Moral Contexts (review)

Margaret Walker's latest book, a collection of essays on ethics that were written over roughly the past fifteen years, is organized to form an argument that, while spanning a broad thematic range, nevertheless has a perspicuous structure. Walker's word for her essays' principle of unity is context. Throughout the book, Walker criticizes dominant ethical theories for neglecting "moral contexts," where these are taken to include, for example, social and historical settings of our actions, respects in which our actions are exposed to chance, and personal relationships and values that we import into practical situations. She argues that a tendency to insist on treating such contexts as of merely secondary moral importance, so that they aren't taken to have a direct bearing on how we delineate our moral responsibilities, produces ethical theories that are not only irrelevant but also misleading in pernicious ways.

In arguing along these general lines, Walker places herself in the company of a diverse group of contemporary moral philosophers (including, among others, various Hegelians, Wittgensteinians, communitarians, and Nietzscheans) who likewise decry what they see as the relatively dismissive treatment of context in mainstream moral philosophy. It is possible to capture what is most valuable about Walker's book by discussing what, within this company, stands out about her own contextual emphasis. We might start by noting that, unlike many other proponents of context-sensitive projects in ethics, she consistently represents her claims about the moral importance of context as compatible with our ordinary understanding of morality as a reason-governed enterprise.

For a representative illustration of this aspect of Walker's thought, we can turn, for instance, to her discussion of moral perception in chapter 3. This chapter critically examines a traditional philosophical construal of our ideal of moral impartiality on which the ideal is spelled out in terms of detachment from our subjective or responsive endowments (for example, 46). Walker rejects this construal and proposes to exchange it for an alternative on which moral impartiality is no longer represented as excluding direct guidance by our responsiveness to contextual particularities. Moreover, she insists that she is not thereby attacking our ideal of moral impartiality—or, for that matter, its companion ideal of moral rationality—but only trying to correct a distorted philosophical construal of the ideal of impartiality that fails to accurately capture its character. Her suggestion is that our grasp of a morally charged situation "may be at once unbiased and drastically incomplete" (40) and, further, that moral impartiality may require, not detachment, but rather "the exercise of many complex, learned, and indefinitely improvable skills of attention, communication and interpretation" (47).

Efforts, like Walker's, to construe moral impartiality as consistent with direct guidance by our responsive natures may seem to be doomed to failure on a priori grounds. It is not uncommon for philosophers to assume that genuine features of the world are there independently of any necessary relationship to human subjectivity, and hence that such features must reveal themselves to impartial scrutiny in a manner that does not essentially involve reliance on any subjective or responsive endowments. And this assumption appears to support the conclusion that a move of the sort Walker makes toward depicting moral reflection as directly informed by such endowments cannot help but leave us cut off from full-blooded moral impartiality. One thing that distinguishes this area of Walker's work, we might accordingly say, is her rejection of this conclusion.

Another distinguishing feature of this area of her work is her method of rejecting it. Walker does not directly attack philosophical assumptions that seem to exclude her preferred, "nondetached" construal of the ideal of moral impartiality. Instead, she proceeds by offering what might aptly be characterized as phenomenological observations about the nature and challenges of moral perception. She describes demands of various kinds of nonmoral perception in rich detail, and she then goes on to compare these kinds of perception with their moral counterparts. These types of descriptive and comparative exercises are what she presents as underwriting her claim that "even if...