Beyond Moral Judgment

Beyond Moral Judgment. By Alice Crary. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007; pp. xi + 233. $39.95 cloth. Broadly speaking, much of the study of ethics can be characterized as the study of moral judgments. This is because moral thinking and speaking are largely dominated by considerations of moral concepts, and how these concepts may be objectively applied to actions or persons. Beyond Moral Judgment is a collection of essays by philosopher Alice Crary, who is critical of the widespread philosophical preoccupation with moral judgments. Instead, Crary argues, language and expression themselves are embedded in ethics, and thus morality as "judgment" ignores the constitutive nature of ethics for the way that we think, speak, and act. Morality conceived in the abstract distorts ethics as merely the product of thought rather than created by and practiced through actual experiences. Crary details an argument about the moral nature of language that indelibly links ethics to all our activities, and not simply to those for which we apply "moral judgments." Ethics should not, therefore, limit itself to that which can be expressed in the abstract, but is more properly understood as those connections that are "constitutive of the fabric of our lives" (p. 162). The view of morality in Beyond Moral Judgment is pragmatic (although "irregularly" so), employing a view that is frequently utilized by philosophers of language. According to a pragmatic approach to language, an understanding of its public employment is necessary for understanding its theoretical structure. This view is thus often thought to supplement semantic theory, which attempts to understand the correspondence between language and truth. Crary's departure from conventional pragmatics, however, holds that the publicity of language should not be considered as simply accessory to semantics. In Crary's view, appreciation of the use of language is essential for understanding its capacities and meanings. Language is thus not merely a vehicle for the expression of moral concepts, but the use of language itself is an ethical practice. The pragmatic account of language, Crary suggests, requires us to also recognize the inherently moral character of language acquisition. This is because "certain acquired sensitivities and propensities internal to a person's linguistic capacities ... [also] compose her moral outlook" (p. 2). Accordingly, even when language or thought does not employ or evoke moral concepts explicitly, they nevertheless embed a moral outlook. This is why Crary argues that we should avoid limiting our philosophical consideration of morality to a focus on moral judgments. If "an individual's moral outlook is a function of a sensibility internal to all her linguistic capacities," then ethics is a dimension in all of discourse that requires the extension of "webs of sensitivities informing all of individuals' modes of thought and speech" (3), and "encompassing her entire personality" (p. 47) rather than that which is merely expressed in moral judgments. A primary concern highlighted throughout Beyond Moral Judgment is a defense of this expanded view of ethics against the charge of relativism. Crary defends the encompassing view of ethics on the same terms Wittgenstein's view of language is defended against this charge in chapter three. Here, Crary argues that a range of modes of persuasive discourse are capable of contributing to our rational understanding, and that this range of persuasive discourses preserves the idea of an objective truth while broadening the scope of our conception of the way in which this truth is conceived and expressed. These discourses can thus serve as rational points of contact between people of different experiential backgrounds. To substantiate the view of objective ethics without resorting to abstract reasoning Crary turns to J.L. Austin and Wittgenstein in chapters 2 and 3, respectively. …