Beyond Moral Judgment (review)

One condition sometimes placed on moral theories is that its dictates ought to be objective. Failing to meet this condition makes moral law akin to a court without a sheriff, inert thunder. One tactic for clarifying the objectivity condition is to abstract away our personal feelings and adopt a neutral standpoint. A neutral standpoint cleansed of our personal biases, we imagine, is entirely rational, persuaded by argument rather than sentiment, and capable of objective moral judgment. Crary’s Beyond Moral Judgment rejects this characterization of objectivity, the method of abstraction that motivates it, and argues for a competing notion of moral thinking and rationality that regards personal sensibility as internal to objective moral determination. To put it squarely, sound moral thought is not only agreeable with feeling but certain aspects of objective moral thought are only possible through the development of such feelings.

The book is divided into three parts: (1) Argument, (2) Illustrations, and (3) A Moral. Each of the three parts corresponds to three goals: (1) to argue for a broader view of moral thinking that goes beyond its narrow preoccupation with moral judgment; (2) to illustrate what this moral thinking is like through literature; and (3) to undermine traditional impartialist approaches to rational moral reflection in ethics (see 4).

The argument begins with a distinction between two different kinds of subjective (perspectival) properties and two different senses of “objectivity.” A merely subjective property is a property “an object can be said to posses just insofar as it in fact elicits a certain response from some subject” (Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment 15). One can think of properties that are the result of a projection by the subject; for example, “that tree looks happy,” “x is nice,” or “x is red” are subject-indexed properties of the form “that tree looks happy to me,” “x seems nice to me,” or “x looks red to me.” In contrast, a problematically subjective property is a property “an object can be said to possess insofar as it is the kind of thing that would elicit certain subjective responses in appropriate circumstances” (15). Examples include affective properties like “amusing” and certain perceptual properties like “red.”

These two different subjective properties are used to define two different senses of “objectivity”: narrow objectivity and wide objectivity. In the case of narrow objectivity, in order for beliefs to have subject-independence, we must abstract every subjective element from our representation of the world. Thus, narrow objectivity requires an abstraction from both merely subjective and problematically subjective properties. In contrast, there is wide objectivity, which is the notion that in order for our representations to have subject-independence, it is only necessary to abstract from the merely subjective properties but not necessarily the problematically subjective properties.

With the above distinction in place, Crary’s argument is directed at the insufficiency of the narrow notion of the objectivity and a defense of the wider notion. Before detailing the argument itself, I ought to mention the upshot. The purpose in arguing for a wide notion of objectivity is that it offers a broader outlook on what constitutes moral rationality, while preserving two competing intuitions: (1) the intuition that if an action is morally wrong, then one’s recognition of its wrongness provides a motivation not to do said action and (2) the intuition that moral evaluation should be objective (in some sense). So, what does this broader moral thought look like? Crary writes:

[W]e need to consider not only individuals’ moral judgments but also modes of thought and speech that do not employ moral concepts and the sensibilities that inform these additional modes of thought and speech. What becomes apparent is that proper respect for challenges of moral conversation involves concern with nothing less than individuals’ entire personalities, the whole complicated weaves of their lives.

(45)

The goal of Part 2 is to illustrate this broader thought through literary works of Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, and Tolstoy. Literary examples are chosen because, unlike the discursive structure of an argument, the discursive structure of a...