Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 45, No.

3, 2011

Huck Finn, Moral Language and Moral

Education

ANDERS SCHINKEL

The aim of this article is twofold. Against the traditional

interpretation of ‘the conscience of Huckleberry Finn’ (for
which Jonathan Bennett’s article with this title is the locus
classicus) as a conflict between conscience and sympathy, I
propose a new interpretation of Huck’s inner conflict, in terms
of Huck’s mastery of (the) moral language and its integration
with his moral feelings. The second aim is to show how this
interpretation can provide insight into a particular aspect of
moral education: learning a moral language. A moral
education that has a proper regard for the flexibility of moral
language and the importance of the integration of moral
language and (pre-)moral feelings should prevent such
conflicts as Huck experienced from arising.

I INTRODUCTION
A traditional interpretation of the moral conflicts experienced by
Huckleberry Finn is that they arise from a clash between conscience
and sympathetic feeling.1 Jonathan Bennett’s ‘The Conscience of
Huckleberry Finn’ has become the locus classicus for this kind of
interpretation.2 A much more interesting—and, I believe, more truthful—
perspective is possible, however. This arises when we focus on Huck’s
mastery of (the) moral language.3 Huck’s inner conflict is not the conflict
of a conscience, representative of conventional morality, with sympathy
(or the ‘heart’), as a force of nature. Rather, it is the result of a split
conscience, where only one half has the whole of Huck’s moral
vocabulary at its disposal. This in turn points to a serious flaw in Huck’s
moral education: Huck has been taught the moral language of the time, but
not with the necessary flexibility. Huck cannot distinguish between moral
concepts and their historically and geographically contingent application
in the conventional morality he was raised in—roughly put, he cannot
distinguish their form from their contents. This article, then, has a double
purpose. The first is to propose a new interpretation of Huck’s inner
conflict, traditionally represented as a conflict between conscience and
sympathy, in terms of Huck’s mastery of (the) moral language and its

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512 A. Schinkel

integration with his moral feelings. The second is to use this interpretation
to gain insight in a particular aspect of moral education: learning a moral
language.
In the following I will start by explaining Bennett’s interpretation of
Huck’s conscience, raise a number of objections to his interpretation, and
substitute my own for it.4 The third section relates Huck’s inner conflict to
his moral education and, drawing on Hare (1992), interprets the flaws in
this education in terms of the way Huck was taught the moral language.
This section also highlights the general implications of these and the
foregoing analyses for moral education. Moral education should have a
proper regard for the flexibility of moral language. It should also take care
that (pre-)moral feelings are meaningfully related to moral language, and
to moral rules and principles in particular. If these conditions are fulfilled,
this should prevent such conflicts as Huck experienced from arising.

II HUCK FINN’S CONSCIENCE

In Bennett’s aforementioned article, Huck Finn figures alongside Calvinist
minister, philosopher and theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) and
Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS in the German Nazi regime. All three,
Bennett contends, experience a conflict between (bad) morality and
sympathy.5 Conscience can be an agent of both a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’
morality (Bennett assumes his readers will agree on what is a ‘bad’
morality, a morality built upon bad principles—and certainly in
Himmler’s case agreement will be almost universal). With Huck, the
latter is the case—that is, we would regard his morality, the conventional
morality he was taught, as bad or deficient in certain respects.
For his analysis of Huck’s conscience, or what he sees as Huck’s
conflict between morality and conscience on the one hand, and sympathy
on the other, Bennett focuses on the part of the story where Huck helps his
slave friend Jim escape from his owner, Miss Watson. They raft down the
Mississippi, until they have almost reached the point where Jim will be
legally free—the state border. At that moment Huck’s conscience begins
to stir:

‘Conscience says to me: ‘‘What had poor Miss Watson done to you, that
you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and never say one
single word? What did that poor old woman do to you, that you could
treat her so mean? . . .’’ I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most
wished I was dead.’ (Bennett [1994, p. 297]; quoted from Twain, The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ch. 16)

Huck’s conscience reminds him, then, of the fact that Huck will be to
blame for having helped a slave, who was another person’s property
(‘poor Miss Watson’s’ property), to escape. Then Jim tells him of his plan
to save money and buy his wife and children out of slavery, adding that he
would steal his children if they could not be bought, and Huck’s
conscience torments him even more. Finally, Huck tells his conscience

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that ‘it ain’t too late, yet’ and decides he will paddle to the shore at
daybreak to give Jim up. ‘I felt easy, and happy, and light as a feather,
right off. All my troubles was gone.’ But then Jim tells him that ‘Pooty
soon I’ll be a-shout’n for joy, en I’ll say, it’s all on accounts o’ Huck I’s a
free man’, that Huck is his best friend ever, and his only friend, and more
to the same effect. So they turn back: ‘I was paddling off,’ Huck admits,
‘all in a sweat to tell on him; but when he says this, it seemed to kind of
take the tuck all out of me.’ In the end, so Bennett’s interpretation goes,
sympathy triumphs over conscience and morality.
I dispute this interpretation on two grounds: 1) there is no reason for us
to adopt Huck’s own view of what constitutes his conscience; 2) Huck’s
conflict cannot simply be a conflict between conscience and sympathy,
because sympathy plays an important role on both sides.

IIA Huck’s Conscience

There cannot be much question about what counts as morality for Huck;
Bennett identifies this correctly. Also clear is what Huck believes is the
right thing to do: Huck thinks he should ‘tell on’ Jim, because it was
wrong to help him escape from ‘poor Miss Watson’. What Huck takes to
be his conscience corresponds with his morality—it is his conscience that
tells him that he is doing the wrong thing. This is how Bennett explains the
situation: ‘On the side of conscience we have principles, arguments,
considerations, ways of looking at things: [. . .] ‘What had poor Miss
Watson done to you?’ ‘This is what comes of my not thinking’ [. . .]. On
the other side, the side of feeling, we get nothing like that.’ Here, Bennett
argues, we find no considerations or principles; only that Jim’s words
‘seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me’, or ‘Well, I just felt sick.’
Huck does not weigh pros and cons, but simply does what he believes to
be wrong, because he ‘warn’t man enough’.
Bennett correctly represents Huck’s perception of things; but that does
not make Bennett’s construal of the situation right. Huck identifies
conscience with the conventional morality (in the shape of rules and
principles) internalised by him. But why would we simply adopt Huck’s
conception of conscience in our own conceptual scheme, as Bennett does?
I see no reason why we should accept what Huck identifies as his
conscience as a fully adequate concept of conscience—and I see several
reasons why we should not.
In his description of sympathy, Bennett points out that we always
sympathise with someone because of something; because someone is in
pain, for instance, or because someone might be harmed by one’s actions.
So sympathy is not just a matter of ‘mere’ feeling, but also has a cognitive
content, an intentionality to it. Sympathy implies some kind of judgement,
for instance that someone deserves caring attention and consideration—
and this constitutes a reason for sympathising with this person. The
reasons nor the judgements need to be articulated; so when sympathy
leads Huck to help Jim escape, we might say that this sympathy implies an

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unarticulated moral judgement, a judgement that simply does not

correspond with the morality Huck was taught.
In a similar vein, Clea Rees (2006) remarks that ‘emotions and feelings
can be reasons for believing or doubting a moral claim’ and that Huck has
‘an emotional awareness of the most fundamental reason slavery is
wrong—namely, that it pretends that slaves are not human beings or
persons, in order to deny them equal moral status’.6 Levy (1964, p. 389)
writes:

It is sometimes said that Huck acts out of simple affection for Jim; but
affection does not determine a moral attitude. It is more reasonable to say
that Huck defies ‘conscience’ on the basis of an unformulated but very
real sense of responsibility—to the notion that it is wrong, for example, to
contribute to the enslavement of another human being. And this is a
matter of conscience, too, to which we may assume Huck’s experiences
with Jim have contributed in a fundamental way.

Conscience encompasses more than moral rules and principles, and may
manifest itself in more ways than through those things (as is evidenced,
too, by the highly affective way in which what Bennett sees as Huck’s
conscience in fact also manifests itself!). On some level, Huck feels that
he ought to help Jim—not just that he wants to help Jim. His somatic
reactions are not just that, but are also the physical manifestation of an
unconscious prehension of value.7 Huck ‘felt sick’ when Jim reminded
him of his promise. My explanation of this feeling would be that the moral
meaning of Jim’s words was on some level understood, a meaning that
conflicted with what Huck ‘knew’ to be morally right.8
Elsewhere (Schinkel, 2007, ch. 8), I define conscience as a mode of
consciousness, a ‘concerned awareness of the moral quality of our own
contribution to the process of reality, including our own being’.9 This
awareness need not be of a rational, intellectual kind—in Huck’s case, we
might speak of an affective and even bodily awareness. Hence, Huck’s
response to the situation is not only a moral response, but also one issuing
from conscience. As such, Huck embodies the ultimate possibility of
conscience: to transcend the often-narrow limits of conventional
morality.10
So one reason why we need not and should not, as Bennett does, adopt
Huck’s own conception of conscience and pit conscience against
sympathy, is that conscience is not merely a cognitive matter, but an
affective one as well; it may manifest itself on various levels of awareness.
A second (but related) reason is that there is another way to explain the
lack of ‘deliberations’ on ‘the side of feeling’ than the one Bennett offers,
one with interesting implications for moral education.
Bennett’s explanation is simple: there are two sides, the side of morality
and conscience, and the side of feeling. Principles, arguments, and
deliberations naturally belong on the former side, given that the latter
simply is the side of feeling and nothing else.

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I think it is more complicated than this, however. Bennett under-

estimates Huck’s predicament: Huck has lost his moral integrity, for his
conscience has split (or grown) in two: Huck somehow has to deal with
two alternately dominant manifestations of the concerned awareness we
call conscience. One of them is articulate, taking its standard from
conventional morality; the other is mute, and has no articulable standard to
go by—Huck cannot articulate any standard on this side, because the
whole of his moral vocabulary is in service of the first. Rees (2006) writes:
‘Although Huck fails to recognise them as such, he is, nonetheless, aware
of crucial moral reasons to reject slavery’; and ‘Huck has perfectly good
ethical reasons to doubt the moral acceptability of slavery, but lacks the
ability to recognize them as such.’ Huck cannot recognise these reasons;
he has no reasons, deliberations, words, ‘on the side of feeling’, simply
because the feelings he experiences do not have Huck’s moral vocabulary
at their disposal. As I put it in Schinkel (2007, p. 359): ‘Huck simply
cannot think of his action as right, because the word has already been
taken; it is not available for what he does.’ Herein, I contend, lies one of
the main failures of Huck’s moral education. I will elaborate on this in
Section III.

IIB Huck’s Sympathy

We have seen above that what Huck experiences cannot simply be a
conflict between conscience and sympathy, because on the side of
sympathy (‘the side of feeling’, as Bennett calls it) we may also speak of
conscience. But if we now turn to consider Huck’s sympathy, we can see
that Bennett once again misses something important and surprisingly
obvious: not only do we find all kinds of feelings (mostly related with guilt
and remorse) on the side of conscience and morality, in fact what we find
is that sympathy, rather than staying neatly on one side of Bennett’s
divide, plays an important role on this side as well.
If we look again at the quotation given above (and given by Bennett!):
‘Conscience says to me: ‘What had poor Miss Watson done to you [. . .]’
[etc.]’, it seems that Huck feels sympathy for Miss Watson—or why else
would he say ‘poor Miss Watson’ and ‘that poor old woman’? Not only,
then, does Huck suffer from a divided conscience, it seems that he also has
to cope with divided—albeit in a much less problematic sense of the
word—sympathies. It is not likely that Huck feels the same kind of
sympathy for Miss Watson that he felt for Jim; the words ‘poor Miss
Watson’ and ‘poor old woman’ can in part be interpreted as devices ‘used’
by Huck’s (conventional) conscience to bring home to him that what he is
doing is wrong.11 But the words must latch onto some feeling in Huck to
be effective. I would think that (despite everything he dislikes about Miss
Watson) Huck is aware enough of what she has done for him to feel at
least pity for her—and this feeling is both evoked and expressed by the
adjective ‘poor’. But given Huck’s moral sensitivity, I think it likely that
his reflection (‘What did that poor old woman do to you that you could

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treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried to learn
you your manners, she tried to be good to you every way she knowed how.
That’s what she done’—Twain, 1958, ch. 16) also expresses a felt
awareness of Miss Watson’s good intentions, rather than just pity.
That Huck has a divided conscience, or perhaps we should say: a double
conscience, may be enough to explain why Huck thinks he would have felt
just as bad if he had done the ‘right’ thing and betrayed Jim as he feels
now he has not.12 But the fact that Huck’s sympathy is also divided, that
both manifestations of conscience are supported by (some form of)
sympathy, makes it even easier to understand this. Whether Huck helps
Jim or not, he cannot avoid frustrating one or another of his sympathies.
It is remarkable that Bennett overlooks all this, placing ‘What had poor
Miss Watson done to you’ squarely on the side of ‘principles, arguments,
considerations, ways of looking at things’, in contrast with ‘the side of
feeling’. Instead of a contrast, there is a partial contrast and a partial
symmetry, or simply an imperfect symmetry: on one side we have both the
‘principles, arguments’, etc. that Bennett speaks of and feelings, whereas
on the other side we have ‘only’ the latter (which, again, should not
prevent us from speaking of conscience on that side, too).

III MORAL LANGUAGE AND MORAL EDUCATION

The inner conflict Huck experiences indicates a flawed moral education.
That is, a child who receives or has received a proper moral education
should not experience such conflicts.13 In this section, I will interpret the
failing of Huck’s moral education in terms of imperfections in his mastery
of moral language. This provides a good reason to (re)visit R. M. Hare, not
only because his name is the first that springs to mind on hearing the term
‘moral language’, but also, and more importantly, because he explicitly
related his thoughts on moral language to the subject of moral education.
Of course, the analysis below will not even approximate an exhaustive
analysis of Huck’s moral education and what went wrong in it. It would
also be possible to expand on the double influence to which Huck was
exposed in the form of the Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson.
The Widow was very strict and had many rules (both moral and non-
moral), but the grounds she gave for being moral were positive,
emphasising reward; Miss Watson, on the other hand, emphasised
punishment. Copeland (2002) writes: ‘Whereas Miss Watson tries to get
Huck to behave by telling him ‘all about the bad place,’ the widow, in a
more Stoic frame of mind, teaches Huck to pray for ‘spiritual gifts’, which
means, as Huck says, ‘I must help other people, and do everything I could
for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about
myself’ [. . .]’. And Huck himself summarises the situation neatly:

Sometimes the widow would take me one side and talk about Providence
in a way to make a body’s mouth water; but maybe next day Miss Watson
would take hold and knock it all down again. I judged I could see that
there was two Providences, and a poor chap would stand considerable

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show with the widow’s Providence, but if Miss Watson’s got him there
warn’t no help for him any more. (Twain, 1958, ch. 3)

With regard to Huck’s ‘second crisis of conscience’ Yates (1960, p. 9)

quotes Edgar M. Branch: ‘Ironically, therefore, Huck commits himself to
Miss Watson’s ‘‘bad place’’ because of his intuitive sense of right, which
agrees with the Widow’s advice to help others.’14 There is good reason,
then, to see in Huck’s ‘double’ moral education a possible source of his
later inner conflict.15 But I mention this merely to illustrate what I said
above: that the analysis below, which focuses on Huck’s mastery of moral
language, is a far from comprehensive analysis of his moral education.

IIIA Moral Language: Form and Content—Norms and Principles

‘When children are learning the moral language from their parents,
teachers, and others [. . .] does the learning of the language, by itself [. . .]
entail the adoption of certain moral opinions?’—so R. M. Hare (1992, pp.
135–136) asks. In Huck Finn’s case, the answer is ‘Yes’. What does
Huck’s mastery of the moral language consist in? He understands the
concepts of stealing, lying, and reciprocity, he knows (in a sense, at least)
how to use terms like ‘conscience’ and ‘blame’, he speaks of heaven and
hell, knows the concept of sin, et cetera. But for Huck all these concepts
have a very specific content. All his moral concepts are tied to
conventional morality—which is why, as I explained above, he cannot
recognize the moral reasons that weigh in on the side of his helping Jim
escape.
Hare’s question is a more general one, of course: is it necessarily the
case that learning the moral language—not a moral language, for Hare)—
entails the adoption of particular moral ideas? Hare believes the two can
be separated. He distinguishes between ‘methodological principles or
values (the logic of the argument)’ and ‘substantial views or values’, and
holds that the former can be neutral with regard to the latter (Hare, 1992,
p. 143). He maintains that ‘although the nature of morality and the
meanings of the moral words establish the canons of moral argument, they
do not by themselves uniquely determine its conclusions, given the
objective facts’ (p. 147). Against this view, we might quote Graham
Haydon (1993, pp. 222–223): ‘Some writers have tried to argue for a form
of moral education that is indeed initiating people into a particular form of
discourse, without predetermining the particular moral choices they will
make; [. . .] John Wilson could be put into this class, and arguably
Lawrence Kohlberg. Unfortunately, any [p. 223] substantive conception of
the form of discourse which is constitutive of morality runs the risk of
being in fact conducive to particular substantive kinds of moral view
rather than others.’ I believe Haydon is right; any moral language (for
there is more than one) will open up particular moral perspectives on the
world and thereby to some extent determine at least the kinds of moral
conclusions at which one might arrive. Moreover, one cannot teach moral

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concepts without making children see their importance; to teach a child

the concept of justice, say, is inseparable from letting her appreciate why
justice matters.16
Nevertheless, it is still worthwhile to make some distinction similar in
kind to the one Hare makes. In fact, to realise that moral language cannot
be (entirely) neutral provides us with an additional reason to try to prevent
the identification of moral concepts with a very particular, historically and
geographically local, content. Huck asks himself what Miss Watson has
done to him, that he ‘could treat her so mean’—but he never wonders how
she could treat Jim so ‘mean’, namely, as her property. He understands the
principles of reciprocity and nonmaleficence, but does not even consider
that they could also be applied to Jim (with respect to either his or Miss
Watson’s relation to Jim). Huck’s view of morality, then, is severely
impoverished.17
There is nothing wrong with the spirit of Hare’s distinction. Hare
wanted to make the point that there are no moral authorities. Teachers,
when discussing moral subjects, should not impose their moral
judgements on their pupils; instead—bearing in mind the impossibility
of neutrality—they should hand them the tools to make their own moral
judgements. ‘It may be true (I believe it is true) that on questions of value
we have ultimately to make up our own minds’ (Hare, 1992, p. 144). This
emphasis on moral autonomy is to some extent peculiar to today’s
Western democratic societies, and does therefore express a geographically
and historically particular ideal—in other words, it is itself in tension with
the desired neutrality. Yet some level of moral autonomy is necessary if
neutrality is not to be more gravely endangered. The answer to a moral
puzzle should never be: ‘Whatever so-and-so says’. There should be room
to seek for guidance by someone recognised as a phronimos, when one
feels insecure about what to do or how to judge. But this does not vitiate
the claim that children should learn to think for themselves.
To accomplish this, rather than distinguish between the logic and the
content of moral language, we should distinguish, first of all, between
moral norms and their underlying principles. This is what John White
(1990, p. 51) explains as ‘understanding the rationale behind dispositions’,
and it has been argued for at least since Locke and Kant. For both,
education was (or ought to be) a process that enabled children to make the
transition from heteronomy to autonomy, from being disciplined to self-
discipline.18 John Locke held virtue to be the aim of education, but this
entailed that children developed the ability ‘to judge for themselves, and
to find what is right by their own Reason’ (Locke, 1968, pp. 155–156
[§61]). Like Locke, Kant (1900, pp. 81; 83ff.) stressed that children need
to understand what they did wrong (if they did something wrong), and that
parents should stimulate the child’s susceptibility to reasons.
Huck could not distinguish between the norms of conventional morality
and the principles underlying them; for him, conventional morality was all
there was to it. Hence, as said above, he was unable to apply the principles
of justice or nonmaleficence in ways that conflicted with the moral norms
he was taught. His moral education was too fragmented and involved too

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many contradictions for him to see any sense in or behind morality. It is

not surprising, then, that he came to view it as an arbitrary set of rules it is
impossible to live up to (see the extensive quotation below). Moral
language is (or ought to be) flexible, and this gives it a critical potential.
For Huck morality was rigid rather than flexible, and though he was
critical of conventional morality in his own way, he lacked the ability to
employ morality’s intrinsic potential for self-criticism. Hare wants
children to learn to think for themselves. Huck definitely thought for
himself, but despite rather than due to his moral education. Thinking for
himself entailed giving up on morality—a clear sign of a failed moral
education if ever there was one.
Secondly, moral education should not only familiarise children with
particular moral principles and norms, but also make clear to them what
kind of principles and norms they are (Hare, 1992, p. 163). At as early
an age as possible, children should learn to distinguish the principles
and norms of morality from those of religion, etiquette, law, aesthetics,
and social convention—or perhaps it is better to say that moral education
should prevent their confusion, for Piaget’s idea (still accepted by Hare,
1992, p. 163) that young children are heteronomous and prone to confuse
social and moral norms seems to be unfounded (Turiel, 1983, p. 146;
cf. Nucci, 2008, pp. 292ff.). Huck’s discussion of the ‘two Providences’
(see quotation) shows that he has a hard time distinguishing moral
reasoning from instrumental reasoning: what is right is what brings you
good results; wrong actions are those for which you have to pay—hence
moral choices are reduced to choices between more or less pleasant
consequences for oneself.19 At his young age, Huck is already rather
cynical about morality (as he conceives it); hence, when he realises that
both following (what he takes to be) his conscience and going against it
(would) result in the same miserable emotional state, he decides that in the
future he will ‘always do whatever comes handiest at the time’ (quoted in
Yates, 1960, p. 6).
The first chapter of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn provides ample
evidence that Huck’s educators blurred the distinction between moral and
other types of norms.

The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come to time. When you
got to the table you couldn’t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the
widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals,
though there warn’t really anything the matter with them [. . .].

Pretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow to let me. But she
wouldn’t. She said it was a mean practice and wasn’t clean, and I must try
to not do it any more. That is just the way with some people. They get
down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it. Here she was a-
bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to anybody,
being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing a thing
that had some good in it. And she took snuff, too; of course that was all
right, because she done it herself.

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Her sister, Miss Watson [. . .] took a set at me now with a spelling-book.

She worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then the widow
made her ease up. I couldn’t stood it much longer. Then for an hour it was
deadly dull, and I was fidgety. Miss Watson would say, ‘Don’t put your
feet up there, Huckleberry;’ and ‘Don’t scrunch up like that, Huckle-
berry—set up straight;’ and pretty soon she would say, ‘Don’t gap and
stretch like that, Huckleberry—why don’t you try to behave?’ Then she
told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there. She got
mad then, but I didn’t mean no harm. All I wanted was to go somewheres;
all I wanted was a change, I warn’t particular. She said it was wicked to
say what I said; said she wouldn’t say it for the whole world; she was
going to live so as to go to the good place. Well, I couldn’t see no
advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I
wouldn’t try for it. But I never said so, because it would only make
trouble, and wouldn’t do no good.

Locke (1968, pp. 157 [§64]; 182 [§82]) already warned that ‘Children are
not to be taught by Rules, which will be always slipping out of their
memories’, but rather by example. Moreover, the educator’s attitude
should express the reasonableness of corrections; it should be clear that
they do not flow from caprice or fancy (ibid., p. 181 [§81]). Yet Huck is
confronted with many rules, which at least to him seem arbitrary.
Furthermore, the Widow does not abide by her own rules, or can only be
said to do so if an (at least with a view to ‘meanness’ and ‘cleanness’)
arbitrary distinction is made between smoking and taking snuff—and as
Hare (1992, p. 159) says: ‘[N]obody is likely to be much of a success as a
moral educator if he is not himself trying sincerely to live up to the
principles which he is advocating.’ Worst of all, Miss Watson moves
straight from a series of nonmoral corrections to talking about ‘the bad
place’, thus blurring the distinction between social and moral (or moral-
religious) norms. Perhaps not so surprisingly, then, we see that Huck
evaluates moral choices in terms of the advantage they bring.20
Thirdly, we may see Huck’s failure to apply the moral principles he
knows equally to Miss Watson and to Jim as a failure in his moral
education in the sense that Huck was not properly taught the principle of
universalisability (Hare, 1992, p. 165). The main prerequisite for this is an
ability ‘to put oneself in the shoes of the other people affected by one’s
actions’ (or, of course, by other people’s actions) (Hare, 1992, p. 166).
According to Hare (1992, p. 167), this involves two abilities: ‘the ability to
discern and discover what the effects of our actions are going to be’ and
‘the ability to discern the feelings of others and how our actions will
impinge upon them’ (with the added requirement of ‘love of our fellow
men’; cf. Hare, 1992, p. 170). Huck possessed both these abilities, and yet,
we might say, he did not fully master the feature of moral language called
‘universalisability’. One possible response is that the principle of
universalisability cannot be applied in a neutral, objective fashion. It
requires assessment of relevant differences and similarities. In Huck’s day,
many people would have argued that Negroes are relevantly different from
white people in a way that justified their being held as slaves by whites.

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 Huck Finn, Moral Language and Moral Education 521

But I don’t accept this relativist response in this case. If Huck’s mastery of
the moral language had been adequate, he could have seen the
inconsistency in his evaluation of his feelings regarding his helping Jim
escape. He would have seen that there were moral feelings and moral
arguments on both sides. But the problem Huck suffered from is that no
mastery of moral language can be complete when moral feelings are not
meaningfully related to its concepts.

IIIB Moral Feelings and Conventional Morality

One reason why Huck experienced the inner conflict discussed in Section
II is that his (pre-) moral feelings were at least partially disconnected from
the moral rules and principles he had learned—partially, because when it
came to ‘poor Miss Watson’ they were connected. But this, too, was
related to his mastery of moral language. As said in Section II, Huck’s
moral vocabulary was not available for his moral feelings concerning
Jim—but this is important: it is not that Huck could not interpret any
feelings as moral feelings, that feelings and morality for Huck were
completely unrelated, it is just that whether Huck interpreted his feelings
as moral feelings depended on whether they were sanctioned by
conventional morality. The only feelings Huck could and did connect to
the concepts of right and wrong, virtue and sin, were those that agreed
with conventional morality. This is the asymmetry in Huck’s mastery of
moral language I mentioned earlier: to speak a moral language entails that
one experiences corresponding emotions, but also that such emotions
suggest the applicability of moral concepts—and with Huck the latter was
only partially the case.
Regarding the relation between moral knowledge and certain emotions
(with an evolutionary origin), Nucci (2008, p. 295) writes: ‘Moral
development and effective moral education incorporate emotion as part of
the informational and affective experiences that generate reflection and the
construction of moral knowledge and reasoning.’ In Huck’s case, a
connection was established between an understanding of conventional
morality and pre-moral feelings; moreover, Huck’s moral understanding
was integrated in his personality (in Blasi’s terms; cf. Bergman, 2004, p.
33) in the sense that he experienced moral emotions when transgressing
moral norms. But not all of his pre-moral and moral feelings were allowed
to inform his moral understanding, and therefore Huck’s moral education
was not ‘effective’ in Nucci’s sense, nor was Huck’s moral development
as it should be.
A person with an adequate grasp of moral language (and its flexibility),
or a proper understanding of morality, can see the experience of certain
emotions or feelings as moral indicators, as signs that certain moral
concepts (might) apply to the situation at hand. This ability is likely to be
facilitated by an understanding of the principles underlying moral rules,
and of the kind of principles these are—we might even say: of the object
of morality.21 Had the Widow’s advice that he should always help others

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522 A. Schinkel

been more central to Huck’s moral education, and not been counteracted
by Miss Watson’s instructions (among other things), Huck might have
been able to interpret his sympathy for Jim and his promise not to tell on
him (ch. 8) as morally relevant. As it was, Huck’s realisation that doing
‘right’ and doing ‘wrong’ resulted in exactly the same feelings did not
suggest anything to him about either the nature of his actions or the nature
and object of morality.

IV CONCLUDING REMARKS
I have given a new interpretation of ‘the conscience of Huckleberry Finn’,
and taking Hare’s writing on moral education as my point of departure,
I have tried to point out some of the flaws in Huck’s moral education.
The implications of these analyses for moral education as highlighted
above are, of course, of a highly general and theoretical nature.
Nevertheless, Huck’s example does show what a precarious enterprise
moral education can be, how complex its results can be, and perhaps even
where the problem(s) might lie in non-fictional cases of flawed moral
education.
It would have been possible to make a more specific analysis of Huck’s
moral education and moral development by applying a particular theory of
moral development. William Damon, for instance, suggests that children
have two moralities, a morality of constraint, characterised by obedience
to authority, and ‘the other morality of the child’, ‘expressed often in peer
settings and based on principles of equality, cooperation, and reciprocity’
(quoted in Bergman, 2004, p. 28). It is tempting to interpret Huck’s inner
conflict as a conflict between these two moralities, since Jim is much more
of a peer to Huck than an adult with authority. Huck’s relation to Jim is
indeed characterised by the principles mentioned by Bergman as forming
the basis of ‘the other morality of the child’, and his helping Jim and
keeping his promise not to ‘tell on him’ express a feeling of ‘being in it
together’ that peers would have. But this was not the purpose of the
present article; rather, such an analysis would be complementary to that
presented above. So, for now, although I wouldn’t want to say, as Huck
did, ‘I am rotten glad of it’, ‘there ain’t nothing more to write about . . .’22

Correspondence: Anders Schinkel, Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus

University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Email: schinkel@fwb.eur.nl

NOTES
1. Levy (1964, p. 383) notes that ‘[n]early all discussion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
consists of an extension and elaboration of Mark Twain’s description of it as ‘‘a book of mine
sound heart & a deformed conscience come into collision & conscience suffers a defeat’’’. His
reference is to Notebook #28a I, TS, p. 35 (1895), Mark Twain Papers, University of California
Library, Berkeley, as cited in Henry Nash Smith’s introduction to Twain, 1958, p. xvi. Levy, like

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 Huck Finn, Moral Language and Moral Education 523

me, disputes this traditional interpretation. There is perhaps a sense in which Bennett’s
interpretation has become the ‘traditional’ one in another way, namely because it is no longer
that fashionable and has become the standard point of departure for other, critical interpretations
(e.g. Teichman, 1975; Rees, 2006)—including my own.
2. Bennett, 1994 [1974].
3. Unlike Hare, who figures prominently in Section III, I do not believe that there is just one moral
language. Therefore, I will speak of ‘moral language’ (without the article) from now on, except
where I refer, directly or indirectly, to Hare, and where by ‘the moral language’ I mean that of
Huck’s time.
4. This analysis is largely taken from my Conscience and Conscientious Objections (2007, pp. 356–
360).
5. Bennett (1994, p. 293) says that he uses the term ‘sympathy’ ‘to cover every sort of fellow-
feeling, as when one feels pity over someone’s loneliness, or horrified compassion over his pain,
or when one feels a shrinking reluctance to act in a way which will bring misfortune to someone
else’.
6. Rees prefers to speak of ‘empathy’ in Huck’s case, rather than of sympathy, because unlike
Himmler Huck identifies himself with Jim, and experiences the emotions proper to Jim’s
situation—but this does not affect the point made above.
7. ‘Prehension’ is a term Whitehead used to denote the experiencing by any kind of subject
(whether a whole organism or something on a far smaller scale) of some object; he coined the
term because he wished to avoid the cognitive connotations carried by ‘apprehension’ and, more
strongly, ‘perception’. See, for instance, Whitehead, 1938, p. 86.
8. Carol Freedman (1997, p. 102), too, argues ‘that there is good reason to interpret Huck’s decision
to help his friend Jim as an instance of moral judgement, even though it is also a case of acting
from compassion and love’. She bases this on a Kantian model of moral judgement (Barbara
Herman’s), which leads her to see the moments in which Huck thinks about Jim as the only ones
where Huck thinks for himself. Craig Taylor (2001, p. 59) sees Huck’s ‘incapacity to turn Jim in’
as a ‘moral incapacity’, yet he does not perceive any important difference with Bennett’s
interpretation. In an article published after the present article was accepted for publication,
Goldman (2010, p. 4, a.o.) also argued that Huck Finn’s sympathy is a moral emotion, signifying
an implicit awareness of moral reasons to help Jim.
9. To see conscience as a mode of consciousness was not my invention, of course. Dole (1906) is
the first I know of to define conscience as one of several modes of consciousness. James
Childress (1979, p. 317) wrote: ‘Conscience is a mode of consciousness and thought about one’s
own acts and their value or disvalue.’ Köhler (1941) suggested that conscience is a kind of
consciousness, and Hörmann (1976, sec. 1) defined conscience as a ‘special kind of
consciousness’. The historical and etymological connections between ‘conscience’ and
‘consciousness’ are obvious; much about them can be found in Schinkel, 2007, especially chs.
1 and 2.
10. Cf. Jacobs (2001, p. 90): ‘Someone with a conscience is someone who can see that customary
practices or rationales are not always adequate.’ Huck’s example shows that this ‘seeing’, and
hence the transcendence of conventional morality, need not be a matter of critical reflection.
11. Thanks are due to the anonymous referee who pointed this out to me.
12. Cf. Yates, 1960, p. 6.
13. Someone might object that the inner conflicts Huck experiences are not the result of flaws in his
moral education, but rather—taking the discussion to another level—of the way he was
constructed as a fictional character. Huck shows reactions and reasoning representative of
various stages in Kohlberg’s model of moral development, and not in the order in which
Kohlberg put them. Moreover, it has been argued that ‘Huck speaks in the language of care’
(Bollinger, 2002). Given this odd mixture, the argument might run, it is hardly surprising that we
see Huck experiencing inner conflicts; it does not make much sense to look for causes in what
Twain reveals about his moral education. However, a number of things speak against this.
Huck’s personality does not seem to strike readers as implausible. Huck is probably 13 years old
in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, so his moral education is by no means complete; at the same
time, however, due to his being an orphan and his circumstances, Huck has to mature quickly.
Given his background, it is not surprising that his moral development does not proceed neatly
along the lines of a Kohlbergian (or other) model; one would expect ‘childish’ and more mature

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524 A. Schinkel

reactions to alternate. Finally, however this may be, plausible connections can still be shown
between aspects of Huck’s moral education and the inner conflicts he experiences, and these are
no less interesting for moral education in real life due to Huck’s being a fictional character.
14. Yates refers to Edgar M. Branch, The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain, Urbana, Illinois,
1950, p. 201.
15. The likeliness of moral confusion was great, considering that ‘Pap’s moral laxity’ and ‘Tom’s
idealistic illusions’ also provided input in Huck’s moral education (Copeland, 2002).
16. Hare is not unaware of this; see Hare, 1992, pp. 159–160).
17. It is important to see that it is only his view of morality, his idea of what belongs to morality and
what doesn’t, that is impoverished, for from a third-person perspective, using a richer concept of
morality than Huck does, his morality itself (i.e. his actions and the values and commitments
these express) is not impoverished at all.
18. Cf. Schinkel, 2007, pp. 218–224; 264–270; see Locke, 1968 and Kant, 1900. See also the
reference to Turiel’s research regarding heteronomy and autonomy below.
19. Note that both Locke and Kant predicted that too much emphasis on discipline (especially when
this has the form of physical punishment) would have exactly this result: (sensual) pain and
pleasure would become the motives for action.
20. Cf. the do ut des idea in ch. 3: ‘[Miss Watson] told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked
for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any
good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make
it work. By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She
never told me why, and I couldn’t make it out no way.’
21. Thus, a rapprochement may be possible between Warnock’s (1971) insistence that we need to
discuss the object of morality (which, for him, is the amelioration or non-deterioration of the
human predicament) and the linguistic approach advocated by Hare, among others.
22. Thanks are due to an anonymous referee for various helpful comments.

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