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Huck Finn, Moral Reasons and Sympathy

Craig Taylor

Philosophy / Volume 87 / Issue 04 / October 2012, pp 583 - 593

DOI: 10.1017/S003181911200040X, Published online: 04 October 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S003181911200040X

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Craig Taylor (2012). Huck Finn, Moral Reasons and Sympathy. Philosophy, 87, pp
583-593 doi:10.1017/S003181911200040X

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Huck Finn, Moral Reasons
and Sympathy
CRAIG TAYLOR

Abstract
In his influential paper ‘The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn’, Jonathan Bennett
suggests that Huck’s failure to turn in the runaway slave Jim as his conscience – a con-
science distorted by racism – tells him he ought to is not merely right but also prai-
seworthy. James Montmarquet however argues against what he sees here as Bennett’s
‘anti-intellectualism’ in moral psychology that insofar as Huck lacks and so fails to act
on the moral belief that he should help Jim his action is not praiseworthy. In this
paper I suggest that we should reject Montmarquet’s claim here; that the case of
Huck Finn indicates rather how many of our everyday moral responses to others
do not and need not depend on any particular moral beliefs we hold about them or
their situation.

As Jonathan Bennett has observed in his influential reading of Mark

Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, when Huck at a crucial moment in the
story fails to turn the runaway slave Jim in to the slave catchers,
Huck manages to do the morally right thing despite what his con-
science, a conscience distorted by racism, tells him he ought to do.
Huck finds himself unable to act as his conscience dictates and acts
rather, so Bennett suggests, on the basis of his feelings. As Bennett
says, ‘[t]he crucial point concerns reasons, which are all on one side
of the conflict. On the side of conscience we have principles, argu-
ments, considerations, ways of looking at things. … On the other
side, the side of feeling, we get nothing like that.’1 Further, as
Bennett also seems to suggest, it is not merely that Huck performed,
as we might say despite himself, the right action, but that in acting
on his natural feelings, his sympathy for his friend Jim, he is
morally praiseworthy. However James Montmarquet, arguing in
this journal, takes issue with what he calls here Bennett’s
‘anti-intellectualism’ in moral psychology, specifically, with
Bennett’s ‘opposition to the general idea that an intellectual grasp
of some truth as to the right thing to do plays a decisive role in

1
‘The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn’, Philosophy 49 (1974), 123.

doi:10.1017/S003181911200040X © The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 2012

Philosophy 87 2012 583
Craig Taylor

moral responsibility.’2 Against Bennett Montmarquet argues that the

case of Huck Finn shows rather ‘the indispensible role of the agent’s
moral beliefs… in any suitable account of the moral praiseworthiness
or blameworthiness of actions’ (ibid). For Montmarquet then, Huck’s
action, or rather inaction, is not morally praiseworthy. I will argue
however that we should reject this conclusion. While it is true that
Huck’s moral beliefs, such as they are, provide him with no reason
for allowing Jim to escape, what Huckleberry Finn serves to remind
us of is the fact that many of our everyday moral responses to
others, including our praise and blame of other people on the basis
of their response to others, do not and need not depend on any par-
ticular moral beliefs we hold about them or their situation at all. At
least, so I shall argue.
Huck, as we know, runs away from his demonic father, travelling
up the Mississippi on a raft with Jim. As they approach Cairo
where Jim will escape to the free states Huck’s conscience tells him
that in helping Jim escape he has wronged Miss Watson, Jim’s right-
ful owner, and he determines to paddle ashore and inform on Jim.
Here is what happens:
When I was fifty yards off, Jim says:
‘Dah you goes, de ole true Huck; de on’y white gentleman dat
ever kep’ his promise to ole Jim.’
Well, I just felt sick. But I says, I got to do it – I can’t get out
of it.
At that moment two men in a skiff looking for runaway slaves come
alongside and ask Huck whether the man left on the raft is black or
white.
I didn’t answer up prompt. I tried to but the words wouldn’t
come. I tried for a second or to, to brace up and out
with it, but I warn’t man enough – hadn’t the spunk of a
rabbit. I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying, and up
and says –
‘He’s white.’3
Elsewhere I have argued that Huck’s inability to turn Jim in here
indicates what we may call a moral incapacity; not, that is to say, an
incapacity to act morally but an incapacity that is itself expressive

2
‘Huck Finn, Aristotle, and Anti-Intellectualism in Moral
Psychology’, Philosophy 87 (2012), 51–63. Hereafter AIMP.
3
M. Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (London, Penguin,
1966), 147. Hereafter, HF.

584
 Huck Finn, Moral Reasons and Sympathy

of an agent’s positive moral character.4 For the purposes of this paper

though, the important point is just to suggest that what Huck takes to
be a failure of nerve – and for him a wicked one at that – is in fact a
genuine moral response, a response worthy of our moral praise.
But why should we think that Huck’s response is not mere weak-
ness on his part? Obviously a person’s inability to act on conscience
in a case like this may simply be mere weakness or something
similar. For example when Huck meets up on his journey with
Tom Sawyer, Tom’s ‘eye lit up’ (HF, 296) at the thought of
helping Jim to escape; Tom’s helping Jim is clearly not a moral
response but merely a kind of lark. Given that the two boys might
act in the same way, how is it that Huck’s response here is a moral
one while Tom’s isn’t? In order to appreciate the difference here I
suggest we need to attend not merely to Huck’s inability to turn
Jim in when given the chance but Huck’s whole pattern of response
to Jim and to others on his journey up the Mississippi. Consider for
example the following exchange between Huck and Jim before
Huck’s moment of crisis. Earlier when Huck is paddling ahead of
Jim on the raft he becomes separated from Jim in thick fog by an
island in the river. It is a tense period and when Huck meets up
with the raft again Jim has fallen asleep with worry and exhaustion
and Huck decides to play a trick on him. When Jim wakes, Huck
tells him he has been there all along and that it has all been a bad
dream, offering to interpret Jim’s dream for him. After a while,
Huck asks Jim what the rubbish and broken oar on the raft – the re-
manets of Jim’s struggle to navigate the raft and locate Huck in the
fog – stands for in his dream, to which Jim replies:
‘What do dey stan’ for? I’s gwyne to tell you. When I got all wore
out wid work, en wid de callin’ for you, en went to sleep, my heart
wuz mos’ broke bekase you wuz los’, en I din’t k’yer no mo’ what
become er me en de raf’. … Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what
is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes’ ‘em ashamed’
Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in
there, without saying anything but that. But that was enough. …
It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and
humble myself to a nigger – but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry
for it afterwards, neither. (HF, 142–3)

4
‘Moral Incapacity and Huckleberry Finn’, Ratio 14 (2001), 56–67. In
this paper I respond to objections by Michael Clark to my earlier paper
‘Moral Incapacity’, Philosophy 70 (1995), 273–85.

585
Craig Taylor

The true meaning of Huck’s inability to turn Jim in is not of course

clear when viewed in isolation; it is only when viewed in the context of
Huck’s whole pattern of response that we can see if for what it is, a
genuine moral response.
Of course Montmarquet accepts that ‘Huck may have all sorts of
good character traits, some of which are exemplified in his act of
helping Jim’. The crucial point for Montmarquet is rather that
‘these [character traits] are not exemplified in the right sort of way
for him to derive credit for this’ (AIMP, 61). Why Huck does not
deserve credit we will get to in a moment. Before that though, and
to begin to explain my claim at the end of the first paragraph, I
need to say something about my use of Huckleberry Finn.
Specifically, I need to stress from the outset that the brief outline
of the story that I offer here is in no way a substitute for reading
the book itself. For it is crucial to my argument, remembering my
claim at the end of the first paragraph, that my response to Huck,
and specifically my conviction that his response to Jim is a moral
response, is not founded on any beliefs I have (and might here
convey) about Huck’s character. Rather, my conception of Huck,
my sense of the kind of person he is including my particular beliefs
about his character, is itself founded on my response to Huckleberry
Finn. Thus to share in that conception requires one to attend to some-
thing that I clearly cannot reproduce here; that is, all that Huck says
and does, including Huck’s responses both to Jim and to other people
that he encounters within Twain’s story. Though I must also flag that
my point here will only become finally clear toward the end of this
paper.
To return to Montmarquet’s argument though, why should
Huck’s character traits, even though they may lead him to help
Jim, earn him no credit? The crucial point for Montmarquet here
is that since Huck’s ‘exhibited traits are not connected to any relevant
choice or deliberation… a distinctively Aristotelian character ap-
proach lends no support to his praiseworthiness for exhibiting
them in the present case’ (AIMP, 60). As Montmarquet says in this
connection Huck ‘does not exploit [the relevant traits]; if anything
they exploit him’ (ibid). While I would accept that Huck’s character
traits are not subject to deliberation and choice, it does not follow
that he is merely in some sense the vehicle of such traits. For often,
I will suggest, it is precisely through the responses expressive of
such traits that we recognise another as a fellow human being; that
is, as the kind of being that may make a moral claim on us at all.
Thus we might say that Huck’s inability to turn Jim in is morally
praiseworthy insofar as this involves his recognition of his shared
586
 Huck Finn, Moral Reasons and Sympathy

humanity with Jim – and this even though Huck himself does not
ever grasp the moral significance of this. Now, Montmarquet actually
provides what might seem like a powerful argument against any such
view in responding to Nomy Arpaly’s discussion of the Huck Finn
case.5 On Arpaly’s account Huck is morally praiseworthy for
helping Jim because, against what Bennett says, he does help Jim
for a moral reason; he helps Jim because he recognises Jim as a
person.6 For Arplay, moral praise depends only upon an agent
doing the morally right thing for – as is the case here – the right
moral reason, it does not require – as is not the case here – that an
agent believe that the relevant action is right for that reason.
Against such a position Montmarquet suggests that while Huck
may help Jim escape because he recognises his shared humanity
with Jim, that in itself is hardly praiseworthy since Huck may on
another occasion help an escaped convict in the same way and for
the same reason. Again the problem for Montmarquet is that a
moral agent is more than ‘a mere conduit wherein “reason” issues
in good or bad actions,’ and that what is missing once again for the
attribution of moral responsibility, praise and blame is the require-
ment that an agent weigh reasons for action in moral deliberation.
Montmarquet’s general point then seems to be this: In praising and
blaming others we are not concerned merely with the traits or reasons
that might explain their actions, but with an agent’s reasons in the
sense of what they take to justify their acting on these traits or
reasons. Thus recognising another as a fellow human being might
explain why I help them on some occasion but it does not in itself,
as the case of the escaped convict shows, justify my so acting. What
is required for moral agency, responsibility, praise and blame is
that I recognise my reasons for action as moral reasons where moral
reasons are essentially the product of deliberation over at least my
moral beliefs and principles. This I take to be the core of the kind
of moral psychology that Montmarquet wishes to defend. However
I will suggest that such a moral psychology, plausible as it may
seem, does not adequately represent our moral reflections on the
lives and actions of others, including our moral praise and blame of
them.

5
N. Arpaly ‘Moral Worth’, in her Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into
Moral Agency (New York NY: Oxford, 2003).
6
I will argue against even such a view however that Huck’s response in
helping Jim determines his sense of Jim’s humanity rather than his sense of
Jim’s humanity determining his response here.

587
Craig Taylor

To explain, and leaving the case of Huck to one side, consider what
might seem like a more everyday moral response to another. I ask
someone ‘why did you stop that man?’, and they reply, ‘because he
was about to walk into busy traffic’. But suppose I reply in turn,
‘no, I mean what moral reason, what moral justification, did you
have for stopping him?’ Perhaps flummoxed my interlocutor may
(eventually) reply ‘he would have got killed!’ or seeing I still wasn’t
getting the point he might say ‘we have a duty to prevent such road
fatalities if we can’. But is that what he meant all along but has
until now only expressed elliptically? No. For of course, in any ordin-
ary case, none of this would ever have entered his head before he
acted. In such an everyday case we simply act, come to another’s
aid, without thinking or deliberating at all. Such responses are an
example of what I have called primitive responses to other human
beings.7 I call them ‘primitive’ to register that such actions are not ex-
plained by an agent’s deliberation over their various moral beliefs and
principles. Now to return to the case of Huck, his response to Jim
strikes me as just this kind of primitive response, more specifically
as the primitive sympathetic response of being moved to act (to
help) in certain ways immediately, without thinking, by the suffering
of another.
I said above that such primitive responses are everyday moral
responses or actions, to register the vast variety of ways in which
our dealings with other human beings are marked by these kinds of
primitive responses to them. But I am not at the same time
denying, what is also obvious, that such responses to others are by
no means always forthcoming. What I do want to point out,
though, is an important feature of our attitude, indeed our response,
to such actions when they are forthcoming; to point out that in such
cases where a person is moved to help another who is suffering we do
not usually (this caveat to be explained directly) ask why that person’s
suffering should be, or be part of, a reason in the sense of a justification
for helping them. But this is exactly what Montmarquet is asking;
what Montmarquet thinks is required in the case of Huck is that he
be able to provide a justification for helping Jim. Now I do not
deny (to explain that caveat) that sometimes this question is appropri-
ate, it is appropriate to ask it of course in the case of the escaped
convict that Montmarquet discusses. My point is though that such
cases are exceptional and that it is only for this reason that a justifica-
tion for our sympathy seems at all required. But to say that we
7
See here especially Taylor, Sympathy: A Philosophical Analysis
(Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002).

588
 Huck Finn, Moral Reasons and Sympathy

recognise or take such cases, for some particular reason or other, as

exceptional is not to suggest that in what I am calling the ordinary
everyday kind of case we take it that these particular (call them poten-
tially sympathy defeating) reasons are absent – as if we classify cases
into two basic types. For my point is we do not take (or classify) these
cases in any way at all, even as cases!; we simply act immediately and
without thinking.
Of course, and to anticipate an obvious objection, there is a sense in
which Huck’s sympathy for Jim is exceptional. That is, it is extraordi-
nary given his upbringing that Huck should respond, at least on this
one occasion, to Jim as to a fellow human being and not as a slave; that
he should not see Jim as many in his society see Jim as belonging
merely because of the colour of his skin to a whole class of exceptions.
While for us sympathy for another human being may be withheld,
though even here only in certain respects, by the fact that a person
is a convict, for the slave-owner his sympathetic responses to a
whole race of others are withheld, denied, or just absent in much
more comprehensive ways because they are seen primarily as, taken
to be, his (or another white person’s) property. What is extraordinary
then is that despite all that his racist conscience tells him, Huck still
manages, what so few in his society could mange, to respond to Jim
as to a fellow human being, that in his case certain natural sympathetic
responses to another should triumph over all the reasons of a bad
morality.
Still, someone might grant that many cases in which we come to
another’s aid our actions are in some sense automatic, but contend
all the same that insofar as they are moral actions we need at least to
be able to provide a justification for so acting. It may be, as in my
example, that the justification is so obvious as to hardly require
mention, nevertheless the moral status of my actions still depends
one might say on my being able to provide a justification after the
fact when asked. Thus, one might argue one needs to indicate what
particular moral beliefs or principles justify acting, say, to help a
person who is suffering on some occasion. That point though turns
on how we understand the relationship between, on the one hand,
our moral beliefs and principles and, on the other, the kind of primi-
tive sympathetic response to others that I have highlighted. What I
want to question is the presumed moral authority of our moral
beliefs and principles over certain primitive, and particularly primi-
tive sympathetic, responses to other human beings. Here it is impor-
tant to note that in discussing Huck Finn Bennett was in part
highlighting the ways in which our moral beliefs and principles can
go badly wrong, and how our sympathies are, as he says (and this is
589
Craig Taylor

a point that Montmarquet at least notes) one of a number of ‘valid

pressures’8 that we might subject our moral beliefs and principles
to in order to avoid this. While I do not share Bennett’s view of sym-
pathy as mere feeling, it seems to me that there is an important point
somewhere here. For I suggest that sympathy in my sense as an
immediate and unthinking response to help another who is suffering
itself helps found the very moral beliefs and principles that presume
authority over it.
To begin to explain the above point, presumably one central moral
belief relevant in the case of Huck Finn is the belief that slavery is
unjust or even a terrible evil. But note that the moral principles or
beliefs that might seem naturally to lead to, even imply, that con-
clusion were not unknown to Huck’s society; in fact they were
surely widely believed. Here are some such beliefs: ‘We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Are
we seriously to suppose hardly anybody in Huck’s society believed
this, believed these words taken from the American Declaration of
Independence, a document that is the foundation, including moral
foundation, of their nation? That seems wildly implausible. So
then what exactly is it that the slave-owners of the American South
failed to see or understand here, and how might that failure be
made good? Well, consider how Frederick Douglass, an American
slave, tries to convince white Americans of the evil of slavery. He
invites them to consider their possible response to the songs of slaves.
Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and
quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If anyone
wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery,
let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation… and place himself in
the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence analyze the
sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, – and
if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because ‘there is no
flesh in his obdurate heart’.9
In order to convince his white readers of the evil of slavery Douglass
is here, I suggest, relying on the enduring power of the experience of
slaves, the ‘complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish’
(ibid), to move them, move them in the kind of primitive sympathetic
8
Bennett, 133.
9
F. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave. (London: Penguin, 1982), 58.

590
 Huck Finn, Moral Reasons and Sympathy

ways I have highlighted.10 But this is not, given the nature of his
appeal, something that he is asking his white readers to deliberate
about. That really would be of no help. For what the slave-owner is
missing in relation to his slaves is not some fact, for example, that
they suffer, that they are human beings (his treatment of his slaves
assumes these things). Rather, as Stanley Cavell has put it, what he
misses is ‘his internal relation to them,’11 or what I am calling his
sense of human fellowship with them. That is what ultimately will
reveal to Douglass’s white readers the evil of slavery. But, as I say, fel-
lowship with another in this sense is not something we deliberate
about or choose – any more than Huck deliberates and chooses to
act towards Jim as a fellow human being rather than a slave; Or,
any more than we choose our fellowship with both Huck and Jim
when we hope that Huck will not turn Jim in, not just for Jim’s
sake, but for Huck’s. But if that is our response, and if
Montmarquet is right, what sense does it make? For if Huck’s
actions do him no moral credit, how can we really hope for his sake
that he does not turn Jim in? Montmarquet’s final suggestion that
Huck is an interesting case of ‘near praiseworthiness’ because he ‘ex-
presses in his act qualities of openness that could easily have lead to a
praiseworthy belief’ (AIMP, 63 emphasis added) hardly seems to
answer that question. My suggestion is then that without this sense
of fellowship certain moral beliefs like ‘all men are created equal,’
or that we have ‘certain unalienable Rights’, are just so many empty
words. What gives them substance is our fellowship, our moral life,
with other human beings.
I cannot develop these thoughts further here. But the supposed
problem in any case with Huck for someone like Montmarquet is
that Huck, as Bennett points out, is unable to provide any justification
for helping Jim to escape. According to the morality that Huck has
been taught, there is no moral reason for him to help Jim escape –
and he never really considers (perhaps unsurprisingly since he is
still a child) that his response to Jim might be the foundations of a
better morality. Thus, for Montmarquet Huck’s actions are not
morally praiseworthy. My point however is that in attending

10
The point here is not that Douglass’s readers be, as we might say,
‘emotionally moved’. Rather the whole point of his Narrative is to move
his readers to action to help those still under the yoke of slavery. The book
had a very practical political purpose.
11
S. Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York NY: Oxford, 1979), 376. I
have in mind in particular here Cavell’s discussion of what he calls ‘soul-
blindness’ in connection with American slavery.

591
Craig Taylor

simply to our response to Huck we may come to see that the supposed
requirement that one be able always to provide a justification for
helping another in need, far from clarifying the nature of our moral
responses and relations to others in fact obscures this. To explain, if
one views Huck’s actions in light of the kind rationalist moral psy-
chology that Montmarquet is committed to, then we cannot but con-
clude that his actions, though right, are not morally praiseworthy.
However, if we simply attend to our own response to Twain’s story
and to Huck’s inability to turn Jim in without this prior commitment,
then the very idea that some justification is called for here, that the
moral status of Huck’s action somehow depends on this, may strike
us as completely unreal. Further, what the case of Huck then
throws light on is how in all those other everyday cases where, as I
have noted, an agent could if pressed provide a justification for
helping another in need, these supposed justifications are in fact
idle, a kind of hollow recital that adds nothing to our understanding
of our moral life with others and in fact obscures its fundamental
form, a form, as I have suggested, that is partly determined by our
primitive responses to other human beings.
Where I take issue with Montmarquet, then, is in seeing Huck as
presenting a kind of problem, in his seeing Huck’s actions as paradox-
ical (AIMP, 51) or Huck himself as presenting what Montmarquet
calls a ‘hard case’ (AIMP, 63). Against this I want to suggest that
there is nothing hard or paradoxical about this case at all, that it is
only the presumption of a certain moral psychology that makes it
appear so. Thus attending to my own response to Huckleberry Finn
and to Huck’s moment of truth on the Mississippi I find that the
problem that he is supposed to represent, the moral justification for
action that he is supposed to lack, dwindles or dissolves to nothing.
What seems a problem then rather is the idea that anyone should
need a justification for helping another who is suffering and in
need in a case like this. Now, to repeat, this is not to say that it is
never appropriate to ask for such a justification, as I have said there
will always be exceptional cases. But to ask not just on some occasion
but in any case whatsoever why another’s suffering should justify
helping them is to question, present as questionable or problematic,
those primitive sympathetic responses to others that makes them an
object of our moral concern at all. Nothing I have said finally, and
of course, provides us with any justification in the sense that
Montmarquet requires for praising a person who simply, primitively,
cannot when it comes to it send a man back into bondage, but on

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 Huck Finn, Moral Reasons and Sympathy

reading Huckleberry Finn we may be relieved, and grateful to Twain,

that we can wonder that we ever needed one.

Flinders University
craig.taylor@flinders.edu.au

593