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John Rethorst
Why Teaching
Art Is Teaching
Ethics
Foreword by Mark Johnson
Why Teaching Art Is Teaching Ethics
John Rethorst
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
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For Connie
and her children
Foreword
People don’t just like stories, they need them. We get embroiled in narratives that
enact the tragedy and comedy of our human condition, showing us the implications
of our values and actions. We form relationships with the characters in stories and
novels, hoping the best for some, fretting over their impending loss, injury or death.
We want things to work out for the best. We want virtue to be rewarded and vice
punished. We want to follow different characters to see where their personalities,
values, virtues and vices lead them in life. Stories do matter for our lives, showing
us possibilities for meaning, thought and action.
Even the most rabid censors and book burners implicitly recognize the power
of narratives to shape our lives. Narratives are experiments in living, for better or
worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. John
Gardner knew this, arguing that the moral cultivation and edification we encounter
in stories come not through narratives that moralize and preach at us, that is, moral
propaganda, but rather from an honest exercise in moral imagination, the exploration
of the meaning of values, traits of character and relationships that constitute our
moral understanding.
This book carries forward the tradition defined by works like John Gardner’s Moral
Fiction, Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge, Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative,
Marshal Gregory’s Shaped by Stories, Alex Keke’s The Enlargement of Life, and
Richard Eldridge’s On Moral Personhood. The basic theme running through such
works is that a certain type of narrative fiction provides an experimental workshop
for the development of moral perception, understanding and values. The goal is to
understand how we are both shaped by stories that interrogate the meaning of our
human situation and also how we can learn from stories to critically assess and
improve our deepest values.
Rethorst has an excellent grasp of a large number of literary works and an
admirably broad knowledge of relevant empirical research, coming from several
fields, on the nature of moral understanding, judgment and growth of deliberative
capacities. He brings mature reflection and a breadth of life experience to his readings
of different kinds of narratives. Underlying his explicit analyses and arguments is a
vii
viii Foreword
values of others—a perspective that narratives with moral density are well-suited to
elaborate.
This all eventually builds up to a plea for the moral density of narrative as key to
moral illumination. The goal is to cultivate moral perceptiveness by letting students
(and readers generally) engage the particularities of character, conflict and values.
The overarching philosophical framework for this argument is, quite correctly, John
Dewey’s conception of morality, which Rethorst develops in considerable detail and
exemplary clarity over the course of the book. He expands on Dewey’s argument that
moral deliberation is an artistic achievement, an activity of aesthetic appreciation and
the making of aesthetically meaningful situations. The culmination is an account of
how children (and adults) should be assisted in engaging complex moral narratives, in
which they simulate the events and deliberations of the characters. The point of such
education is not to preach the values of the elders, but to develop a deep appreciation
of character, values and their consequences. Besides tracking Dewey’s view of moral
growth, there is excellent treatment of Aristotle’s conception of virtue and a life of
well-being and well-doing that constitutes human flourishing.
Rethorst appreciates Dewey’s view of the role of habit in the formation of our
moral sensibilities and biases, and he draws convincingly on Dewey’s account of
the reconstruction of habits, the expansion of sympathies, the sharpening of nuanced
perception and the working of imaginative reflection in resolving moral problems.
What emerges is a form of virtue ethics rooted in moral density.
Running through every chapter is the stressing of the importance of the cultivation
of moral imagination that is necessary if our children are going to manage the moral
complexities that will confront them in this troubled world of ours. However, when it
comes to the need for a certain kind of moral edification and cultivation, this applies,
not just to our children, but to everyone, since our moral education is and must be a
lifelong ongoing journey of self-discovery and self-transformation.
Mark Johnson
Philip H. Knight Professor of Liberal
Arts and Sciences, Emeritus
Department of Philosophy
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR, USA
Preface
Back when life was simple, or at least easy, I was a sailor on an icebreaker in the
U. S. Coast Guard. One day as we prepared to leave Boston for Greenland, I watched
as the ship’s engineer oiled and adjusted our gyroscopic compass. Turning at 8,000
rpm, it synchronizes with the earth’s rotation to point north.
He finished his work, closed the lid and turned it on, and we looked through the
plexiglass window on top as it gained speed. I couldn’t help but notice that it was
pointing nowhere near north, and said so. “It finds north,” he replied. “Takes about
four hours.”
I am reminded of this by current discussion about the ‘moral compass’ we have
and how to engender and nourish it. If you blindfolded the ship’s engineer and spun
him around in a room, then asked him to point north, he wouldn’t be able to do
it better than you or I could. Yet he knows how to find north, using a mechanism
informed by science.
That’s what this book is about, but by science I do not mean psychology or
evolutionary biology, although they both have something to say. I mean to remember
Quine’s observation that philosophy is continuous with science. The sublime clarity
of good philosophy is just what we need to discern how moral perception occurs and
how to make use of that perception to lead more decent lives and show our children
how to do the same.
The eminent American philosopher John Dewey, one of my primary sources,
cautioned against art and literature that attempts moral education as its didactic
purpose, thereby rendering it art of secondary quality. My argument, instead, favors
art that does not intend to teach but rather to illuminate, examples including
Middlemarch, Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Jane Austen.
xi
Contents
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Name Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
xiii
Chapter 1
Utility, Principle, Virtue
If this epigraph only rarely escapes English class, something like it has fascinated
philosophers for a long time. Iris Murdoch remembers that “Kant said that beauty
was an analogon of good, Plato said it was the nearest clue.”1 I want to go further and
posit that our means of perception of the aesthetic and the ethical share an organic
connection, an understanding of which will help elucidate moral perception, a critical
component of moral education.
Or, moral education as it should be. But what currently counts as such is, directly
or almost directly, simple instruction. I ask why this does not work. I ask why Jane
Austen said “We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth
knowing.”2 She did not mean that training in a skill is not worth having; rather, that
life’s larger questions are not amenable to direct instruction. I ask whether in this
sense the traditional idea of moral instruction is fatally flawed. Traditional education
in ethics speaks in entirely general terms and teaches entirely general rules. These
can be topics of instruction, but cannot provide what I call moral illumination.
Let’s explore how to create this illumination, by developing a theory of ethical
perception with conceptual building blocks gained from the thinking of Aristotle,
John Dewey, Iris Murdoch, and several fine contemporary philosophers, neurolo-
gists, linguists and psychologists. The first several chapters here form a theoretical
framework that explains and supports the belief of Dewey and Murdoch that teaching
art is teaching ethics. I was astonished to read these theorists and realize that their
points of view had not been thoroughly explored and critiqued by their followers,
given the potential importance of a conceptual structure that would allow society,
finally, to have a way effectively to teach ethics to young people. This book under-
takes that objective, and develops an original idea that I call moral density, which
adequately explains for the first time the deep relation between art and ethics.
There’s more on offer here. Dewey and Murdoch, exceptional philosophers by
anyone’s standards, tend in my opinion to contemplate a topic and arrive at brilliant
insight. However, they spend less time constructing a clear and detailed argument
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1
J. Rethorst, Why Teaching Art Is Teaching Ethics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19511-2_1
2 1 Utility, Principle, Virtue
and comparing several points of view so that the argument is more accessible and
convincing to more people of different backgrounds and frames of mind. What I will
suggest is something worth keeping in mind by anyone teaching art or literature,
and will take time and attention on the part of teachers and students in school, from
junior high through college. Asking for that much time from anyone requires a careful
argument and clear direction. That is, art as moral intimation is not a new topic, but has
never been supported with sufficient rigor to justify an influence in actually modifying
the school curriculum. That’s an expensive and fraught undertaking, both by itself
and because adding something to the classroom hour requires deleting something
else.
But this book will not suggest that somehow simply teaching art has the effect of
teaching ethics. While the relation between them is profound, it is far more subtle
and abstruse than direct instruction could reach. Nor is this a book of educational
theory; its questions, sources and arguments are those of philosophy, in this case
in the service of education. This kind of enquiry has notable precedents: Aristotle’s
wonderful Nicomachean Ethics, while a cornerstone of Western philosophy, was
intended as, and largely is, a practical manual of moral education, with philosophical
insight sometimes a matter of reading between the lines.3 Speaking of the value
of ethical habituation, Aristotle says “It is not unimportant, then, to acquire one
sort of habit or another, right from our youth; rather, it is very important, indeed all-
important.”4 Dewey’s work, while including significant contributions to metaphysics,
ethics, and aesthetics, is also in substantial part an expression of his strong interest
in education.
This book spends much of its time exploring thinking from these and many more
theorists. But this is not philosophy for philosophers: it’s intended for a literate
general audience. Jargon is minimal (any technical terminology is defined in the
Glossary at the back of the book), and a background in the area is not assumed. I
hope this work has something to offer to everybody who realizes that ethics needs to
be learned, that young people need guidance to grow up to be good people, but also
that our world has not yet put into practice an effective and reliable means to do this.
˛˛˛
“How can I be moral?” is a deceptive question, because it can be taken two ways. It
can mean, how can I act in a certain manner and not another, where some actions are
encouraged, others tolerated, and still others circumscribed according to rules, laws,
or prescribed principles such as seeking the greatest good for the greatest number or
resolving to treat others as ends rather than means to an end. Further, should I act
that way because I perceive benevolence, or because of fear of punishment? But the
question can also mean, should I be disposed to act in certain ways more than others:
should my emotions point me in one direction and not another? These two ways are
much different, and it’s not hard to see that the second interpretation requires context
that the first does not. The question is not only how precisely to be ethical,5 but also
why should one be so to begin with.6 I will show that logic alone does not provide
the tools necessary to answer the latter question. A certain kind of insight must be
1 Utility, Principle, Virtue 3
present, and the task for educators is a nourishment of conditions that encourage that
elucidation.
How would this work? Consider that the initial choice a person has is not whether
to be moral, but to acknowledge that the choice to be moral is one to be taken seriously.
What kind of reason can we offer the agent to make this choice? David Hume says that
we don’t act because of reasons—instead, we act because of our feelings, which may
give us reasons7 —and Søren Kierkegaard argues that the choice to be ethical must
precede reasons to be so; otherwise, no reason can have any force. To every reason
given the agent to be moral, she can simply ask why that should count as a reason.8
But if a kind of illumination generated by either direct or vicarious experience can
occur first, reason can subsequently delineate and adjudicate decision procedures. It
is no criticism of logical reasoning to say that at this point it cannot do all the work.
Something must precede it. We may for the moment call this something virtue.
Aristotle defines virtue as the state “that makes a human being good;”9 Nancy
Sherman adds that it encompasses emotion and governs action, as both a correct and
sensitive response to a particular situation.10 Hume confirms that “The final sentence
. . . which makes morality an active principle . . . depends on some internal sense or
feeling [of benevolence], which nature has made universal in the whole species.”11
(Note that Hume does not argue that the feeling exists to the same degree in all
members of the species.) Murdoch says that “virtue is being in love with good.”12
Dewey finds that “A disposition of virtue is a means to a certain quality of happiness
because it is a constituent of that good, while such happiness is means in turn to
virtue, as the sustaining of good in being.”13
None of this conflicts with moral directives such as utility: seeking to provide
the greatest good to the greatest number, nor with principles of fairness and duty
such as Immanuel Kant’s: treating the other person as an end, not as a means to an
end. Either of those two theories may appeal to an individual to a greater or lesser
degree, but both are calculations, i.e. we want to do x, so here’s the best way to do
x, where x is one of many theories guiding behavior. But first we must want to do x.
That aspiration may be a reflection of virtue. It may also, for example in the case of
utilitarian or consequentialist theories, be a means to cost-effective governance, in
which case only a calculation, since they prescribe performing actions a, b and c so
that outcomes x, y and z may be realized, where x, y and z are desirable and external
to a, b and c, which themselves may be pleasant or odious. Steven Fesmire sums
up what we need for calculations: “the dominant contemporary moral philosophies
in the United States and Britain share a quest for an irrecusable principle or system
of rules regulating human conduct. This can be seen in the two most prominent
examples in philosophical literature: utilitarianism . . . and Kantianism . . . Behind
surface differences, there lies a shared strategy: pursuit of a bedrock principle”14
from which to calculate.
A difficulty with any calculation is presented by Hume, with his argument that
determination of what anyone deserves in a given situation is a hard calculation
to make.15 Law agrees that certain actions may be regarded as criminal and entail
punishment, but takes mitigating circumstances into account. Which circumstances
should count how much, relative to other transgressors’ circumstances, becomes
4 1 Utility, Principle, Virtue
difficult to calculate. We would need to know the complete details of everyone’s life
to fairly award each what she deserves. Otherwise, Fesmire writes, “moral education
is reduced to training in cost–benefit calculations of self-interested actors striving to
maximize their individual satisfactions. Any role for imagination is utterly missing.
The account is descriptively inadequate and prescriptively bankrupt.”16
Because the body of thinking created by Aristotle that we call virtue ethics (VE)
does not make calculations, it would thus be an error to consider VE as not more
than another moral theory. It may be fair to consider it a deeper conception of ethics.
Further, virtue—dispositions based on emotions, suitably habituated—obviates what
Martha Nussbaum calls a crudeness of moral theories that are based on general
principles.17 It does not preclude adoption of such a generalist theory, of which there
are many, but neither does virtue specifically require adoption of one. It simply seems
to be prior, in considerations of what we mean by ethical. As such, it provides less of
an algorithm or recipe for calculation of right action than do generalist theories. Julia
Annas explains that “we find it natural to make a number of demands on a moral theory
which ancient theories [e.g. VE] do not make. It is a common modern assumption that
a moral theory should help us to decide what it is right for us to do,”18 i.e. provide a
structure within which we can make a straightforward calculation. Classical theories
such as Aristotle’s do not do this. Rather, Annas says, they:
assume that the moral agent internalizes and applies the moral theory to produce the correct
answers to hard cases; but the answers themselves are not part of the theory . . . Thus for
ancient theories it is true that there is not much to be said in general about hard cases.
Modern theories often see it as a demand they be able to generate answers to hard cases in
a comparatively simple way; and to this extent ancient ethics fails to meet modern demands
on casuistry . . . Ancient ethics accepts no such demands; we shall see that the intellectual
model it finds appropriate for ethical understanding is quite different . . . Ancient theories
do not have the strong structure which we find in many modern theories, especially those
which are consciously based on a scientific conception of theory.19
However, virtue is the set of dispositions resulting from educated, habituated feel-
ings, not simply the feelings we might otherwise happen to have. Sherman argues
that the formation of moral habits is anything but non-rational; rather, it is cognition
guiding and instructing desire and thereby developing character. Quality of char-
acter and practical wisdom—how to live—are in the end inseparable, according to
Aristotle.20
Recent work by Sherman, Nussbaum and others explores this claim of an intimate
and organic relationship between the emotions and a perception of moral obligation,
a claim not always acknowledged in traditional moral education. There, the direct
instruction that is often more in favor is a pedagogy that requires devotion to principle
(see for example Wynne and Ryan21 and other practices discussed in Chap. 9). I will
show how moral theories based on principle, and the ways those can be taught, fall
short of providing the illumination we need.
For instance, principles are often treated in moral discourse as if they required no
explanation or justification for their acceptance. “Abortion is murder, and murder is
wrong” and “A woman has the right to reproductive freedom” are two sides of an
exasperating argument, vexing because no generally-acceptable solution has been
1 Utility, Principle, Virtue 5
of moral education at the elementary level. At the point where a young person is able
to ask why one principle must take precedence over another, though, another answer
must be forthcoming. As Nussbaum29 and Jonathan Bennett30 agree, rules are useful
guides to action, perhaps especially for young people, since they have yet to develop
practical wisdom and so are fortunate to benefit from perceptions and judgment of
those with more experience, but rules cannot be relied upon any further.
An ethics of virtue provides, in Thomas Kuhn’s31 sense, a much different
paradigm, or way of seeing the big picture. While a principle entails an injunction, a
virtue suggests an inclination to do a certain specific thing in a certain particular situ-
ation—an inclination, even if it presents itself so strongly as to be felt as obligation.
What is required of virtuous action must be more than that required of principled
action, because action and situation can never be described completely enough to
transcend the limited vision of principle. The constraint of the latter is entirely satis-
fied by obeying the law; demands of the former include an account of perception I
believe is vital to morality.
Sherman defines Aristotle’s practical wisdom as having three capacities: moral
perception, choice-making, and collaboration.32 Perception, according to Nuss-
baum’s reading of Aristotle, is a complex response to a particular situation, rather than
anything to do with general precepts.33 She speaks of the difficulty in understanding
what we see in such concrete situations, and in choice of how to act. So, calling a
certain choice ‘good’ rather than ‘right’ acknowledges the complexity, rather than a
clear cut, black and white simplicity to which any situation with an ethical question
can be distilled enough to fit an abstraction.
Such a mapping of an action onto an abstraction is easy, but only if you don’t
mind that it doesn’t completely fit. Because Aristotle does mind, saying basically
that no abstraction can cover or describe circumstances adequately to provide enough
information to choose what to do, his concept of practical wisdom defends both imag-
ination and emotion as ingredients vital to the exercise of reason in moral thinking.
Imagination, I will contend, is of profound importance to moral development and
choice, and it just does not make sense to speak of instructing imagination. I will
instead speak of nourishing it, and how that might be achieved. Aristotle says that
seeing correctly comes with maturity since it takes time to have the experience that
teaches us how to see.34 I will ask whether ways of nourishing imagination can let
us vicariously live through different moments of life to gain enough experience to
support, at least to a degree, the illumination that we need.
If imagination is this important, then the way it works, and how we can address
that, become the heart of the issue. I will show that art and literature work to nourish
imagination to a degree that little else can, and that the vicarious quality of this
aesthetic experience is not a limitation on its efficacy. Marshall Gregory even says
that “Story is first of all a form of experience, not a form of intellectual discourse”35
and “narratives’ ethical visions help us think about [experience] in richer ways than
if we had to rely solely on our own firsthand experience.”36
The first part of this, although still at odds with the larger part of traditional moral
theory, has received a good deal of support from diverse thinkers. Adam Smith found
substantial value in literature as counsel in ethical matters,37 not long before the poet
1 Utility, Principle, Virtue 7
Percy Shelley provided Dewey with the inspiration for his transcendental final chapter
of Art as Experience, both he and Shelley saying that exceptional moral illumination
is available from the arts. It may be that literature is particularly well suited to this
kind of edification, a point I will consider in Chap. 7. However, the appeal of one
or another art form is dependent on the individual, and the mature novel is for some
people, especially young people,38 a relatively inaccessible genre. That said, there
is a wide range of novels that can, with sympathetic introduction, appeal powerfully
to a great number of young people. Those with significant ethical content include
Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and everything the
adult Jane Austen wrote. I will discuss why these works offer significant moral
illumination in terms of philosophy, and I will apply that thinking to my goal in
education. I will offer analysis of what works of literature like these can do in junior
high, high school, and college settings and how they can do it, and I will suggest
ways to approach the study of art and literature.
So I would like to start by discussing three constituents of VE, necessary to realize
the disposition we seek:
• Particularism: Aristotle’s idea that general moral law or principle is deficient
because it cannot take into account the myriad particulars of a specific case,
which may have important bearing on judgment. We need to acknowledge the
primacy of the particular to truly see the essence of an ethical situation.
• Perception: Aristotle’s idea again: how clearly and deeply we can see another’s
specific circumstance has everything to do with how we judge her. Cognitive
science—the study of how we make sense of the world—bears on this as well.
• Imagination: my primary sources here are John Dewey, America’s preeminent
philosopher, Iris Murdoch, a fine philosopher with the special vantage point of a
good novelist, and several excellent contemporary theorists.
With an understanding of these three elements, we can then explore how the
moral agent can use them to realize illumination of what is good. This discussion
will concern:
• The aesthetic: I again depend on Dewey and Murdoch, and on Nelson Goodman’s
theory of art. Metaphor, now gaining vital support from the science of neurology,
shows us a powerful, organic relation between art and ethics.
• Density: and Dewey’s interest in primary experience and moral imagination.
• The literary: why literature may be the most accessible of the arts for the purpose
here. Psychology’s Theory of Mind shows us the special value of literary fiction.
I explore that fiction and continue with what deserves its own chapter, the novels
of Jane Austen as seen through the lens of Aristotelian theory.
This book concludes with consideration of dialog with young people, keeping in
mind their well-founded suspicions that adult ‘morality’ is often just another means
of hypocrisy and excessive control.
Chapter 2
Particularism
The primacy of the particular in ethical thinking, a concept with a genesis in Aris-
totle,39 has been affirmed by much recent work in philosophy, notably by Julia
Annas,40 Carol Gilligan,41 Mark Johnson,42 Iris Murdoch,43 Nel Noddings,44 Martha
Nussbaum,45 and Nancy Sherman,46 work that concludes that the specifics of a situa-
tion with a moral dimension take priority over general ethical principle, which by its
process of logical deduction and abstraction may omit something important. George
Eliot, author of Middlemarch, agrees that “There is no general doctrine which is not
capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct
fellow feeling with individual fellow-men”47 : generalism, although throughout much
of history the dominant mode of ethical thinking, cannot always provide complete
justification for moral choice. It misses something. This approaches a great divide
in moral philosophy: generalism hearkens back to Plato, particularism to Aristotle,
and not much consensus has developed since then.
To explore this division, I will consider ethics of general principle in Kantian and
in utilitarian terms because much moral theory as discussed in government, social
sciences and education uses these terms. This is not to say that theory, especially
within the academy, has not evolved substantially since the writings of Mill and
Kant. It has, and I will use as one example Barbara Herman’s modern, sophisticated
exegesis of Kant.48 Rather, it is clear that many in the world, including in education,
reason about morality as a matter of priority of principle. However, some of the
theorists whom I most respect argue against this kind of thinking, which they define
in largely Kantian or utilitarian terms. They are not attacking ancient and irrelevant
theory; they are making impassioned and persuasive arguments against the way much
of the world reasons ethically.
A cogent introduction to the debate is Sherman’s Making a Necessity of Virtue:
Aristotle and Kant on Virtue,49 which attempts to reconcile major features of the
Aristotelian and Kantian traditions. She seems to me to do anything but sell short
either tradition, and it is noteworthy that she treats Kantian theory in essentially the
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 9
J. Rethorst, Why Teaching Art Is Teaching Ethics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19511-2_2
10 2 Particularism
form in which Kant developed it. This would not deny that complex modifications
have been made of it, by John Rawls50 and others. For Sherman to mention Rawls
only twice in her text and in five footnotes is not to say that she thinks Rawls or
other current theorists are lacking or wrong, if anything only that their work cannot
be considered the default interpretation and development of Kantian deontological
theory.
How is generalism deficient? Note that a principle must exclude reference to
details. “It’s wrong to tell a lie” would, if it admitted of exceptions, only be weaker.
This is the basis for Kant’s defense of this principle at all times and under all
circumstances.51 He gives the remarkable example of a man who has run from a
murderer and is now hiding in your house. The murderer comes to your door and
asks you if you know where his intended victim is. According to the principle of
absolute honesty that Kant holds, you must tell the truth because “To be truthful
(honest) in all declarations is . . . a sacred and unconditionally commanding law of
reason that admits of no expediency whatsoever.”52 It is difficult to understand the
point of Kant’s further, at times consequentialist, supporting arguments that suppose
e.g. that the intended victim had, unknown to you, left by the back door and, if
you had lied to the murderer who had then continued down the street, he would
have seen the victim when otherwise not, and so on. Such possible benign conse-
quences to the truthful statement have nothing to do with Kant’s categorical reasons
for arguing its necessity. In response to a charge by his contemporary philosopher
Benjamin Constant that following an absolute duty always to tell the truth would
render society nonfunctional, and that the significance of a lie must be measured by
its harm to another, Kant says “a lie always harms another; if not some other human
being, then it nevertheless does harm to humanity in general, inasmuch as it vitiates
the very source of right.”53
In response, Murdoch says “Kant resented the hold which history has upon ethics.
He attempts to make of the act of moral judgement an instantiating of a timeless form
of rational activity . . . Kant does not tell us to respect whole particular tangled-up
historical individuals, but to respect the universal reason in their breasts . . . Kant’s
view of ethics contains no place for the idea of tragedy . . . We are supposed to
live by exceedingly simple and general rules: suppression of history, suspicion of
eccentricity.”54 She concludes that he would like to build a moral structure consisting
entirely of general rules, which would then allow no consideration for the complexity
we often find in real-world ethical questions.55 That is, to live by rules is to miss what
can be complicated, often subtle, sometimes important, and on occasion the heart
of the matter. Morality and life are simply too complex for a rational activity that
generates timeless imperatives that admit of no exceptions. Fesmire concludes that
the thinking of Dewey and others “rejects [Rawls’s] geometric paradigm inasmuch
as idealized matrices for moral reasoning oversimplify the richness and complexity
of moral experience as lived.”56
It is also noteworthy that Kant’s arguments, as do those of many moral philoso-
phers, happen to reflect just the contingencies of culture that rationality claims to
transcend. Thus Kant’s Lutheran Pietist parents taught him that morality required
telling the truth in all circumstances. By contrast, Bantu parents teach their children
2 Particularism 11
not to tell the truth to strangers, in regard for the safety of the family. If one practice
is more rational than the other, Kant has not shown us this, because each practice
can be consistently universalized.
It is in fact astonishing how much history, culture and language contribute to
what we think of as purely logical thinking. René Descartes, who spoke of “une
pomme rouge” (literally, “an apple red”), thought in a language that first addressed
substance, followed by determination of attribute: in French, the adjective follows
the noun. Across the English Channel, John Locke talked of “a red apple” in a word
order that by considering attributes arrives at a notion of substance. The difference
in syntax runs parallel to the philosophical traditions of continental rationalism and
British empiricism, and studies show that this kind of linguistic distinction may be
more than coincidentally related to systems of thought.57 As well, the rise of British
empiricism occurred just as the Restoration succeeded in re-securing metaphysics
from the hands of upstarts and re-establishing its control by the church. As Richard
Boyd notes, there was nowhere else for secular thinkers to go but into an empiricist
tradition.58
Alasdair MacIntyre presents an effective argument that rationalities occur in tradi-
tions of thought, and that the ready accession of any one tradition to a universaliz-
able quality is a fiction.59 In the formation of such a quality, the Enlightenment
intended to establish standards of rationality and thus principles by which all aspects
of human behavior could be judged, a development guided only by ratiocination.
Thus followers of Enlightenment thinking established a hierarchy between those
with access to a supposed timeless and universal reason, and those unfortunately
more encumbered with cultures and traditions, for a central tenet of Enlightenment
rationality is transcendence of culture, tradition and history.
This is a misleading supposition, because Enlightenment theorists found unex-
pected difficulty in establishing the moral principles that would be supported by every
rational person. The ideal of ethics informed by pure rationality seemed impossible
to realize.60 Theorists could elude failure only if a moral theory based on principle
could on its own terms demonstrate that other conceptions of rationality, such as
derive from Aristotle, were mistaken. This they have been unable to do. The debate
has shown no signs of mitigating in over two hundred years. Nor has any generalist
theory convincingly discredited Classical theory or more recent work in virtue ethics,
for example, or feminist ethics. For instance, to show that only useful maxims can
be universalized, MacIntyre argues that Kant has to use:
notoriously bad arguments [and make] large mistakes. It is very easy to see that many
immoral and trivial non-moral maxims are vindicated by Kant’s test quite as convincingly –
in some cases more convincingly – than the moral maxims which Kant aspires to uphold
. . . ‘Let everyone but me be treated as a means’ may be immoral but it is not inconsistent
and there is not even any inconsistency in willing a universe of egoists all of whom live
by this maxim. It might be inconvenient for each if everyone lived by this maxim, but it
would not be impossible and to invoke considerations of convenience would in any case be
to introduce just that prudential reference to happiness which Kant desires to eliminate from
all considerations of morality.61
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Hän kohotti silmänsä ja näki oman tuttavansa, pitäjän
kirkonpalvelijan Efreman, liikanimeltään Krotsi, pienen, kumaraisen
ihmisen, jolla oli terävä nenä ja himmeät silmät hän istui huonoilla
rattailla, olkikuvon päällä, nojaten kärryn takalautaan.
Akim pysähtyi.
— Kotiin.
— Tahdotko, kyyditsen?
— Vai niin, vai ajoi hän sinut pois? — virkkoi katkerasti Akim.
— Ei, isäseni, tapa minut, isäseni, tapa minut kirottu: lyö, älä välitä
hänen sanoistaan, — huusi Audotja, kierien Akimin jaloissa.
Isä! isä!
Efrem vilkastui.
<tb>
Ellei Kirilovna aivan oikein kertonut Lisaveta Prohorovnalle
keskusteluaan Akimin keralla… niin samaa voidaan sanoa
Audotjasta: Naum ei häntä ajanut pois, vaikka hän niin Akimille
sanoi; hänellähän ei ollut siihen oikeutta… Hän oli velvollinen
antamaan vanhoille eläjille aikaa poismuuttoon. Hänen Ja Audotjan
välinen pesänselvitys eli kokonaan toisenlainen.
Kun Akim Eframin kanssa ajoi hänen luotaan pois, jättäen hänet
yksinään pellolle, niin hän alussa ainoastaan itki, liikahtamatta
paikaltaan. Itkettyään kyllikseen lähti hän herraskartanoon, vielä
katkerampaa oli näyttäytyä palvelijain huoneessa. Kaikki tytöt
hyökkäsivät häntä vastaan osaaottavina ja sääliväisinä. Heidät
nähtyään, ei Audotja voinut pidättää kyyneltään; ne nyt virtoina
valuivat hänen turvonneista ja punaisista silmistään. Kokonaan
voimattomana vaipui hän eteensattuvalle tuolille. Juoksivat
hakemaan Kirilovnaa. Hän tuli, meni hänen luokseen kerrassaan
lempeänä. Mutta herrattaren luokse ei laskenut häntä enemmän kuin
Akimiakaan. Eikä Audotja itsekään kovin tiukasti vaatinut herrattaren
puheille, hän tuli kartanoon yksinomaan siltä syystä, ettei ensinkään
tietänyt, mihin olisi päänsä kallistanut.
<tb>
— Niin; vielä.
Vasta hämärsi, kun hän ajoi pihaan, mutta siltä huolimatta portilla
jo seisoi valjaissa hevonen ja yksi Naumin palvelija istui kuskilla
pidellen ohjia.
— Mitä varten?