Not Dr. Laura

Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry, eds. Moral Problems in American Life: New Perspectives on Cultural History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. ix + 350 pp. Illustrations, contributors, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Birds do it, bees do it. Why shouldn't historians do it? Let's do it, croon the humanists among us. Let's do moral inquiry.

Everyone else is doing it, you know. "Ethics is in vogue," proclaim Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas. ¹ Actually, they said this back in 1983. That was before Rush Limbaugh began edifying us about The Way Things Ought to Be, before virtue ethics was a twinkle in the eyes of William Bennett and Christina Hoff Sommers, before Dr. Laura Schlesinger was advising twenty million radio listeners a day how to resolve their "moral dilemmas." "We know no spectacle so ridiculous," sniffed Lord Macaulay, "as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality." And he never received a brochure in the mail inviting his kids to attend "Ethics Camp."

These days, higher education is looking a lot like ethics camp. Business and professional schools require courses in ethical decision making. Foundations fund projects examining the development of "ethical intelligence." Presidents, parents, and legislators call for general education to further the cultivation of moral character. Conferences draw large numbers to hear about "ethics across the curriculum," "moral models of leadership," and other topics related to values in academia. The norm of disinterested objectivity continues its decades-long retreat, while even in the sciences value advocacy gains ground. Wherever one looks, within the academy or without, there's a whole lot of ethics goin' on.

In light of these trends, it is not surprising that a number of historians are urging their colleagues to get in the game and view scholarship and teaching as opportunities for moral reflection. It is hard to know what to make of these appeals, especially when they come from such contradictory voices. We hear calls for the marriage of historical and moral inquiry from neoconservative defenders of Victorian rectitude such as Gertrude Himmelfarb, from liberal multiculturalists such as Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, and from postmodernist champions of "ethical reading" such as David Harlan. ² Scoffing at all this comes easily, of course, as it did for Macaulay. Reminders that history is a moral enterprise cause the Geiger counters most of us picked up in graduate school to click madly, especially when words like "morality" and "virtue" radiate negative associations suggesting self-righteous hypocrisy, privatized propriety, and faded Sunday School certainties. But if the claim is that the practice of moral inquiry can invigorate the historical profession and perform a needed service to our larger communities, it would be a mistake to ignore those who make it. The zeitgeist is not always an ill wind. As Socrates once said, "We are discussing no small matter here, but how we ought to live."

Anyone wanting to survey the state of the art of moral inquiry in American history today will find Moral Problems in American Life an indispensable starting place. Produced as a festschrift to honor David Brion Davis, this collection of essays by fifteen acclaimed American historians succeeds completely in its purpose by transcending the usual limits of its genre. Though it does not present itself as a response to calls for an injection of moral reasoning into the practice of history, Moral Problems makes an important contribution to discussions about the redemptive potential of historical scholarship. Offering a selection of core samples taken from the moral landscape of the American past, from colonial Virginia to the Vietnam War, this book offers diverse examples of what moral reflection looks like when historians try their hand at it. Additionally, in a time like the present moment, a time of acute moral crisis and cheap moral talk, it also provides an opportunity to consider what forms of moral inquiry are more helpful than others.

Essays collected to honor a teacher often focus...