Morality in a Realistic Spirit: Essays for Cora Diamond

267 Pages·2019·1.375 MB·English

by  Andrew Gleeson, Craig Taylor

Morality in a Realistic Spirit
This unique collection of essays has two main purposes. The first is to
honor the pioneering work of Cora Diamond, one of the most important
living moral philosophers and certainly the most important working in
the tradition inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second is to develop
and deepen a picture of moral philosophy by carrying out new work in
what Diamond has called the realistic spirit .
The contributors in this book advance a first-order moral attitude that
pays close attention to actual moral life and experience. Their essays,
inspired by Diamond’s work, take up pressing challenges in Anglo-
American moral philosophy, including Diamond’s defense of the concept
“human being” in ethics, her defense of literature as a source of moral
thought that does not require external sanction from philosophy, her
challenge to the standard “fact/value” dichotomy, and her exploration
of non-argumentative forms of legitimate moral persuasion. There are
also essays that apply this framework to new issues such as the nature
of love, the connections of ethics to theology, and the implications of
Wittgenstein’s thought for political philosophy.
Finally, the book features a new paper by Diamond in which she
contests deep-rooted philosophical assumptions about language that
severely limit what philosophers see as the possibilities in ethics. M orality
in a Realistic Spirit offers a tribute to a great moral philosopher in the
best way possible—by taking up the living ideas in her work and taking
them in original and interesting directions.
Craig Taylor is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Flinders University.
He is the author of Moralism: A Study of a Vice (2012) and Sympathy:
A Philosophical Analysis (2002), and a co-editor of Hume and The
Enlightenment (2011) and A Sense for Humanity: the Ethical Thought of
Raimond Gaita (2014).
Andrew Gleeson has taught philosophy at the Australian Catholic University,
the University of Adelaide, and the Flinders University of South Australia. He
works mainly in ethics and philosophy of religion. His book A Frightening
Love: Recasting the Problem of Evil was published in 2012.
Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory
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Edited by Derek Matravers and Anik Waldow
Putting Others First
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T. Ryan Byerly
Methodology and Moral Philosophy
Edited by Jussi Suikkanen and Antti Kauppinen
Self-Transcendence and Virtue
Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Technology
Edited by Jennifer A. Frey and Candace Vogler
Moral Rights and Their Grounds
David Alm
Ethics in the Wake of Wittgenstein
Edited by Benjamin De Mesel and Oskari Kuusela
Perspectives in Role Ethics
Virtues, Reasons, and Obligation
Edited by Tim Dare and Christine Swanton
Self, Motivation, and Virtue
Innovative Interdisciplinary Research
Edited by Nancy E. Snow and Darcia Narvaez
Morality in a Realistic Spirit
Essays for Cora Diamond
Edited by Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.
com/Routledge-Studies-in-Ethics-and-Moral-Theory/book-series/SE0423
Morality in a Realistic Spirit
Essays for Cora Diamond
Edited by Andrew Gleeson
and Craig Taylor
First published 2020
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Contents
Introduction 1
ANDREW GLEESON AND CRAIG TAYLOR
1 Ethics and Experience 12
CORA DIAMOND
2 Cora Diamond and the Uselessness of Argument:
Distances in Metaphysics and Ethics 50
RESHEF AGAM-SEGAL
3 The Importance of Being Fully Human: Transformation,
Contemplation, and Ethics 68
SARAH BACHELARD
4 How to Be Somebody Else: Imaginative Identification
in Ethics and Literature 81
SOPHIE CHAPPELL
5 Different Themes of Love 98
CHRISTOPHER CORDNER
6 A Brilliant Perspective: Diamondian Ethics 113
ALICE CRARY
7 The Riddling God 132
ANDREW GLEESON
8 Shakespeare, Value, and Diamond 146
SIMON HAINES
vi Contents
9 The Asymmetry of Truth and the Logical Role of Thinking
Guides in Ethics 157
OSKARI KUUSELA
10 Difficulties of Reality, Skepticism, and Moral Community:
Remarks After Diamond on Cavell 176
DAVID MACARTHUR
11 Comparison or Seeing-As? The Holocaust and Factory
Farming 194
TALIA MORAG
12 Two Conceptions of “Community”: As Defined by What
It Is Not, or as Defined by What It Is 215
RUPERT READ
13 Thinking With Animals 229
DUNCAN RICHTER
14 Diamond on Realism in Moral Philosophy 242
CRAIG TAYLOR
Contributors 253
Index 258
Introduction
Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor
In her chapter for this collection, Cora Diamond quotes a remark of Allen
Tate: “poetry, perhaps more than any other art, tests with experience the
illusions that the human predicament tempts us to believe.” Diamond
takes a view of philosophy—inherited from her greatest influence, Ludwig
Wittgenstein—which sees it as unusually liable (among all the intellectual
traditions which make up our disciplinary inheritance) to succumb to
those illusions, and to articulate them in a highly abstract form. Thus, for
example, people may in certain moods (which can become chronic) feel
estranged from the world, and from their human fellows—and philoso-
phy elaborates these experiences as doctrines of skepticism, and thereby
distorts them, not by making them objects of reflection (which is perfectly
legitimate) but by turning reflection a way from the experiences and on to
a reified metaphysical substitute for them, a habit which Stanley Cavell
calls d eflection. This process changes the nature of the reflection from a
patient and sympathetic attempt inwardly to understand the human con-
dition, to thought of a very different sort, the theoretical construction of
an intellectual model, a form of thought which has its modern exemplar
in science. To take a moral example, a human being may be deeply per-
plexed and disturbed in the face of a moral dilemma—a philosophical
deflection of this converts it into impersonal speculation about which
theory of how to behave (consequentialism, Kantianism, and so on) best
meets criteria of intellectual merit, an approach which flourishes on cari-
catures of moral dilemmas like the trolley problem. Most of these deflec-
tions can be seen as mistaken attempts to meet a real need. One such
need arises from the powerful bewilderment and sense of impotence we
can experience in the face of catastrophic evils that seem to defy compre-
hension and to threaten morality (or even rationality) as an institution
for guidance through life. That threat to the pretensions of morality (so
conceived at least) is one of the deepest lessons that such life experiences
have to offer. But philosophy’s deflecting response has too often been
to shore morality up, to try and minimize the bewilderment (or even to
dispel it as mere weakness, the limits to human rationality) by contending
that evils like the Holocaust, or our systematic, industrial-level cruelty
2 Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor
to animals—both are cases Diamond has discussed—are in principle per-
fectly well understood in terms of familiar and relatively straightforward
notions like sentience, rationality, flourishing, and so on. As C raig Taylor
explains in a chapter elucidating the realistic spirit and exploring what it
might mean in ethics, moral philosophies that put these concepts at their
heart are in fact evasions of difficult realities. Their own apparent hard-
headed realism—no obscure nonsense here please!—is a failure of nerve
in the face of (as Taylor, paraphrasing Diamond puts it) the resistance
reality sometimes puts up to our thinking it, the felt inadequacy of our
concepts to encompass certain experiences. Taylor notes that this sense
of thought’s defeat by reality is also found in the experience of great
goodness or beauty. D avid Macarthur takes up Cavell’s idea of deflection
explicitly, discussing it (as does Taylor) with special reference to Dia-
mond’s seminal paper “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Phi-
losophy.” The difficulty of philosophy is to avoid deflection, to learn how
not to convert profound human life experiences into over-intellectualized
theoretical conundrums. Philosophers produce moral arguments that rely
on a purportedly universal logic, employing concepts like sentience, per-
sonhood, and so on that are designed to compel conclusions. Examples
are familiar to any philosopher: animals are sentient, t herefore they have
certain rights; fetuses are not self-conscious, therefore they lack certain
other rights. Diamond, in contrast, believes that such arguments are of
avail only inside “moral communities” that already share a substantial
moral outlook. Discussion between different communities—between meat
eaters and vegetarians, say—must proceed very differently. Macarthur con-
tends it has to proceed through an inescapably first-person articulation
of personal experience, which makes its language and sensibility deeply
akin to that of literature, art, and criticism, in which forms of thought the
deepening of understanding is never exhausted.
The motive force behind Diamond’s entire oeuvre in philosophy has been
that of resistance to deflection, resistance to what Wittgenstein called
philosophical fantasy . That resistance—that determination to keep her
eyes on the actual phenomena of human life, and to avoid the creeping
tendency to metaphysical abstraction—is what Diamond calls “the realis-
tic spirit.” The name is meant to flag a contrast with standard metaphysi-
cal (or epistemological) realism, which on its own self-understanding
is a speculative thesis that may be debated for its truth or falsity. On
Diamond’s view, philosophical realism is a characteristic piece of phil-
osophical confusion arising from the deflection away from human life
onto speculations that seek to understand more than we can actually
explain (and so make sense of) in the practice and business of that life.
For an example in ethics, the realistic spirit would argue that once we
have learned the way that in actual moral life we make a distinction
between what is right or good and what is not, there is no need—and
indeed no coherent conceptual space—to debate any further account of
Introduction 3
moral reality, any account postulating, or debunking, metaphysical moral
properties, debate of the sort that takes up most of standard meta-ethics.
The realistic spirit is not a doctrine making claims about the world, but
the effort to avoid deflection, a determination to cultivate a kind of way
of seeing that is unclouded by the charms of theoretical abstraction, sim-
plification, and neatness (however complicated in detail) that divert us
from the manifold, messy, incomplete, and contradictory reality of our
lives. There is no technique for this. It is a matter of criticism, patience,
and persistence—as Lars Hertzberg has remarked, it is a matter of stay-
ing the course. And no one is immune to the temptation to deflection.
Even those officially opposed to it may succumb, as Cavell has brilliantly
shown in the case of some Wittgensteinian philosophers whose response
to skepticism about other minds is complicit in that skepticism.
At one level, the realistic spirit might seem platitudinous. What philos-
opher would want to admit that they are not paying attention to the real
phenomena of moral life? It is true that the gravamen of Diamond’s radi-
cal critique of mainstream analytic moral philosophy lies in the claim that
this mainstream is succumbing to deflection in a s ystematic , structural
way. Certain deflections, particularly deep and intractable to exposure
and correction, have become second-nature, and practically foundational
to how the discipline conducts its business. Much of Diamond’s work
has been devoted to untangling the knots of these deflections, as well
as to showing ways in which an undeflected moral philosophy might
proceed. Thus, in her chapter for this collection, she identifies as a major
instrument of deflection a deep-rooted, pervasive philosophical picture
of language. The picture depicts a cognitive core of language use—roughly,
truth-evaluable assertions whose contents can be publicly communica-
ble knowledge, and where that evaluation is answerable only to logic
and sensory perception in daily life and in science, what Diamond calls
“tourist-and-scientific” English—to be contrasted with a domain of pri-
vate, idiosyncratic, non-cognitive psychological associations and emo-
tive force. Whatever belongs to the poetic or the literary, to individual
sensibility or judgment, whatever requires richer language than tourism
and science, is relegated to this latter department. This picture of lan-
guage, she argues, has baleful consequences for how philosophers see the
possibilities in ethics. According to the picture, ethics can lay claim to
cognitive status only by paying its accounts to the tourist-and-scientific
language use, say by being reducible to, or supervenient upon, reality
described by that language, or—as in a philosopher like John McDowell,
revealingly criticized in Diamond’s chapter—by being construed on the
model of a secondary property. Such an approach to ethics is possible
she says, but only at the cost of eviscerating its meanings, its capacity
to distill the individually appropriated reflective experience of a whole
tradition or culture in the careful yet creative selection and use of words.
To take one of her examples, on the picture of language she is attacking,