenology of dissonance described in Chapter 2 (§2.3), which we saw can be cultivated into a catalyst for larger-​scale moral change. Yet if an instance of outlaw resentment is to realize its full cognitive potential, providing not only an initially confused, inchoate apprehension of something important, but maturing into the sort of ruminative, morally articulative emotion I have been describing, it requires the support of a community of mutual trust and care. Here we may think of sorts of feminist consciousness-​raising groups Jaggar alludes to here, or Mills’s “black alternative public sphere” mentioned in the previous chapter (§2.2), as providing the right sort of emotional subculture in which this can take place.33 The “conservative” depictions of resentment we discussed in §3.3 have difficulty accommodating this idea, either rejecting it outright or rendering mysterious how resentments could overleap the bounds of an existing normative outlook, whether that of an individual or the collective normative expectations of a group that shares similar experiences of anger. It is true that, in light of the prior norm requirement, we should view the development of new norms concerning sexual harassment not as the ex nihilo invention of radically new moral norms and concepts, but as a result of working within existing normative space, drawing from, for example, bourgeoning notions of sexism, discrimination, and nonsexual notions of harassment already in circulation (cf. §2.1, above). The articulation model allows us to respect this point while also insisting that such transformations involve more than novel iterations of old norms. For it emphasizes that bringing existing normative conceptions to bear on new experiences of violation can have a transformative effect upon those normative conceptions themselves. 33 For a recent discussion of the epistemology of consciousness raising that is amenable to this point, see Haslanger (2021). Haslanger does not, however, discuss the epistemic role of emotion in her account. I critically discuss Haslanger’s work in more detail in Chapter 4.

Creative Resentments  117

3.5.  Conclusion Let me sum up the previous section’s argument. I defended a view according to which emotional responses to wrongdoing can make a rational contribution to the transformation of an agent’s normative outlook from the inside. Though resentments take as their ground the agent’s historically developed normative outlook, they initiate a cognitive process that can deepen and extend that outlook in ways that are both genuinely new and purportedly rational. The articulation model of emotion introduces a framework for understanding how emotional cognition can contribute to one’s development of a value-​laden picture of the world. The articulation model makes two broad theoretical assumptions: (i) like Nussbaum’s cognitive-​evaluative theory of emotion, it holds that the cognitive appraisals at work in emotion start from the existing normative outlook of the agent; yet (ii) the ensuing processes of emotional cognition are capable of deepening and extending that outlook in new ways, insofar as they involve not just assenting to pictures of wrongdoing but also forming them. Thus, the articulation model is consistent with the prior norm requirement yet, unlike the views considered in §3.3, is not restricted to a norm-​ conservative function. This brings the defensive and creative aspects of resentment together into a unified theory. The idea that our emotional responses can follow the expressive logic of articulation should not, I think, be confined to the case of resentment. Following the general outlines of the model elaborated out here, we might conceive of grief, for example, not just as the evaluative judgment that someone of deep importance has been lost, but as a dynamic process of reflecting upon why that loss matters and drawing imaginative connections to others’ losses.34 Gratitude could be conceived not only as the evaluative judgment 34 Judith Butler argues that the role of grief in disclosing the value of a life need not take place solely after that life has ended but rather can, and should, pervade the ethical acknowledgment of its precarity: “grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters. For the most part, we imagine that the infant comes into the world, is sustained in and by that world through adulthood and old age, and finally dies. We imagine that

118  MORAL ARTICULATION that one is the recipient of others’ goodwill, but as involving sustained ruminative attention upon the nature of the help one has received, why it matters, and the moral meaning of human interdependence. My conjecture is that for any given emotion, this would follow the structure of articulation sketched here: a particular emotional response registers the agent’s normative outlook as it already stands, yet sets in motion processes of emotional cognition capable of transforming that outlook from the inside. We may, therefore, add to our evolving portrait of moral articulation a central place for emotions. Moral articulation is a thoroughly emotional affair, not in the sense that emotion merely accompanies its cognitive work, but in the deeper sense that emotion is an essential aspect of that work.

when the child is wanted, there is celebration at the beginning of life. But there can be no celebration without an implicit understanding that the life is grievable, that it would be grieved if it were lost, and that this future anterior is installed as the condition of its life” (2009: 14–​5). Butler’s claim that recognition of a life’s mattering goes hand-​in-​hand with a capacity to grieve such a life is also an illustration of a point made earlier, namely, that we cannot encounter a world of things and people as mattering to us apart from our having adopted an emotionally laden normative outlook (§2.2; see also the discussion of “metabiological meanings” in §5.3, below).

4 Is Morality Loopy? Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture. This is the process which moral philosophy must attempt to describe and analyze. —​Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics” (1997: 75)

A recurring theme in the preceding chapters has been that moral articulation is a process through which agents simultaneously (i) strive to be objective about what they articulate, such that there is the possibility of criticizing articulations for being deluded, false, or distorting, and (ii) bring about significant transformations in the very areas of ethical life they are trying to see clearly, such that the ‘object’ of articulation is not stable but changes over time. So far, our explorations of the transformative effects of moral articulation have focused primarily upon transformations that occur within the perspectives of agents undertaking moral articulation, particularly at the socio-​epistemic and moral psychological levels. This has been the concern of the first half of this book (Chapter 1, 2, and 3). Yet we should ask whether the transformative effects of moral articulation might extend even further, reshaping not only our conceptions of value but the actual substance or reality of values themselves. If we entertain this idea, what will it entail for the notion of ethical objectivity? Are we better off, if we are committed to objectivity in ethics, restricting ourselves to the weaker claim that, while moral articulation can bring about dramatic transformations in our conceptions of value, as well as corresponding shifts in our Moral Articulation. Matthew Congdon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197691571.003.0005

120  MORAL ARTICULATION habits and social practices surrounding those values, it leaves the “values themselves” unchanged? Or might morality remain rationally objective while being deeply sensitive to, and in significant part constituted by, the historically changing conceptual schemes and discursive repertoires we use to make sense of it? I shall address these questions in the remaining chapters of this book (Chapters 4, 5, and 6), where my primary critical target shall be the immutability thesis, the presupposition that, if objective moral grounds exist, those grounds must be immutable.1 In the present chapter I make a start by proposing that moral articulation is a special instance of what some social philosophers call discursive construction, such that the values thereby articulated are constituted in significant part by their very articulation.2 Part of what makes moral articulation a form of discursive construction is its following the expressive logic introduced in Chapter 1 (§1.5): it simultaneously illuminates and helps to alter objective features of ethical life (or, as I shall also say, “moral facts”3). Yet now I shall place added emphasis on the idea that, at least when a struggle for moral articulation is successful, this is not just any alteration whatsoever, but one for which metaphors of maturation and growth are appropriate. This chapter begins my defense of this idea by introducing a distinction between causal and rational forms of discursive construction, urging that moral articulation is better viewed as a version of the latter. 1 For an elaboration of the immutability thesis and references to philosophers who have held it, see Chapter 5 (§5.1), below. 2 For references, see the overview of literature on discursive construction in §4.1, below. 3 A note about terminology: I use the phrase “moral facts” in my discussion below as part of my engagement with social philosophers, particularly Sally Haslanger, who adopt this terminology. However, I am wary of its use for two reasons: (i) its apparent implication that there exists a sharp distinction between moral and non-​moral facts, which I do not wish to embrace here; and (ii) its lending itself to a picture of moral truth as taking explicitly propositional form, where true moral judgments are those that properly correspond to the “moral facts.” My discussion of discursive breakdown and proto-​ discursivity in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 were meant, precisely, to militate against an exhaustively propositional conception of moral truth.

Is Morality Loopy?  121

4.1.  A Problem in Critical Social Philosophy The question of how best to understand historical changes in our ethical and political concepts is central in recent discussions of social critique and ideology.4 A core idea in these discussions is that the critique of ideology—​understood in a broad sense as the conceptual aspect of unjust social practices—​should go beyond criticizing beliefs and judgments in a narrow sense and include the criticism of historically inherited conceptual schemes, for it is such schemes that determine what sorts of beliefs and judgments can be framed, formulated, and considered intelligible in the first place.5 These inherited conceptual schemes, moreover, structure more than just the way we think about the world. They structure the world itself. A conceptual scheme of two gender categories, for example, exists not merely in the minds of those who adhere to it. It is materially manifest in the design of toilet facilities, as ableist conceptual schemes are materially manifest in sidewalks without curb cuts and capitalist schemes of wage labor in the design of the factory gate, the punching-​in station, and the assembly line (Haslanger 2012: 463; 2015: 22).6 This is a two-​way street, for our schematically shaped material resources go on to reinforce our conceptual schemes, by training the habits, dispositions, and common sense of those socialized within them. Ian Hacking and Sally Haslanger refer to this phenomenon with the metaphor of a “feedback loop.”7 A community’s having adopted a particular scheme of concepts tends to influence how they structure the world around them, and how the world around them is structured tends to “loop” back up, 4 See, for example, Mills (1997; 2005; 2007; 2017a); Haslanger (2012; 2015; 2017a; 2017b); Fricker (2007: Ch. 7), Celikates (2018), and Jaeggi (2018). 5 See the debate between Shelby (2003; 2014) and Haslanger (2017b). 6 This materialist commitment is inherited from Althusser: “Ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material” (Althusser 2008: 40) 7 On “feedback loops,” see the references to Hacking and Haslanger in Sections §§4.2 and 4.3 below.

122  MORAL ARTICULATION influencing the scheme of concepts they find most natural. So ideological conceptual schemes are doubly pernicious: they get the world wrong, hiding from view real forms of suffering and injustice, while simultaneously shaping the world in their image. One of the principal mechanisms driving this is discursive construction, an activity whereby the ways we categorize and talk about a thing make it, to some significant extent, what it is (cf. Haslanger 2012: 88). We may think of the development of the sorts of concepts with which we began in the Introduction of this book—​critical notions of ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘hate speech’, ‘sexual harassment’, etc.—​as efforts to develop counter-​ideological conceptual schemes. If ideology is “doubly pernicious” in the sense just described, then we might expect the development of counter-​ideological schemes of concepts to involve a corresponding double aspect. On the one hand, the new scheme of concepts would allow us to see the social world more clearly by bringing into view forms of suffering and injustice that our ideological schemes had obscured.8 On the other hand, the development of counter-​ideological concepts would not only allow us to see better, but alter what is there to be seen. Toilet facilities would be redesigned, curb cuts added to public walkways, and the organization of work changed, all of which would “loop” back up to reinforce the newly transformed shared cultural schemas. The question of this chapter arises when we combine this idea about “loopy” social phenomena with a second idea, also found in contemporary critical social theory, namely, that ideology critique involves an appeal to moral facts. Haslanger expresses this latter idea when she writes, “the presupposition that there are some moral facts cannot be avoided by those engaged in justified political resistance” (2015: 40).9 She makes this claim as part of her discussion of a 2013 8 See, for example, Mills: “As a result of having these [new counter-​ideological] concepts as visual aids, we can now see better: our perceptions are no longer blinded to realities to which we were previously obtuse” (Mills 2005: 176). 9 In a similar vein, Mills writes that ideology produces “not merely ignorance of facts with moral implications but moral non-​knowings, incorrect judgments about the rights and wrongs of moral situations themselves” (Mills 2007: 22). In Rahel Jaeggi’s phrase,

Is Morality Loopy?  123 report (Paltrow and Flavin 2013) on forced medical interventions (e.g., forced C-​sections) and arrests of pregnant people (e.g., a twenty-​year felony prison sentence to a woman whose miscarriage was suspected to be self-​induced) in the United States over several decades, which revealed that the majority involved “poor pregnant women and pregnant women of color” (Haslanger 2015: 31–​2).10 The feedback loop Haslanger identifies is roughly as follows. A historically developed conceptual scheme rooted in overlapping forms of sexist, racist, and class-​based oppression constructs the social meaning of poor and racially marginalized pregnant people as “irresponsible,” “uncaring,” and even “disposable incubators” (43) and so as posing a threat to fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses in ways that mandate forced medical interventions and arrests. This shapes the organization of material resources in the policing of pregnant people and the institutional norms surrounding pregnancy, which in turn loop back up to reinforce the conceptions, dispositions, and habits of thought that make up the initial conceptual scheme.11 The result is an ideological feedback loop in which unjust social relations are sustained. Haslanger urges that this situation can be subject to justified ideology critique from a perspective that defends the “moral fact” that pregnant people enjoy “the full rights of personhood” (Haslanger 2015: 40; cf. 2017a: 165). Yet the invocation of a value this is a rejection of “ethical abstinence,” the attempt to maintain a methodological neutrality concerning competing moral visions when engaging in social critique (Jaeggi 2018: 1–​33). 10 A word on terminology: The report was written in partnership with a U.S.-​based non-​profit advocacy group named, from 2001 until 2022, National Advocates for Pregnant Women. On November 15, 2022, the group announced that they had renamed themselves Pregnancy Justice to reflect their “fight to defend all people with the capacity for pregnancy against criminalization” (Pregnancy Justice 2022). I shall use the phrase “pregnant women” when directly quoting Paltrow and Flavin’s 2013 report and Haslanger’s 2015 discussion of it. When not directly quoting, I shall follow Pregnancy Justice’s lead in using the updated phrase, “pregnant people.” 11 Haslanger prefers to speak of the looping effect as taking place between a “cultural technê” and “resources” (Haslanger 2015). I replace the former with “conceptual scheme” for the sake of continuity with earlier chapters.

124  MORAL ARTICULATION like personhood for the purposes of ideology critique raises the question of this chapter. Does an appeal to “moral facts,” such as the personhood of pregnant people, constitute an appeal to something that lies outside the feedback loops of the discursively constructed social world? According to a familiar tradition in the history of moral philosophy, this must be so, for otherwise the relevant moral facts would lose the categoricity and necessity they need to do their job.12 Yet can we really hold that moral facts enjoy a special ontological status that insulates them from the forms of historical alterability and discursive construction to which the rest of the social world appears to be subject? Do the ways we conceptualize and talk about morals not reach down to affect the objective structure of ethical life itself? Are moral facts just as loopy as other social phenomena? If they are, what follows for the possibilities of ethically oriented social criticism? Here I shall argue that efforts in recent critical theory to address these questions have faced difficulties when they assume an overly narrow picture of the sorts of discursive construction there are. An exclusive focus upon a merely causal picture of the transformative effects of conceptual change limits what we can say about the discursive construction of moral facts. For it leaves out the possibility that discursive construction can, in some cases, take the form of a rational development of moral maturation, bringing about changes, not merely within a space of causally related objects, but within a normative space of reasons. In §4.2, I illustrate the limits of a merely causal view of discursive construction by showing how Hacking’s discussion of the discursive construction of child abuse 12 The categoricity of moral demands contrasts with their being merely conditional upon the desires, inclinations, and attitudes of moral agents. The necessity of moral demands refers to their modal robustness: if x is wrong here and now, it must be wrong in all possible worlds where sufficiently similar conditions obtain. Both notions find their classical formulation in Kant (2012). The worry is that the “loopiness” of any discursively constructed “fact” will be too conditional and too contingent to allow for either condition to be fulfilled. For other examples of figures who fall in this tradition, see §5.1, below.

Is Morality Loopy?  125 leads to a dilemma that takes the following form. Moral facts are loopy or they are not. If they are, we lapse into an uncritical relativism that is inconsistent with the aims of a critical social theory. If they are not, we embrace an ahistorical moral realism that appears, at best, internally inconsistent with the historicist commitments of this strand of critical social theory and, at worst, dogmatic and difficult to defend. In §§4.3–​5, I spell out my alternative notion of rational discursive construction, which both avoids this dilemma and explains how moral facts can be subject to discursive construction in thoroughgoing ways without losing their claim to objective rationality. I present this alternative by way of an analogy between an intimate case of articulation (drawn from E.M. Forster’s novel, Maurice) and large-​scale, social movement-​driven cases of moral articulation, showing that both share certain features that mark them as instances of rational discursive construction. In developing this view, we shall see its connection with our overarching concept of moral articulation, for we find here a form of linguistic expression that brings something to light while simultaneously maturing or actualizing the very thing brought to light. The arguments of this chapter, however, only take us part of the way, offering an abstract picture of the rational discursive construction of morals. Thus, our argument will continue in Chapter 5, where I situate this idea within the wider context of a historicized variation of Aristotelian ethical naturalism.

4.2.  Hacking on Child Abuse: A Case Study in Causal Discursive Construction In several places, Hacking (1991; 1995; 1999; 2002) cites child abuse as an example of a social kind that has been “made and molded” over time, in this case, starting in the 1960s. ‘Child abuse’ is, Hacking says, an “interactive kind,” that is, a kind that exists in a co-​constitutive relationship with the humans and social relations

126  MORAL ARTICULATION to which it is applied. Hacking’s historical account is complex, but some key points run as follows: the modern concept of ‘child abuse’ is not a synonym for what earlier generations called ‘cruelty to children’. The new term involves a medicalization and “societization” of a problem that had previously been treated as a private issue (1991: 280; 1999: 134). The new category connected violence and mistreatment of children to patriarchal domination and the abuse of women in the home (1991: 260). The concept introduced new distinctions between “normal” and “deviant” behavior and provided new ways for both victims and abusers to label themselves (258). Because people can become aware of the way they are labeled and change their behavior accordingly, the concept ‘child abuse’ led victims to experience their hurt differently, as events previously ignored or repressed were consciously viewed as abusive (254; 258). In such respects, Hacking argues, the social facts surrounding child abuse were made and molded by acts of discursive construction. Yet what should we say about the moral status of child abuse as it is made and molded over time? Hacking’s view shifts. In Rewriting the Soul, Hacking (1995) urges that child abuse “is a real evil, and it was so before the concept was constructed. It was nevertheless constructed. Neither reality nor construction should be in question” (Hacking 1995: 67–​8). Here, Hacking urges that discursively constructed phenomena are no less real than non-​constructed phenomena, and that a distinctively moral valence like “evil” can be part of their reality prior to the development of the relevant concept. A few years later, however, in The Social Construction of What?, Hacking (1999) criticizes his earlier statement: “What a terrible equivocation! “What ‘it’ is a real evil? The object, namely, the behavior or practice of child abuse. What ‘it’ is said to be socially constructed? The concept. My switch from object (child abuse) to idea (the concept of child abuse) is worse than careless” (Hacking 1999: 29). In this self-​critique, Hacking charges his former self with equivocation and updates his view to avoid it: now there is a non-​ constructed reality that is objectively wrong (child abuse itself),

Is Morality Loopy?  127 which should be distinguished from the discursive construct (the concept of child abuse). The objective evil of the act is secured by separating object and concept. Moral ontology and social ontology seem to come apart—​at least with respect to their susceptibility to discursive construction. Yet this is too quick. As Hacking himself argues, object and concept are reciprocally constitutive in the case of historically emergent action-​types, and he continues to include child abuse on a list of kinds that “come into being hand in hand with our invention of the ways to name them” (Hacking 2002: 170; cf. 69). As we just saw, Hacking holds that what we today call “child abuse” is not the same action-​type as, for example, what the Victorians called “cruelty to children.” The point is not just that our labels change, but that our changing labels change their objects. As such, Hacking is committed to a historical ontology according to which the object itself comes into being as a result of its expression in concepts. So, by Hacking’s own lights, it is not clear just what, ontologically speaking, “the real evil” is prior to the development of the concept. The problem is compounded when we ask about the historical status of “evil” as Hacking uses it in these passages. What is evil? Is evil a social phenomenon, and so subject to the same looping effects as any other bit of social reality? Or should we join a long tradition in the history of philosophy of viewing the fundamental categories of morality as exempt from the historical mutability to which the rest of the social world is subject? Toward the end of his discussion, Hacking sketches two options: One says that if our consciousness is now raised so that we see an event as abusive, then that event always was abusive, even if no one intended it that way or experienced it that way when it occurred. . . . The other option resists this, and says the events were not evil in their time, though it would be wrong to repeat acts like that now. (Hacking 1999: 161)

128  MORAL ARTICULATION Without a further story about the views between these extremes, Hacking’s discussion is constrained by the dilemma introduced above. Moral facts either remain untouched by the feedback loops that characterize social facts generally, and so we wind up with ahistorical moral realism (“that event always was abusive . . .”), or they are loopy, and so we wind up with thoroughgoing historical relativism (“the events were not evil in their time . . .”).13 The second option should be unpalatable to anyone interested in ethically oriented social criticism, since it appears to demote any alleged “moral fact” to the same normative status as any other discursively constructed “social fact,” and so the former could never be invoked to criticize the latter. This may lead us to embrace the first option instead. This would require an account of the ahistorical grounds in question that could transform them from dogmatically assumed givens into a rationally justified foundation. Assuming such grounds exist, their defender will face then the moral epistemological task of explaining how ordinary moral agents come to know them. Such ahistorical grounds will have to be identifiable from within the historically shaped conceptual schemes and normative outlooks we actually occupy. This will be a difficult task. For if our moral-​epistemic resources are thoroughly mediated by such schemes and outlooks (see Chapter 2, §2.1), it is hard to understand what standpoint we could occupy that would allow us to validate, finally, any candidate for such grounds as bearing the requisite ahistorical status. Assuming this moral epistemological challenge can be overcome, there is yet a further challenge to be faced. For one must somehow avoid drawing such a sharp distinction between (ahistorical, non-​discursively 13 We may note that the dilemma in question also implicitly structures Hacking’s self-​ criticism in The Social Construction of What?, mentioned above. In an effort to recover the idea that child abuse is a “real evil,” he tries to separate out, precisely, a loopy phenomenon (the concept of child abuse) from a non-​loopy phenomenon (child abuse itself). But this maneuver makes sense only if we assume that the loopiness of moral facts—​or more broadly, their being the historical results of discursive construction—​a priori rules out their critical potential. Yet why should we think that?

Is Morality Loopy?  129 constructed) moral facts and (historical, discursively constructed) social facts that the two become wholly alienated from one another. If the cost of claiming the existence of moral facts is their being sequestered away in a special, ahistorical realm, then it is fair to ask: what have such distant entities to do with temporally bound creatures like us and the historically concrete social situations we face? This places a burden upon the defender of ahistorical moral facts to show how, once moral facts and social facts have been set so far apart, they can once again be brought together again in judgment and practice.14 To be sure, the challenges I have briefly mentioned here do not amount to decisive objections to the idea of ahistorical moral facts. They bring out, rather, some burdens one must bear in defending them. It can look as though bearing such burdens is forced upon us, if we wish to reject the uncritical historicism that renders ethically oriented social criticism impossible. Yet before thus committing ourselves, we should interrogate whether the dilemma presenting this choice rests upon shaky assumptions. My diagnosis is that Hacking, at least at crucial junctures in his argument, tends to describe the effects of discursive construction in merely causal terms.15 This is to conceive of the determining force of discursive construction as metaphysically on par with other merely causal forces, the way rising global temperatures affect birds’ migratory patterns, or the way soil erosion influences a 14 This theme is explored at length in Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, where she characterizes the problem in terms of a tragic reversal: in their efforts to maintain the purity of objective values, philosophers have tended to remove them from the messy world of actualities to which they were meant to have application, thereby depriving them of their relevance (1992: chap. 2). 15 An important caveat here is that Hacking’s picture of discursive construction includes an interpretive-​agential or, as we might put it, hermeneutical dimension that is not neatly captured in merely causal terms. This is illustrated in the ways Hacking’s framework has been taken up and used to think about the discursive construction of racial categories, particularly their providing interpretable and re-​interpretable “scripts” for human beings, who can in turn contribute to the rewriting of those scripts through their words and deeds. See, for example, the application of Hacking’s “dynamic nominalism” to the case of “African-​American” identity in Appiah (1996: 78–​80) and Gooding-​Williams (2006: 92–​5). Nevertheless, at least in formulating the dilemma under consideration, a merely causal picture seems implicitly at work.

130  MORAL ARTICULATION community’s agricultural practices. In Hacking’s case, the fact that people change their behavior, senses of identity, and shared norms as a result of the invention of new labels is, as I interpret his analysis of child abuse, viewed through this sort of causal lens. To the extent that communal norms and social practices are causally influenced in these ways, their alterability is subject to a high degree of contingency. They go, so to speak, whichever way the wind blows. Presumably, the notion of a “moral fact” that is contingent to this degree is not a suitable basis for ethically oriented social criticism, since the “moral facts” that exist on this picture would be made and molded by whatever discursive forces happen to be dominant, irrespective of their moral goodness, rightness, or justice. Thus, if the question whether moral facts are discursively constructed is reduced to the (arguably separate) question of whether moral facts are causally constructed by discursive acts, Hacking’s dilemma appears inevitable. For then moral facts must either escape the looping effects of discursive construction altogether or else be determined by whatever modes of discourse happen to be in power. This merely causal picture leaves unexplored another possibility, namely, that there exist forms of discursive construction that shape their object rationally, taking place within a historically emerging space of reasons, as opposed to a merely causal space. I develop this suggestion in the following section. My point so far has been to illustrate how restricting ourselves to a causal picture of discursive construction makes it difficult to see how we could avoid Hacking’s dilemma.

4.3.  Rational Discursive Construction In order to develop our alternative, let us begin by building upon Haslanger’s definition of discursive construction.

Is Morality Loopy?  131 Discursive construction (preliminary): “Something is discursively constructed just in case it is the way it is, to some substantial extent, because of what is attributed (and/​or self-​attributed) to it.” (Haslanger 2012: 88)

We may modify this definition to allow for instances in which an object is transformed by linguistic acts that are not neatly captured as instances of “attributing” or “self-​attributing”: Discursive construction (expanded): Something is discursively constructed just in case it is the way it is, to some substantial extent, because of the ways it is expressed (and/​or expresses itself) in language.

This allows us to include, for example, non-​literal and indirect discursive acts such as expression through metaphor. It also allows us to say that an object can be discursively constructed through its inclusion within stories and myths. Note the caveat in both definitions, “to some substantial extent.” To say that x is discursively constructed is not to say that x owes its existence just to its expression in language. To say of a human being, for example, that they are discursively constructed (cf. Haslanger 2012: 88–​9) is not to say that they are constituted by language, full stop, but that significant aspects of their identity are co-​constituted by their expression in language along with a host of other natural and social forces. With these points in mind, we can say that discursive construction is at work in all three of the following cases: Case A: An unjust ideology exists in the United States within which poor and racially marginalized pregnant people tend to be stereotyped as uncaring and irresponsible. The way they are labeled shapes their lives by reinforcing practices surrounding the ways they are policed, monitored, and denied

132  MORAL ARTICULATION decision-​ making autonomy in medical settings. Those practices then lead, as a matter of social fact, to more arrests, convictions, and forced interventions amongst those who have been so labeled. Many living in this culture cite these social facts as evidence of the initial stereotype of irresponsibility and uncaringness. In doing so, they contribute to the perpetuation and pervasiveness of this ideological stereotype by confirming its place with the “common ground” of meanings shared within this culture.16 Let us assume, moreover, that at least many of those who do so possess neither the intention of producing any discursively constructive effects nor an awareness that they produce such effects unintentionally. Rather, they see themselves merely as stating matters of fact. They nevertheless play a significant role in contributing to a complex process of ideological discursive construction. The result is “a structure of social relations that is ideologically sustained” (Haslanger 2015: 32). Case B: At Beth’s middle school, students are divided randomly into four groups each year: Sugar Maples, Magnolias, Bamboos, and Oaks. Each group engages in learning activities together, collaborates on art projects, and competes with other groups in intramural games. Beth is a Sugar Maple. As the school year goes on, this substantially shapes her identity. It organizes the way her time is spent, leads her to develop friendships, and builds a sense of camaraderie with her fellow Sugar Maples. By the end of the year, what started as a randomly assigned group has become a mini-​community with a mini-​history, whose members share senses of identity, routine, and meaning.

16 On the idea of a “common ground” and its role in Haslanger’s theory of ideology, see Haslanger 2012: chap. 17.

Is Morality Loopy?  133 Case C: In E.M. Forster’s novel, Maurice, the titular character struggles together with another man, Clive Durham, to express the love and attraction they feel for one another. In the context of the novel’s setting, England around 1912, homosexual love is multiply damned: law treats it as a crime, the church as a sin, medicine as a congenital illness, and social convention as unspeakable.17 Yet Maurice and Clive painstakingly find creative ways to make sense of their experience to themselves and one another. In doing so, they not only disclose their love, but develop it in new directions. Clive, for example, urges Maurice to read Plato’s Symposium over the school break, in the tacit hope that Plato’s portrait of eros, coupled with the dialogue’s depiction of ancient Greek homosexuality, will speak to features of their burgeoning affections in ways they have not yet dared voice explicitly. Maurice obliges, and after an ambivalent reunion with Clive on campus, realizes that a “storm had been working up not for three days as he supposed, but for six years. . . . He loved men and always had loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs” (Forster 1971: 62). Much later, they sit together and attempt to express their feelings more directly. As part of their conversation, Clive contrasts the beauty he sees in Maurice with the beauty that anyone can see in a Michelangelo. There are “two roads” leading to beauty, he explains, one of them open to all and another private. His journey to Maurice’s beauty runs along a private road. At this point, the novel’s third-​person narrator comments: 17 The novel was completed in 1914 and published posthumously in 1971. Activities deemed by the state to be “homosexual acts” would not be legalized in England and Wales until the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967. A “Terminal Note” appended to the novel in 1960 offers background for both the composition of the novel and Forster’s reluctance to publish it. One of the main obstacles to its publication, Forster explains, was not merely that it portrays homosexual love, but that it ends with happiness for Maurice and his lover: “If it had ended unhappily, with a lad dangling from a noose or with a suicide pact, all would be well, for there is no pornography or seduction of minors. But the lovers get away unpunished and consequently recommend crime” (Forster 1971: 250).

134  MORAL ARTICULATION And their love scene drew out, having the inestimable gain of a new language. No tradition overawed the boys. No convention settled what was poetic, what absurd. They were concerned with a passion that few English minds have admitted, and so created untrammeled. Something of exquisite beauty arose in the mind of each at last, something unforgettable and eternal, but built of the humblest scraps of speech and from the simplest emotions. (93, emphasis added)

Maurice and Clive’s shared struggle to piece together, from “the humblest scraps of speech,” an adequate expression of their experience—​a struggle that includes their searching for texts (Plato’s Symposium), metaphors (the “two roads” of beauty), and other styles of expression—​does more than merely describe the pair and their love. For through this struggle they help create (and recreate) themselves and their love anew. To be sure, they struggle to articulate feelings that preceded their explicit articulation, and their articulations strive to be faithful to real features of their experience that are not simply “made up.” At the same time, however, their shared efforts of articulation are aimed, not merely at shedding epistemic light upon the ‘object’ of their articulations (themselves and their love), but at cultivating and nurturing this ‘object’ in the direction of flourishing. In short, both they and their love grow and attain new value as Maurice and Clive find new ways to express themselves and their love in words. Discursive construction is at work in Case A insofar as the agents’ acts of citing certain social facts (higher rates of incarceration, arrest, and forced medical interventions) as evidence for the “irresponsibility” and “uncaringness” of the pregnant people in question contributes to the causal feedback loop Haslanger describes, namely, a co-​constitutive relation between an ideological conceptual scheme and a set of resources and practices surrounding

Is Morality Loopy?  135 the policing of pregnant people. It is at work in Case B insofar as various aspects of Beth’s life—​her behaviors, attitudes, identity, relationships, and the organization of her time—​have become what they are, to a substantial extent, because she is categorized as a Sugar Maple. Finally, it is at work in Case C insofar as Maurice and Clive’s love is not merely described but developed and matured through its articulation in language.18 Hence, it is reasonable to see all three as instances of discursive construction. There are, however, important differences between them, and noting those differences will help us define the rational form of discursive construction we are looking for. To home in on the relevant differences, consider two different sorts of end toward which any discursive act might or might not be oriented. A discursive act may be both, one, or neither of the following: (i) epistemically oriented, meaning that the discursive act aims at illuminating genuine features of the object of discursive construction and can be criticized on that basis (i.e., the discursive act has objective purport); or (ii) developmentally oriented, meaning that the discursive act aims at maturing or developing the object of discursive construction in a direction of flourishing or goodness (i.e., the discursive act is oriented toward eudaimonistic growth). 18 For an account of the ways this can occur within a conversation between friends, see Daniela Dover’s illuminating essay, “The Conversational Self ” (2022). There, she discusses a “kind of conversation in which our willingness to take one another seriously opens us up to fundamental changes in our values and self-​conceptions. In such conversations, the practice of interpersonal inquiry does not merely disclose its objects but also shapes them, and it does so not accidentally but by design, as a result of the interlocutors’ willingness to be so shaped” (212). We may thus interpret Maurice and Clive’s efforts to interpret their affections as an example of the sort of conversation Dover describes. We may, moreover, think of the sort of conversation Dover describes as an activity of joint articulation.

136  MORAL ARTICULATION To say that a discursive act is oriented in either or both senses does not require that the agents in question always have these ends in mind. Rather, it requires the less demanding notion that, if the agents in question were pressed to provide a narrative of their discursive activity, part of what would go into an accurate account would include, even if only retrospectively, an acknowledgment of both epistemic ends (In Case C, for example: “We wanted to understand the nature of our bond”) and developmental ones (“We wanted to enrich that very bond”).19 Adopting this rough schema of a dual orientation toward epistemic and developmental ends, we could picture a two-​by-​two grid sorting discursive acts into four types: those that are normatively oriented in both ways, (i) but not (ii), vice versa, and neither. The rational sort of discursive construction I want to identify is normatively oriented in both senses and, moreover, in a way that relates (i) and (ii): it matures and develops the very object it strives to illuminate. Let us look again at our three cases with these characteristics in mind. Case A involves (i) epistemic orientation but lacks (ii) developmental orientation. It involves (i) because, in citing high rates of incarceration, arrest, and forced medical interventions as evidence for the irresponsibility and uncaringness of certain demographics of pregnant people, the agents in question take themselves to be describing real qualities of actual people. We may wish to protest these characterizations as false, yet the fact that we take them to be suitable targets of epistemic criticism presupposes that such discursive acts are, in fact, epistemically oriented. However, they lack developmental orientation. For in sketching Case A, I stipulated that we focus on those instances in which the discursive agents contributing to the ideological loop neither intend nor even notice

19 I say more about articulators’ retrospective assessments of their own past struggles of articulation in Chapter 6 (§6.2, thesis [iv]), below.

Is Morality Loopy?  137 any discursively constructed effects of their claims.20 Rather, they take themselves simply to be describing the world as it objectively is. As such, the discursive acts in question do not aim at the maturation of their objects (or at any sort of change, for that matter). Whatever alterations the act of discursive construction has upon its objects—​including, we may imagine, positive changes, such as accidentally sparking passionate political resistance or ethically productive forms of anger in those subjected to the stereotype—​take place via merely causal, accidental, or violently coercive means, not via agents’ good faith efforts to nurture, develop, or in some way actualize the discursively constructed object. Case B is the reverse, lacking (i) while involving (ii). Since the four groups at school are chosen randomly, Beth’s being categorized as a Sugar Maple is not an attempt to capture or track some objective feature she bears. There simply is no trait that makes it epistemically apt for her to be sorted as a Sugar Maple rather than, say, a Magnolia. The act thus lacks epistemic orientation. Yet we can easily imagine that the effort to sort Beth into one of the four groups is developmentally oriented. On this interpretation of Case B, it is not an accident that Beth’s categorization as a Sugar Maple fosters relationships, attitudes, and behaviors that are positive parts of her childhood development. Rather, these are intended consequences of her teachers’ concern for the eudaimonistic growth of those they categorize into the four groups. Case C involves both (i) and (ii) in a way that contrasts it with the previous cases and provides an example of the sort of rational discursive construction we are looking for. Let us, therefore, examine Case C more closely than we did the previous two cases. On the one hand, as Maurice and Clive struggle to articulate the meaning of their love, their efforts of interpretation are subject to epistemic constraints of objectivity. Some interpretations they attempt may be 20 Though see Case E, below (§4.4), for a more difficult case in which the agents involved do have such intentions.

138  MORAL ARTICULATION criticized as deluded or inaccurate, whereas others may be praised as discerning and illuminating. Maurice subjects his own self-​ interpretations to such forms of epistemic criticism throughout the novel. Take, for instance, his initial reaction to Clive Durham’s admission of his feelings: Maurice was scandalized, horrified. He was shocked to the bottom of his suburban soul, and exclaimed, “Oh rot!” The words, the manner, were out of him before he could recall them. “Durham, you’re an Englishman. I’m another. Don’t talk nonsense. I’m not offended, because I know you don’t mean it, but it’s the only subject absolutely beyond the limit as you know, it’s the worst crime in the calendar, and you must never mention it again. Durham! a rotten notion really—​.” (59)

Maurice later assesses this reaction as deeply deluded and self-​ deceptive, borne out of a complex mixture of fear, self-​preservation, culturally ingrained habit, and muddle. The criteria for this sort of self-​criticism are, to be sure, not easily formulated, yet they are immanent to Maurice’s experience and memory:21 for example, the sudden and surprising sorrow he had felt as a boy when he learned that a servant, George, with whom Maurice was unconsciously infatuated, had left their household;22 his discomfort as a boy upon hearing a family doctor proclaim, “Man that is born of woman must go with woman if the human race is to continue” (28); his rush to read the Symposium at Clive’s suggestion; and the regret building into agony in the days following his repudiation of Clive’s love.23 21 They are, in other words, criteria of the sort we should expect from the conceptualist epistemology developed in Chapter 2. 22 Maurice is not yet aware that he is in love with George, and he lies awake one night trying to piece together his strange upsurge of emotion upon hearing of George’s departure: “Something had stirred in the unfathomable depths of his heart. He whispered, ‘George, George.’ Who was George? Nobody—​just a common servant. Mother and Ada and Kitty were far more important. But he was too little to argue this” (19–​20). 23 Forster describes Maurice’s realization in the following terms: “Thus it was that his agony began as a slight regret; sleepless nights and lonely days must intensify it into a

Is Morality Loopy?  139 Insofar as Maurice and Clive’s articulations are appropriately subject to such forms of criticism, we may say that their articulations strive to illuminate their object, and thus possess an epistemic orientation.24 On the other hand, the object of interpretation, namely, their love, is not left unchanged by Maurice and Clive’s hermeneutical efforts but deepened and matured. If this is right, and if this happens not accidentally but by design, it bears a developmental orientation. Forster brings this out in several ways: through their conversations and letter writing they “created new images in each other’s hearts” (83). As Clive says to Maurice, “we woke up one another. I like to think that any way” (91). Through the humblest scraps of speech they “created untrammeled” (93). While there are surely many things Forster has in mind in describing their mutual waking and creation, at least part of what they create, through the development of a shared language, are new conditions in which their love might survive and flourish despite the hostile conditions surrounding it. In short, the object of articulation is subject to not just any change but change for which metaphors of maturation and growth are appropriate. Their joint efforts of articulation are, moreover, a significant aspect of the history of the very relationship frenzy that consumed him. It worked inwards, till it touched the root whence body and soul both spring, the ‘I’ that he had been trained to obscure, and, realized at last, doubled its power and grew superhuman. For it might have been joy. New worlds broke loose in him at this, and he saw from the vastness of the ruin what ecstasy he had lost, what a communion” (60). In line with the argument of Chapter 3, we may say that Maurice’s “agony” and “regret” are doing the cognitive and ruminative work of emotional articulation, piecing together a value-​laden picture of the world that initially strikes him as inchoate, fragmented, and confused. 24 Though as Francey Russell (2018) emphasizes, to say that one’s articulations concerning a social relation involve an epistemic orientation should not lead us to the reductive notion that the relation in question is simply “an object to be known—​to be figured out and laid bare” (3). Treating others and one’s relations to them as mere epistemic objects is not just a form of error, but a mode of deflecting from the genuine ethical difficulties and ambiguities at stake in such relations (cf. Fricker’s discussion of “epistemic objectification” as a form of wrongdoing that can occur in the context of testimonial exchange [2007: 129–​42]). Hence, while Case C involves “objective purport” in the sense described above, we should carefully distinguish this from the thesis that Maurice and Clive’s love is an object that can be known once and for all.

140  MORAL ARTICULATION they are attempting to articulate. Their relationship would have been something different—​remaining unrealized or undeveloped in certain respects—​if this activity of joint articulation had not taken place. Moreover, (i) and (ii) occur not independently but through one another. The object that has matured is the same object brought more clearly into epistemic focus. Maurice and Clive’s articulations simultaneously illuminate and develop their love. This is characteristic of the form of rational discursive construction I want to explore: it involves the maturation of not just any features of the phenomenon, but precisely those features targeted when discursive construction has an epistemic orientation. It brings something to light, while helping to develop what it brings to light. How do we judge whether Maurice and Clive’s efforts qualify as successful instances of rational discursive construction? How, in other words, might we credit them with having satisfactorily articulated rather than misarticulated what they seek? At one point in the novel, Maurice’s doctor diagnoses Maurice’s love as an illness and attempts to cure him through hypnosis (180). The doctor is well-​meaning in his diagnosis, and the novel gives us no reason to doubt that he has utterly sincere epistemic and developmental ends in mind when he frames Maurice’s homosexuality as a congenital disorder. On what grounds can we judge that Maurice’s efforts are faithful articulations whereas his doctor’s are, however sincerely pursued, ideological misarticulations? Features (i) and (ii), as this example makes plain, should not be understood as criteria of success, for the fact that an articulator aims to illuminate and positively develop some phenomenon does not guarantee they do so. Features (i) and (ii), rather, provide something more modest, namely, the parameters within which criteria for success and failure may immanently arise as part of the process itself. I already mentioned examples of criteria that arise in the novel concerning Maurice’s epistemic revelations: for example, that he must, retrospectively, make sense of his adolescent feelings toward the servant,

Is Morality Loopy?  141 George, as well as explain his rush to read the Symposium, and his regret turning to agony after repudiating Clive. It is on the basis of such criteria that Maurice acknowledges his love. None of these, to be sure, are the sort of criteria that will impress a skeptic. Indeed, they are not even enough ultimately to convince Clive, who eventually repudiates Maurice’s love, declares himself a heterosexual, and marries in an effort to join “normal” society. Yet they are, in the difficult, messy, ambiguous context of interpersonal life, the sort of criteria upon which one’s interpretations must hang. That room for skepticism about whether one really is in love remains is not a failure of the criteria in question, but a basic human condition.25 What might count as criteria concerning the developmental success of their efforts? These must not only arise immanently to the case at hand, but will also, to a significant extent, only be available retrospectively.26 For in a case like theirs, where they cannot rely on a fixed yardstick for measuring the maturation of their love, the successes and failures of their experiments in loving will be measured, in significant part, by the new forms of happiness and suffering they make possible. As I earlier quoted Taylor in speaking about articulation, “it is not exactly that I have no yardstick, in the sense that anything goes, but rather that what takes the place of the yardstick is my deepest unstructured sense of what is important, which is as yet inchoate and which I am trying to bring to definition (Taylor 1985: 41–​2). Rahel Jaeggi, in a similar spirit, describes a sort of immanent criticism in which “a given object is not measured against a rigid, unchanging yardstick; rather, the yardstick of criticism itself has a dynamic character in the sense that it transforms itself in the exercise of criticism” (2018: 193). Forster himself, reflecting upon his novel many decades later, attributes to Maurice a 25 My use of the concepts of criteria, skepticism, and acknowledgment in this paragraph are indebted to Stanley Cavell’s discussion of Wittgensteinian criteria in The Claim of Reason (1979) and his essay, “Knowing and Acknowledging” (1969). 26 See my discussion of the retrospective character of some aspects of judgments of moral progress in Chapter 6, §6.2, thesis (iv), below.

142  MORAL ARTICULATION happy ending, a judgment that can only be justified by having the full arc of the novel’s narrative in view (1971: 250). The criteria for judging this to be a genuine story of the maturation of Maurice’s love and happiness must, therefore, lie within that narrative, rather than in something that transcends it. In short, then, features (i) and (ii), while not themselves criteria for successful articulation, begin, in however vague outline, to define the normative space within which judgments of success and failure become possible. It is within this space, then, that one would have to find resources for criticizing Maurice’s doctor’s diagnosis as both failing to illuminate and actively distorting Maurice’s love and happiness. We are now in a position to draw some preliminary conclusions. Case C is meant to show that at least some instances of discursive construction have an internally purposive orientation toward the dual ends of illumination and maturation. This does not, to be sure, suffice to demonstrate that “moral facts” are discursively constructed. Yet it does, I think, provide us with a rough image of a viable third option beyond the two extremes in Hacking’s dilemma. For the dilemma only arises if we cannot see a way to account for the discursively constructed nature of moral facts without conceding their susceptibility to being shaped arbitrarily in any direction whatsoever. Any “moral facts” that arise, on such a picture, risk being constituted by whatever forces happen to be in power, thus forfeiting their critical potential. Thus, we faced the apparent dichotomy: accept the uncritical historicism that results or else embrace the idea that at least some moral facts exist untouched by both history and our means of expressing them in language. Yet this choice is not forced upon us a priori if there exist forms of discursive construction that shape their objects, not in the accidental, causal, and arbitrary manner of Case A, but in the simultaneously epistemically and developmentally oriented manner of Case C. For it was the putatively accidental, causal, and arbitrary nature of discursive construction’s effects that set the dilemma in

Is Morality Loopy?  143 motion. As the case of Maurice’s doctor illustrates, that agents have such aims does not suffice to make their efforts of illumination and maturation successful. Yet all we need to challenge the dichotomy is the very notion that some such successful cases exist. Forster’s readers must judge for themselves whether the successful articulator is Maurice or his doctor. I favor Maurice. Yet as long as one concedes that such cases admit of success and failure in the ways I have described, the phenomenon of rational discursive construction has been granted. My aim so far, then, has been to substantiate a negative point: the seeming opposition between ahistorical realism and uncritical historicism in this debate is not an a priori given but, rather, borne out of truncated picture of the sorts of discursive construction there are. This negative point, in turn, entails a new possibility to be explored. Might we be philosophically permitted to say that moral facts are discursively constructed, not in the ideology-​sustaining manner exemplified by Case A, but in a manner analogous to Maurice and Clive’s articulation of their love? Might it be the case that, when human beings struggle to articulate the “moral facts,” and do so with some success, they not only illuminate but help develop their object of inquiry in new and creative directions? I think the answer to both questions is “Yes,” but this requires a closer examination of the analogy just proposed, namely, between Maurice and Clive’s intimate struggle for articulation and larger-​scale struggles of moral articulation.

4.4.  From Intimate Articulation to Moral Articulation Recall, once again, Charles Taylor’s distinction between descriptions, which target more or less stable objects whose features are indifferent to our predications of them (as when we say that “The stroller is gray and has four wheels” or “Mercury is the planet closest to the sun”) and articulations, which take oneself, one’s feelings and

144  MORAL ARTICULATION desires, and the importance of those feelings and desires, as their object (Taylor 1985: 36–​42; 2016: chap. 6). As Taylor puts it, Our attempts to formulate what we hold important must, like descriptions, strive to be faithful to something. But what they strive to be faithful to is not an independent object with a fixed degree and manner of evidence, but rather a largely inarticulate sense of what is of decisive importance. An articulation of this ‘object’ tends to make it something different from what it was before. (Taylor 1985: 38)

What I want to consider here is an extension of Taylor’s notion of articulation beyond its transforming what we hold important to the more encompassing idea that moral facts and values themselves are rationally discursively constructed over historical time in culturally concrete ways. That is, I am proposing an analogy between Case C, in which a loving relation evolves and matures through Clive and Maurice’s efforts to articulate it, and the historical articulation of human ethical life, such that “moral facts” are developed through their discursive expression. According to this analogy, the “moral facts” a social critic purports to voice by invoking concepts like ‘personhood’—​as Haslanger does in her critique of the ideology of Case A—​are not simple givens, unchanged from the beginning of moral history, but evolve in part through humanity’s efforts of ethical self-​interpretation. To make this more concrete, our analogy shall be between Case C and the following: Case D: An unjust ideology exists in the United States within which poor and racially marginalized pregnant people tend to be stereotyped as uncaring and irresponsible. The way they are labeled shapes their lives by reinforcing practices surrounding the ways they are policed, monitored, and denied decision-​making autonomy in medical settings. Yet many

Is Morality Loopy?  145 living within this culture refuse to let this systemic pattern of suffering and injustice persist without protest. They seek collectively to understand, resist, and eventually overcome such conditions. An important aspect of this effort of resistance involves the struggle to conceptualize, name, and express publicly the existence of a pattern of mistreatment of pregnant people. Doing so successfully will include, among other things, articulating how this pattern connects with matters of fundamental ethical significance. For in articulating what has gone wrong, the agents in question must tarry with the meanings of the concepts and words they bring in to express it, say, humiliation, degradation, dignity, autonomy, and personhood. In doing so, they articulate, not only a historically local pattern of mistreatment, but a broader ethical picture of the sorts of creatures we are. There are, no doubt, many important differences between Cases C and D. Case C occurs on the intimate scale of two lovers, while Case D on the large scale of a social movement. Case C takes place within a few years, while Case D is a part of a multigenerational struggle against racist, gender-​based, and class-​based oppression. The agents in Case C know each other intimately, while Case D includes many who, though joined in solidarity, will never even meet, let alone know each other well. Case C involves articulators struggling to express themselves solely to themselves, while Case D involves efforts to reach a potentially open-​ended, public audience, well beyond the community of those who have experienced this pattern of mistreatment first-​hand. Given such differences, our aim in proposing the analogy cannot be a simple reduction of one to the other. Rather, our claim can be refined by focusing upon the features outlined in the previous section. Let us consider each feature in turn. Case D is (i) epistemically oriented in more than one way. The agents in question seek to identify, and make legible for others, the

146  MORAL ARTICULATION reality of a pattern of mistreatment that has been obscured by ideological conditions. Their efforts thus make claims to truth, objectivity, and the way the world really is. The 2013 report by Paltrow and Flavin, for example, is devoted to gathering information from public records, police and court documents, news periodicals, inquiries to public defenders, judges, legal advocates, and healthcare providers.27 The report presents these findings by way of demographic analysis, the identification of significant patterns among cases (e.g., concerning allegations of drug use, qualification for indigent defense, etc.), and highlighting certain exemplary cases in narrative form. Yet their epistemically oriented efforts go further, not only providing statistical, demographic, legal and other details, but articulating those conditions as unacceptable, disgraceful, as the sort of conditions fellow human beings should mobilize to improve. The agents in question hope to articulate an ethically laden picture of these conditions not just to themselves, or a closed community of the likeminded, but to a broader and open-​ended public. They aim, therefore, to show that atrocious forms of violation, humiliation, degradation, and unfreedom really exist, and that they can and should be recognized as such by any fellow reflective participant in shared ethical life. They thus aspire to a certain universalism. Sometimes, making good on this aspiration may involve invocations of quite general moral categories (such as “personhood” in Haslanger’s critique or “deprivations of liberty” in Paltrow and Flavin). In other cases, it may involve piecing together compelling stories of pregnant people who, for instance, were shackled around the waste while in active labor (Paltrow and Flavin 2013: 334) or interrogated by police while still under the effects of sedatives from cesarean surgery (329). Both approaches can play serious roles in realizing the moral epistemic ends of this struggle. For both the concepts invoked and the stories told have the potential to speak to

27 See the “Methodology” section in Paltrow and Flavin 2013: 301–​3.

Is Morality Loopy?  147 an open-​ended public, including those who have not experienced the forms of violence and humiliation they elaborate.28 Through these efforts, then, the agents involved in such a social movement articulate, not only particular empirical details about the case in question, but relate those details to a broader picture of what matters in a human life. It relates them, quite generally, to a picture of what humans need to survive, flourish, and be actualized, such that we can see the conditions under criticism as falling radically short. So, to say that the discursive activity in Case D is epistemically oriented includes an explicitly ethical dimension: the agents seek to illuminate a deeper sense of the sorts of creatures we are such that this pattern of mistreatment can be recognized as violating, humiliating, and wrong.29 That the discursive activity in Case D is (ii) developmentally oriented may initially appear easy to demonstrate. For by their own account, the agents involved aim not only at illuminating the conditions of the pregnant people in question, but at positively developing, in the direction of goodness and flourishing, those very conditions. Paltrow and Flavin, for example, end their report by expressing hope in a social movement that will “advance the health, rights, and dignity of pregnant women and their children” (2013: 335). These are, no doubt, efforts aimed at what one might justifiably call “eudaimonistic growth.” However, our present argument requires a more precise claim. For our thesis is not just that discursive acts in Case D help bring present conditions closer in line with a set of preexisting “moral facts,” but that they help bring into being, to a significant degree, the “moral facts” themselves. 28 For a sociological account of historical efforts to forge “new moral universals” through these and other means, see Alexander 2004. 29 Karen Ng (2021) puts this point in terms of a dialectic of particular and universal perspectives on suffering and injustice: “As particular, injustice appears as both socially and historically indexed, referring to specific social roles, relationships of domination, and hierarchies between individuals and groups. As universal, injustice appears as . . . unworthy of human beings because it impedes our ability to lead a truly, or perhaps better, a flourishing human life” (Ng 2021: 148).

148  MORAL ARTICULATION What might this mean? In sketching point (i) just now, I said that the agents in Case D seek to illuminate, among other things, the sorts of creatures we are. This offers a clue as to what, exactly, is simultaneously illuminated and matured in Case D. The “moral facts” these agents seek to discover, on such a roughly Aristotelian approach, are neither transcendent platonic entities nor abstract features of pure reason but naturalistic considerations grounded in what human beings need to survive, flourish, and be actualized. Such facts include, moreover, considerations about the possible shapes that our survival, flourishing, and actualization can take. Point (ii) would apply at this level to Case D, then, if we could hold that social movements such as this not only seek to bring present conditions in line with preexisting ideals of survival, flourishing, and actualization, but help create unencumbered conditions wherein new possibilities for survival, flourishing, and actualization can become manifest. Here we could go beyond mere analogy and say that the case of Maurice and Clive, amplified to the level of a global social movement protesting heteronormative restrictions on sexuality and love, aims to accomplish precisely this. It aims, among other things, to create spaces for the freedom to explore a new range of forms that sexuality and love might take within a flourishing human existence, rather than bringing existing sexual and loving practices in line with a metaphysically predetermined set of moral facts. Case D, I think, runs parallel in this respect. We need not suppose that this social movement’s efforts aim at a static set of moral facts concerning what shall constitute reproductive justice. Rather, we may interpret those efforts as struggling to create spaces for the freedom to explore a new range of forms that flourishing and justice might take when it comes to such phenomena as pregnancy, birth, and children. This means, however, that what is required to establish this point of the analogy, beyond a merely illustrative gesture, is a defense of the historicized variation of the Aristotelian view just mentioned. This shall be the task of Chapter 5, where I extend the notion of

Is Morality Loopy?  149 rational discursive construction defended here, applying it to the case of a shared ethical “life-​form.” For now, we can put the point schematically by saying that the “loopiness” here amounts to this: moral facts are grounded in naturalistic considerations concerning the conditions of our flourishing, given the sorts of creatures we are; yet the successful articulation of the latter can, sometimes, not only illuminate but help create anew the possible forms our flourishing might take, thus developing the sorts of creatures we are. How do we judge whether the efforts of the social movement in Case D qualify, either in whole or in part, as successful instances of rational discursive construction? How can we credit this as a case of progressive moral articulation as opposed to ideological misarticulation? Indeed, just as we should consider the case of Maurice’s doctor, who, we assumed, pursues epistemic and developmental ends as sincerely as Maurice himself, we should consider cases like the following: Case E: A social movement exists that seeks to articulate what its members view as a dangerous pattern of irresponsibility and uncaringness in pregnant people, especially from poor and racially marginalized backgrounds. They view certain coercive measures, including arrests, detentions, and forced medical interventions as regrettable yet ultimately morally necessary for the sake of correcting this pattern. They see themselves, moreover, as struggling against a pervasive cultural ideology that tries to suppress their ethical apprehension of something vulnerable, beautiful, and in need of protection, namely, a human life in embryo. Let us assume that the agents in question undertake their efforts of articulation in good faith, struggling to develop new and creative expressive means to voice to an experience of profound ethical significance. What they struggle to articulate, let us suppose,

150  MORAL ARTICULATION runs counter to the convictions of the agents in Case D in nearly every significant detail. Both of the features I have outlined apply to Case E. I have assumed social actors who are not, say, the covert agents of an ulterior and knowingly sinister agenda, but are genuinely oriented toward the dual ends of illumination and maturation in good faith, and so their efforts qualify as simultaneously (i) epistemically oriented and (ii) developmentally oriented. We therefore face a situation in which two cases fit the general form of “rational discursive construction” yet arrive at systematically opposed “moral facts.” This can look as though it forces us back into the dilemma we have been trying to escape. We must either (a) provide at least some ahistorical and non-​discursively constructed ethical criteria for adjudicating between conflicts like this; or (b) admit that our picture of rational discursive construction allows the moral facts to be constructed in any direction whatsoever, including multiple contradictory directions at once. My full reply to this concern will come later, for it relies upon the Aristotelian normative background defended in Chapter 5, along with the immanent epistemology of judgments of moral progress and regress outlined in Chapter 6. For the moment, however, we may offer a preliminary reply analogous to that given above when we asked what criteria could allow us to judge that Maurice’s articulations are to be preferred to his doctor’s. I begin by noting, as I did earlier, that (i) and (ii) are not themselves normative criteria for adjudicating conflicts but, rather, define the formal outlines within which such criteria may immanently emerge as part of the process of articulation itself. Assuming, as we have, that the agents in Case E strive in good faith toward the epistemic end of illumination, then by their own standards they cannot simply reject out of hand, or willfully ignore, the sort of critical work exemplified by Paltrow and Flavin’s 2013 report. The fact that their own efforts are epistemically oriented commits them to an openness to consider the

Is Morality Loopy?  151 sort of counterevidence the 2013 report exemplifies, as well as take seriously conscientious lines of rational criticism from their opposition (the same going, of course, for the agents in Case D). Similarly, assuming the agents in Case E strive in good faith toward the developmental end of maturation, then by their own standards they cannot simply reject out of hand, or willfully ignore, the possibility that their efforts create conditions that hinder, rather than develop, possible directions for human flourishing. The fact that their own efforts are developmentally oriented commits them to an openness to consider alternatives that may better realize this very aim. In this way, features (i) and (ii) help define, however vaguely, the bounds within which certain considerations may appear as criteria at all. In practice, we should not expect such criteria to be easy to identify, to go uncontested by all sides, or to lead decisively to rational resolution. As in the case of Maurice’s criteria for acknowledging his love, these are not the sort of criteria that will impress the skeptic, and there is no necessity to their swaying even our imagined conscientious fellow articulator who takes the opposed view. Yet this is only to acknowledge how difficult rational criticism can be, not to rule it out as worthless or impossible. Within these parameters it becomes possible to identify a method of immanent ethical criticism that draws upon historically concrete criteria that arise within struggles for moral articulation themselves. The picture of rational discursive construction offered in this chapter is, however, only the first, formal step toward defending such a method. Chapter 5 shall suggest that a historicized Aristotelian ethical naturalism provides the right normative framework for grounding such immanent criticism, and Chapter 6 shall examine the prospects for a wholly immanent epistemology of moral progress. For the present, we may recall that the aim of this chapter is more modest. We wanted to explore the very possibility of a form of discursive construction that operates outside Hacking’s dilemma. Case C was meant to show that there is more to discursive construction than its merely causal, arbitrary, and non-​rational

152  MORAL ARTICULATION form (albeit in an intimate case whose structural features are easier to see than in its large-​scale, historically protracted counterparts). Its extension by analogy to Case D was meant to show, in turn, what it would look like to apply our alternative rational form of discursive construction to a case of moral articulation at a larger scale. As the conflict between Cases D and E illustrates, the fact that features (i) and (ii) are present in some struggle for articulation does not entail that they successfully realize their ends of illumination and maturation. Yet as long as we concede the very idea of success and failure in the ways I have outlined, we have thereby granted the phenomenon of rational discursive construction. The dilemma we faced only gets going if we rule out, in advance, the very idea that the discursive construction of moral facts could take this latter form. Thus, already with the materials assembled in the present chapter, we have strong reason to conclude that Hacking’s dilemma rests upon a false dichotomy.

4.5.  Some Formal Features of Moral Articulation Before concluding, I wish to extend the analogy between Cases C and D by noting several additional features at play in both. Noticing these features will be important for the chapters that follow and will give further definition to the formal structure of moral articulation. In this section I argue that Cases C and D are not only (i) epistemically oriented and (ii) developmentally oriented, but also: (iii) counter-​ideological, (iv) emotionally and evaluatively non-​neutral, (v) dynamically teleological, and (vi) multiply realizable. I shall elaborate these additional features primarily through Case C, indicating their application to Case D by way of conclusion.30 30 I also consider the application of these features to a further historical case of moral articulation discussed in Chapter 5 (§5.3), namely, the historical development of new concepts and words to articulate gender-​based oppression.

Is Morality Loopy?  153 The joint activity Maurice and Clive undertake is: (iii) counter-​ideological, meaning that successful realizations of the epistemic and developmental ends described in (i) and (ii) involve a capacity to oppose, subvert, or otherwise resist reigning ideologies that work against it. Maurice and Clive face ideological suppression in nearly every sphere of society they traverse. Church, nationality, law, medicine, class, family, and common sense all conspire against them. What makes their struggles of articulation difficult is not simply the lack of obvious expressive resources for their experience, but the intrusion of ideological expressive resources from these spheres. Ideological expressive resources intrude by purporting to name Maurice and Clive’s experiences, explaining them without remainder, and smoothing over their nascent true meanings.31 We already saw, quoted above, that Maurice’s initial repudiation of Clive invokes a putative connection between English national identity and a heteronormative ideal of masculinity (“Durham, you’re an Englishman. I’m another. Don’t talk nonsense.”). Later, speaking with a doctor, Maurice asks, “What’s the name of my trouble? Has it one?” To which the doctor replies, “Congenital homosexuality” (180), thereby summing up a life’s worth of experiences, passions, strivings, and social relations into a simple medical diagnosis. In Clive’s case, the conceptual framework that too easily suggests itself is not medical but theological. Clive had suffered little from bewilderment as a boy. His sincere mind, with its keen sense of right and wrong, had brought him the belief that he was damned instead. Deeply religious, with a living

31 Here we may recall the predicament of Antonio in the Bicycle Thieves (§1.4), for whom the conceptual scheme of “theft” too quickly swallows up his experience of injustice.

154  MORAL ARTICULATION desire to reach God and to please Him, he found himself crossed at an early age by this other desire, obviously from Sodom. He had no doubt as to what he was: . . . He had in him the impulse that destroyed the City of the Plain. It should not ever become carnal, but why had he out of all Christians been punished with it? (69)

Clive’s form of religiosity focuses his attention on certain questions (“Why am I, of all Christians, being punished?”) while making others less likely to arise (e.g., “Are these impulses really something one should hold punishable?”). It focuses his attention on ready-​ to-​hand answers (his desires were “obviously from Sodom”) while discouraging a search for alternatives. In these and other ways, ideological expressive resources gang up on Maurice and Clive’s self-​interpretations, purporting to settle what confounds them by suggesting simple labels: un-​English nonsense, congenital illness, sin. The counterculture of two that Clive and Maurice form, and the expressive resources they develop therein, must not only voice their experiences in a positive sense but work against ideologies that threaten to suppress the latent meaning of their experiences.32 This is a complex and often ambivalent point in practice, for a struggle’s qualifying as “counter-​ideological” is no guarantee that it is free of its own forms of ideology. Far from it in Case C, as Forster emphasizes that the growing closeness between Clive and Maurice amplifies their shared misogyny (100). To characterize a discursive struggle as “counter-​ideological,” then, is only to say that whatever forms of illumination and maturation arise amidst such ambivalences must do so in opposition to a prevailing ideology. The next two characteristics are related, as both concern the standpoint of the agents involved in rational discursive construction. The activity of discursive construction in Case C is both: 32 Cf. our discussion of the epistemic-​critical potential of experiences of dissonance, and the need for countercultural communities within which to foster them (§2.3).

Is Morality Loopy?  155 (iv) emotionally and evaluatively non-​neutral, meaning that significant aspects of what the agents in question seek to illuminate, given the end described in (i), will be inaccessible absent certain emotionally and evaluatively charged relations of concern for the object in question; and (v) dynamically teleological, meaning that the values and standards that set limits upon what shall count as a rational development of moral maturation, given the end described in (ii), emerge within, and evolve alongside, the process of articulation itself. The telos of maturation is not fixed in advance but develops, in significant part, through the struggle to reach it. These points reflect in different ways the embeddedness of agents within, and their being shaped by, the very conditions they seek to articulate. Beginning with (iv), if Maurice and Clive were to suspend or bracket the emotions and evaluations that color their experience, they would lose the very phenomenon they seek. Getting clearer about reality involves, in their case at least, working from within their normative outlooks (§§2.1–​2), shaped as they are by emotion and evaluation, rather than seeking a dispassionate and value-​neutral standpoint that transcends them. This will strike us as odd only if we assume that an ideally objective point of view always requires maximal abstraction from the emotions, evaluations, and other contributions that characterize a subjective point of view.33 Yet in the context of Maurice and Clive’s epistemic strivings, this ideal of objectivity, which situates subjectivity and objectivity 33 Cf. Crary’s (2007, 2016) critique of a narrower conception of objectivity that holds this sort of “abstraction requirement,” in favor of a wider conception that allows us to credit as objective thinking that takes place from within a normative outlook. For a similar critique, see McDowell 1998: Essay 7.

156  MORAL ARTICULATION as conceptual opposites, has no place. Their emotions focus their attention and sustain their ruminations in ways that bring new discoveries and self-​discoveries to light. Recalling the articulation model of emotion defended in Chapter 3, the point is not just that their struggles of articulation take place alongside emotions, but that emotions themselves play a powerful cognitive role in those struggles. In Maurice and Clive’s case, we may add, emotions and evaluations constitute their very object of inquiry. For the phenomenon they are trying to understand is their love, and this just is a relation constituted by their emotions and evaluations. Thus, far from bringing the world into clearer objective view, maximal abstraction would deprive them not only of a powerful cognitive resource, but of the very object they seek.34 Point (v) is at work insofar as Maurice and Clive’s struggles set in motion a maturation of their love, not by the measure of a preset standard, but by creatively inquiring into what their love might become. Although their activity is developmentally oriented toward a telos of eudaimonistic maturation, neither Clive nor Maurice can say, in advance of the struggle itself, just what that telos looks like, what it might demand of them, and what forms of happiness it might unveil. At least part of the reason they cannot know in advance, with perfect clarity, the telos toward which they strive is that the telos itself is sensitive to, and shaped in substantial respects by, their efforts to pursue it. This claim needs to be handled carefully, for although Forster describes Maurice and Clive as having “created untrammeled,” this should not be reduced the crude claim that they simply make up, as a matter of sheer caprice, what the conditions of their love and happiness shall be. On the contrary, and as the novel makes plain, their efforts of articulation must be rationally sensitive to, and are constrained by, very real factors, most notably the reality of their feelings and desires and the need to navigate those feelings 34 For more on this point, see the discussion of “metabiological meanings” in Chapter 5, below (§5.3).

Is Morality Loopy?  157 and desires within a social milieu hostile to them. The idea of a dynamic teleology must therefore involve the more subtle idea that, within such real constraints there nevertheless remains open space for creativity, novelty, and experimentation concerning the object they seek. This appears faithful to the case of Maurice and Clive, for in the novel’s context of early twentieth-​century England, there is no preexisting blueprint that can set out, in advance of their actual struggle itself, what would count as a maturation of their love. Thus, though their aiming at a telos of maturation imposes upon them real limits, the telos is, to a significant degree, an outcome of their efforts to pursue it.35 This is closely related to the final characteristic I wish to highlight, namely, that the activity in question is: (vi) multiply realizable, meaning that there is more than one way to satisfy the ends described in (i) and (ii). Maurice and Clive develop creative means to articulate their love, such as reading Plato’s Symposium and creating a “new language” of metaphor. These moments prove to be crucial episodes in the illumination and maturation of their love. Yet there is no reason to think they are the only possible forms illumination and maturation must have taken in this case. In place of Plato’s Symposium, we could imagine the pair jointly attend to a painting, articulating their love through what they see. In place of the metaphor of two roads, we could imagine Clive composing a sonnet for Maurice. We could imagine a narrative of articulation that unfolds quite differently for the two lovers, yet still succeeds as a story of illumination and eudaimonistic growth. We now have six features in view. Maurice and Clive’s shared struggle of articulation is (i) epistemically oriented, (ii) 35 This is related to what Robert Stern (unpublished) calls a “dynamic good,” a concept he develops in conversation with Hegel and MacIntyre.

158  MORAL ARTICULATION developmentally oriented, (iii) counter-​ideological, (iv) emotionally and evaluatively non-​neutral, (v) dynamically teleological, and (vi) multiply realizable. I already discussed a reading of Case D as sharing features (i) and (ii). Since the remaining features are all, in various ways, elaborations of the first two, I shall treat their application to Case D with relative brevity. Case D is (iii) counter-​ideological. For the ends of both illumination and maturation to be satisfactorily realized, the agents in question must work against prevailing ideological schemes embedded in overlapping forms of racist, gender-​based, and class-​based oppression. Haslanger notes, for example, how ideology functions not only through negative stereotypes concerning poor and racialized pregnant people, but through the perpetuation of an ideological ideal of the “pregnant woman”: “The ideal, in many US contexts, is the white, relatively affluent, heterosexual, married, behaviorally cautious, young, fit, woman” (2015: 36). We can compare this with the ideal against which Clive and Maurice repeatedly compare themselves in the novel: the English, Christian, married, healthy, and well-​ bred man—​ every aspect of which entails, implicitly, heterosexuality. It is also (iv) emotionally and evaluatively non-​neutral. For the articulators in Case D wish to illuminate the pattern of mistreatment of poor and racialized pregnant people not merely as an abstract social phenomenon, but as an injustice and, thus, as something that matters to them and ought to be seen as mattering deeply to others. When they describe scenes such as “humiliating police questioning about intimate details of their lives while lying, and sometimes dying, in their hospital beds” (Paltrow and Flavin 2013: 328), their use of value-​laden concepts and imagery indicates the sort of ethical reality their efforts seek to disclose. To recognize some act as humiliating is already to apprehend it from within a normative outlook shaped by modes of emotional and evaluative concern. For one will quickly reach a limit in their efforts to grasp the very idea of “humiliation,” or the acts appropriately described in

Is Morality Loopy?  159 its terms, without relying on capacities to feel its emotional weight and understand its evaluative significance.36 If the articulators involved in Case D, therefore, attempt to set aside all antecedent emotional and evaluative commitments, approaching this phenomenon instead from a dispassionate and neutral perspective, the realities they seek would quickly escape their grasp.37 Case D is (v) dynamically teleological, progressing not toward a preset telos, but in a direction that may open up new forms of happiness and fulfillment that help constitute the telos of maturation itself. I suggested earlier that we focus upon a particular ‘object’ of articulation in this case, namely, the sorts of creatures we are, understood in an ethically robust sense as including such matters as the social relations, needs, dependencies, and vulnerabilities that, taken together, set conditions upon the possibilities for human flourishing. According to classical versions of this idea, a historically fixed picture of human nature provides the telos for our moral strivings. Yet this historically fixed image is not forced upon us. Consider the historically dynamic variation that Sabina Lovibond gives to the idea that our efforts of moral growth are teleologically oriented. She urges a different understanding of the teleological theme in virtue ethics. Instead of assuming the telos of formation, or upbringing, to be determined by a timelessly fixed human nature, . . . [we may] recognize as part of the distinctive “natural history” of our species that, as humans, we possess a “second nature” as well as a “first,” and hence (at the risk of paradox—​but this particular nettle is one we must go ahead and grasp) that it is natural to us to participate in a history that is more than merely natural. (Lovibond 2002: 63) 36 That this is so reflects the idea that ‘humiliating’ and similar notions are examples of “thick ethical concepts,” which “express a union of fact and value.” (Williams 1985: 129). Cf. Murdoch’s similar notion of “secondary moral words” (1971: 22, 31, 40–​1). 37 We may, moreover, interpret this case as requiring the kinds of emotional articulation defended in Chapter 3.

160  MORAL ARTICULATION She goes on to refer to this as the “the natural capacity of human beings for self-​transcendence” (Lovibond 2002: 63n51). In the next chapter I shall have much to say about the idea of an ethics grounded in a historically dynamic human nature—​a nature that we, to some extent, help shape through our efforts of articulation. For the moment, I take Lovibond’s formulations simply as an indication that such a view is a philosophical possibility to be explored. If it is, then we should not suppose in advance that the efforts of a social movement, like those in Case D, to articulate previously unvoiced moral demands and ideologically suppressed forms of valuing necessarily aim at a fixed telos of maturation. Rather, they might have a hand in shaping the very telos at which they aim, creating new and potentially surprising values that enrich what it is to be human. Finally, and related to this last point, the efforts of the articulators in Case D are (vi) multiply realizable, meaning that there is more than one way for the articulators to realize satisfactorily their strivings toward the dual ends of illumination and maturation. The articulators are faced with the task of expressing a complex pattern of mistreatment that involves intersecting forms of oppression rooted in gender, race, and class. In giving voice to the wrongness of this pattern, as well as the positive values it destroys, articulators may reach for different kinds of expressive resource, from quite general moral categories, as in Haslanger’s invocation of the “full rights of personhood” (2015: 40) and Paltrow and Flavin’s emphasis upon “deprivations of pregnant women’s liberty” (2013: 300; cf. 301, 317, 320, 321, 325, 326, and 335), to first-​personal narratives of particular cases, works of art, and political demonstrations.38 We need not suppose that any single expressive resource, nor any combination of resources, represents the only form that illumination and maturation might take here.

38 On the power of first-​person narratives in unifying, making more perspicuous, and recovering from forms of violence and harm suffered under gender-​based oppression, see Brison 2002 and Alcoff 2018.

Is Morality Loopy?  161 Though radically different in various respects, Cases C and D nevertheless share a common form marked by features (i) through (vi). Case C occurs on an intimate scale while Case D occurs at the larger scale of the social movement, yet in both we find human beings striving to develop expressive resources to grasp and give voice to experiences of profound ethical significance. It would be wrong to think that their contrasting scales of magnitude mean that they are wholly separate types of struggle. On the contrary, every large-​scale social movement needs its Maurices and Clives: passionate individuals striving to give voice to experiences of profound personal significance, no matter how particular and intimate the details may be. The Maurices and Clives, in turn, need the sorts of larger-​scale conceptual transformations that occur at the level of social movements if their intimate articulations are not to be merely ephemeral epiphanies, eventually swallowed up within a dominant ideology. Between the two scales we find middle stages in the process of moral articulation: moral subcultures arise that begin to traverse the distance from intimate articulation to large scale articulations of the sorts of creatures we are.39 Cases C and D are, then, not just analogous, but examples of activities that occur on a continuum with one another, transforming initially inchoate experiences of elusive meaning into new forms of ethical understanding. They are, in other words, both part of the work of moral articulation.

4.6.  Conclusion So, are moral facts loopy? If by “loopy” we have in mind their being shaped by the sorts of non-​rational, arbitrary, and causal forms of discursive construction we considered earlier, the answer is “No.” The defender of ahistorical moral facts is right to worry that, if

39 For more on this point, see Chapter 6, §6.2, thesis (iii), below.

162  MORAL ARTICULATION moral facts were loopy in this sense, they would be no more or less rationally authoritative than the social facts they are meant to oppose. Might there nevertheless remain a sense in which moral facts are discursively constructed? If the alternative I have explored here qualifies as a genuine form of discursive construction, we have at least opened up a conceptual space in which the answer can be “Yes.” For this allows us to hypothesize that moral facts can be significantly shaped by historically and culturally concrete discursive regimes without this a priori ruling out the very idea of their rational and critical authority. For this to hold, however, not just any form of discursive construction must be at work. The unique form of discursive construction that breaks free of Hacking’s dilemma is rational discursive construction. If there is a “loop” in the view that results it is this: objective ethical requirements (“moral facts”) are grounded in the sorts of creatures we are, yet our efforts to articulate those ethical requirements can, in turn, have transformative effects upon the sorts of creatures we are, in an ongoing reciprocal effect. However, the argument of the present chapter gives us, at most, a formal outline of the sort of discursive construction at work in moral articulation. I have in some places anticipated more substantive moral notions like goodness and flourishing and invoked a notion of eudaimonistic growth. How does the formal outline of rational discursive construction sketched here touch upon these more substantive ethical concepts? Can we move beyond this abstract view of the articulation of moral facts to a more concrete picture of the historically evolving moral grounds that underwrite them? The next chapter continues the argument begun here, recommending that the questions just raised may find answers within the context of a historicized variation of Aristotelian ethical naturalism.

5 Changing Our Nature I did not believe your proclamation had such power to enable one who will someday die to override God’s ordinances, unwritten and secure. They are not of today and yesterday; They live forever; none knows when first they were. —​Antigone, speaking to Creon, in Antigone (Sophocles 2013: 450–​9)

In the previous chapter, I began my defense of the idea that moral articulation’s transformative effects extend beyond the intra-​subjective changes detailed in the first half of this book, extending to the domain of objective values themselves. Yet our account of the discursive construction of moral facts only gets us so far. For I have remained, as yet, rather circumspect about whether the moral facts in question possess a deeper normative ground and, if so, whether moral articulation’s transformative effects extend to this deeper ground as well. I shall concentrate first on the question of whether an objective moral theory necessarily presupposes an ahistorical core (§5.1), before moving on to ask, more specifically, whether an updated version of Aristotelian ethical naturalism, which purports to ground objective moral requirements in human nature, is invariably bound to this assumption (§5.2). I find that it is not and that, when properly historicized, an updated Aristotelianism yields the right sort of model for the idea that moral Moral Articulation. Matthew Congdon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197691571.003.0006

164  MORAL ARTICULATION grounds can be simultaneously objective and historically alterable in a thoroughgoing sense (§5.3). The result shall be an enriched conception of what it is that moral articulation articulates: not just this or that “moral fact,” but the sorts of creatures we are.

5.1.  The Immutability Thesis Does morality require an ahistorical core? The assumption that it does, found in defenders and critics of moral objectivity alike, can be expressed in the following form: if objective moral grounds exist, they must be (traceable back to grounds that are) historically inalterable.1 According to this assumption, the postulation of values or rational grounds that objectively constrain ethical judgment and practice is, ipso facto, the postulation of values or grounds that transcend history. Reformulated as an equally familiar contrapositive: if some putative moral grounds are discovered to be historically alterable, they must not be objective. Call the thought expressed in both forms the immutability thesis, since it holds that objective moral grounds, whether or not they exist, would have to be immutable. The idea is ancient. Consider the lines from Sophocles’s Antigone that serve as this chapter’s epigraph. Having buried her brother not once, but twice, in violation of royal decree, Antigone is brought before the court to face Creon’s judgment. Freely admitting her deed, Antigone describes the laws that bind her as eternal and divine: I did not believe your proclamation had such power to enable one who will someday die to override God’s ordinances, unwritten and secure.

1 In all further formulations I omit the parenthetical addition, though it is assumed throughout. It is meant to foreground that the grounds in question are those one might call “ultimate,” “foundational,” or “regress-​stopping.”

Changing Our Nature  165 They are not of today and yesterday; They live forever; none knows when first they were. (2013: 450–​9)

The laws that compel Antigone to bury her brother are not of “today and yesterday,” but transcend the ephemera of mortal time. Though her words express a religious ethos particular to her time and place, they also express a conviction that has endured for millennia in both religious and secular guises: there is a deep relationship, verging on identity, between the authority of ethical demands and their being rooted in something unchanging. Antigone’s conviction recurs in various guises in the history of moral philosophy. Perhaps its most explicit celebrations come from the early modern rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who held that the ground of morality was the unchanging “order” or “reason” of the universe. In his Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, Ralph Cudworth states the immutability thesis plainly: “if there be anything at all good or evil, just or unjust, there must of necessity be something naturally and immutably good and just” (1996: 16). Samuel Clarke copied the lines from Antigone just mentioned into the margins of his Discourse Concerning the Unalterable Obligations of Natural Religion, where he compares the immutability of fundamental moral laws to the principles that govern mathematics, geometry, and mechanical physics: [A]‌s the Addition of certain Numbers, necessarily produces a certain Sum; and certain Geometrical or Mechanical Operations, give a constant and unalterable Solution of certain Problems or Propositions: So in moral Matters, there are certain necessary and unalterable Respects or Relations of Things, which have not their Original from arbitrary and positive Constitution, but are of eternal necessity in their own Nature. (1728: 215)

166  MORAL ARTICULATION Here the immutability thesis is given a metaphysical inflection, referring us to moral truths embedded within an unchangeable structure of the universe. Yet the assumption is not restricted to the theological ethical systems that Cudworth and Clarke exemplify. Kant, as we shall see, maintains the immutability thesis in a different guise by relocating ethical grounds from the fabric of the cosmos to the structure of pure practical reason. Nor is it restricted to moral objectivity’s defenders. For the assumption is that, whether or not objective moral grounds exist, the very idea of such grounds is the idea of something immutable. Thus, an image of objective values as constrained by the immutability thesis can serve as a handy target for skeptics of values untouched by history.2 A powerful argument in favor of the immutability thesis can be derived from Kant. For Kant, the “objectivity” of a practical principle is defined by its “holding for the will of every rational being” (2015: 5:19). This means that, if a moral requirement binds me rationally, then it binds me through an aspect of myself that I share with every other rational being. Though the details of how I am to act will invariably be constrained by empirically contingent features of my situation, the underlying principle determining my will is “objective” in the sense that any rational being in relevantly similar circumstances would be similarly bound. Additionally, any rational being examining the circumstances I am in should ideally come to the same conclusion about what I ought to do. So, although different rational beings find themselves in dramatically different situations across history and location, the universal scope of moral requirements presupposes a rational principle all those historically and locally situated beings share. We can see how this gets us to the immutability thesis when we notice that the class containing “every rational being” extends not only across all of space, such that 2 Mackie, for instance, cites Clarke’s eternal Relations of Things as exemplifying what he has in mind when he attacks objective values as metaphysically “queer” (1977: 40). Similar criticisms recur in both Anglophone and Continental thought in the late twentieth century (see, e.g., Williams 1985: 153 and Foucault 1984: 78).

Changing Our Nature  167 rational aliens would be bound by the same fundamental moral law as human beings,3 but also across all of time. At any point in history, as long as we find beings who qualify as rational, we should discover the same moral principle operating through their wills. To be sure, Kant held that the exact nature of our specific moral duties requires historical contextualization. For example, the case of the shopkeeper in the Groundwork (4:397) who acts wrongly in overcharging inexperienced customers only makes sense in a society that has a specific set of economic practices that includes money and markets. Similarly, the “Casuistical Questions” in the Doctrine of Virtue of the Metaphysics of Morals are not the dilemmas of an abstract rational being but are faced by human subjects in historically concrete contexts, for example, whether it is permissible to receive a smallpox vaccination (6:424), the degree to which excessive intake of food and drink is permissible at a banquet (6:428), and whether a military leader is permitted to commit suicide if captured to avoid betraying his country (6:423). Kant’s defenders are increasingly in agreement that Kant never intended his abstract formulae of the categorical imperative to provide, by themselves, a logically deducible register of concrete moral duties (see, esp. Wood 1999). For the latter, as Kant himself emphasizes, we require anthropological and historically concrete inputs (2012: 4:388; 2017: 6:411–​2; cf. Wood 1999: Ch. 4). Thus, in determining our specific moral duties, Kant makes ample room for historical alterability. Kant’s commitment to the immutability thesis therefore consists in a more fundamental theoretical conviction: the supreme principle of morality (in contrast with specific duties to oneself and others outlined in the Doctrine of Virtue) is beyond the possibility 3 Kant emphasizes that the categorical imperative “does not restrict itself to human beings only, but applies to all finite beings having reason and will” (2012: Ak. 4:389). Thompson highlights Kant’s views about aliens as a point of contrast with Aristotelian ethics (2004: 60–​1; 2008: 7–​8; and 2022). For an insightful discussion of Kant’s views on extraterrestrial life and its relation to his Anthropology, see Clark 2001.

168  MORAL ARTICULATION of historical transformation, because it reflects the inalterable structure of pure practical reason (2012: 4:389; 2015: 5:8). As Allen Wood explains: Kant holds that our use of reason develops through history but that reason itself is a single faculty with unchanging principles. History is not the emergence of reason out of tradition or revelation but the development through reason of the entire range of human capacities and dispositions. (1999: 230)

We are therefore justified in speaking of an ahistorical core of Kant’s ethical view, one consistent with the notion that specific moral duties can undergo historical change. Insofar as this ahistorical core refers to the ultimate ground of morality, Kant is committed to the immutability thesis. Now, my point is not to dwell on Kant but to highlight a feature of his ethics that we find repeated many times over in modern and contemporary moral theory, namely, a compartmentalization of morality into a changing and an unchanging part.4 In Kant’s case, this is reflected in his systematic distinction between the “empirical” and “pure” parts of ethics (2012: 4:388). Yet we encounter this compartmentalization well beyond Kant himself, for we find it in any moral theory that defends a moral principle, practical recommendation, or procedure of deliberation intended to be intelligible independently of, and authoritative across, all possible historical situations. This includes, at least, Kant’s own inheritors, variations of contractualism, utilitarianism, and some versions of virtue ethics.5 We can say that such views embrace partial historicism

4 I borrow this formulation from Raz 1994. 5 For the first three sorts of view, see, respectively, Korsgaard 2009; Scanlon 1998; and Parfit 2011. For virtue ethicists who embrace immutability, see footnote 6. For two further examples, see Moody-​Adams’s platonic defense of the unchangeability of fundamental moral concepts (2004: 268) and Richardson’s claim that, although morality changes at its periphery, it retains an “invariant core” (2018: 21).

Changing Our Nature  169 about moral value, since they hold that aspects of morality can shift while nevertheless maintaining an invariant moral core. We may contrast this with thorough historicism, which does not compartmentalize morality in this way. Where do moral theories that ground moral requirements in human nature fall with respect to the immutability thesis? Here we may think of a project such as Aristotle’s, which outlines a table of virtues that is grounded in observations about what human beings are like (Aristotle 2009: 1097b22–​1098a19). We may also think of more recent ethical naturalists, such as Philippa Foot (2001), Rosalind Hursthouse (1999), and Michael Thompson (2004; 2008), who hold that ethical judgments are grounded in what they call the human life-​form. This is an updated version of the ancient view that morality is grounded in human nature, in what creatures like us need to survive and flourish, to be fulfilled and actualized. Does such an approach require an ahistorical picture of human nature? Many have thought so.6 This has, in turn, fueled suspicions that ethical naturalism cannot succeed, for it ignores the historical dynamism of our species. A passage from Bernard Williams—​though it predates the contemporary defenses of ethical naturalism just cited—​exemplifies the suspicion: [W]‌e only have to compare Aristotle’s catalogue of the virtues with any that might be produced now to see how pictures of an appropriate human life may differ in spirit and in the actions and institutions they call for. We also have the idea that there are many and various forms of human excellence which will not all fit together into a one harmonious whole, so any determinate 6 Whyman writes that Foot holds “a notion of the human good as something univocal, and ultimately unchanging—​something that every human being, who has ever existed, is subject to in ethical reflection in exactly the same way” (2018: 167). Both Hacker-​ Wright’s Kantian approach (2009a and 2009b) and Frey’s Thomist approach (2018) urge that ethical naturalism requires an “invariant core” (Hacker-​Wright 2009a: 416). Haase argues that ethical naturalists should hold that virtues like justice are invariant features of all species of “practically self-​conscious life” (2018: 124).

170  MORAL ARTICULATION ethical outlook is going to represent some kind of specialization in human possibilities. That idea is deeply entrenched in any naturalistic or, again, historical conception of human nature—​that is, in any adequate conception of it—​and I find it hard to believe that it will be overcome by an objective inquiry, or that human beings could turn out to have a much more determinate nature than is suggested by what we already know, one that timelessly demanded a life of a particular kind. The project of giving to ethical life an objective and determinate grounding in considerations about human nature is not, in my view, very likely to succeed. (Williams 1985: 153)

Williams’s assumption that a “historical conception of human nature” can form the basis of an attack on ethical naturalism raises the central question of this chapter. For not only does this forceful passage illustrate a version of the immutability thesis in its contrapositive form (with its tacit premise, “If human nature is historically alterable, it cannot provide objective moral grounds”), but it poses precisely the sort of challenge I wish to take up here. Might we not, contra Williams, pursue a picture of morals as objectively grounded in considerations about human flourishing while remaining conceptually innocent of any assumptions about the “timelessness” of its demands?7

7 Efforts in this direction have precedent, notably in MacIntyre’s discussion of tradition in After Virtue (2007) and deeper still in Hegel (1977) and Marx (1988), who have been interpreted as “historicized ethical naturalists” (Wood 1990: 33–​5). More recently, see Whyman (2018), who advocates “a thoroughgoingly historicized account of human nature”; and Müller (2020), who urges that critical theory provides a “much-​needed amendment” to ethical naturalism by foregrounding the “historical and social determination of moral thought” (2020: 442). Hursthouse urges that the notions of “rationality” and “personhood” employed by ethical naturalists are “culturally and historically situated” (2018: 37). McDowell (1996: Lecture IV; and 1998) defends a roughly Hegelian naturalism of “second nature” that is thoroughly historical.

Changing Our Nature  171

5.2.  Human Natural History Let us turn, then, to a contemporary strand of Aristotelian ethical naturalism, asking whether it is open to the sort of historicizing modification just proposed. Classical versions of ethical naturalism hold that there are objective truths about what constitutes virtue and vice, justice and injustice, beneficence and harm, and that these truths are grounded in human nature, in what humans need to survive and flourish, to lead fulfilled, actualized lives.8 Aristotelian ethical naturalists like Foot (2001), Hursthouse (1999), and Thompson (2004, 2008) defend updated versions of this point by claiming that ethical judgment is grounded in the human life-​form, a complex concept that can be understood, roughly, as an ethically saturated counterpart to the biological concept, species. There are two major steps to their argument. First, they identify a distinctive kind of form-​relative judgment aimed at living creatures. These are judgments that assess a creature not in light of one’s merely subjective ends and preferences (“x is strong enough to pull a plow”; “x is cute”; “x is good to eat”), but in relation to life-​activities and vital characteristics that exemplify members of its kind. Whether a pair of wings is strong enough depends upon whether they belong to a hummingbird or an albatross. Whether this plant’s root system is absorbing enough moisture depends upon whether it is an oak or a cactus. What qualifies as good eyesight will be one thing in an owl and another in an octopus. In short, features that are healthy, typical, or life-​promoting in one species can be unhealthy, depriving, or lethal in another. Ethical naturalists urge that evaluations of the latter sort (“These wings are well-​ developed”; “These roots are absorbing the right amount of moisture”; “This creature’s eyes are functioning well”) form a distinctive class characterized by their “life-​form relativity” (Foot 2001: 27; Thompson 2004: 60–​2; Thompson 2008: 81). Such judgments are 8 For a canonical statement, see Aristotle 2009: 1097a15–​b19.

172  MORAL ARTICULATION grounded, not in the judge’s subjective attitudes, but in the creature’s life-​form, the purposive unity of behaviors, life cycles, and vital characteristics that members of a species need to survive and flourish. In making such judgments, one ascribes values to nature without their being grounded in one’s merely subjective attitudes. In this way, they aspire to objectivity. The second major step is to urge that, insofar as ethical judgment is concerned with the question of how to live well, and insofar as human ethical life is no less natural than plant or animal life, our ethical assessments of human action share the same logical structure of life-​form dependence as all other forms of naturalistic assessment (Foot 2001: 27). Thus, the second major step for defenders of neo-​Aristotelian ethical naturalism is to argue that, despite the many differences between human and nonhuman life-​forms, the same basic logic of life-​form dependence remains in place. For example, when human beings express experiences and grievances via concepts like ‘child abuse’, ‘racism’, and ‘hate speech’, the background against which such claims are intelligible and authoritative—​their rationally objective ground—​is a conception of what a flourishing life would be for members of a common life-​form. Grasping and articulating the wrongness of some action-​ type or practice involves an appreciation that certain conditions are important for our creature-​specific flourishing in the way that deep roots are important for an oak, combined with an assessment of the action-​type or practice in question as denying, destroying, or distorting those conditions. So, if one of the harms of child abuse is that it destroys bonds of trust that need to be developed in early childhood for a life to go well, then its wrongness consists, at least, in its depriving a member of our life-​form of an essential condition of flourishing—​roughly as damaging the root system of an oak would do for it.9 9 Foot’s tendency is to locate the wrongness in the wrongdoer themselves, such that the “natural defect” in the example of child abuse would be the abuser’s vicious character and acts (Foot 2001: 5). The person who is “deprived” of conditions of human

Changing Our Nature  173 Both steps are controversial and have invited controversy.10 For present purposes, however, the crucial point is that nothing in the structure of life-​form dependent evaluative thought requires the reifying supposition that owls, oaks, and octopi—​or, indeed, humans—​have fixed and inalterable natures. On the contrary, because the relevant evaluative judgments refer only to features that characterize a life-​form at the moment of assessment, this reference is compatible with the life-​form’s undergoing historical change both before and after the moment of assessment. Foot says this explicitly, urging that her view sits comfortably with evolutionary theories of species-​development: “species themselves are subject to change” and so the truth of a system of natural historical judgments is the “truth about a species at a given historical time, and it is only the relative stability of at least the most general features of the different species of living things that makes these propositions possible at all” (2001: 29). Similarly, Hursthouse (1999) points out that, while such judgments are grounded in a species’ “characteristic ways of going on,” it is always possible for a species to develop “a new characteristic way of going on” (203) and thus to have “changed their nature” (220n2). Thompson likewise emphasizes that “we are able to describe changes in the characteristics natural-​historically attributable to particular kinds of living things, and so to supply a Darwinian account of these changes” (2008: 66). Thus, ascribing a flourishing, if we take this perspective, is the abuser. In the main text above, I highlight instead the harms done to those who have suffered child abuse. My view is that these two emphases are complementary and that both are ultimately required as part of an ethical naturalist’s critique. 10 The literature is vast, but representative objections include that ethical naturalism ignores our reflexive capacity to step back from the authority of our life-​form (Korsgaard 2011); indulges an indefensible foundationalism by grounding ethical value in our first nature (McDowell 1998: Essay 9); is “conservative” in its restriction of the potential forms of human flourishing (Whyman 2017: 1224; cf. Hursthouse 1999: 211); is “speciesist” given the special role it grants to the human in ethics (Richardson 2018: 82; for defenses, see Crary 2021 and Ng 2021); and runs afoul of contemporary biology (for discussion and defense, see Hacker-​Wright 2009b and Moosavi 2019). Though I touch on some of these issues below, my main concern is with the assumption that this picture loses its claim to objectivity unless it presupposes an ahistorical core.

174  MORAL ARTICULATION characteristic to a creature’s nature, on this account, presupposes neither the immutability of that characteristic nor of their nature in general. If the life-​form can change while nevertheless continuing to orient evaluative thought about its members, then we have a model for a kind of thoroughly historicized objective value, in this case, values that arise immanently from living, evolving nature.11 To begin to see how this works in an ethical case, consider one of Foot’s examples, namely, that we are creatures who engage in social practices of promising. Following Anscombe (1981b), Foot contends that to break a promise, in the absence of special circumstances, is to act badly, where this evaluation is rooted in “quite general facts about human beings” (2001: 45). These facts include the importance of exchange, trustworthiness, and securing our futures by relying on others. She also includes features indexed to social roles and practices, for example, “what it means for parents to be able to rely on a promise securing the future of their children in case of their death” (45). As Foot develops the point, the wrongness of any particular instance of promise breaking is secured, not by appeal to an immutable moral law or ground, but a life-​form that has developed over time to include such features as these. She writes, It would be different if human beings were different, and could bind the wills of others through some kind of future-​related mind-​control device. But we have not got such powers, any 11 For this reason, Footian ethical naturalism appears not to be trapped within Sharon Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma” for realist theories of value (Street 2006; for a critique, see Vavova 2014). Street may readily acknowledge this, as it is unclear that Foot’s view qualifies as “realist” in the precise sense that Street stipulates in her article, for which the defining claim is that “there are at least some evaluative facts or truths that hold independently of all our evaluative attitudes” (110). While this certainly includes platonist realisms like those of Cudworth and Clarke, it will not include Foot’s—​at least if the life-​form-​dependence of value includes an essential reference to our being the sorts of creatures who are capable of certain kinds of evaluative attitudes (e.g., the kind of love Maurice and Clive strive to articulate, as discussed in Chapter 4). The version of ethical naturalism I endorse here includes this reference (see the discussion of “meta-​biological meanings” in §5.3, below).

Changing Our Nature  175 more than animals who depend on cooperative hunting have the power of catching their prey as tigers do, by solitary stalk and pounce. (45)

The moral importance of promising is no less a matter of our natural history than the importance of cooperative hunting is for a wolf, who cannot suddenly take on the powers of a tiger. When we inquire into the wrongness of false and broken promises, what we find are facts about human beings such as the importance of exchange, trustworthiness, and securing our futures, along with our inability to secure them through alternatives like the “mind-​ control” powers Foot imagines in this passage. These facts appear quite stable, and so can provide a normative horizon against which moral judgments about promising are intelligible and authoritative. They can play this role even if there is no logical or transcendental necessity to their being features of our life-​form, in a sense that would entail their immutability as opposed to historically concrete stability. The picture here is emphatically that of a particular species that has developed over long historical periods to live socially in certain ways, with historically evolved needs, dependencies, vulnerabilities, and shared concerns. The wrongness of promise breaking, when it is wrong, emerges from this simultaneously natural and cultural historical development. It remains, moreover, emphatically objective. An objective moral ground must impose some form of unchosen constraint upon our subjectivity, such that what is morally important transcends personal whim and social convention. It must thereby keep in check the judging subject’s own desires and evaluative attitudes. Recall Foot’s distinction between two sorts of evaluative judgment concerning living creatures: those relative to the judge’s own desires, interests, and projects (“x is good for eating”; “x is good for pulling a plow”) and those relative to the life-​cycles, activities, and development of a creature’s life-​form (“x’s root system is absorbing enough moisture”; x’s eyesight is functioning properly”). Foot calls these

176  MORAL ARTICULATION judgments of secondary goodness and natural goodness, respectively (2001: 26–​7). When we make ethical judgments concerning human practices like promising, we are making judgments of natural goodness about ourselves. Such judgments are, to be sure, dependent upon human beings, for they depend upon general facts about our life-​form. In Foot’s example, such facts include the importance of trust, exchange, and securing the futures of children. Yet this sort of dependence does not entail the anti-​objectivist thesis that the judgments they support are ultimately just expressions or projections of the judge’s merely subjective attitudes. Though dependent upon us, ethical grounds are not simply up to us. The rational requirements those grounds underwrite remain categorical, rather than merely hypothetical, imperatives.12 Roughly, then, this view aspires to meet an important desideratum of ethical objectivity, namely, providing unchosen constraints upon our subjectivity, while remaining open to the idea that what constrains us is deeply historical.13 12 Famously, Foot defends, in her earlier work, a picture of morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives (1972), yet abandons this view by the time of Natural Goodness. Cf. McDowell’s critique of Foot’s earlier view in McDowell 1998: chap. 5. 13 We may also note an additional conceptual resource already at work in this strand of ethical naturalism that can help explain the possibility of cultural and historical variation within an objective framework of life-​form dependence. Hursthouse defends the idea of “role-​dependent virtues” (1999: 214), virtues whose possession counts toward being a good human insofar as one bears a particular social role, but whose lack does not count toward being a bad person if one does not bear the relevant role. Her example is the virtue of being a good parent, whose lack is bad if you are a bad parent, but not if you are not a parent. The existence of role-​dependent virtues would multiply the possibilities for realizing human goodness at the cultural level while remaining within the life-​form dependent structure. For the fact that humans take on diverse social roles within heterogeneous forms of life is itself a natural historical fact about our life-​form. It is but a short step from this basic point about role-​dependence to the idea of a more radical accommodation of historical and cultural variation within the Footian life-​form framework. In a culture with a different kinship structure and set of practices concerning the raising of children, a different set of role-​dependent virtues will be in place. Recall Foot’s own insistence that the parent–​child relation is one of the general features that contributes to the value of promising, emphasizing “what it means for parents to be able to rely on a promise securing the future of their children in case of their death” (Foot 2001: 45). That care for the next generation of children can come in heterogeneous cultural forms is, then, an additional concrete way in which the moral importance of promise-​keeping is at once deeply historical and objective.

Changing Our Nature  177 We can now see that the Kantian argument (§5.1) relies upon a premise that an ethical naturalist is free to reject. For it requires that we define the “objectivity” of a moral ground in terms of its holding for all rational beings. Any ethical naturalist, thoroughly historicized or not, can deny this, since the widest possible class of beings for whom moral requirements are shared is defined not by the class of rational beings but by the class of fellow life-​form bearers (Thompson 2008: 7–​9).14 If this is true, and if life-​forms change (as Foot, Thompson, and Hursthouse all acknowledge), the Kantian argument never gets going on the naturalist’s picture. It can seem, however, that this asks us to give up too much. For, one might object, part of the attraction of the Kantian definition of ethical objectivity is that it captures an intuition worth defending, namely, the idea that moral requirements are universal in scope and binding with “absolute necessity” (2012: 4:389). Lacking such notions, the historicized variation of ethical naturalism I am proposing appears forced to defend a bland picture of moral requirements as—​because neither universal nor necessary—​merely 14 The life-​form approach is sometimes charged with speciesism, since it appears to a grant a special moral status to the human being or, worse, exclude other species from the ambit of ethical concern altogether (see, e.g., Richardson, who urges that the “idea of the human life form is the speciesist idea par excellence” [2018: 82]). This is based in a mistaken view of what ethical naturalism involves. The point is not that other species lack objective and autonomous moral importance, but that their (objective and autonomous) moral importance must be something we can apprehend within the horizon shaped by our own life-​form. As we saw a moment ago with Foot, the distinction between judgments of natural goodness and secondary goodness is one that can be drawn from within a human perspective. A truly speciesist view would amount to holding that other species only qualify as important in the sense of “secondary goodness.” For two thoughtful handlings of the speciesism objection, see Crary 2021; and Ng 2021. As Ng puts it as part of a discussion of the role of the Marxian concept of species-​being (Gattungswesen) in making forms of wrong and injustice visible, “there is no intrinsic connection between the indexing of wrongs to species-​specific capacities and any implied or explicit claim to a hierarchical relation between species. Instead, attention to the context of the life and ecology of particular species—​i.e., attention to species-​being—​is essential for providing an adequate diagnosis of possible unjust conditions and treatment” (Ng 2021: 150). Crary puts the point more positively, urging that the life-​form approach allows us to say that other animals, “matter just as the kinds of creatures they are” (Crary 2021: 167). If we take this view, then the life-​form approach not only avoids the charge of speciesism, but is, rather, required if we are to do justice to the moral importance of nonhuman creatures.

178  MORAL ARTICULATION parochial and contingent. Yet we can do justice to the notions of moral universality and necessity without adopting the Kantian definition of “ethical objectivity.” Regarding universality, we may think of cases of moral articulation wherein agents strive to express certain claims neither simply to themselves nor to a closed audience of likeminded others, but to a public, open-​ended audience, including those who have never experienced, first-​hand, the forms of experience, meaning, and value they express. They seek to articulate a sense of moral significance in a way that any fellow reflective participant in shared ethical life can, in principle, grasp. This is an activity with undeniably universalist aspirations. Yet there is no obstacle to our saying that the hoped-​for universality in this case is defined by a historically developed class of fellow life-​form bearers as opposed to an ahistorically defined class of rational beings. To say of the authority of some normative claim that it is “universal” is, taken by itself, an incomplete thought. For we cannot comprehend the relevant notion of “universality” until we specify the set of those over whom the claim purportedly legislates. Thus, with the shift from rational being to fellow life-​form bearer, it is not the idea of universality that has been abandoned, but a particular picture of what might provide the appropriate set. The universal scope of moral significance remains, albeit in a life-​form relative guise. A similar point goes for the historicized ethical naturalist’s notion of ethical necessity. Urging that ethical requirements are grounded in a historically concrete life-​form is not to trade the necessity of ethical demands for their mere contingency. Rather, ethical naturalism provides a framework within which we may identify certain acts, practices, and conditions as, in Foot’s phrase, “Aristotelian necessities,” which she glosses as “that which is necessary because and in so far as good hangs on it” (2001: 15).15 For Foot, certain practices like promising, as well as certain virtues like justice and 15 Though the label is Foot’s, she attributes the idea to Anscombe and her discussion of “stopping modals” (Anscombe 1981a). For a discussion, see Vogler 2020.

Changing Our Nature  179 courage, are Aristotelian necessities. Without them we would be deprived of conditions that not only make possible certain forms of distinctively human good, but, at least in some cases, are themselves part of the actualization of those very goods.16 Historicized ethical naturalism embraces this conception while adding that “Aristotelian necessities” are not lost if we suppose that both the goods in question and the virtues and practices that actualize them are themselves results of historical development, such that they are what they are, in significant part, due to a history that has brought them into being and, at least potentially, is open to further changes in the future. My claim, then, is that notions of both universality and necessity in ethics can be retained on this view, albeit in life-​ form relative guises. The persistence of my appeal to life-​form dependence may prompt a further objection. For it can look as though historicized ethical naturalism leaves in place its own “ahistorical core,” namely, the thesis of life-​form dependence itself. For whatever else might change within a life-​form, there can be no changing the fundamental condition of having to make ethical judgments against the background of a value-​laden picture of kinds of creatures we are. By the ethical naturalist’s own lights, then, the thesis of life-​form dependence appears no more susceptible to historical change than the categorical imperative is for Kant, or the principle of utility is for Bentham and Mill. This leads to a dilemma. We can either relinquish our thorough historicism by admitting that the thesis of life-​ form dependence is immutable or relinquish our ethical naturalism by denying that life-​form dependence invariably pervades all objective ethical thought. Either way, historicized ethical naturalism appears self-​undermining.

16 This last point is important insofar as it prevents the value of such “Aristotelian necessities” from being exhaustively instrumental. On this point, see McDowell 1998: Essay 4.

180  MORAL ARTICULATION Responding to this objection gives us a chance to clarify just what we are denying when we deny that our life-​form must possess an “ahistorical core” in order to orient objective ethical thought and practice. It is true that the thesis of life-​form dependence is not subject to change on my view. However, the objection rests upon a conflation of two kinds of claim: what we might call, following a suggestion from Foot, grammatical claims, which make explicit the logical connections between a certain class of concepts and judgments, and substantive ethical principles, which make explicit imperatives, rules, procedures, and practical recommendations meant to have normative authority for moral agents.17 Historicized ethical naturalism denies that there are timeless truths of the latter sort, not the former. If the thesis of life-​form dependence were a substantive ethical principle, it would have to be reformulated in explicitly action-​guiding terms. Perhaps: I ought never to proceed except in such a way that my action is an actualization of the life-​ form I bear; or, more succinctly: Be the sort of creature you are! Yet taken by themselves, such reformulations turn out to be empty. It may well be that the imperative, Be human!, has some ethical content for us. We may imagine contexts in which a speaker utters such an imperative with the intention of ruling out some courses of action while encouraging others. Yet when such an utterance has any ethical content, it is only thanks to some antecedent substantive conception of the life-​form in question, and such a substantive conception is not built into the thesis of life-​form dependence as 17 Foot credits her notion of grammar to Wittgenstein (Foot 2001: 91). On Foot’s method as grammatical investigation, see Husthouse 2018 and Lott 2018. On the distinction between grammatical and substantive normative claims, see Thompson’s (2003) distinction between “logical” and “substantive Footianism.” In drawing this distinction, I do not mean to rule out that a single judgment might simultaneously express a grammatic claim and substantive ethical principle. Kant’s various formulae of the categorical imperative, for example, might be read as encompassing both. On such a reading they would simultaneously (a) seek to express something about the conceptual structure and logical connections characterizing a certain stretch of evaluative thought and (b) be capable of taking explicitly imperatival or action-​guiding form, that is, the form of a “law.”

Changing Our Nature  181 such.18 This should lead us to reject the assumption upon which the objection rests, namely, that the thesis of life-​form dependence is a substantive ethical principle akin to Kant’s categorical imperative or the principle of utility, viewing it instead as a grammatical claim about a certain stretch of evaluative judgment. Even if we grant the thesis of life-​form dependence a historically transcendent status, this provides no grounds for postulating any unchanging substantive ethical truths sub specie aeternitatis.19 So far, my argument has aimed at supporting a negative point: the thesis of life-​form dependence neither relies upon nor entails the further thesis that any life-​form, including our own, contains an ahistorical core. In this way, it provides a rough model for an objective ground that sets real constraints upon ethical thought and practice, even if that ground is, as Thompson puts it, “a definite product of nature, one which has arisen on this planet, quite contingently, in the course of evolutionary history” (2004: 59). Our next task, which I come to in the following section (§5.3), shall be to situate this framework in relation to our overarching account of moral articulation. For our aim is not merely to defend the thesis that our life-​form is susceptible to just any form of contingent change, but that at least significant aspects of it are susceptible to rational discursive construction, meaning that our efforts of articulation not only illuminate, but help to develop, in a direction of 18 To this we may add a second problem. The objectivity of such an imperative would depend upon its accurately reflecting a feature of one’s own life-​form, a condition that would quickly reveal an unhelpful circularity: a feature of my life-​form I must actualize is that I must actualize features of my life-​form. 19 Here I set aside two additional objections that might be raised by an ethical naturalist who defends the idea that human nature contains an “invariant core.” The first is rooted in the idea, defended by Thompson (2004), that at least some substantive knowledge of our life-​form is not founded upon empirical observation, which one might take to support the notion that certain ethical features of our life-​form are given a priori and, thus, unchanging. The second is rooted in the idea, pursued by Hacker-​Wright (2009a) that we can deduce from basic premises about our species’ capacity for self-​ conscious agency an “invariant core” of our life-​form (416). I discuss both objections in detail and suggest how a thoroughly historicized ethical naturalist might respond in Congdon 2023.

182  MORAL ARTICULATION moral maturation, ethically salient features of the sorts of creatures we are (cf. §§4.3–​5).

5.3.  Articulating Our Nature What role, then, does moral articulation play in the historical development of our life-​form? When human beings develop new ways of conceptualizing their own conditions of suffering and flourishing, are they describing or articulating them? We can pose this in relation to the idea, voiced by Foot, that matters of moral importance are shaped by “quite general facts” (2001: 45) that characterize a life-​form. What is the status of such “quite general facts” prior to their expression in concepts and language? Do our efforts to find new conceptual means to express such facts follow the straightforward logic of description, such that they already exist, fully meaningful and intact, just waiting to be made explicit? Or does the self-​interpretation of a species by its own members follow the expressive logic of articulation, such that these “quite general facts” can, at least in some cases, become what they are, and be developed in new directions, through their conceptual and linguistic expression? In many cases description seems the more fitting answer. Consider the formulation of natural historical judgments concerning features of our life-​form viewed from a strictly biological standpoint. Take, for example, the relatively recent scientific effort to understand the human microbiome, the genetic material of microbes that live in the human body in a mostly symbiotic relationship, helping us perform functions like digestion, regulation of our immune systems, and the production of vitamins. Though research into aspects of the human microbiome began in the late nineteenth century, it was not until the late 1980s that its existence was generally accepted and that a scientific terminology, including the term, “microbiome,” came into prominence. This is an example

Changing Our Nature  183 of the historical development of a new concept that gives expression to a vital aspect of our life-​form. Yet in this case, we find that our new conceptualization concerns biological processes that went on in humans for a very long time and may continue to go on in the same way irrespective of their being so conceptualized. To be sure, the fact that we have formulated new concepts and terms for understanding and speaking about the human microbiome has led to new efforts to alter it. Our new conceptualizations put us in a position to, as researchers from the Human Microbiome Project put it, “define the parameters needed to design, implement and monitor strategies for intentionally manipulating the human microbiota, to optimize its performance in the context of an individual’s physiology” (Turnbaugh et al. 2007: 804). This latter sort of transformative effect, however, is distinct from what I shall call a life-​form articulation. Articulations transform their objects directly through the conceptualization itself, not merely through additional, indirect effects. In this case, our microbiome is transformed, not by our conceptualizations per se, but what we do in light of those conceptualizations. Cases like this, which involve strictly biological claims about our life-​form, therefore seem more accurately characterized as life-​form descriptions than life-​form articulations. By contrast, there is a group of natural historical judgments aimed at what we could call, following Taylor, “metabiological” features of our life-​form (2016: 91–​2, 181, 184–​90). These features are not susceptible to being understood in reductively biological terms because a grasp of their full significance requires that we occupy a perspective shaped by evaluations and emotions that characterize a normative outlook (§§2.1–​2). In the language of the previous chapter, such features are only available from a standpoint that is emotionally and evaluatively non-​neutral (§4.5). Recall our example of Maurice and Clive. I argued that Maurice and Clive’s efforts to self-​interpret their love cannot take place under an ideal of objectivity that mandates maximal abstraction from their locally

184  MORAL ARTICULATION situated emotions and evaluations. On the contrary, Maurice and Clive’s emotions and evaluations help focus their attention and enable their attunement to the reality they seek to understand. That their perspectives are shaped by such emotions and evaluations plays a crucial role in allowing them to see, from an engaged point of view, what cannot be seen from the disengaged points of view exemplified by the avatars of medicine, law, class, and nationalism that they encounter throughout the novel. My claim now is that at least many ethically salient features of our life-​form are like this, requiring a perspective not just upon but from within our life-​form, that is to say, from within a perspective shaped by the passions, attachments, and motivations that characterize the drama of an engaged human existence.20 While one can formulate and understand objectively correct natural-​historical judgments about oaks’ root systems, owls’ eyes, and the human microbiome from a relatively neutral and dispassionate perspective, there exist features of our own life-​form that are only appreciable from the perspective of a normative outlook that is concretely human. What it means to enjoy a deep sense of communion with one’s loved ones, to strive to become virtuous, to experience humiliation, or to resent wrongdoing are like this. Beginning to understand such human phenomena requires the engaged perspective of a subject who can feel their emotional weight and respond to their evaluative significance.21 This does not mean that judgments about such features can never be reflected upon with relative evaluative neutrality or repeated dispassionately by rote. The point, rather, is that our initially 20 A theme developed at length in Crary 2016. 21 The point I am making here in connection with Taylor is similar to a point Murdoch makes when she draws a distinction between “two senses of ‘knowing what a word means’ ” (1971: 28). Though learning the meanings of certain words might require simply that one is able to use them successfully in social practices of language use, the meanings of words that express matters of value require a personal history of attunement to those meanings: “Knowledge of a value concept is something to be understood, as it were, in depth, and not in terms of switching on to some given impersonal network. . . . We do not simply, through being rational and knowing ordinary language, ‘know’ the meaning of all necessary moral words” (ibid.).

Changing Our Nature  185 coming to grasp the depth of these features of our life-​form as part of our ethical formation, and our reaffirming their value when they are challenged or under threat, cannot take place apart from our capacity to feel their emotional weight and evaluative place in our lives.22 With this distinction in place, I can formulate my claim more precisely: while the development of new concepts and words to express strictly biological features of our life-​form may follow the straightforward logic of description, the development of new concepts and words to express metabiological features of our life-​ form follows the expressive logic of articulation. Why think this? It follows if we embrace the following two ideas, both of which I think are true. The first is that metabiological features of our life-​form are what they are, in significant part, because of the evaluations and emotional responses involved in experiencing them. For example, certain vulnerabilities to wrongs endemic to our life-​form, say, being humiliated by standing in unjustly hierarchical social relations, are what they are because we can experience certain socially nuanced forms of suffering. In Foot’s phrase, it would be different if human beings were different, if our emotional and evaluative responses were structurally impervious to what we understand to be humiliating treatment. The point is not to deny that people can be wronged or suffer injustice without feeling anything.23 Rather, the point is that, if our life-​form were so fundamentally different that experiences of humiliation simply had no place, or were experienced in a radically different way, then certain forms of wrongdoing simply would not exist and others might 22 This notion of an “ethical formation” is indebted to Lovibond 2002. 23 More broadly, we should avoid “psychologizing” injustice, which would entail a collapse of the distinction between experiencing oneself as the victim of an injustice and actually being a victim of injustice. On this point, see Nancy Fraser’s critique of Axel Honneth, whom she views as indulging in this sort of psychologization (Fraser, in Fraser and Honneth 2003: 202–​5). Nevertheless, there is a significant difference between the psychologizing move Fraser rightly views with suspicion and the idea that what really counts as an injustice is dependent upon psychological features of the sorts of creatures we are. It is the latter claim I am embracing here.

186  MORAL ARTICULATION come into being. The same goes for ethically enriching features of our life-​form: for example, such goods as friendship, conversation, art, and communion with nature. Such human goods owe their existence, at least in part, thanks to human capacities to feel certain emotions and evaluations, along with a broader repertoire of embodied, affective, and psychological modes of engagement with the world. Subtract from our natures the relevant emotions and evaluations, and such goods go with them. By the same token, if our emotional and evaluative capacities change in significant ways, this will alter the goods themselves, by altering the phenomenology of our enjoyment of them. In these ways, metabiological features of our life-​form depend upon, and are alterable by changes in, our being the kinds of creatures who are capable of a certain range of emotions and evaluations.24 The second idea is that our capacities for the relevant forms of emotion and evaluation are deeply informed by the concepts and languages we use to express them. A small-​scale version of this idea was at work in the case of Maurice and Clive articulating their love in Chapter 4. The emotions and evaluations constituting their love were not merely described but nurtured and developed through their expression. We also saw, in Chapter 3, how emotions themselves can prompt a cognitive process of conceptualization that leads to new and previously unanticipated shapes of the very emotions that initiated the process. Resentment at wrongdoing, according to the articulation model of emotion defended there, is not a single, undifferentiated burst of emotion, but a temporally extended process of emotional rumination whereby a value-​laden picture of the world is stitched together. I now wish to extend these

24 Notice that this is not a version of the emotivist or anti-​realist thesis that those value-​laden features are merely subjective projections of our attitudes upon a value-​ neutral reality. The fact that metabiological features of our life-​form depend on the existence of kinds of creatures that feel certain feelings does not make them any less real. For our life-​form exists, as do the propensities to feel the feelings at stake (recall the distinction noted earlier between values being up to us and being dependent upon us in §5.2).

Changing Our Nature  187 ideas into the context of our present argument. Continuing with an example from the previous paragraph, the proposal is that the emotional and evaluative tendencies in human beings that, at least typically, render us morally vulnerable to acts of humiliation depend, to a significant extent, upon our capacity to express ourselves and such acts in concepts and words. To this extent, they are discursively constructed in the sense defended in Chapter 4. Though not simply the products of their conceptualization, they are at least co-​ constituted by their conceptualization in concert with other forces (§§4.3–​5). In the case of humiliation, this is most obviously the case when it comes to our vulnerability to verbal insults: one cannot so much as be aware of, let alone be humiliated by, a verbal attack unless a history of conceptual and linguistic mediation has already significantly shaped one’s emotional and evaluative outlook. Yet more generally, one’s vulnerability to moral injury, as opposed to mere misfortune or accidental injury, requires, minimally, a capacity to conceptualize oneself as deserving certain forms of recognition, combined with a conceptualization of the act in question as denying or withholding the relevant form of recognition.25 In this way, our emotional and evaluative responses to perceived moral violations are already conceptually complex, such that significant shifts in the concepts and words we have at our disposal can develop corresponding shifts in those responses. A similar point goes for the emotional and evaluative tendencies in human beings that render phenomena such as friendship, art, conversation, and communion with nature the ethically enriching goods they are. Our previous argument that the thesis of life-​form dependence lacks any conceptual dependence upon an ahistorical core (§5.2) allows

25 A recurring theme in Honneth, who writes, “Only living beings who can relate reflexively to their own lives in the sense of being volitionally concerned about their own wellbeing are morally vulnerable. Without reference to the qualitative standards of one’s own life, it is in no way possible to explain which personal elements have actually been injured or encroached upon in cases of a moral injury, as opposed to mere damage, ill luck or constraint” (2007a: 134).

188  MORAL ARTICULATION us to hold that the emotional and evaluative capacities endemic to our life-​form are historically fluid. We are now adding the further thought, rooted in the picture of articulation and discursive construction of the previous chapters, that this historical fluidity is due, at least in part, to transformations in the concepts and words we use to express them. Combining these two ideas—​that metabiological features of our life-​form depend for their existence upon, and change alongside, relevant forms of emotion and evaluation, and that the relevant forms of emotion and evaluation are shaped by the concepts and words used to articulate them—​we arrive at the thesis stated earlier. Metabiological features of our life-​form follow the expressive logic of articulation rather than straightforward description.26 As I emphasized earlier (§4.3), this is not to say that such features are created by concepts and words ex nihilo. Nor is it the claim, that would have us lapse back into an uncritical “anything goes” relativism, that metabiological features of our life-​form may be articulated in any direction whatsoever. It is, rather, the more subtle claim that our conceptualizations and linguistic expressions co-​constitute these features in concert with other forces and within the bounds of quite real constraints and limits.27 So when it comes to metabiological features of our life-​form, the function of language in expressing them cannot be reduced to that of referencing or labeling independently existing “ethical values” or “moral facts.” Rather, we may say that, as human beings collectively struggle to articulate the ways we are morally vulnerable to various forms of humiliation, we may succeed not only in illuminating the contours of our vulnerabilities but in creating new ways of inhabiting our

26 “The constitutive power of language operates here in a different way,” Taylor explains. “Here, in the realm of metabiological meanings, expression opens new and unsuspected realms. The new enacted and/​or verbal expressions open up new ways of being in the world” (2016: 188–​9). 27 On this point, recall our discussion of the limits and constraints at work in Cases C and D in Chapter 4. See also the discussion of immanent critique in Chapter 6.

Changing Our Nature  189 vulnerability, new ways of valuing the precarity of our condition, and new ways of valorizing the forms of care it calls for. This follows, at least, if our vulnerability to the moral injuries of humiliation is a metabiological feature of our life-​form.28 The same would go for our efforts to articulate goods like friendship, art, conversation, and communion with nature. When our moral articulations go well, they might succeed, not only in shedding light on preexisting yet overlooked possibilities in these areas of human flourishing, but in opening space for new such possibilities. If a critical mass of Maurices and Clives, for example, join together in social movements that initiate massive changes in the ways we conceptualize the joys of love and sexuality, this may succeed not only in illuminating previously overlooked forms of human flourishing, but creating new ones. This proposal can seem hyperbolic. For it is one thing to say of an individual, or even a small community, that their capacities for emotion and evaluation evolve alongside their concepts and words, thereby prompting changes in what is good for the individual or community. Yet what could it mean to say that the transformation takes place at the level of our life-​form, recreating not just this individual or that isolated community, but the sorts of creatures we are? There is, no doubt, a long distance to be traversed between the scale of intimate articulation at work in Maurice and Clive’s struggle and the sorts of life-​form articulations at stake here. Yet the distance to be traversed lies over a continuum, not an abyss. Life-​form transformative articulations have nowhere else to start than in such small-​scale and intimate discussions like those of Maurice and Clive—​opening up to slightly larger

28 Which is emphatically not to deny that our vulnerability to moral injury is a matter of our being embodied, needy, interdependent animals of a particular sort. The “metabiological” is not the “non-​biological”: it is meant to mark a register of phenomena that include, while remaining irreducible to, the strictly biological. For a picture of our vulnerability to moral injury that emphasizes the inseparability of these two registers, see Bernstein 2017.

190  MORAL ARTICULATION counter-​ ideological subcultures like feminist consciousness-​ raising groups and our earlier example from Charles Mills of the “black alternative public sphere” (§2.2). Struggles for moral articulation begin within such local moral subcultures, yet may eventually aspire to reach an open-​ended public, reaching not only a closed community of the likeminded, but those without any first-​ hand experience of the conditions they articulate. They may aim to show that serious patterns of wrongdoing really exist, and that such patterns can and should be recognized as such by any fellow reflective member of one’s life-​form. This requires demonstrating how the local conditions they articulate fit within a broader picture of what matters in a human life, relating those conditions to a picture of what we need to survive, flourish, and be actualized, such that the local conditions in question become perspicuous to a broader public as falling radically short. There is a kind of universalistic aspiration here, though it is a “universalism from below,” one that bubbles up from local struggles for moral articulation and cannot take its own claims to universal validity as metaphysically given or guaranteed in advance.29 At least in aspiration, then, moral articulation strives to traverse the distance from intimate articulation to life-​form articulation. Consider what this proposal would look like in a concrete historical case that weaves together several threads from previous chapters. Human beings are currently living through a multigenerational struggle to articulate the harms and wrongs of gender-​ based oppression, as well as the unrealized forms of flourishing and human connection this form of oppression hinders. In just the past two centuries, we have seen, as part of this social movement, the invention of myriad new concepts and terms across languages that seek to express a wide range of experiences, values, sufferings,

29 I borrow the phrase, “universalism from below,” from Susan Buck-​ Morss, who introduces it in the context of a discussion of Hegel and the Haitian Revolution (2009: 106).

Changing Our Nature  191 and joys.30 A large part of this includes efforts to name and criticize specific forms of wrongdoing, for example, ‘marital rape’, ‘date rape’, ‘domestic abuse’, ‘sexual harassment’, and ‘sexual objectification’. It also includes efforts to express more positive experiences, such as overlooked or newly developed forms of human connection, solidarity, and happiness. Here we may think, for instance, of the evolution of the consciousness-​raising group, new elaborations of ethics that place care at their center, new ways of celebrating the aesthetics of embodiment beyond the male gaze, and revised understandings of the pleasures of sex outside the frame of heteronormative desire.31 My proposal is that we interpret the many overlapping struggles to develop such concepts as contributing to a large-​scale, multigenerational effort of life-​form articulation, such that the new concepts and words not only help illuminate real features of our life-​form, but help positively develop new ways of being, valuing, and flourishing within a human life. Thus interpreted, the multigenerational struggle to articulate the wrongs of gender-​based oppression, as well as the forms of flourishing it stymies, would, at least ideally, follow the form of rational discursive construction outlined in the previous chapter. As (i) epistemically oriented, the struggle must remain faithful to real experiences, real patterns of suffering and mistreatment, and real acts of moral injury and suppressed human connection, all while navigating constraints placed upon us by the sorts of material, embodied, social creatures we are. As (ii) developmentally oriented, these efforts aim a telos of maturation that, though it follows a complex epistemology I shall defend in the next chapter, admits of assessment in terms of moral progress and moral regress. These efforts 30 For both historical and philosophical background, see Schapiro 1985; Alcoff 2018; Anderson 2006; Brison 2002; Brownmiller 1999; Crary 2007: Ch. 5; Freedman 2002; and Collins 2009. 31 On the development of feminist consciousness-​raising groups, see Brownmiller 1999 and Freedman 2002. On the ethics of care, see Held 2006. On the male gaze and the possibilities for an aesthetics that transgresses it, see Mulvey 1975. On sex, see hooks 2001: Ch. 10.

192  MORAL ARTICULATION are (iii) counter-​ideological, insofar as their success requires not just the creation of new conceptual schemes but resisting the power of hegemonic patriarchal and heteronormative schemes. We already saw that such an effort must be (iv) emotionally and evaluatively non-​neutral, since what is at stake are metabiological features of our life-​form, which neither exist nor can be fully grasped without our feeling their emotional weight and grasping their evaluative place in our lives. As (v) dynamically teleological, these efforts aim not at a preestablished telos of human flourishing, but may involve what Lovibond calls the “natural capacity of human beings for self-​ transcendence” (2002: 63n51), helping to forge creatively the very telos toward which they strive. Finally, as (vi) multiply realizable, we need not suppose that there is just one possible narrative for how human beings’ struggles to articulate gender-​based oppression might succeed, and in a case like this, where no clear blueprint of justice is available, creatively testing out multiple possible strategies may be precisely what is called for. Notice how this view of the moral articulation of gender-​based oppression contrasts with two alternative views, which stand at opposite extremes. One interpretation involves the idea that humanity is, after a long learning process, recognizing and clearing away willful forms of ignorance concerning a set of ahistorical moral facts that condemn gender-​based violence. On this view, we might change, but morality does not. For example, Michele Moody-​ Adams (2004, 2017, 2022) argues that the fundamental moral concepts capable of condemning the subordination of women have always in principle existed (concepts like justice, equality, and dignity), yet we as a species have, for most of human history, either misinterpreted these concepts or failed to put them into practice. Living through large-​scale social revolutions, therefore, “does not (indeed cannot) teach anything fundamentally new about morality” (2004: 268). Her core conviction is a form of partial historicism: though our beliefs and practices may change, the underlying

Changing Our Nature  193 fundamental concepts of morality remain rationally available and metaphysically immutable. Contrast Moody-​ Adams’s interpretation with Robert Pippin (2008), who views the idea of immutable moral facts with skepticism. From his perspective, it is naïve to look at large-​scale moral revolutions and not think the underlying values have changed. Also discussing gender-​based oppression, Pippin writes, it is, at the very minimum, highly implausible that the right explanation for this change (and the right way to take account of it in a philosophical theory of normativity) is that someone or some group discovered a moral fact that had lain hidden for thousands of years, in principle accessible to human beings but unfortunately (for the thousands of generations involved) undiscovered. One could say the same thing about slavery, child labor, colonialism. (2008: 276)

Opposed as these views are, they nevertheless share a questionable supposition. Pippin’s rejection of “moral facts” is underwritten by the assumption that those facts must be construed in accordance with the immutability thesis, such that they stand outside history, laying “hidden for thousands of years.”32 Moody-​Adams’s insistence upon the ahistoricity of fundamental moral concepts is similarly structured by the immutability thesis, for it betrays the worry that objective moral criticism will lose its footing if the ground itself can shift. If historicized ethical naturalism is a genuine alternative, then we can recover a notion of moral objectivity with all the moral-​ critical power Moody-​Adams wants without sliding into the historically insensitive platonism Pippin views with skepticism. With

32 Pippin’s rhetoric also obscures the fact that the relevant moral facts were not just “unfortunately missed,” but actively suppressed or willfully ignored by patriarchal ideology.

194  MORAL ARTICULATION respect to gender-​based oppression, historicized ethical naturalism leaves room for the idea that morally salient facts preexist and justify moral criticism, for example, genuine experiences of suffering, humiliation, anger, and domination, which social efforts of articulation might contribute to uncovering, while maintaining that the ensuing linguistic and conceptual revolution involves a massive reshaping of basic human self-​conceptions and experiences, including how humans understand kinship, social reproduction, childcare, sex, gender, marriage, love, law, waged work versus housework, the private/​public distinction, notions of inequality, freedom, esteem, and respect. It holds that historical shifts as profound as this are not necessarily evaluable in relation to already existing forms of human flourishing but may articulate new ways of realizing a recognizably human life. To say that ethical features of our life-​form are rationally discursively constructed is to say neither that they are created ex nihilo nor that they may be shaped in any direction whatsoever, but that those features develop, in potentially new directions of flourishing, through their expression. Though I deny that this entails a fixed telos of human development, it does mean that the process of moral articulation does not invent ethical content from scratch. It must work upon rational considerations that are, in some sense, already there prior to their conceptualization. On the Aristotelian view just sketched, these “rational considerations” are neither transcendent platonic entities of the sort Cudworth and Clarke defended nor formal features of pure practical reason, but naturalistic considerations about what we need to survive, flourish, and be actualized. This leaves room for us to say, with Moody-​Adams, that rational considerations capable of condemning gender-​based oppression are at least as old as gender-​based oppression itself. For as soon as gender-​based oppression begins creating experiences of suffering, humiliation, anger, resistance, and counter-​ideological solidarity, it begins, precisely, attuning human beings to aspects of the sorts of living things they are that, emphatically, speak against

Changing Our Nature  195 such oppressive modes of social organization. Yet pace Moody-​ Adams, we are not bound by the immutability thesis, and hence are free to hypothesize that the features to which we thereby become attuned are not eternal, but, rather, deeply historical features of our own creaturely existence. We neither merely invent nor merely discover the conditions of our flourishing. Being human is a condition we articulate.

6 Moral Progress and Immanent Critique We put the truth into a conceptual picture because we feel it can’t be expressed in any other way; and then truth itself forces us to criticize the picture. —​Iris Murdoch, “Above the Gods” (1997: 506)

6.1.  An Inescapable Circularity? Having traced the basic arc of moral articulation, from its proto-​ discursive beginnings to its transformative role in the history of our life-​form, we may now return to the theme of moral progress. On our account, moral articulation helps constitute the very space of moral intelligibility within which we can judge instances of social change as morally progressive or regressive. Yet moral articulation is itself a form of social change and, hence, ought to be assessable in precisely those terms. A certain circularity seems imposed upon us here, given that a successful struggle for moral articulation will have a hand in shaping the very conceptual constellation we use to assess it. Now, this circularity can seem to pose an objection for our account, especially from the perspective of a tradition that demands a firmer, external criterion for the assessment of moral progress.1 I suspect, however, that this circularity is not 1 The question whether judgments of moral progress rely upon a foundation that could escape this kind of circularity is central in recent discussions of moral progress. Moral Articulation. Matthew Congdon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197691571.003.0007

Moral Progress and Immanent Critique  197 a philosophical problem that our theory must resolve, but rather a difficulty of reality that it must acknowledge:2 for if one of the aspects of ethical life we must continually strive to improve is our development of conceptual repertoires for making sense of it, and if judgments of moral progress draw upon those very repertoires, then this circularity is part of our condition as moral agents, not a paradox for a moral theory to try to solve or explain away. The task of this chapter, then, is not to show how we might escape the circle, but to explore the rational resources for critique and judgment that exist within it.3 Extending the arguments of previous chapters, I shall pursue the idea that judgments of moral progress and regress can take the form of a kind of immanent critique, one that renders the above-​mentioned circularity philosophically Often the issue is framed as the question of whether the possibility of moral progress presupposes a “realist” metaphysics or whether progressive social changes must be explained by reference to independently existing “moral facts” (for discussions see, e.g., Cohen 2010; Wilson 2010 and 2019; Arruda 2017; Rønnow-​Rasmussen 2017; Richardson 2018; Luco 2019; and Kitcher 2021). In other cases, the circularity issue is raised in terms of the need to develop a “non-​question-​begging” moral epistemology that can show why a social change is progressive not merely in light of our current beliefs, which are themselves a product of the change (see, e.g., Anderson 2014 and 2015). In still other cases, the question of circularity concerns whether judgments concerning moral progress presuppose that all morally progressive social changes are headed in the direction of a single telos (see, e.g., Honneth 2009). In connection with the discussion of the previous chapter, it is worth noting that a tacit commitment to the immutability thesis (§5.1) often structures these debates. For example, in a critique of realist approaches to moral progress, Catherine Wilson writes that the “moral realist says that when moral progress occurs, it does so because we have discovered some new facts—​that certain of the social arrangements and practices of our ancestors were morally wrong and have always been so” (Wilson 2019: 46). 2 I am borrowing the distinction between “difficulties of philosophy” and “difficulties of reality” from Diamond 2008. 3 In this respect, my account of moral progress shares the same starting point as Michele Moody-​Adams, who emphasizes that “we cannot recognize that some new conception constitutes moral progress unless it can be made intelligible as a defensible development in moral thinking” (Moody-​Adams 2004: 257). However, as I go on to explain, and as the preceding chapters already anticipate, my view of moral progress remains open to the possibility of genuinely new moral concepts in ways that Moody-​ Adams’s account forecloses. For example, she writes of the case of the development of the term, “sexual harassment,” “the progress of anti-​sexual harassment efforts cannot be traced to the articulation of new moral ideas, but to innovations in non-​moral language for describing the world to which familiar moral concepts like justice apply” (Moody-​ Adams 2017: 159). Cf. my reference to Moody-​Adams in §5.3, above.

198  MORAL ARTICULATION innocent, even as it poses real challenges for actual agents. I shall develop this point by presenting five theses concerning moral progress, emphasizing how each follows from arguments defended in the preceding chapters. These are, to anticipate, that (i) the rational resources for judging an instance of moral articulation as progressive or regressive are immanent to the social change itself; that (ii) such immanent resources exist at multiple points in time, some prior to, (iii) some only in the midst of, and (iv) some only after the social change takes place; and, finally, that (v) the moral progress of our moral concepts and vocabularies is ongoing and open-​ended. Though I present these as five distinct theses, we shall find that they are all variations on the overarching theme of immanence.

6.2.  Five Theses on Moral Progress (i) Rational resources for judging that a social change from A to B counts as morally progressive can be identified immanently, i.e., within local perspectives shaped by the historically and culturally concrete context of the social change itself. What I mean by “immanent” can be brought into relief via two contrasts.4 First, this 4 The following discussion is indebted, in significant respects, to Rahel Jaeggi (2009 and 2018), most notably her strategy of contrasting “immanent criticism” not only with “external criticism” but also with a superficially similar method she calls “internal criticism.” My view also shares several fundamental commitments with Jaeggi, including, at least, (a) the idea that the standard of immanent criticism is not fixed but evolves dynamically as part of the process itself (2018: 193), (b) a rejection of the idea that both the success of immanent criticism and the possibility of moral progress presuppose a fixed telos of moral development (211), (c) the notion that immanent critique is not merely reconstructive of old norms but transformative of both the norms and reality it criticizes (203–​4), and (d) her emphasis on the notion that immanent criticism is an experiential activity and a rational learning process (204 and Part IV passim). Nevertheless, the discussion of immanent criticism offered in this chapter diverges from Jaeggi’s in some key respects. Most importantly, I do not assume here that immanent criticism must take the specific and demanding form Jaeggi outlines, whereby what is at stake is the exhibition, analysis, and eventual sublation of a “systematic contradiction” between the norms constitutive of a social practice and their deficient actualization within that practice. For by the time some experience of dissonance can be formulated satisfactorily in terms of a contradiction, the work of moral articulation has already taken place, at least assuming

Moral Progress and Immanent Critique  199 contrasts with the idea that moral progress must be judged by appeal to rational resources that belong to some third perspective, C, that transcends, or is external to, the perspectives of both A and B. Perhaps the perceived appeal of a moral theory that includes the sort of ‘ahistorical core’ I criticized in Chapter 5 lies, in part, in its claim to have to provided such a perspective upon any instance of social change. On this sort of view, the judge of moral progress or regress would, first of all, endorse an independent standard of evaluation and then apply it, in a second step, to particular cases in a ‘top-​down’ fashion. A theorist who defends, say, a theory of the full rights of personhood in abstraction from concrete historical conditions, and then shows how B represents an improvement over A by using that theory as an independent standard, would be engaging in a form of external critique of this instance of social change (cf. Haslanger’s use of the “full rights of personhood” as a moral fact that can underwrite ideology critique, mentioned in Chapter 4, §§4.1 and 4.4). What makes it “external” is the conviction that the theory of rights that serves as our measuring stick is appreciable from a third perspective, C, that wholly transcends the historically concrete situations of A and B. By contrast, on the view I have been defending, the first-​personal perspectives of those actually engaged in struggles of moral articulation already contain rational resources for criticizing A and advocating an alternative that the conflicting terms of the contradiction can be expressed in propositional or discursive form (related to this point, see the distinction between contradiction-​based discursive breakdown and elusion-​based discursive breakdown in Chapter 1, §1.2). If the process of moral articulation itself is already a rational and critical activity, then we must find other rational resources for criticism that—​while neither merely “external” nor “internal”—​take other, more flexible and proto-​discursive forms than the form of systematic contradiction Jaeggi analyzes (a point I try to substantiate in theses [ii] through [iv], below). Moreover, even restricting ourselves to the level of fully discursive criticism, my view is that there exist forms of practical reasoning appropriate to this task that rely neither upon merely “internal” nor “external” standards yet also do not easily fit the contradiction-​based model Jaeggi advocates (see, especially, the discussion of “reasoning through transitions” in thesis [iv], below). In any case, nothing I say here requires that we reject the idea that the form of immanent criticism Jaeggi carefully elaborates is, indeed, a legitimate form of critique. It suggests, rather, that Jaeggi’s preferred method is just one—​albeit paradigmatic—​form of immanent criticism, not the form.

200  MORAL ARTICULATION state of affairs, without appealing to any such ahistorical or external standard. To anticipate, some of these resources can be found in A itself, prior to the social change in question (this will be the point of thesis [ii]); some will emerge in the midst of the social change (thesis [iii]), and some will only be available retrospectively, after the change has occurred and a new perspective opened up by B has been made available (thesis [iv]). That the standards for judging moral progress evolve and develop as the change itself takes place reflects the historically dynamic character of the process of moral articulation I have been exploring. Though I shall elaborate each of these points in the following theses, we can sum them up in roughly Hegelian fashion by saying that judgments concerning the morally progressive or regressive character of a social change from A to B can take the form of an immanent critique of its object.5 The second and less obvious contrast that brings out what I mean here by “immanent” concerns what Rahel Jaeggi refers to as the distinction between immanent critique and internal critique (Jaeggi 2009; 2018). “Internal critique” is similar to immanent critique in its lack of any appeal to an external standard that is applied, in a

5 Variations on the theme of “immanent criticism” are usually traced back to the dialectical method of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in which the efforts of consciousness to give an account of itself are measured, not by a standard introduced by a philosopher occupying a perspective outside this process, but standards arising within the process itself: “Consciousness provides its own criterion from within itself, so that the investigation becomes a comparison of consciousness with itself. . . . Consequently, we do not need to import criteria, or to make use of our own bright ideas and thoughts during the course of the inquiry” (Hegel 1977: §84). Hegel emphasizes, moreover, that the “criterion” consciousness provides for itself is not static, but evolves dynamically alongside the inquiry itself: “the criterion for testing is altered when that for which it was to have been the criterion fails to pass the test and the testing is not only a testing of what we know, but also a testing of the criterion of what knowing is” (§85). In very broad strokes, then, the view I elaborate here is roughly Hegelian insofar as judgments of moral progress do not try to assess a transition from A to B by appeal to a third, allegedly external standard, C, but by way of immanent criteria that reveal the need for or desirability of B within the transition out of A itself. Yet I say only “roughly” Hegelian since the precise details of Hegel’s method are both notoriously difficult and highly contested amongst his defenders. For example, if Hegel’s method requires a fairly demanding appeal to “systematic contradictions” and their sublation (as Jaeggi suggests; see footnote 4, above), the view I propose here will not precisely fit the Hegelian mold.

Moral Progress and Immanent Critique  201 top-​down fashion, to a particular instance of social change. Yet it differs from the sort of immanent critique at work in moral articulation insofar as it is dependent upon the explicitly avowed normative commitments and ethical beliefs that exist within a given community. That is, the method of internal critique is to show how some individual or community is not living up to standards or normative commitments that they themselves already avow. A criticism of a vegetarian who wears leather products for failing to live up to their own convictions, or a criticism of the hypocrisy of a society that publicly embraces a standard of “equality before the law” while perpetuating racist law enforcement practices would both qualify as instances of internal critique. Applying this to the case of judging moral progress, the idea would be that an internal critique of A reveals that those who live within a shared cultural horizon of value can better uphold their own avowed ethical convictions by undergoing a social change to B. While there may often be strategic advantages to employing this form of critique, it has serious limits given its reliance upon only those normative commitments already explicitly in circulation within a community.6 By contrast, the process of moral articulation described in the preceding chapters is concerned with developing new commitments and normative standards that are, precisely, not yet explicitly formulable or communicable given the discursive repertoires at large. As I have 6 For a discussion of both the strategic advantages and limits of internal criticism, see Jaeggi 2018: 183–​9. As Jaeggi explains, one advantage is that, at least in typical cases, internal criticism bypasses difficult questions about how the activity of criticism could have the power to motivate actual social change. Since internal critique appeals to standards that an individual or community already holds, pointing out their failure to realize those standards will, at least typically, be sufficient to motivate real change. A closely related advantage is that internal criticism can bypass difficult questions about its own normative justification. For the internal critic appeals only to standards that the individual or community under scrutiny already recognizes as valid. Yet even in cases where internal criticism is appropriate and useful, it presupposes a prior activity of articulation: “In many situations that call for internal criticism, even the norms themselves are given only more or less explicitly, and thus first have to be articulated and actualized by the critic” (Jaeggi 2018: 185). To put this in our own terminology, the activity of moral articulation is prior to and makes possible internal critique, and so the critical power of the former cannot be characterized simply in terms of the latter.

202  MORAL ARTICULATION detailed in the preceding chapters, it draws upon rational resources that are immanent within A—​from the initial experience of discursive breakdown that begins the process to the newly articulated aspects of the life-​form that emerge as results of the process—​albeit only in inchoate and fragmented form. In the technical vocabulary I am adopting here, then, the rational resources that moral articulation works upon are immanent, though not necessarily internal, to the context of the social change in question. This is important, for it allows for the possibility that moral articulation can develop new commitments and values that are transgressive with respect to the already held convictions of the social context it works within. I said earlier that the following four theses would all be elaborations of the first. In the cases of theses (ii) through (iv), this will involve specifying in more detail where the immanently arising rational resources for judging moral progress are to be found, and how they evolve and grow as the process moves forward. They will concern, respectively, the moments prior to, during, and after the social change in question. (ii) Some of the immanently arising rational resources for judging that a transition from A to B would qualify as morally progressive are already available prior to the social change in question. This is to say that we are sometimes in a valid epistemic position to apprehend something bad about conditions A, imagine a possible future alternative B, and judge that the future alternative would constitute a moral improvement over A, without yet having brough B into being. In practice this can be very difficult to realize, given the sorts of conditions that have been our focus throughout this book, namely, those in which the discursive repertoires that currently exist serve to suppress, rather than express, experiences that deserve our moral attention. When pernicious forms of ideology and epistemic injustice thwart individuals’ and groups’ capacities to express satisfactorily the moral significance of what they experience, what rational resources are available to them to criticize unjust conditions A and gesture toward improved conditions B prior

Moral Progress and Immanent Critique  203 to the shift itself? To answer this, we may assemble some claims from earlier chapters. First, there is the experience of discursive breakdown itself, which I portrayed in Chapter 1 not simply as a failure of our cognitive capacities, but as, in some cases at least, a rational response to the limits of our present discursive means. There was the important difference I noted between the boss insulting you without your recognizing any insult at all (and so the meaning of the act simply eludes you) and your harboring a cloudy sense that the boss has done something insulting that you cannot quite pin down (and so the meaning of the act is experienced as elusive) (§1.1). The latter experience involves a heighted form of self-​consciousness and a sensitivity to an elusive meaning worth pursuing, both of which are potential marks of a rational encounter with reality, despite the fact that it is only the person in the former case who experiences their discursive intellectual capacities as functioning smoothly (cf. our discussion of epistemically productive dissonance in Chapter 2, §2.3, above). Insofar as such experiences can occur for those living under conditions A prior to the transition to conditions B, they represent an important epistemic resource—​albeit one in need of development that will take the prolonged and difficult work of articulation to achieve—​that can spur on the work of criticizing present conditions and imagining better alternatives. Moreover, since these experiences are contained within the perspectives of those who live in A yet are also capable of rupturing and challenging the normative expectations they already explicitly hold, they can be understood along the lines of immanent, as opposed to internal, critical resources. Second, we can extend our earlier account of emotional articulation (Chapter 3) to include various forms of affect, for instance, painful experiences that are capable of making themselves felt and calling out for further articulation, prior to the sort of improvements in our moral vocabularies that would make them fully articulate. As proto-​discursive, they can be viewed as situated within the space

204  MORAL ARTICULATION of reasons without yet taking fully discursive form (§2.1). As such, they too represent rational resources that may exist immanently, as opposed to internally, within A. That acts of sexual harassment cause real and serious forms of suffering prior to the invention of the concept ‘sexual harassment’ is an example of this. For although the process of moral articulation is apt to transform the quality of an instance of suffering, the latter still possesses a normative significance and reality prior to the effort to invent new categories for its expression. There are, moreover, additional matters of fact concerning these painful experiences that preexist the shift to B which can contribute to the initial rational resources available as moral articulation begins, for example, facts concerning the material causes of an instance of suffering, the extent of its harmful effects, the ways in which it is caught up in broader patterns of suffering in others, the ways one’s social identity renders one more or less vulnerable to this sort of suffering, and so on. That conditions of ideology and epistemic injustice make these realities difficult to see and talk about does not render them any less real and immanent to the context being judged, and even under oppressive conditions, there always remains the possibility of oppositional standpoints arising that are capable of attending to them (§2.2).7 (iii) Some of the immanently arising rational resources for judging that a transition from A to B would qualify as morally progressive only become available during the social change itself. Earlier I quoted Alison Jaggar as speaking of a moral “subculture defined by perceptions, norms, and values that systematically oppose the prevailing perceptions, norms, and values” (Jaggar 1989: 160; see §3.4, above). We might use the idea of a moral subculture to refer to a certain middle stage in the process of moral articulation, which 7 On the idea of oppositional standpoints, see the discussions of “counterpublics” in Fraser 1990 and Haslanger 2021, critical anti-​racist standpoints in Mills 2017a, and resistant acts of imagination in Medina 2013. On the role that art and aesthetic experience can play in promoting oppositional standpoints, see Gooding-​Williams 2021 and Congdon 2021.

Moral Progress and Immanent Critique  205 arises between its initial beginnings in individual experience and its eventual successful creation of new, publicly intelligible and authoritative terms and concepts. Some, like Nancy Fraser and Sally Haslanger, have referred to this sort of alternative ethico-​politico-​ epistemic community as a “counterpublic,” because it enjoys aspects of the forms of communication, trust, and mutual intelligibility characteristic of a well-​functioning public sphere, while nevertheless operating against, and to some extent under the radar of, the norms of the hegemonic public sphere (Fraser 1990; Haslanger 2021). An example of such a moral subculture or counterpublic that we considered earlier was a feminist consciousness-​raising group, like the one in Ithaca, New York, where, in 1975, the concept ‘sexual harassment’ was born (Brownmiller 1990: 279–​94; Freedman 2002: chap. 12). Other examples might include a group of workers joined in solidarity by a union struggle, or, as I discussed earlier, what Charles Mills terms “the black alternative public sphere,” the establishment of black newspapers, scholarly journals, art, literature, and other spaces of discourse in which anti-​racist concepts and vocabularies would be developed, tested, and refined (Mills 2017a: 106; see §§2.2 and 2.3, above). The claim of this third thesis is that some of the rational resources for criticizing status quo A and promoting imagined alternative B only arise once this sort of moral subculture gets going, for the collective epistemic work and mutual trust that can arise within such groups enables forms of moral attention, self-​reflection, and insight that would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a solitary epistemic agent to accomplish on their own.8 Consider, for example, the realization that one’s latent sense of violation, which one had initially taken to be an isolated incident, or peculiar to one’s personal situation, is really part of a much broader and systemic pattern of moral injury against women. This is the sort of realization that can arise in the 8 On the theme of “intellectual self-​trust” and its role in helping to overcome conditions of epistemic injustice, see El Kassar 2020.

206  MORAL ARTICULATION midst of a struggle for moral articulation, as a moral subculture comes together in a space of mutual trust to voice experiences and forge links of solidarity and shared ethical purpose. The conceptualist social epistemology defended in Chapter 2 was intended, in part, to help defend this point. As I emphasized there, one of the main points of defending combined commitments to conceptualism and realism was to embrace the idea that the thoroughgoing social mediation of one’s orientation in the space of reasons is consistent with its being an orientation toward objective features of the world. The social mediation of one’s orientation within the space of reasons is, as I emphasized there, a double-​edged sword: while prevailing ideologies and forms of epistemic injustice in one’s social milieu can hide injustices from view, it is equally the case that the socially mediated reorientation provided by a moral subculture or counterpublic can open one’s eyes to value-​laden features of reality that one had previously missed or apprehended only dimly. The key point expressed by this third thesis is that the rational resources for critique are sometimes neither already available prior to the process nor simply results of the completed process, but rather become available in the undertaking of the process itself. There is a basic pragmatic point here: sometimes the best, or only, way to see that something works is to try to do it. And sometimes the best or only way to confirm that a certain standpoint allows one to see something more clearly is to try occupying that standpoint. (Compare this with how one finds the best place to stand in a room to judge whether a picture on the wall is level. One’s realization that one is in the best position coincides with one’s having put oneself there. There is no appealing, in this sort of case, to a standard external to one’s having tried and tested various standpoints and arrived at the best one.9) What the moral subculture or counterpublic provides is a space in which this testing-​by-​doing can be undertaken collectively in relative safety 9 I borrow this analogy from Taylor 1995.

Moral Progress and Immanent Critique  207 and trust. In these cases there is, in other words, no substitute for the actual testing out of new concepts and normative expectations in the midst of such spaces of shared trust and solidarity.10 (iv) Some of the immanently arising rational resources for judging that a transition from A to B qualifies as morally progressive are only available retrospectively, from points of view made possible by B. There is more than one way to elaborate this point. One way is to emphasize that, even when the conditions and norms of A are recognized by many as wrong and in need of improvement, it is not necessarily clear which alternative should take their place. It may often be that actually putting B to the test by implementing it and living through its benefits, burdens, and unpredicted side effects will provide us with the evidence we need that B is (or is not) an advance over A. Elizabeth Anderson (2014; 2015) has developed a version of this point under the banner of J.S. Mill’s notion of “experiments in living” (Mill 2015: 56). She explains, Social movements must offer alternatives to the norms they challenge. Those alternatives may contain defects not anticipated or appreciated by the movements themselves. Hence the ultimate test of moral progress must lie in critical reflection on the results of a social movement, in the experiences of those living under the new norms that an effective social movement establishes. (Anderson 2014: 14, emphasis added)

We may set aside Anderson’s strong claim that this is “the ultimate” test of moral progress and consider the more minimal claim that this is, at least, one important guide in judging moral progress. If critical reflection upon the results of a social movement is an important guide in judging moral progress, having the full results of the transition from A to B before our eyes will provide us with a 10 For a development of this point, see Haslanger’s account of the “epistemology of consciousness raising” in Haslanger (2021).

208  MORAL ARTICULATION greater quantity of evidence to work with in making our assessment. While this does not mean that we are simply without rational resources for criticizing A and promoting B before the transition is completed (as theses [ii] and [iii] urge), it does mean that a certain significant range of such resources will only be available retrospectively, once the transition in question has come to a close. It also means that assessments of moral progress in any particular case will be immanent in the sense identified in thesis (i). Focusing on the case of British abolitionism, Anderson illustrates her point by urging that, while decisive reasons for the abolition of slavery no doubt pre-​existed the success of abolition movements, “experience with the new institutions of (quasi-​) free labor that replaced slavery” offered further evidence that abolitionism’s cause was morally progressive, not only in what it criticized, but in the alternative social arrangements for labor that it promoted (Anderson 2014: 23). Anderson’s notion of “experiments in living” thus provides one way to substantiate thesis (iv), which emphasizes the retrospective character of judgments of moral progress. I am broadly sympathetic with Anderson’s contributions in this direction, as well as her careful use of detailed historical case studies to make her point. Yet I want to emphasize that moral articulation may open up yet another, more radical, way in which judgments concerning moral progress rest upon rational resources that become available only after the transition takes place. A successful struggle for moral articulation, beyond adding to the pool of rational resources available for supporting our judgments in a cumulative sense, may also offer a more fundamental reorientation of moral perspective concerning what does and does not strike us as a rational resource in the first place. It is not just that there is more moral evidence to see, but that how we see moral evidence has changed. If this thought is defensible, then it would represent a deeper way in which some of the immanently arising rational resources for judging moral progress are only available

Moral Progress and Immanent Critique  209 retrospectively, appreciable from points of view made possible by the change itself. To develop this latter form of retrospective moral judgment, I turn to Charles Taylor’s idea that practical reasoning often takes the form of reasoning through transitions (Taylor 1995). In contrast with the foundationalist assumption that comparative evaluations of A and B necessarily require reference to an external criterion, there exists a form of everyday practical reasoning, which focuses, rather, on the passage from A to B. At question in making such judgments is how well A and B deal with each other rather than with some external standard, C. If B puts us in a position to tell the history of A and our emancipation from it in a way that preserves A’s successes and insights while simultaneously exposing its failures and limits, and if we find it impossible to construct a similarly illuminating narrative that runs in the opposite direction, we may have all the epistemic resources we need (or can even hope for) to judge B as morally progressive over A. Though this form of judgment stops short of naming B the morally ‘best’ standpoint, it can conclude that, whatever the ‘best’ might be, B is an improvement over A.11 To illustrate how this form of practical reasoning might work, let us consider a concrete case of moral articulation, namely, the invention of the term “genocide,” showing why we have reason to judge the invention of the term a moral advance even if we restrict our normative criteria to those available solely within the history of the transformation itself.

11 The form of practical reasoning Taylor describes under the heading of “reasoning through transitions” finds similar expression in Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the role of dramatic narrative in explaining progress in scientific thinking: “The criterion of a successful theory is that it enables us to understand its predecessors in a newly intelligible way. It, at one and the same time, enables us to understand precisely why its predecessors have to be rejected or modified and also why, without and before its illumination, past theory could have remained credible. It introduces new standards for evaluating the past. It recasts the narrative which constitutes the continuous reconstruction of the scientific tradition” (1977: 460).

210  MORAL ARTICULATION Prior to the mid-​twentieth century, the word “genocide” did not exist. The neologism was invented in the winter of 1942 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who fled Nazi occupation.12 It was only in 1944 that the term became widely known and discussed, following its first appearance in print in Lemkin’s book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Lemkin 2008).13 Lemkin’s conviction that a new word was needed to express the systematic elimination of entire ways of life and ethnic traditions was part of a lifelong effort to reshape both moral attitudes and international law to reveal this as a distinctive sort of crime. What would later be named “genocide” was a crime that was not, he argued, adequately captured by existing and frequently used terms like “mass murder,” “atrocity,” and “war crimes.” “Mass murder” failed to capture what was distinctive about genocide, namely, that it was not just the destruction of a great number of individuals, but the concerted effort to eliminate a people united by ways of life and cultural traditions. “Mass murder” also obscured the fact that physical killing is only one technique of genocide, which can also be perpetrated by stripping a group’s members of the traditions, languages, religious practices, politics, economic subsistence, moral convictions, and other features that constitute their ethnic and cultural identity, as well as by their forced assimilation to a hegemonic culture. “Atrocity,” for its part, was too vague, being used to describe a wide range of horrific acts of war, including the cruel treatment of prisoners. “War crime” not only shared this problem of vagueness but also failed to account for the fact that genocide can take place in both times of war and peace. Lemkin’s own efforts to develop a better vocabulary for the distinctive moral wrong that these vocabularies missed began a decade earlier when, in 1933, he addressed an international law 12 The historical sketch offered in this and the following paragraphs draws from Korey 2001; Power 2013; and Irvin-​Erickson 2017. Where factual discrepancies (mostly concerning dates) arise between these sources, I have followed Irvin-​Erickson 2017. 13 There, Lemkin notes a second potential neologism, namely, “ethnocide” (2008: 79n1), though he does not make extended use of it.

Moral Progress and Immanent Critique  211 conference in Madrid, citing both Hitler’s ascent to power and the Ottoman Empire’s devastation of the Armenian people in World War I as events that required an expansion of existing legal terminology. There he proposed a law banning two practices which he then termed “barbarity” and “vandalism,” referring, respectively, to the premeditated destruction of a people and the premeditated destruction of works of art and culture of that people. Yet these terms, Lemkin himself later acknowledged, faced the same difficulties as others like “mass murder” and “atrocity,” in that their scope of conventional application was much wider than the specific crime he meant to name. Other terms that began to spring up in public discourse to describe Nazi acts struck Lemkin as similarly limited: “denationalization” fell short in that it only connoted deprivation of citizenship, while “Germanization” was both too culturally specific (from the beginning, Lemkin’s aim was to identify a name that would include, but not be limited to, the Nazi Holocaust) and implied merely that the Nazis’ sole technique was forced assimilation to an existing culture. There was also the need to combat the propagandistic language deployed by the Nazis themselves: for example, the euphemism of “resettlement” when defending their actions to an international audience and the sanitized language of a “solution” within their own ranks. These details alone demonstrate vividly how much the naming of an event matters morally, and how our struggles to name it are themselves an ethical activity. It also shows how facing up to an experience of discursive breakdown, rather than insisting on the sufficiency of one’s existing discursive practices, can be a rational response to the real limits of one’s language in the face of something that demands expression. Recalling a speech by Winston Churchill, in which the British prime minister declared, “We are in the presence of a crime without a name,”14 Lemkin became convinced that an entirely new word was required, one that was not

14 Originally an address broadcast by the BBC, quoted in Power (2013: 29).

212  MORAL ARTICULATION only unique but would immediately connote moral condemnation. The result was “genocide,” combining gen (from the Greek, meaning ‘race’ or ‘tribe’) and cide (from the Latin, caedere, ‘to kill’, creating easily understood resonances with more familiar terms connoting moral condemnation, like ‘homicide’). Lemkin defined it as “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves” (Lemkin 2008: 79). The new term spread quickly. By the end of 1944, it was appearing in newspapers, including a Washington Post editorial titled, simply, “Genocide.” By the 1950s, “genocide” had earned its place in Webster’s, the French Encyclopédie Larousse, and the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1948, a mere four years after the term first appeared in print, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. So, with the details of this instance of moral articulation in place, we can reraise our question: how might we arrive at the judgment that the invention of this term represents an instance of moral progress, without appealing to standards that transcend the transition from A to B itself? And how does the transition to B, that is, a newly expanded moral vocabulary that includes the term, “genocide,” open up a new perspective for judging the transition itself to be progressive that was not available prior to the transition itself?15 15 A couple caveats are needed here. First, in citing the invention of the term “genocide” as a successful instance of moral articulation and, hence, moral progress, my point is not to identify it as a total success or to deny that it has its own limits and ambiguities. Simply coining a new term does not put an end to the wrong it attempts to name. Nor did the invention of this particular term immediately galvanize the international community, as the passage of the UN genocide convention was both difficult and unevenly accepted. The term “genocide” itself, its definition, and its scope of applicability continues to be a subject of dispute among lawmakers and social scientists (Hinton 2002). Second, while Lemkin is rightly credited with coining the term, and his own individual efforts in promoting it should not go unrecognized, this instance of moral articulation remains emphatically social through and through. We may note, for example, that the success of the spread of the term relied upon the fact that those who controlled the “means of symbolic production” (Alexander 2004), such as newspapers and international lawmaking bodies like the UN, were willing to recognize and promote it.

Moral Progress and Immanent Critique  213 I said earlier that this sort of reasoning works by showing that we can form a narrative of our transition from A to B as one of various sorts of gain, such that both the successes and limitations of A are explicable from the perspective B, while a narrative running in the opposite direction cannot be accomplished (at least not, we might add, without self-​deceit or willful ignorance). This seems to be the case when we consider a comparison of moral vocabularies that exclude and include the term “genocide.” To simplify, let A refer to a perspective that attempts to view the events in question solely through the concept ‘mass murder’, and let B refer to a perspective that has gained the new concept, ‘genocide’. A does successfully articulate aspects of the events in question, namely, that physical extermination of human beings is occurring on a huge scale. Yet once the new perspective, B, becomes available, A’s successes can now be viewed in a fresh light as limited in important ways. For from the perspective of B, it is possible to view within one comprehensive framework not only the murders but also the more subtle efforts to eliminate a people, for example, laws forbidding Jewish-​owned businesses and shops, laws forbidding Aryan and non-​Aryan children from playing together, or laws declaring that Jewish people were no longer allowed to purchase soap or shaving cream.16 The point is not that it allows us to see more, but it allows us to forge fresh links, fresh patterns of connection, between what is seen. It allows us to see in a more subtly connected way. By contrast, a narrative running the opposite direction is less illuminating: it is difficult to see how viewing such events simply through the lens of ‘mass murder’ shines a fresh light on events that we had previously seen through the lens of ‘genocide’. The transition reveals itself to be a gain running from A to B and a loss running in the opposite direction. Beyond a certain point, it is unreasonable to pretend that the

16 These were laws passed in Berlin in the early 1940s. I take these examples from the “Places of Remembrance” memorial in Schöneberg, created by artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock.

214  MORAL ARTICULATION destruction of something beyond a collection of individual lives, namely, the destruction of a culture or people, is not at stake. A in this case loses the contest because of its inability to explain, in its own terms, the apparent successes of the shift to B, whereas B can explain, in its own terms, the phenomena successfully articulated within A as well as A’s limits. We can offer a narrative of the transition from A to B in terms of gains in our moral understanding, whereas a narrative running in the opposite direction would be a narrative of increased misunderstanding, ignorance, and loss. The asymmetry in A and B’s abilities to account for one another’s failures and successes can be a rational resource for the judgment that B is a moral improvement over A.17 Now, one might try to interpret this example in a way that shows it to be an example of external, rather than immanent, critique. On this interpretation, the success of the concept ‘genocide’ is demonstrated by appeal to independent facts, namely, the actual circumstances constituting genocide, which exist and ought to be named. When we compare two conceptual frameworks, one that excludes the concept ‘genocide’ and one that includes it, the latter is clearly an advance over the former by reference to this independent set of facts. Yet this interpretation depends on the idea that we have access to the facts independently of whatever conceptual frameworks we presently possess. It is, in other words, a version of the temptation to think we can “crawl under the net” of our 17 The gains we thereby identify in the transition from A to B, moreover, must be intelligible as such from the perspectives of agents engaged in that very transition, for otherwise we forfeit this method’s claim to immanence. If we describe a narrative running from A to B in positive terms, say, as “illuminating,” “crisis-​resolving,” or leading to “increased understanding,” we should understand these as epithets of praise that actual agents embedded within the transition might conceivably use to describe it, and their use of those epithets can only refer to qualities of the narrative that are available from their point of view. Otherwise, we risk hypostatizing qualities like being ‘illuminating’, ‘crisis-​resolving’, or leading to ‘increased understanding’ as abstract criteria that return us to the sort of external criticism we were trying to avoid. ‘Illumination’ or ‘crisis-​ resolution’ as such cannot be the criteria we are looking for, but rather, illumination and crisis-​resolution as concrete qualities embedded within the specific transition in question.

Moral Progress and Immanent Critique  215 concepts, criticized in §2.2, above. Both A and B purport to provide us with access to the facts, and so the attempt to adjudicate between them by providing a third perspective, C, which claims to have a more perfect take on the facts than either only succeeds in adding one more disputant into the mix. Moreover, this interpretation relies on a conception of the function of moral words as aiming solely to refer to independently existing moral realities, a picture that this book has tried to complicate. New moral words do not just increase the scope of the realities we can identify, as if progress in moral language were simply a matter of filling in the details on a map (see our critique of the idea that concepts “map” a nonconceptual reality in §2.2). Rather, new moral words can offer fresh orientations of vision. As Iris Murdoch puts it, “moral concepts are . . . deep moral configurations of the world, rather than . . . lines drawn round separable factual areas” (Murdoch 1997: 95). I gestured toward this idea a moment ago when I drew a distinction between a moral change’s increasing the moral considerations there are to see and changing the way we see moral considerations. The development of the term ‘genocide’ is an instance of the latter sort of transformation, which we can understand as a transformation of moral vision or attention (Murdoch 1971). It is in such cases, I have been arguing, that the identification of some new perspective as an improvement over the old is inseparable from the achievement of that very perspective. What will count as a relevant consideration when we view an event through the lens of the concept ‘mass murder’ will be different than when we view it through the lens of ‘genocide’, because only the latter includes the idea of the destruction of a people’s ways of life and ethnic traditions, beyond the destruction of the individuals who make it up. The new conceptual framework of genocide offers not just a new name for events we already apprehended, but a new way of orienting ourselves toward and apprehending those events. It is this sort of reorientation that allows us to view our own history in a different light as the concept is employed beyond the initial

216  MORAL ARTICULATION historical context of its invention: as in, for example, its use to articulate the “slow motion Holocaust of American slavery” (Mills 1997: 99), the “forgotten Holocaust of Nanjing” (Alexander and Gao 2012: 119), or the genocide of Indigenous communities in the Americas (Cave 2008). It matters very much how an atrocity is labeled. If genocide is re-​packaged to the international community as a “tragedy” or a “civil war,” it may greatly shape the sorts of practical response and forms of empirical evidence that are considered relevant and appropriate to it. In these ways, concepts like ‘genocide’ are more than labels. They are orientations of vision. At this point, a certain kind of skeptic will raise the worry that some people may come along who are fully convinced of the narrative that runs from B to A. Worse, those people already exist. They are called genocide deniers. How could our effort to demonstrate the superiority of B over A via reasoning through transitions convince the likes of them? And what prevents them from using precisely the same form of reasoning to defend their own position? Doesn’t this show that, absent some independent, external criterion that transcends A and B, this way of arguing is impotent? Though very real, that this can and does occur does not undermine the claim that reasoning through transitions is genuinely rational or critical. What it shows is a limit to any form of reasoning. The power of argument to convince others, especially those who stubbornly maintain forms of willful ignorance and self-​deceit, or who buy into ideological historical narratives, will always be limited. More importantly, however, it is difficult to see why, even if an external criterion C was somehow discovered and applied to the dispute, it would have to be accepted by both sides, or why one side couldn’t offer a twisted interpretation of C that served its own interests. External critique, if it is even possible, is just as vulnerable to corruption, co-​opting, and forced stalemates as the form of immanent critique I am advocating here. But I am also inclined to follow Taylor in his skepticism of the very possibility of such critique:

Moral Progress and Immanent Critique  217 The bad model of practical reasoning, rooted in the epistemological tradition, constantly nudges us towards a mistrust of transition arguments. It wants us to look for ‘criteria’ to decide the issue, i.e., some considerations which could be established even outside the perspectives in dispute and which would nevertheless be decisive. But there cannot be such considerations. My perspective is defined by the moral intuitions I have, by what I am morally moved by. If I abstract from this, I become incapable of understanding any moral argument at all. (Taylor 1989: 73)

The retrospective justification of an instance of moral articulation, understood as a form of reasoning through transitions, is like this. It begins from the intuitions we have but does not rest content with those intuitions in their initial, inchoate, fragmented state. It develops them into new forms of understanding, the full significance of which only becomes evident once we adopt the new perspectives that moral articulation makes possible. This last point also helps explain why this example resists interpretation as an instance of internal, rather than immanent, critique. Interpreted as merely internal critique, the success of the transition to B is demonstrated by showing that the creation of the concept ‘genocide’ brings members of A closer in line with explicitly avowed commitments and ethical beliefs that already existed within that community. The invention of the concept ‘genocide’, in other words, would be interpreted as part of a slow ironing out of internal contradictions between what this community claims to value and its actual modes of social organization. However, this can be, at best, only part of the story. For if a new moral concept like ‘genocide’ is not, as I just put it, a mere label, but a potential reorientation of moral vision, then the acquisition of such a concept will involve, not merely a better sense of how best to bring our practices in line with normative commitments we already had, but, at least potentially, the realization of new ones. As Jaeggi puts it,

218  MORAL ARTICULATION Insofar as internal criticism refers to internal contradictions within an existing social order, its aim is to (re)establish an agreement, hence to restore a previous state. As a result, internal criticism is by its very nature conservative (in the structural sense, not necessarily in a political sense). In other words, it is not dynamic and not transformative. It does not seek to transform the status quo, but to help it realize itself. (Jaeggi 2018: 187, emphasis in the original)

We need not deny that internal criticism played some role in this historical case. In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin himself draws upon the method of internal criticism in order to urge defenders of international law to adopt the new concept, ‘genocide’. For example, he argues that the new term and conception will better allow nations to defend already widely accepted norms (enshrined in existing Hague regulations) prohibiting the harming of non-​ combatants in war (Lemkin 2008: 80). This follows the method of internal critique insofar as Lemkin urges that adopting the new concept and term, “genocide,” will bring the practices of an international community committed to upholding such norms closer to their own explicitly held ideals. Yet as soon as we acknowledge that the creation and widespread adoption of a concept like this might bring about any of the manifold sorts of dynamic and transformative effects that have been the theme of this book, the model of internal critique will start to look insufficient. As sociologist Jeffrey Alexander puts it, the articulation of new ways of speaking about genocide is part of complex historical process whereby a set of specific and situated historical events “become transformed into a generalized symbol of human suffering and moral evil, a universalized symbol whose very existence has created historically unprecedented opportunities for ethnic, racial, and religious justice, for mutual recognition, and for global conflicts to be regulated in a more civil way” (Alexander 2004: 197).18 The model of internal 18 For detailed anthropological writings, case studies, and ethnographies that lend support to the idea of such dynamism and transformation in the aftermath of

Moral Progress and Immanent Critique  219 criticism cannot abide such dynamism, whether restricted to our normative outlooks and socio-​epistemic practices (the theme of Chapters 1–​3) or expanded to our ethical features of our life-​form more broadly (the theme of Chapters 4–​6). Reducible to neither merely external nor merely internal criticism, moral articulation follows the model of immanent criticism. (v) The process of moral articulation is ongoing and open-​ended. Can there ever be a state of full moral articulacy? To the extent that we could imagine it, to admit this possibility would mean that some moral agent could finally develop a moral vocabulary capable of expressing the full moral significance of all their experiences with undiminished clarity and authority. Their discursive intellect would admit of no lack when it came to questions concerning human flourishing and suffering, and if any interlocutor failed to understand their moral utterances, the fault would lie entirely on the side of the hearer. In short, one would have achieved as a personal condition the sort of picture I criticized in earlier chapters as philosophically flawed, namely, one in which moral meaning is discursively articulable all the way down. There are many reasons to be skeptical of such a possibility, but it may be helpful to specify just what my reasons are (and are not) for rejecting it. In particular, I want to emphasize that my reasons for rejecting the possibility of full moral articulacy are not merely based on a recognition of the epistemic limitations of actual agents. For such reasons leave in place the idea that full moral articulacy remains an intelligible condition in theory, albeit one that no finite moral agent could ever attain—​and this is a picture I want to reject. That is, one might hold that full moral articulacy is impossible in actuality, given that we are finite creatures with limited capacities for moral awareness and reflection, but nevertheless maintain that it can continue to serve as a kind of regulative ideal, a state that, Lemkin’s efforts, see the essays collected in Hinton 2002 and Eyerman, Alexander, and Breese 2013.

220  MORAL ARTICULATION though impossible to attain here and now, provides us with a goal worth striving toward. It is sometimes held that a regulative ideal along roughly these lines is an inescapable presupposition when we judge that a social movement is headed in a morally progressive (or regressive) direction.19 We might then hold that a state of full moral articulacy represents the regulative, hypothetical endpoint of all struggles for moral articulation, while stressing that this endpoint remains forever unattainable for finite beings like us. Without wishing to deny our epistemic finitude, the picture of moral articulation I have been defending militates against this regulative picture in at least two ways. First, if our life-​form is not a transhistorically fixed object, and can undergo historical change, sometimes in response to our very efforts to articulate it, then moral truth becomes something of a moving target. As such, “full moral articulacy” cannot be figured as a state of rest, as a hypothetical endpoint of the history of moral articulation, because there is no such endpoint. In other words, if the historicized picture of ethical objectivity defended in Chapters 4 and 5 is defensible, then the reasons for rejecting the possibility of full moral articulacy are not merely epistemic, but metaphysical as well. We could frame this in terms of there being a dialectical relation between our acts of articulation and the historically evolving world they strive to articulate. Historically new shapes of the life-​form create the need for new moral concepts, insofar as they involve new kinds of social relations, new ways of hurting and helping each other, and new possibilities for suffering and flourishing. This generates new experiences that cry out to be communicated to others, and thus puts pressure on our existing moral vocabularies. The development

19 Axel Honneth, for example, defends the idea that a hypothetical endpoint of moral history that indicates the general direction in which all morally progressive social struggles are headed is an unavoidable assumption for a social critic who wishes to maintain a commitment to the idea of moral progress (Honneth 1995: 171; Honneth 2002: 508–​9; Honneth 2007b: 332). For a critique of Honneth on this point, see Congdon 2020.

Moral Progress and Immanent Critique  221 of new moral concepts, along with other historical forces, can contribute to the formation of new historical shapes of the life-​form. As a result of this dynamic, even when we do our epistemic best, the development of new moral concepts is perpetually late on the scene, always struggling to catch up to a reality developing anew. The second reason for resisting the idea that a picture of full moral articulacy should serve as a regulative ideal is that it misleadingly suggests that there is, in each concrete struggle for moral articulation, one right way to be successful. I doubt that this is true, and throughout this book have tried to emphasize that the realist orientation of moral articulation is compatible with a high degree of human creativity and unpredictability in developing new moral vocabularies. To speak in terms of growth and maturation, as I have here, may seem to come along with strong teleological commitments, as if a ‘full’ realization of human value is already present in potentia within present conditions, the way a full-​grown oak is sometimes said to be implicit within an acorn. However, the standard of maturation at work here does not have to be spelled out in terms of a fixed telos of moral historical development, located in a “hypothetical endpoint of moral history” (Honneth 1995: 171). Rather, on the view defended here, a plurality of forms of maturation may be possible for any given stage in moral historical development. Notice that this is consistent with our ordinary uses of the concepts of maturation and growth. We ordinarily speak of someone as having “matured” in their outlook, without implying that their current outlook, shaped as it is, is the only possible form this maturation could have taken. Likewise, we speak of an artist’s sensibilities as having “matured” in a more sophisticated direction without supposing a single trajectory for their artistic career. Similarly, we are capable of judging the new term “genocide” as an advance without supposing that this term, or the particular definitions that have been assigned to it, represent the only ways in which an advance could have been made in our moral vocabularies with respect to the moral horrors the new term names. If we are

222  MORAL ARTICULATION pressed to explain how such judgments are possible in the absence of a regulative ideal or hypothetical endpoint of full moral articulacy, we can point to the many immanently arising rational resources discussed in theses (i) through (iv). In the face of those resources, the demand for a single telos of full moral articulacy loses its appearance of urgency. If the aim of moral articulation is not a hypothetical endpoint of full moral articulacy, we are free to rest content with a more mundane picture of its successes and failures. Not an infinite striving for a state of perfection, but always a local and piecemeal struggle to improve our powers of moral expression regarding this or that concrete moral experience, moral articulation is an ongoing and open-​ended activity that is often complete in itself. That the coining and widespread acceptance of the terms “sexual harassment” and “genocide” offer new and better orientations for our attention is sufficient to call them instances of moral progress without claiming for them any final or unimpeachable status. And if we should be cognizant of the real limits facing our efforts of moral articulation, the ones that truly deserve our vigilance are the ones we should strive to overcome, rather than any a priori limits set by our epistemic finitude. I am thinking, for example, of the sorts of epistemic injustice and ideology discussed in previous chapters, but also the much broader range of human frailties that make the pursuit of goodness so difficult, such as selfish fantasy, complacency, or the sort of pessimistic misanthropy that sometimes masquerades as critical thought. If a particular struggle for moral articulation has a telos, it is not given by a fixed endpoint, but is a fragile projection of imagination, hope, and the bonds of solidarity that support it.

Conclusion In this book, I have been painting a portrait of moral articulation, the process of creating new concepts and linguistic capacities in response to previously inarticulate ethical experiences. The philosophical interest of this effort derived, in part, from the challenge it poses to two often tacit assumptions that orient much of contemporary ethical theory. First, against the assumption that moral significance is discursive all the way down, careful attention to the process of moral articulation demonstrates that the rational growth and maturation of our moral discursive capacities rests upon a wider picture of moral meaningfulness as irreducible to discursive or linguistically explicit form. The early chapters of this book (Chapters 1–​3) were aimed at making this point, showing how the process of articulating latent senses of importance rests on meanings that confound our discursive capacities while nevertheless engaging us rationally. The point of this critique was not to turn our attention away from the importance of discursively formulable moral meanings, but to show how such meanings have proto-​discursive origins. Second, against the immutability thesis, the assumption that an objective theory of morality requires an ahistorical core of unchanging moral facts, the picture of moral articulation presented here demands a thoroughly historical picture of objective morality. The later chapters of this book (Chapters 4–​6) have been dedicated to showing how this is possible without lapsing into uncritical historicism, in large part by demonstrating that at least one familiar and venerated tradition in normative ethics, one centered on the notion of human flourishing, can be understood as historically open-​ended in this way. Moral Articulation. Matthew Congdon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197691571.003.0008

224  MORAL ARTICULATION These critical points may be viewed as two aspects of a more fundamental lesson that this investigation of moral articulation aspires to impart. This is that we go profoundly wrong when, in doing moral philosophy, we start with situations and dilemmas whose descriptions are treated as if they were mere givens, or as if the activity that produced those descriptions was a mere precursor to the ‘real’ moral work. Being able to describe the world such that moral situations and dilemmas arise in the first place is itself the result of a historically extended, difficult, and continually ongoing activity of articulation that is an ethical task in its own right. If it is right to say, as I argued in Chapter 1, that many of the most familiar questions posed in contemporary moral philosophy only arise once moral thought and practice have taken explicitly discursive shape, then we have a situation in which moral thought fails to investigate its own origins and conditions of possibility, which lie in the prior activity of forging, from the fragments of elusive experience, a working moral vocabulary. What is at stake is an appreciation of the ethical task of crafting new words, new perspectives, and new ways of being in the world. This task is continually at stake for us: both as individuals striving to grow and learn and as a species continually striving to put into words what it is to be human.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Adorno, Theodor W., 36n.22 agency contrasting ideals of, 34–37, 34n.21, 36n.22 mediating role in experience of, 19–20, 20n.2, 59, 71–72 Alcoff, Linda Martín, 15–16n.19, 50–51, 66, 78n.25 Alexander, Jeffrey, 218–19 Alshanetsky, Eli, 9n.15 Althusser, Louis, 121n.6 Anderson, Elizabeth, 207–9 anger. See resentment Anscombe, Elizabeth, 31–32, 31n.17, 33–34n.20, 54n.39, 178n.15 Aristotle, 61n.6, 169–70 Aristotelian approaches in ethics. See ethical naturalism articulation (as contrasted with description), 8–9, 14, 46–51, 52–54, 65, 111–12, 143–44, 182–83 expressive logic of, 2–3, 8–12, 45–53, 90–92, 117–18, 120, 182, 185, 188–89 formal features of, 143–61 of a life-form, 182–95 misarticulation, 47–49, 140–41, 149 model of emotion, 13, 89–90, 95– 96, 105–16, 117–18, 155–56

Taylor on, 8–9, 46–49, 48n.32, 49n.35, 51, 54n.38, 111–12, 141–42, 143–44 autonomy, 112   Bazin, André, 42n.30 Bicycle Thieves (film), 41–45 Bird, Caroline, 1–2 Bradley, F.H., 80n.29 Brandom, Robert, 24–26, 54n.38, 78n.25 Brewer, Talbot, 36n.23 Brownmiller, Susan, 96–97 Buck-Morss, Susan, 190n.29 Butler, Bishop, 92–94, 93n.6, 104–5, 105n.24 Butler, Judith, 117–18n.34   Cavell, Stanley, 141n.25 child abuse, 1–2, 2n.1, 124–30, 172, 172–73n.9 Clarke, Samuel, 165–66, 194–95 climate crisis, 1–2, 2n.1 cognitivism in metaethics, 31n.14 cognitive-evaluative theories of emotion. See emotion coherence (as a normative standard), 78–82, 80n.29 colonialism, 73–74 concepts, 57–85 conceptualism, 12–13, 78n.25, 82–83, 84n.36, 206–7

240 Index concepts (cont.) conceptual mediation, 19–20, 20n.2, 57–85 conceptual scheme, 28–29, 37–47, 37–38n.26, 48–51, 75–77, 80–82, 121–23 thick versus thin, 4n.5, 159n.36 consciousness raising, 86–88, 96–97, 116, 189–91, 204–6 Cormier, Henry, 78n.25 ‘counterpublics,’ 4–6, 65, 65n.9, 83n.34, 204–7 Crary, Alice, 15–16n.19, 53n.37, 58n.2, 68n.15, 77n.23, 155n.33, 173n.10, 177n.14 critique, 74–85, 121–25, 129–30, 144 external, 196–97, 198–200, 198– 99n.4, 209, 214–15, 216–17 immanent, 15–16, 141–42, 150– 52, 197–219, 198–99n.4 internal, 200–2, 201n.6, 203–4, 217–19 Cudworth, Ralph, 165, 166, 194–95   Dancy, Jonathan, 30–31n.13 Darwall, Stephen, 104n.23 Davidson, Donald, 78n.26 description (as contrasted with articulation), 8–11, 14, 46–47, 48–49, 50–51, 111–12, 143–44, 182–83, 185, 188–89 de Sica, Vittorio. See Bicycle Thieves ‘dialectical activities,’ 36n.23 Diamond, Cora, 59n.4, 197n.2 Dieleman, Susan, 78n.25, 80–82 ‘differend,’ 41n.29 discourse. See language discursive breakdown, 11–12, 18–45, 51, 53–54, 56–57, 89–90, 200–2, 203 contradiction-based, 26–28, 29n.10, 78–79, 86n.38 elusion-based, 26–29, 86n.38

discursive construction, 13–14, 119–62, 163–64 causal, 13–14, 120, 124–25, 129–30 rational, 13–14, 52–53, 120, 124–25, 130–43, 144, 148–52, 154–56, 181–82, 191–92, 194–95 discursive mediation (as contrasted with conceptual mediation), 20n.2, 57–70 See also concepts; language discursive theories of meaning, 9–11, 23–37, 44–46, 52–55, 109–10n.27, 219, 223 dissonance, 21–22n.3, 22–23, 26, 56–57, 77–78, 85–88, 116, 154n.32, 198–99n.4, 203 domestic violence, 1–2, 2n.1, 66 Dover, Daniela, 135n.18 Du Bois, W.E.B., 21–22n.3   elusiveness, 19–21, 26–29, 29n.10, 35, 36n.23, 37–38, 42n.31, 43–44, 47–48, 52–53, 63–64, 85–86, 86n.38, 89–90, 108–9, 111–13, 114–15, 161, 198– 99n.4, 203, 224 emotion, 13, 59, 89–118, 152, 155– 56, 157–59, 183–88, 191–92 articulation model of, 13, 89–90, 95–96, 105–16, 117–18, 155–56 cognitive-evaluative theories of, 13, 90, 94n.9, 106–9 ‘outlaw emotions’, 94–95, 95n.13, 115–16 See also gratitude; grief; humiliation; resentment emotivism, 4n.5, 186n.24 epistemic injustice, 202–4, 205n.8, 206–7 ‘epistemological crisis’, 21–22n.3

Index  241 ‘epistemology of ignorance’, 73 ethical life, 10n.17, 15–16, 18–19, 31n.15, 35–37, 51, 70, 81–82, 120, 144, 148–49 ethical naturalism, 14, 124–25, 147–49, 151–52, 162, 163–64, 169–70, 171–95 exploitation, 42–43, 61–62   ‘family resemblances’, 60n.5 ‘feedback loop’, 67–69, 121–25, 127, 128, 128n.13, 129–30, 134–35, 136–37, 148–49, 161–62 feminist philosophy, 15–16, 26n.7, 66, 67n.13, 84n.36, 116, 189–90 feminist epistemology, 21–22n.3, 82n.33, 90–92 feminist theories of emotion, 90–95, 96–100 Flavin, Jeanne, 122–23, 123n.10, 145–48, 150–51, 160 Foot, Philippa, 14, 169, 171–76, 172–73n.9, 174n.11, 176n.12, 176n.13, 177n.14, 178–79, 180–82 Forster, E.M.. See Maurice Foucault, Michel, 6–7, 6–7nn.10–11 Fraser, Nancy, 185n.23, 204–6 Frege, Gottlob, 23–24n.5 Frey, Jennifer, 169n.6 Fricker, Miranda, 15–16n.19, 38n.27, 86–88, 97n.16, 139n.24   Gattungswesen. See species-being gender-based oppression, 30– 31n.13, 61–62, 66, 66–67n.12, 125–26, 190–95 genocide, 1–2, 2n.1, 4–6, 209–19, 212n.15 Gooding-Williams, Robert, 15– 16n.19, 73n.19, 204n.7 gratitude, 117–18

grief, 90–92, 107–8, 109–10n.27, 113n.31, 117–18, 117–18n.34   Haase, Matthias, 169n.6 Hacker-Wright, John, 169n.6, 173n.10, 181n.19 Hacking, Ian, 8n.14, 13–14, 121–22, 124–30, 128n.13, 142, 151–52 Hare, R.M., 29–30 Haslanger, Sally, 13–14, 80n.30, 116n.33, 120n.3, 121–24, 130–32, 134–35, 144, 158, 160, 204–6 hate speech, 1–2, 2n.1, 172 Hegel, G.W.F., 10–11nn.17–18, 48n.32, 78n.25, 157n.35, 170n.7, 190n.29, 200n.5 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 48n.32 historicism, 9–11, 11n.18, 14, 128– 29, 135, 142–43, 179, 223 partial, 168–69, 192–93 thorough, 168–69, 170n.7, 173– 74, 177, 179, 181n.19, 223 Honneth, Axel, 11n.18, 15–16n.19, 104n.23, 187n.25, 196–97n.1, 220n.19 humiliation, 144–45, 146–47, 158– 59, 183–88 Hursthouse, Rosalind, 169, 170n.7, 171, 173–74, 173n.10, 176n.13   ideology, 12–13, 35–37, 72, 72n.18, 73–75, 77–78, 121–23, 142–43, 144–45, 149–50, 153–54, 161, 202–4, 206–7 counter-ideological activity, 122, 152, 153–54, 157–58, 189–92 immanent critique. See critique immutability thesis, 9–11, 14, 120, 164–70, 193, 194–95, 196– 97n.1, 223

242 Index Jaeggi, Rahel, 15–16n.19, 79n.28, 141–42, 198–99n.4, 200–2, 201n.6, 217–18 Jaggar, Alison, 94–95, 95n.13, 115– 16, 204–6 judgements emotion as involving, 90, 106–8, 109–11, 109–10n.27 natural historical, 182–85 of natural versus secondary goodness, 175–76, 177n.14 perception as involving, 25–26, 25n.6, 58n.2 propositional form and, 23, 23– 24n.5, 25–26, 25n.6, 30–31n.13, 46, 52–53, 54n.38, 57–58, 65   Kant, Immanuel, 4–6, 20n.1, 23–24n.5, 33, 79n.28, 124n.12, 166–69, 180n.17 Kitcher, Patricia, 11n.18 Korsgaard, Christine, 34n.21, 173n.10   language concepts and, 57–70 expressive theories of, 48n.32 genealogy of morals and, 6–7 limits of (see discursive breakdown) meaning and, 23–28 metaethics and, 29–31 Murdoch on, 21–22n.3, 184n.21 Wittgenstein on, 15–16, 48n.32 See also articulation; description; discursive breakdown; discursive construction; discursive mediation; discursive theories of meaning; judgments Leet, Pauline M., 1–2 Lemkin, Raphael, 1–2, 210–12, 218–19

life-form, 148–49, 169, 171–95, 200–2 articulation, 183, 185, 188–90, 194–95 description, 183, 185 ‘loopy’ phenomena. See ‘feedback loop’ Lorde, Audre, 95n.13 Lovibond, Sabina, 11n.18, 15– 16n.19, 159–60, 185n.22 Lugones, María, 97–99 Lyotard, Jean-François, 41n.29   MacIntyre, Alasdair, 11n.18, 15–16n.19, 21–22n.3, 157n.35, 170n.7, 209n.11 MacLachlan, Alice, 95n.13 Manne, Kate, 31–32 Marx, Karl, 6n.9, 170n.7 mass murder, 210–11, 213–14, 215–16 Maurice (E.M. Forster), 124–25, 133–35, 133n.17, 137–43, 138–39nn.21–24, 144, 147–48, 149, 150–51, 153–58, 183–85, 186–88, 189–90 maxim, 33–34n.20, 34 McDowell, John, 15–16n.19, 17n.21, 20n.1, 30–31n.13, 58n.2, 62n.8, 65n.10, 72, 76–58nn.21–2, 82n.33, 170n.7, 173n.10, 179n.16 metabiological meanings, 117– 18n.34, 156n.34, 183–86, 186n.24, 188–89, 188n.26, 189n.28 microbiome, 182–83 Mills, Charles, 5n.7, 15–16n.19, 72–75, 78n.25, 79n.28, 82–85, 83n.35, 84n.36, 87–88, 116, 122n.8, 122–23n.9, 189–90, 204–6 Moody-Adams, Michele, 168n.5, 192–95, 197n.3

Index  243 Moore, G.E., 29–30 ‘moral facts’, 31n.15, 120, 120n.3, 122–25, 128–30, 142–43, 144, 147–49, 150, 161–62, 192–93 moral progress, 14–15, 141n.26, 151–52, 196–222 moral subculture (moral avantgarde), 4–6, 115–16, 154, 161, 189–90, 204–7 Müller, Jan, 170n.7 Murdoch, Iris, 15–16n.19, 20n.1, 21–22n.3, 22–23, 30n.12, 37–41, 49n.33, 75–77, 75n.20, 129n.14, 159n.36, 184n.21, 215 Murphy, Jeffrie G., 93n.7 ‘Myth of the Given’, 25–26, 75n.20   natural history, 159, 171–82 necessity in ethics, 124n.12, 177–79 Ng, Karen, 147n.29, 173n.10, 177n.14 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6–7, 7n.11 normative outlook, 59, 71–72, 75–77, 76n.21, 82–84, 89–90, 94–95, 99–100, 101, 104–5, 106–7, 112–13, 116, 117–18, 155–56, 183–85 Nussbaum, Martha, 13, 90–91n.2, 95–96, 95n.12, 101–2, 102n.19, 102n.20, 103, 103–4n.22, 106–8, 109–10n.27, 110n.28, 112–13, 114–15   Paltrow, Lynn M., 122–23, 123n.10, 145–48, 150–51, 160 particularism, 33n.19 Pippin, Robert, 78n.25, 193–94 Plato, 133, 138–39, 140–41, 157 pragmatism, 9n.16, 11n.18, 78–82 ‘priority of the propositional’, 25–26, 32–33, 54n.38

prior norm requirement, 94, 95–96, 100–6, 116–17 promising, 174–76 propositions. See judgments proto-discursivity, 18–19, 21–28, 31–32, 35–38, 43–46, 47–49, 52–55, 58–59, 65, 69–70, 86–87, 89–90, 108–9, 111–13, 196–97, 203–4, 223   racism, 1–2, 2n.1, 72, 73n.19, 74, 79–80, 83–85, 98–100, 122–23, 145 Railton, Peter, 34n.21 Raz, Joseph, 11n.18, 168n.4 realism in ethics, 2–3, 9n.16, 11n.18, 15–16n.19, 31n.15, 52, 81–84, 83n.35, 87, 124–25, 128, 142–43, 174n.11, 196– 97n.1, 206–7, 221–22 ahistorical, 124–25, 128, 142–43, 164–70 anti-, 31n.15, 48n.32, 50–51, 78–83, 78n.25, 186n.24 historicized, 9–11, 11n.18, 15–16n.19, 16–17, 52, 142–43, 173–74, 177–79, 193–94, 220–21 ‘reasoning through transitions’, 209–19 Reid, Thomas, 92–94, 104–5 resentment, 7n.12, 13, 89–118, 186–88 norm-creative, 94–100, 102–3 norm-defensive, 95–96, 106–7, 116 ruminative, 108–11, 115 ‘settled’, 105n.24 ‘sudden’, 105n.24 Richardson, Henry S., 9n.16, 11n.18, 38n.27, 173n.10, 177n.14 Russell, Francey, 139n.24

244 Index self-conscious predicate, 20–21 Sellars, Wilfrid, 25–26, 25n.6, 58n.2, 72, 75n.20 sexism, 1–2, 2n.1, 116, 122–23 sexual harassment, 1–2, 2n.1, 4–6, 38n.27, 44–45, 50–51, 52, 59, 61–62, 63–64, 66–30, 71–72, 86–87, 96–97, 115, 116, 197n.3, 203–6 Smith, Adam, 92–94 social facts, 128–30, 131–32 Solomon, R.C., 113n.31 Sophocles, 164–65 species. See life-form speciesism, 177n.14 species-being (Gattungswesen), 6n.9, 177n.14 standpoint epistemology, 82n.33, 84n.36 Stern, Robert, 80n.29, 157n.35 Strawson, P.F., 90–91n.2, 92n.3, 93n.7, 104n.23 Street, Sharon, 174n.11   Taylor, Charles, 8–9, 8n.13, 11n.18, 15–16n.19, 46–49, 51, 73n.19,

111–12, 141–42, 143–44, 183– 85, 188n.26, 209, 216–17 Thompson, Michael, 169, 171, 173– 74, 180n.17, 181–82, 181n.19 Timmons, Mark, 33–34n.20   ‘universalism from below’, 190n.29 universality in ethics, 177–79, 189–90   Walker, Margaret Urban, 93n.7, 100–3, 103n.21, 112–13 Weisstein, Naiomi, 96–97 Whyman, Tom, 169n.6, 170n.7, 173n.10 Williams, Bernard, 3n.3, 15–16n.19, 31–32, 32n.18, 36n.24, 76n.21, 83n.34, 169–70 Wilson, Catherine, 196–97n.1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 15–16, 22–23, 23–24n.5, 25n.6, 30n.12, 48n.32, 60n.5, 75n.20, 180n.17 Wood, Allen, 11n.18, 15–16n.19, 167–68 Woolf, Virginia, 27n.8