Moralism

A Study of a Vice

Craig Taylor

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317547709
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Philosophy History & Theory

Moralism involves the distortion of moral thought, the distortion of reflection and judgement. It is a vice, and one to which many - from the philosopher to the media pundit to the politician - are highly susceptible. This book examines the nature of moralism in specific moral judgements and the ways in which moral philosophy and theories about morality can themselves become skewed by this vice. This book ranges across a wide range of topics: the problem of the demandingness of morality; the conflict between moral and other values; the contrast between the practice of moral philosophy and other modes of moral thought or reflection; moralism in the media; and, moralism in the public discussion of literature and art. This highly original and provocative book will be of interest to students of philosophy, psychology, theology and media, and to anyone who takes a serious interest in contemporary morality.

ONE
Moralism and related vices

Moralism, I shall argue, involves a distortion of moral thought, reflection and judgement about both people and events. So understood, moralism can be thought of as a kind of vice related specifically to moral thought and judgement. However, there are, as I shall outline, a number of vices that could be so described. Indeed, it may be argued that moralism is really a kind of blanket term used to signify a range of such vices or human tendencies. Certainly, moralism as a term of moral criticism is commonly used in this sort of way, and I have no desire to quibble with this common usage. But to concede, as I do, that moralism does not admit of a simple or uncontentious definition is not to say that we cannot understand moralism, which is to say, the range of human tendencies that “moralism” seems to cover, somewhat better. This book is partly about examining the complex of human tendencies that may be classified as kinds of moralism, and part of why that is important is to make clear and explicit certain distinct ways in which moral thought and judgement may themselves be distorted.

As will already be clear, in this context I am using the term “vice” very broadly. As I shall argue, moralism sometimes indicates certain kinds of defect in the ways in which we respond to others in our specific moral judgements. So in this sense one can think of moralism as indicating certain defects of character. But beyond this, I shall also argue, moralism can involve thinking about morality, including its place in our lives, in the wrong kind of way, specifically in ways that discount the importance of other (non-moral) values. So moralism involves flaws indicated both by certain tendencies of judgement and action and by tendencies of moral thought more generally. To put the point in Aristotle’s terms, moralism, as a defect of both action and thought, encompasses what he called both the moral (character) vices and intellectual vices.

One initial thought we might have about moralism as a vice is that it involves making extreme or excessive moral judgements about people and events that they are involved in, but particularly about particular people and their actions. But while that is a feature of moralism on many occasions, including some that I shall discuss, at other times it may simply be that a moral judgement, say, is inappropriate or uncalled for. Thus in some such cases, as we shall see, we might want to say that a person’s moral judgement is unreasonable in the sense that it is wrong to make a judgement in the present case.¹ So morally judging another can be unreasonable even though the judgement is true: even though one is uttering a true proposition. As a first and rough approximation, let us say that to be accused of moralism is to be accused of an excessive or otherwise unreasonable tendency in one’s moral thoughts and/or judgements about people or events. So described, moralism involves some kind of vice or failing.

I suggested above one way in which we may initially think of moralism, one according to which moralism involves a certain kind of failing. But one might have another opposing thought according to which moralism is no failing whatsoever. Moralism, we might say, is simply the practice of the moralist, so that to criticize someone for moralism really amounts to the rejection of morality. Of course to claim that someone is a moralist need not be, at least not obviously, to criticize them at all. The moralist per se is indeed simply one who makes moral judgements or simply engages in moral thought or reflection about, for example, people, their actions and society generally: a moral philosopher even. Moralism, to the extent that it is a vice, would seem to involve some distortion of the proper activity of the moralist. I am not convinced that the distinction between the moralist and those guilty of moralism can always be so clearly drawn, or that there is not always something faintly suspicious in the desire, say, to morally judge others.² Nevertheless, there is, I shall claim, an important distinction to be made between two kinds of people. First, there is the person who seeks to describe, understand and evaluate or judge the morally relevant features of situations, which we might think simply amounts to taking morality seriously. Second, there are those who resort in their public and private moral judgements of others, and perhaps even themselves,³ to moralism, which we may take to be wrong and sometimes highly offensive. We might distinguish the two types by calling the second not a moralist but a mere moralizer. From here on when I refer to a moralizer as opposed to a moralist I shall mean only this latter type of person: the person guilty of moralism.

Other moralisms

I have so far considered moralism in only the most ordinary senses of the word. However, moralism also has a number of distinct technical meanings in different fields, so in order to avoid any unnecessary confusion it is worth distinguishing moralism as a vice (as I shall understand it) from these other moralisms: from kinds of moralism that denote specific theoretical movements and ideas.

First and most obviously there is legal moralism: the idea within the philosophy of law that a society’s collective moral judgements and values can properly be supported by legal sanction even against acts that do not result in harm to others. While I shall not be concerned to examine legal moralism in this book, certain debates here appear to be somewhat relevant to some aspects of my distinct discussion of moralism. One such debate that I shall mention in a note in Chapter 3 is the famous debate in legal moralism between H. L. A. Hart and Lord Patrick Devlin. This debate focused on a British Government report, the Wolfenden Report, which recommended legalizing homosexual acts between consenting adults in private.⁴ Second, more recently moralism has been understood in the field of aesthetics as the view that a moral defect in a work of art is, or at least can be, an aesthetic defect and that a moral merit is, or at least can be, an aesthetic merit. There are a range of positions we might hold here, depending on how extreme the claim is: for example, are moral defects always also aesthetic defects, moral merits always aesthetic merits, or (with either or both merits and defects) only sometimes?⁵

An interesting question is to what extent we might see these moralisms as connected to moralism as I shall understand it, as a kind of vice. One might, for example, want to argue that the very idea that one might be justified — as Devlin thinks — in using the coercive power of the state simply in support of a society’s moral values is itself an example of the vice of moralism. A point of connection between my account of moralism and Hart’s response to Devlin’s legal moralism is Hart’s defence of reason or reflection and sympathetic understanding in moral judgement. Hart’s arguments thus bear on some of what I shall have to say about moralism in the sense I am concerned with. Turning to moralism as a theory in aesthetics, one might think that aesthetic moralism really involves something like the moralization, again in the pejorative sense, of art: that is, the application of moral ideas and concepts to art where they do not apply. I shall consider how aesthetic moralism might lead to moralism in this sense in Chapter 4. While there may be a range of connections between these moralisms and the vice of moralism, they are not the subject of this book, although what I have to say about moralism as a vice may — in ways I have just flagged, for example — throw some light on debates in these quite distinct enquiries.

Another kind of moralism worth mentioning, but which I shall not discuss in this book, is moralism as it is used in Christian theology to indicate a kind of theological error or flaw. Thus the Protestant liberalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was charged with moralism in that its interpretation of Christ’s teaching reduced the kingdom of God to the realm of liberal moral values. So, as Alister McGrath notes, Johannes Weiss, in his critique of Protestant liberalism, argues that “the idea of the ‘kingdom of God’ was understood by the liberal Protestants to mean the exercise of the moral life in society, or a supreme ethical ideal” (McGrath 1994: 369). What makes such an interpretation questionable, so the critique went, was the preaching of Jesus about the end of humankind in which the realm of merely human values will be overturned. Interestingly though, the kind of moralism associated with this critique bears some relation to what I shall argue in this book, for a central claim I shall make about moralism is that it involves seeing some things as moral matters when they really are not. Thus we can say that the account of Protestant liberalism I have just sketched amounts, perhaps, to a reduction of religious values and ideals to moral ones in ways that fundamentally distort religious faith. This general aspect of moralism, which we might say involves an unreasonable moralization of human life and the variety of human values, will become clearer below when I consider a kind of moralism somewhat closer to my own project.

Moralism is also used by a range of other thinkers — although there are not actually many of them — to denote a particular kind of failing in a somewhat similar way to mine in this book. A particular philosopher whose account of moralism as a kind of failing is more directly related to some of what I want to say about moralism is Bernard Williams. Williams’s account of moralism has been highly influential and I shall discuss his work on this and related subjects in some detail in Chapter 4. Williams’s concern with moralism as he understands it is, in ways I shall explain, tied to his influential criticisms of what he calls the “morality system”.⁶ Williams’s criticism is not of particular moral judgements but of impartialist moral theories as a whole (Kantian and Utilitarian theories being Williams’s central target). Such theories are moralistic, Williams claims, in that they involve a failure to recognize that a complete or even adequate human life requires our acceptance of a space in human life outside the scope of morality’s demands. Such moralism is manifest not only in the way in which we judge others but also in the way in which we judge ourselves. Williams’s account of moralism fits into my overall account of moralism as a kind of distorted conception of moral thought and judgement: by its overweening, as I call it, in our lives. To say that morality overweens in our life is a criticism of impartial morality. When, following Williams, I criticize impartialist conceptions of moral thought and judgement as overweening I mean that they trespass into areas of human life where they have no authority. Thus the issue is not whether moral considerations always trump other non-moral considerations: the kind of impartialist who is my target in Chapter 4 may accept that sometimes moral values are outweighed by other values, but even so, morality may continue to overween in our life to the extent that morality sees its role as allowing that on some occasion other values may be weightier. Th e overweening is thus a matter, as I say, of the scope that morality presumes for its own authority: its authority to weigh all values, moral and otherwise. All the same, as will become clear in Chapter 5, however, my account of moralism goes beyond Williams’s.

There are a number of other philosophers as well who argue that moralism is a kind of moral failure in something like the way I shall argue in this book. I shall have occasion to refer to some of these philoso phers in later chapters, as well as more immediately in the next two sections of this chapter, where I examine the similarities and differences between moralism and a range of other closely related failings.

Moralism and hypocrisy

To begin, we need to distinguish moralism from hypocrisy. It is oft en suggested that one thing that is so offensive about moralism is that the moralizer condemns immorality in others while failing to acknowledge their own similar moral failings. This is indeed simple hypocrisy. However, the moralizer need not be a hypocrite; sometimes the moralizer’s pronouncements and judgements will be inconsistent with their own conduct, but this need not be so. The politician who, while cheating on his wife, condemns those who fail to respect the covenant of marriage is a hypocrite; however, the Catholic priest who condemns this same infidelity may be a moralizer but he is not a hypocrite (assuming that priest is not, say, sleeping with one of his married parishioners).

One might think that moralism and hypocrisy are alike in that they are both vices related to the making of moral judgements. But one can be a hypocrite without advancing a moral judgement at all. Consider a person who publicly proclaims that a particular popular author is a low-minded philistine and not worth reading but secretly reads the said author enthusiastically. Such a person is surely a hypocrite, but their judgement is something like an aesthetic not a moral one. Looked at another way, we might want to say more generally that the hypocrite proclaims the higher (in some moral, aesthetic or other sense) but practises the lower, but this need not be so either. It is easy to imagine the reverse; say, where a man hides a fine aesthetic sensibility because he thinks that such a sensibility will be seen as unfitting for a man to possess. Or think, in a similar connection, of Nietzsche saying: “The noblest hypocrite. Never to talk about oneself is a very noble piece of hypocrisy” (Nietzsche [1878] 1996: 181). In these cases there is a conflict between the beliefs or commitments a person presents to others and their actual lives and conduct, a conflict that involves an element of pretence,⁷ and that is all that is necessary for the charge of hypocrisy.

Nevertheless, in a wide variety of cases there are illuminating similarities between hypocrisy and moralism. First, what both the moralist and the hypocrite claim may be true in one sense; that is, we might think that infidelity or adultery is a bad thing. This shows how moralism is distinct from, say, racism or sexism; unlike these vices moralism does not necessarily depend narrowly on any faulty beliefs a person may have, including about people in groups different from their own. I shall explore this idea further in Chapter 2. Second, what seems objectionable about both hypocrisy and moralism in the case of moral judgements is that, even granting that the judgements involved are true in the above sense, it is somehow unwarranted that the moralist or hypocrite should actually pronounce these judgements. A common objection to both the hypocrite and moralist, for example, is not that they get things wrong but that they are in no position to criticize or condemn.

Now at this point one might suggest that what is objectionable in the case of moralism is that the person making a negative moral judgement — either in public or in private — about another has no right to make this judgement. Robert Fullinwider (2006) defends an account of moralism along these lines. What the moralist fails to see, one might argue, is that it is only if one has a specific personal relationship to another, or occupies some cultural or institutional role in relation to them, that we are entitled to judge them in certain ways. To give some examples: two people in an intimate relationship have a special right to judge aspects of each other’s moral conduct; magistrates and judges have some right to judge our conduct in the public sphere to the extent that our conduct is both immoral and illegal; and professionals have a right sometimes to judge the moral conduct of their peers as it pertains to their professional lives.

However, while there is clearly a moral dimension to judgements dispensed by those within such relationships and occupying such roles, it is limited to what is morally required of a person in order to fulfil those relationships and roles. For example, if a member of the medical profession has a right to judge some aspect of the character of another doctor then that is only because that aspect of character has a bearing on a doctor’s ability to perform their professional duties. There is, however, no special right for professionals, judges or even spouses to make more unqualified moral judgements about the relevant parties. The traditional and still most obvious pretender to this role is the priest. Such an example though really just illustrates the point that for secular beings no one is in a special position to judge their moral conduct simpliciter. But the objection to moralism cannot be that no one, except in the qualified cases just described, ever has a right to morally judge us or at least our actions; that would not be an objection to moralism but to morality as a regulative ideal for any human society.

I do not want to deny that sometimes accusations of moralism may indeed be directed precisely at those who judge others without the right provided by specific personal relationships or roles. My argument is, first, that this does not exhaust the proper scope of moral judgement. There are some matters, such as grave public wrongs, about which any of us has a right to speak and judge both in private and in public. And second, in such cases too, where any of us has a right to make moral judgements, we may be guilty of moralism. So we cannot characterize moralism merely as making moral judgements without a right to do so and in this respect my account of moralism differs sharply with that given by Fullinwider.

Moralism and self-righteousness

Another vice with close connection — perhaps even closer connection — to moralism is the vice of self-righteousness. We might simply regard self-righteousness as a form of moralism, but there is an important distinction we might make between self-righteousness and moralism as I shall understand it. Moralism involves excessive or otherwise unreasonable negative judgements or assessments of others and perhaps also oneself, whereas self-righteousness involves an agent in making unreasonable positive judgements or assessments about themselves. Self-righteousness may be thought of as an unwarranted sense of one’s moral superiority to others. So understood, it is easy to see how self-righteousness and moralism (as I shall understand it) can blend together. In understanding how that might be, two questions are: (i) are the self-righteous necessarily moralizers; and (ii) are moralizers necessarily self-righteous?

To consider the first question, one way in which the self-righteous person’s sense of moral superiority may be sustained is by comparing themselves with another about whom their moral judgements and assessments are unreasonably harsh. So the self-righteous person, for example, may also be guilty of moralism in that they make too much of the moral failings of others, which then seems to them to throw their own supposed relative moral merit into sharper relief. In this way moralism may bolster their sense of their moral superiority, but it is not the only source of this sense of superiority. In the most extreme (or purest) kind of case, so secure is the morally self-righteous person’s sense of their moral superiority or exceptional excellence of character, so unqualified is their confidence in their own judgements, that they hardly need any such selective and skewed evidence derived from their experience of others in order to sustain this grand but flawed vision of themselves. In such a case it may be that self-righteousness is consistent with an attitude of uncritical, benevolent condescension to others who (one imagines) lack one’s moral qualities.

To consider the s...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Moralism and related vices
• 2. The Scarlet Letter: "a tale of human frailty and sorrow"
• 3. Trusting oneself
• 4. Overweening morality
• 5. Moral judgement and moral reflection
• 6. Moral difference
• 7. Public moralism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index