Moralism: A Study of a Vice by Craig Taylor (review)

Craig Taylor’s engaging and well-written book argues that moralism, as a vice, involves failing to respond to others as human beings. Moralism is not about the truth of moral judgments but rather about the nature of morality itself, requiring “fellow feeling.” Moralism reduces others to single characteristics or acts, as happens to Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Scarlet Letter when she is punished for adultery by being forced to wear the letter A: “Hester’s identity as a morally accountable being even capable of acknowledging guilt and expressing remorse does not figure in [the community’s] judgment of her. Hence Hester becomes ‘the fallen woman,’ no more a real person than the rake in Hogarth’s series of paintings.” For Taylor, “there is something deeply morally offensive in reducing other human beings to such caricatures.”

The vice of moralism is “a fundamental failure to understand what human life is like and the kinds of demands it makes upon us.” Specifi-cally, it involves failure to understand our connection to and dependence on others for ethical understanding and integrity. When moral judgments depend only on “cerebral convictions,” we fail to respond to another in a “primitive” emotional sense. We act out of love or compassion, but it is “an abstract inhuman kind of love,” motivated by intellectual categories but not human sentiment. We make moral judgments with “no serious recognition of the life of another,” judgments explained by shallowness of personal response and an inability to adequately conceive of oneself in relation to another person.

Taylor situates his argument in relation to Bernard Williams’s concern for the “overweening” nature of impartialist morality that ignores personal commitments. Taylor supports (and repeats too often) Williams’s claim that the morality of personal commitments involves “one thought too many” because friendship, for example, needs no moral justification. Taylor is not concerned with whether morality “trespasses” into relationships over which it has no authority; more interestingly, he argues that such relationships possess explanatory primacy as regards morality: personal relationships play a constitutive role, not by providing reasons for acting or judging in a certain way, but by providing content to moral judgments: “my sympathetic responses to others (including remote strangers) … help to constitute the web of human relationships through which we recognize another as an appropriate object of concern.”

Taylor’s argument goes beyond Williams and the impartialists not, as he says, by arguing that the nature of morality requires “fellow feeling” but by arguing that the nature of knowledge, at least humanist knowledge, is so characterized. In arguing for the importance of “primitive” response in forming ethical judgments, Taylor acknowledges an epistemological concern: how to individuate human beings as human beings. Rather than orienting himself toward the impartialist/partialist debate, he might have considered philosophers – feminists are one group – who have argued that ethics ought to take a back seat to questions about embodiment as a response to dualism. In arguing that moralism is a failure to completely and humanly respond to another person, Taylor suggests that pity, compassion, tenderness, and friendship are necessary to know ourselves as human beings as a result of knowing others. Certain Eastern philosophers – Chuang Tzu and Siddhartha Gautama – and certain Western ones – like Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci – have taken this view all along: our situation in the universe is such – characterized by interdependence – that we know ourselves and others as human precisely because of such responsiveness.

Taylor’s argument makes an important contribution to an understanding of the role of emotional response in ethics. It could contribute to epistemological and metaphysical discussions of embodiment, the view that the body thinks. Embodiment, a focus of feminist philosophy, challenges dualistic views of mind-body relations and residual foundationalism about justification remaining from positivism. It has implications for ethics because it has implications for how we know what is good and right, and how we know those to whom such judgments apply. Taylor’s admirable book advances this...