Morality in a Realistic Spirit This unique collection of essays has two main purposes. The first is to honor the pioneering work of Cora Diamond, one of the most important living moral philosophers and certainly the most important working in the tradition inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second is to develop and deepen a picture of moral philosophy by carrying out new work in what Diamond has called the realistic spirit . The contributors in this book advance a first-order moral attitude that pays close attention to actual moral life and experience. Their essays, inspired by Diamond’s work, take up pressing challenges in Anglo- American moral philosophy, including Diamond’s defense of the concept “human being” in ethics, her defense of literature as a source of moral thought that does not require external sanction from philosophy, her challenge to the standard “fact/value” dichotomy, and her exploration of non-argumentative forms of legitimate moral persuasion. There are also essays that apply this framework to new issues such as the nature of love, the connections of ethics to theology, and the implications of Wittgenstein’s thought for political philosophy. Finally, the book features a new paper by Diamond in which she contests deep-rooted philosophical assumptions about language that severely limit what philosophers see as the possibilities in ethics. M orality in a Realistic Spirit offers a tribute to a great moral philosopher in the best way possible—by taking up the living ideas in her work and taking them in original and interesting directions. Craig Taylor is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Flinders University. He is the author of Moralism: A Study of a Vice (2012) and Sympathy: A Philosophical Analysis (2002), and a co-editor of Hume and The Enlightenment (2011) and A Sense for Humanity: the Ethical Thought of Raimond Gaita (2014). Andrew Gleeson has taught philosophy at the Australian Catholic University, the University of Adelaide, and the Flinders University of South Australia. He works mainly in ethics and philosophy of religion. His book A Frightening Love: Recasting the Problem of Evil was published in 2012. Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory Philosophical Perspectives on Empathy Theoretical Approaches and Emerging Challenges Edited by Derek Matravers and Anik Waldow Putting Others First The Christian Ideal of Others-Centeredness T. Ryan Byerly Methodology and Moral Philosophy Edited by Jussi Suikkanen and Antti Kauppinen Self-Transcendence and Virtue Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Technology Edited by Jennifer A. Frey and Candace Vogler Moral Rights and Their Grounds David Alm Ethics in the Wake of Wittgenstein Edited by Benjamin De Mesel and Oskari Kuusela Perspectives in Role Ethics Virtues, Reasons, and Obligation Edited by Tim Dare and Christine Swanton Self, Motivation, and Virtue Innovative Interdisciplinary Research Edited by Nancy E. Snow and Darcia Narvaez Morality in a Realistic Spirit Essays for Cora Diamond Edited by Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Ethics-and-Moral-Theory/book-series/SE0423 Morality in a Realistic Spirit Essays for Cora Diamond Edited by Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-47996-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-06430-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Introduction 1 ANDREW GLEESON AND CRAIG TAYLOR 1 Ethics and Experience 12 CORA DIAMOND 2 Cora Diamond and the Uselessness of Argument: Distances in Metaphysics and Ethics 50 RESHEF AGAM-SEGAL 3 The Importance of Being Fully Human: Transformation, Contemplation, and Ethics 68 SARAH BACHELARD 4 How to Be Somebody Else: Imaginative Identification in Ethics and Literature 81 SOPHIE CHAPPELL 5 Different Themes of Love 98 CHRISTOPHER CORDNER 6 A Brilliant Perspective: Diamondian Ethics 113 ALICE CRARY 7 The Riddling God 132 ANDREW GLEESON 8 Shakespeare, Value, and Diamond 146 SIMON HAINES vi Contents 9 The Asymmetry of Truth and the Logical Role of Thinking Guides in Ethics 157 OSKARI KUUSELA 10 Difficulties of Reality, Skepticism, and Moral Community: Remarks After Diamond on Cavell 176 DAVID MACARTHUR 11 Comparison or Seeing-As? The Holocaust and Factory Farming 194 TALIA MORAG 12 Two Conceptions of “Community”: As Defined by What It Is Not, or as Defined by What It Is 215 RUPERT READ 13 Thinking With Animals 229 DUNCAN RICHTER 14 Diamond on Realism in Moral Philosophy 242 CRAIG TAYLOR Contributors 253 Index 258 Introduction Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor In her chapter for this collection, Cora Diamond quotes a remark of Allen Tate: “poetry, perhaps more than any other art, tests with experience the illusions that the human predicament tempts us to believe.” Diamond takes a view of philosophy—inherited from her greatest influence, Ludwig Wittgenstein—which sees it as unusually liable (among all the intellectual traditions which make up our disciplinary inheritance) to succumb to those illusions, and to articulate them in a highly abstract form. Thus, for example, people may in certain moods (which can become chronic) feel estranged from the world, and from their human fellows—and philoso- phy elaborates these experiences as doctrines of skepticism, and thereby distorts them, not by making them objects of reflection (which is perfectly legitimate) but by turning reflection a way from the experiences and on to a reified metaphysical substitute for them, a habit which Stanley Cavell calls d eflection. This process changes the nature of the reflection from a patient and sympathetic attempt inwardly to understand the human con- dition, to thought of a very different sort, the theoretical construction of an intellectual model, a form of thought which has its modern exemplar in science. To take a moral example, a human being may be deeply per- plexed and disturbed in the face of a moral dilemma—a philosophical deflection of this converts it into impersonal speculation about which theory of how to behave (consequentialism, Kantianism, and so on) best meets criteria of intellectual merit, an approach which flourishes on cari- catures of moral dilemmas like the trolley problem. Most of these deflec- tions can be seen as mistaken attempts to meet a real need. One such need arises from the powerful bewilderment and sense of impotence we can experience in the face of catastrophic evils that seem to defy compre- hension and to threaten morality (or even rationality) as an institution for guidance through life. That threat to the pretensions of morality (so conceived at least) is one of the deepest lessons that such life experiences have to offer. But philosophy’s deflecting response has too often been to shore morality up, to try and minimize the bewilderment (or even to dispel it as mere weakness, the limits to human rationality) by contending that evils like the Holocaust, or our systematic, industrial-level cruelty 2 Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor to animals—both are cases Diamond has discussed—are in principle per- fectly well understood in terms of familiar and relatively straightforward notions like sentience, rationality, flourishing, and so on. As C raig Taylor explains in a chapter elucidating the realistic spirit and exploring what it might mean in ethics, moral philosophies that put these concepts at their heart are in fact evasions of difficult realities. Their own apparent hard- headed realism—no obscure nonsense here please!—is a failure of nerve in the face of (as Taylor, paraphrasing Diamond puts it) the resistance reality sometimes puts up to our thinking it, the felt inadequacy of our concepts to encompass certain experiences. Taylor notes that this sense of thought’s defeat by reality is also found in the experience of great goodness or beauty. D avid Macarthur takes up Cavell’s idea of deflection explicitly, discussing it (as does Taylor) with special reference to Dia- mond’s seminal paper “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Phi- losophy.” The difficulty of philosophy is to avoid deflection, to learn how not to convert profound human life experiences into over-intellectualized theoretical conundrums. Philosophers produce moral arguments that rely on a purportedly universal logic, employing concepts like sentience, per- sonhood, and so on that are designed to compel conclusions. Examples are familiar to any philosopher: animals are sentient, t herefore they have certain rights; fetuses are not self-conscious, therefore they lack certain other rights. Diamond, in contrast, believes that such arguments are of avail only inside “moral communities” that already share a substantial moral outlook. Discussion between different communities—between meat eaters and vegetarians, say—must proceed very differently. Macarthur con- tends it has to proceed through an inescapably first-person articulation of personal experience, which makes its language and sensibility deeply akin to that of literature, art, and criticism, in which forms of thought the deepening of understanding is never exhausted. The motive force behind Diamond’s entire oeuvre in philosophy has been that of resistance to deflection, resistance to what Wittgenstein called philosophical fantasy . That resistance—that determination to keep her eyes on the actual phenomena of human life, and to avoid the creeping tendency to metaphysical abstraction—is what Diamond calls “the realis- tic spirit.” The name is meant to flag a contrast with standard metaphysi- cal (or epistemological) realism, which on its own self-understanding is a speculative thesis that may be debated for its truth or falsity. On Diamond’s view, philosophical realism is a characteristic piece of phil- osophical confusion arising from the deflection away from human life onto speculations that seek to understand more than we can actually explain (and so make sense of) in the practice and business of that life. For an example in ethics, the realistic spirit would argue that once we have learned the way that in actual moral life we make a distinction between what is right or good and what is not, there is no need—and indeed no coherent conceptual space—to debate any further account of Introduction 3 moral reality, any account postulating, or debunking, metaphysical moral properties, debate of the sort that takes up most of standard meta-ethics. The realistic spirit is not a doctrine making claims about the world, but the effort to avoid deflection, a determination to cultivate a kind of way of seeing that is unclouded by the charms of theoretical abstraction, sim- plification, and neatness (however complicated in detail) that divert us from the manifold, messy, incomplete, and contradictory reality of our lives. There is no technique for this. It is a matter of criticism, patience, and persistence—as Lars Hertzberg has remarked, it is a matter of stay- ing the course. And no one is immune to the temptation to deflection. Even those officially opposed to it may succumb, as Cavell has brilliantly shown in the case of some Wittgensteinian philosophers whose response to skepticism about other minds is complicit in that skepticism. At one level, the realistic spirit might seem platitudinous. What philos- opher would want to admit that they are not paying attention to the real phenomena of moral life? It is true that the gravamen of Diamond’s radi- cal critique of mainstream analytic moral philosophy lies in the claim that this mainstream is succumbing to deflection in a s ystematic , structural way. Certain deflections, particularly deep and intractable to exposure and correction, have become second-nature, and practically foundational to how the discipline conducts its business. Much of Diamond’s work has been devoted to untangling the knots of these deflections, as well as to showing ways in which an undeflected moral philosophy might proceed. Thus, in her chapter for this collection, she identifies as a major instrument of deflection a deep-rooted, pervasive philosophical picture of language. The picture depicts a cognitive core of language use—roughly, truth-evaluable assertions whose contents can be publicly communica- ble knowledge, and where that evaluation is answerable only to logic and sensory perception in daily life and in science, what Diamond calls “tourist-and-scientific” English—to be contrasted with a domain of pri- vate, idiosyncratic, non-cognitive psychological associations and emo- tive force. Whatever belongs to the poetic or the literary, to individual sensibility or judgment, whatever requires richer language than tourism and science, is relegated to this latter department. This picture of lan- guage, she argues, has baleful consequences for how philosophers see the possibilities in ethics. According to the picture, ethics can lay claim to cognitive status only by paying its accounts to the tourist-and-scientific language use, say by being reducible to, or supervenient upon, reality described by that language, or—as in a philosopher like John McDowell, revealingly criticized in Diamond’s chapter—by being construed on the model of a secondary property. Such an approach to ethics is possible she says, but only at the cost of eviscerating its meanings, its capacity to distill the individually appropriated reflective experience of a whole tradition or culture in the careful yet creative selection and use of words. To take one of her examples, on the picture of language she is attacking,