The Cat and the Camel: A Hesitant Response to "Morality or Moralism?"

First Hesitation: What differentiates moralism from morality?

What, to begin with, is "moralism"? On the one hand, Hache and Latour identify it with a set of doctrines: a commitment to the fact-value distinction, and a belief that only morality-bearing subjects (human beings) are of moral concern. On the other hand, moralism is represented or figured as a scale or axis, thus implying that an author or text might be a more or less clear-cut or intense or extreme instance of moralistic thinking. But surely, either one believes that only human beings are of moral significance, or one does not; how can this be a matter of degree? Or is it that the scale measures the intensity with which one affirms that view? Kant is, after all, placed lower on this axis by Hache and Latour because they read him as hesitant about his moralism.

As for "morality," it is identified, first, with indifference to the distinctive ontological status of the beings to which it is responsive. Second, morality is characterized by the quality of the attention paid to those beings: the depth of response evinced to their appeals. Morality in that first characterization would appear to be a doctrine (the polar opposite of the core doctrine of moralism) and accordingly a view that one either accepts or rejects-hence not, on the face of it, a matter of degree. Only morality in the second characterization would allow for gradations and thus invite construction of the second scale introduced by Hache and Latour-a scale that measures the degree of sensitivity or scruple evinced in one's moral responses.

But how is this hybrid characterization supposed to operate? Could not its component elements come apart? For surely, someone might affirm the doctrine of ontological indifference and still exhibit minimal sensitivity to any given nonhuman being's call or claim on us. (One might respond to wolves in preference to sheep, for instance, or to the wilderness rather than its wild inhabitants.) The critical question may be whether one displays a greater or lesser degree of concern about drawing ontological distinctions of any kind (between the human and the nonhuman, or within the realm of the nonhuman), since a focus on degree would place us again in the realm of hesitation. Or is the real point here that anyone who rejects the moralists' attribution of moral significance to human beings-human beings alone-is thereby revealed as maximally sensitive in her moral responses? If so, then we do not have two separate components to morality at all.

Furthermore, why is the issue of degrees of sensitivity or scruple applicable only to morality and not to moralism? Could we not imagine ranking all those who strongly affirm the exclusive moral significance of human beings? They could be ranked according to the degree of sensitivity they evince to the particular claims made upon them by particular human others. Or equally well we could rank them according to the degree of scrupulous care and sensitivity they manifest during the process of coming to affirm the exclusive moral significance of human beings.

My tentative conclusion is that the figure of two orthogonal axes or scales or gradations that Hache and Latour put forward pertains to their text rather than to their idea. Their idea is that much ethical theory not only affirms but takes for granted the exclusive moral significance of human beings and that this unhesitating doctrinal exclusion is itself an indication of moral insensitivity and lack of scruple-a cultivated indifference to the calls made on us as moral beings by nonhuman beings.

Second Hesitation: What is an exercise in (de)sensitization?

Hache and Latour's subtitle is intended, so they inform us, to evoke the immu-nological sense of the term sensitization. They wish to evoke, that is, the general physiological notion that a cell, organ, or organism can be made sensitive to an agent or stimulus by repeated exposure to it. Though clearly, it is the more specific medical inflection-sensitizing an immune system to the presence of an allergen-with...