Alice Crary’s Inside Ethics is an ambitious and thought-provoking book; and I am in broad agreement with much of what it is trying to say, and do. The idea that what may initially be referred to as “empirical reality” is not ethically inert, or “neutral,” and more specifically the idea—hereafter referred to as “Crary’s central thesis”—that human beings and animals have “empirically discoverable moral characteristics (or qualities)” (1, 31, 255), seems to me potentially true and important. But of course, everything depends on what is meant here by “empirically discoverable” and by “moral characteristics”; and, as we will see, there are questions to be raised about how Crary means these terms. It is not clear to me that, at the end of the day, these terms could coherently be meant in such a way that Crary’s central thesis would retain its plausibility, or even truth, and at the same time have quite the significance that Crary takes it to have.

Though Crary’s central thesis may be summarized in a sentence, the overall argument of the book is complex and multilayered. Its two main layers are, first, the central thesis and the argument for it, and, second, another argument that is meant to convince us that the thesis applies to all human beings and animals, regardless of their possession of any particular property or set of properties, beyond that of being a member of this or that species. Since the first layer is difficult enough by itself to reconstruct, understand, and assess, I will focus exclusively on it, in order to keep this response to Crary’s book manageable. And for the same reason, I will say almost nothing about Crary’s marvelous employment of literary examples, whose power and compellingness struck me as going beyond, and as being largely independent of, Crary’s more “formal” argumentation. And that—I mean, the idea that literary examples could be central and even essential to what may rightly be called “argument” in ethics (as opposed to playing a merely supportive or illustrative or rhetorical role in ethical argumentation)—is to my mind one of the most important insights of Inside Ethics.

Coming back to Crary’s central thesis, let me ask again: what does it mean to say that “human beings and animals have empirically discoverable moral characteristics”? As is often the case in philosophy (and not just in philosophy), in order to understand the thesis—see what it comes to—we need to consider the argument for it, as well as the implications it is taken to have. I therefore begin with an attempt to reconstruct the argument, as I understand it:

1. Human and animal behavior—at least insofar as it is pertinent to ethics—may not aptly be understood as a mechanically-produced response to physical stimuli, but rather needs to be seen as a manifestation of understanding—however rudimentary or primitive—of the creature’s circumstances, and as expressive of what matters to the creature, and how (cf. 68).[/NL]

Therefore:

2. In order to understand a stretch of human or animal behavior—at least insofar as it is pertinent to ethics—we need to situate it within a broader conception of what matters in the life of that creature, and how—where that in turn needs to rest on a conception of what matters in the life of such creatures, and how (cf. 88).1
3. A conception of what matters in the life of a creature, and how, is itself an ethical conception (cf. 67–68, and 89), where “an ethical conception” needs to be understood in contrast with something like “a conception belonging purely to natural science, or purely expressible and explicable in its terms” (cf. 24).[/NL]

Therefore:

4. An understanding of human and animal behavior—at least insofar as it is pertinent to ethics—may only be had from inside ethics (cf. 80). This is supposed to contrast with what Crary takes to be the prevailing view, on which natural science may, and should, tell us all that we need to know, in ethics, about human beings or animals.

Let me say outright that I find myself in broad agreement with Crary’s argument as summarized above. The main aim of this response is to invite Crary to clarify issues that I find unclear, and thereby to find out how far our agreement reaches. I begin with what might only be a small disagreement—as far as the argument of Inside Ethics is concerned—but which would set the stage for everything else I’m going to say in this response.

Crary believes that in order to entitle herself to 1, she needs to argue that human and animal perception is “conceptual all the way down” (4, 50). This—I mean, both Crary’s “conceptualism” about perception and her taking it to be essential to her overall argument—seems to me to be mistaken. For Crary, the reason why human and animal behavior is expressive of what matters to the creature and how, is that human and animal perception is “conceptual(ized),” and (as Wittgenstein has taught us) our concepts are expressive of what matters to us and how. This is one of several places in the book where Crary takes her cue from John McDowell; and it seems to me that, here and in few other places, the argument of the book would have benefited from relying less on McDowellian transcendental philosophizing, which proceeds on the basis of claims about what perceptual experience needs to be (97) in order for this or that philosophically-construed cognitive achievement to be possible, and more on the insights of phenomenology. In other words, Crary’s argument would have benefited from engaging less in what Wittgenstein calls “thinking,” and more in what he calls “looking and seeing” (PI 66). Not that there isn’t much valuable looking and seeing in the book; it’s just that, as I see it, the thinking sometimes comes in the way. The issues here are complex and difficult, and I have written about them in considerable detail elsewhere.2 Here, I’ll limit myself to just a few, minimally supported comments.

Originally, McDowell argued that human perceptual experience is “conceptualized,” or has “conceptual content,” in that it has propositional content—the sort of content expressible by means of sentences of an indicative form (McDowell 1994 and 1998). As Crary notes, McDowell himself has come to recognize that that idea is implausible.3 More recently, McDowell has proposed that the normal perceptual experience of normal human adults has “content” that, while not (yet) propositional, is nonetheless “conceptual” (cf. McDowell 2007 and 2009), and Crary too is arguing for some such understanding of human and animal perception as well (cf. 99). Crary proposes that human and animal perceptual experience is conceptual in that it is “about individuals and kinds of things” (100) and, therefore, “dealing in universals” (110).

This attempt to hold on to a watered-down conceptualism is still deeply problematic, it seems to me.4 For one thing, it is not clear that we can actually make sense of the idea of conceptual content that is not, or does not presuppose, propositional content, for, as Travis has compellingly argued (in Travis 2013), concepts may most plausibly be understood as abstractable elements of whole thoughts, or judgments—some sort of a taking of a representational stand. The difficulty of disconnecting conceptualism from propositionalism shows, it seems to me, in Crary’s talking of perceptual experience as being about individuals and kinds of things (97)—thereby attributing, in effect, a representational function appropriate to propositionally-articulated judgments or thoughts to perceptual experience. And it also shows in her proposal to cash out her version of conceptualism in terms of “an interpretation or thought . . . [contributing] internally to our perception of a thing” (52, see also 97). I’m not saying that there is no way of understanding “interpretation” or “thought” in such a way that an interpretation or thought would not (necessarily) have propositional form, or content. But it is, at the very least, unclear what such an understanding would be, or come to.5

Another worry is that Crary’s (and McDowell’s) talk about the content of a perceptual experience does not make clear sense. I just do not know how perceptual experiences are supposed to be identified, and counted,6 and how their contents are supposed to be identified, and counted.7 When Crary writes, for example, that if she went for a walk and saw an unfamiliar dog, “the content of one of [her] visual experiences would be ‘a dog’” (100, my emphasis)—where that is supposed to be applicable to (and illuminative of) a moment in her conscious life—even apart from her noting, or remarking, or otherwise saying, to herself or to someone else, something along the lines of “there is a dog over there” (ibid), I worry that we have replaced the original McDowellian picture, which Crary rightly questions (99), of (adult human) perceptual experience as always accompanied by subtitles, with the no less suspicious and problematic picture of every familiar thing and every familiar physiognomy in perceptual experience showing up, whenever and however it shows up, with a name tag or label attached (perhaps sometimes with a question mark following the name). And it should be noted that even name tags or labels need to be attended to in the right way (noted, registered), and understood within the context of a shared practice that has a point, or makes sense, against a certain worldly background, in order for them to fulfil their function.

As competent speakers, we know how to tell (= know the criteria for), and would normally be able to specify well enough for present intents and purposes, what some human being (which could be oneself) or animal saw (for example); and in specifying it, we would normally be using words, and applying concepts.8 But to go from that to a claim about what human and animal perceptual experience is, is unwarranted. The basic danger is that of reading into perceptual experience the content of possible specifications, or descriptions, of its (objectively identified) objects, thereby encouraging an overly intellectualized, and distorted, picture of the former—a picture that encourages (and is in turn encouraged by) our natural tendency to overlook perceptual experience, and, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, to “forget it as a fact and as perception in the interest of the object which it presents to us” (Merleau-Ponty 1996: 57).9

In Crary, following McDowell, the insistence on conceptualism is motivated by the assumption that all sense is conceptual, so that the only alternative to conceptualism about perception is what McDowell (following Sellars) has famously called “the myth of the (purely mechanically) given”—where the given, as such, is taken to be, precisely, lacking in sense. Crary sometimes cashes out the McDowellian “given” in terms of what’s “merely biological” (108, 183), or what may fully be cashed in terms of “pure stimulus-response mechanisms” or “immediate biological impulses” (117). But the McDowellian dichotomy between the conceptual and the senseless is false, and so is Crary’s dichotomy between the conceptual and the merely biological or mechanical. One of the most fundamental insights of phenomenology, which is central to Merleau-Ponty (and in a different way to Heidegger), is that the world as pre-reflectively perceived and responded to has physiognomic, rather than conceptual, unity and sense—unity for, and in terms of, our body, not our intellect. What we perceive and respond to has motor and affective significance, before it has anything that may sensibly be thought of as conceptual sense. A ball, for example—some particular ball—is perceived as soliciting, and allowing, certain bodily engagements and manipulations, which may with time become more or less habitual, before, and even apart from, being recognized as a ball, let alone as having a particular geometrically-defined shape. Crary echoes approvingly McDowell’s echoing of Kant’s famous dictum that the “I think” must be capable of accompanying all of our representations (109); but, as Merleau-Ponty points out, in what is clearly meant as a repudiation of the Kantian dictum, “consciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can’” (Merleau-Ponty 1996: 137). The world as pre-reflectively perceived and responded to is perceived as a field of actual and potential bodily engagement, before it becomes, where and when it becomes, the object of true or false judgments. And, contrary to what Crary suggests (51–52), that is what the dawning of Wittgensteinian “aspects” teaches us: that there is perceivable sense, or comprehensible unity, that is not (yet) conceptual, that no conceptualization could fully capture, and that does not always correlate with what we know objectively about the object.10 Incidentally, that is also what the perceptual experience of beauty teaches us, according to Kant.11

Our discussion thus far may be summarized by saying that far from it being the case that our behavior is expressive of what matters to us in one way or another, and how, because our perception is always conceptual(ized), and our concepts are expressive of what matters to us and how, as Crary proposes, our concepts express what matters to us and how, because they enable us to objectify—more or less usefully for various intents and purposes—an intersubjectively sharable, and largely shared, phenomenal world that draws our attention and calls for (solicits, elicits) motor-affective responses that, as such, are already forms of valuing.

Now, how significant is all this to Crary’s central thesis and her argument for it? There is a sense in which it is not very significant. Neither Crary’s central thesis, nor her argument for it, requires her “conceptualist” account of perception. And in fact, if you go back to my reconstruction of Crary’s argument, you’ll see that it makes no mention or use of Crary’s “conceptualism.” It is possible, in fact, to read Crary’s argument in such a way that the phenomenological understanding of perception and behavior lies tacitly at its background: the reason why human and animal behavior may not aptly be understood as a mechanically-produced response to physical stimuli, but rather needs to be seen as a manifestation of understanding of the creature’s circumstances, and as expressive of what matters to the creature, and how, is that human beings and animals perceive and respond to physiognomic, not-yet-conceptual sense, in the way sketched above; and no purely mechanical account can do justice to that. Moreover, as perceivers and responders to physiognomic sense, we immediately and pre-reflectively perceive the behavior of other human beings and animals as intentional and expressive of what matters to the creature and how: the moment our gaze falls upon the body of another human being or animal “the objects surrounding it immediately take on a fresh layer of significance” (Merleau-Ponty 1996: 353)—that is, we immediately perceive things also in terms of their motor-affective significance for that other. Thus, while Crary’s conceptualism may be misguided, as I’ve suggested, its phenomenological critique arguably leaves her overall argument not just essentially intact, but actually better motivated.

So far so good. But the phenomenological critique of conceptualism—which I have admittedly barely just sketched above—raises further questions about how we should understand the “empirically discoverable” and the “moral characteristics” components of Crary’s central thesis. It also has bearing on what may be thought of as the illocutionary force of the thesis.

What does Crary mean by “empirically discoverable”? She might have meant something like “perceivable,” in the sense of “part of the phenomenal world, or the world as perceived and responded to prior to being thought, or thought (or talked) about.” Once again following McDowell, however, Crary proposes to cash “empirically discoverable” in terms of “objectivity” (29, 31), and thereby skips, in effect, the phenomenal world. Moral values, she says, are “woven into the objective fabric of the world” (17; see also 61). And then there are moments in which Crary presents herself as advancing a metaphysical claim (cf. 11), and says that “aspects of mind”—which are the “moral characteristics” from her central thesis—are “part of the true furniture of the universe” (39). These lapses into pre-Kantian metaphysical talk seem to me un-Wittgensteinian, and unhelpful. It is difficult enough to keep clearly in mind the grammatical-phenomenological distinction between the phenomenal world and the objective world—or, more precisely, between the world as pre-reflectively perceived and responded to, and the world as thought (and talked) about objectively—and to think about its implications for Crary’s central thesis.

On the phenomenological understanding, the phenomenal world is where we each first and foremost find ourselves, and others. It is a world of meanings, or interrelated meaningful phenomena, where meaning, as I’ve already mentioned, is understood in terms of motor and affective significance;12 and this in turn means that the phenomenal world is internally related to the phenomenal body—the body as lived, or experienced, as opposed to the body understood objectively—in that the latter is perceived, or pre-reflectively present to us, as an intentional power of actual and potential engagement with the former, and the former is perceived as a field of actual and potential engagement by the latter.

It is at this level of pre-reflective, embodied being-in-the-world, I wish to propose, that the continuity between human perception/behavior and animal perception/behavior—the continuity that Crary mistakenly seeks to capture by attributing to animals conceptual capacities (92ff.)—is to be found.13 As Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello puts it, sharing the experience of animals “is a matter not of inhabiting another mind but of inhabiting another body” (Coetzee 2003, 96).

The phenomenal world is intersubjectively sharable and, for each one of us, is actually shared with others—to varying degrees with different others. The objective world—the world in which temporally enduring objects, with their determinate properties, stand in determinate temporal and spatial relations to each other—is a world that we (human beings) construct together on the basis of our always-already sharing a phenomenal world, and against the background of that world. The construction of the objective world is an ongoing, intersubjective practice (or set of interrelated practices), into which we each are initiated almost from the moment we are born—a practice that involves, among other things, establishment of shared attention; identification and reidentification and naming of (types of) things; and further down the line involves methods of calibration, experimentation, collection of and appeal to evidence, and proof, invocation of agreed upon standards of measurement and accuracy, agreed upon ways of being proven right, or wrong, and of gaining authority and establishing expertise; and so on and so forth.

Crary argues against the widespread notion that “objectivity is free from everything with an essential reference to our affective or other subjective responses” (32); and, following Wittgenstein on rule-following, she goes as far as to claim that we “lack a clear idea” of what it would be for any “region of thought”—including objective discourse—to be thus free (44). I think this is an important insight, though I would have thought that this understanding of “objectivity” may already be found in Kant, who argues in the first Critique that the objective, empirical world is constituted by judgment, and then argues, in the third Critique (what is already implied in the first) that our agreement in judgments, without which we would not be able to constitute an objective world together, rests on nothing more, nor less, than our sharing a sense of fit between “concepts” and “intuitions,” or between the “understanding” and the “productive imagination”—a sense of fit that comes to the fore in the judgment, and experience, of beauty (cf. Kant 2000, 5:241–42). A way of putting the basic insight of phenomenology would be to say that the perception of Kantian “beauty” is primary and pervasive (see PP, xvii): the phenomenal world presents us with an indeterminate unity, in whose enactment we participate, “without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it” (Kant 2000, 5:314).

The objective world, unlike the phenomenal world (or Kant’s beauty, or Wittgenstein’s aspect), is independent of any particular individual’s perceptual experience of it—that’s essentially what’s meant in calling it “objective.” But, as Crary argues, it is not independent of us; it is not, as Kant has taught us to recognize, a world “as it is in itself.” And Crary’s proposal that “objectivity” encompasses more than just the natural sciences (cf. 34ff.) is surely right: every element or feature of the phenomenal world—human and animal behavior included—could be objectified; and objectifying it might be beneficial in some way. But there is also the question of what would thereby be lost.

Having sketched the distinction, and relation, between the phenomenal world and the objective world (however “widely” the latter is understood), the question I accordingly wish to raise at this point is in which of those two worlds we should locate the “moral characteristics” from Crary’s central thesis. Crary, as we’ve seen, wishes to locate them in the objective world; and no doubt, one could think about human behavior, as well as of the mental states it expresses, objectively. The problem, however, is that one would thereby render problematic Crary’s further claim that the characteristics in question are “internally related to action and choice” (13, my emphasis). For how, or in what sense, is a piece of human behavior, understood objectively, internally related to action and choice? When I spoke above of an internal relation between the phenomenal world and the phenomenal body, I meant that things in the phenomenal world are perceived, prior to any theoretical reflection, as having affective and motor significance, as calling for (eliciting, soliciting), or allowing, or hindering . . . certain affective-motor responses, which means that, at the pre-reflective, pre-objective level, what you perceive is not separable from how it moves you. Features of the world as thought of and understood objectively, by contrast, though still reflective of what matters to some collective “us,” and how, are, precisely, not thus related to our affective-motor responses. There are indefinitely many ways in which one could coherently respond, or find oneself moved to respond, to the same particular piece of human behavior, as it is identified and understood objectively. So in what sense might that piece of behavior be internally related to choice and action?

Crary, it seems to me, is not entirely clear on this issue; and this brings us to what “moral” means in the “moral characteristics” of her central thesis. Initially, Crary says that by “moral” she means “practically significant,” and then explicates “practically significant” in terms of “internally related to action and choice” (13, see also 15). As I’ve just noted, however, given the fact that she wishes to locate what she calls “moral characteristics” in the objective world, it is not clear what it would mean for those characteristics to be internally related to action and choice.14

Two further things that Crary says to clarify what she means underscore the difficulty I’m trying to bring out. One thing she says is that the recognition that a creature has moral characteristics is “practically significant in the sense of being directly relevant to how it should be treated” (13, my emphasis). Another thing she says is that “to count as immediately relevant to action, a feature of the world has to be such that, in the right circumstances, things that possess it have a tendency to invite specific practical attitudes” (32, my emphasis). I note that these are two distinct ways of cashing “moral” (or “practically significant”); and neither of them is the same as saying that there is an internal relation between the set of characteristics in question and our practical responses to those characteristics. Together, however, they seem to me to exhaust the basic options available to Crary, once she has chosen to place the characteristics she wishes to talk about in the objective world: given the objectively establishable presence of some characteristic (or set of characteristics) of a creature, or some piece (or range) of creaturely behavior, one could either argue, or claim, or plead . . . that a creature with that characteristic, or that thus behaves, should be treated in some particular way—thereby acknowledging in effect that the relation between the characteristic or piece of behavior and the treatment advocated is not internal—or one could try to establish statistical correlation (perhaps under certain conditions) between the presence of that characteristic or piece of behavior and some particular attitude or response, or some range of attitudes or responses, on the part of those who perceive it. I take it that Crary does not mean to be talking about anything like the latter. But, if so, what might be the force of her “should”?

Crary, if I understand, wants her moral “should” to be objective as well, together with the “moral goodness” and “moral outrage” or “harm” it is supposed to track (13);15 and in this she aligns herself with the tradition of Western moral philosophy and with much of the work on ethics in contemporary analytic philosophy. But, as much as I sympathize with the philosophical craving for an objective, moral “should”—what with the danger of relativism, nihilism, simple moral conflict, and so on—and even taking into account Crary’s “wide” understanding of “objectivity” (and “argument”), I’m not sure there is an objective and at the same time moral understanding of “should” that could do the work Crary wants it to do.

There are objective uses of “should” that aren’t moral. There is the empirical “should” of well-grounded expectation (“If our calculations are correct, and nothing has gone wrong, the spaceship should have reached its final orbit by now” or “The egg should be hard by now”). And there is also the instrumental “should” (“If you really want to help protect the environment, you should live in a smaller house and drive a smaller car,” or “If you want to be healthier, you should exercise on a regular basis.”) It seems clear that neither of those uses of “should” is what Crary aims at, or needs. But what might be an objective and moral use of “should”? How, for example, might one establish the correctness of a claim about what someone morally “should” do? How might such claims be calibrated? How might expertise in, or authority on, matters of what morally should be done be established? If I tell you that you should not eat meat, or should not be cruel to animals, or that all human beings are worthy of respect, would it make sense for you to ask, “How do you know?” which normally makes perfect sense in response to empirical claims, but which, to my ear, sounds extremely odd here? And if you did ask me, “How do you know?” how might I respond? Clearly, it seems to me, not in any of the kinds of ways we ordinarily and normally respond to that question.

The ordinary and normal moral “should” (and similarly “ought”), I wish to propose, has the force, not of stating an objectively establishable fact, but of urging someone, or calling upon her, to do what we believe, “know in our heart,” but cannot prove, to be the right thing for her to do. When people use “should” in a moral context, and use it as if they were simply stating an objective fact, as if they could simply be right, and others wrong, about what morally should be done, they are typically guilty of moralizing: they fail to acknowledge (to themselves and to others) the moral burden necessarily incurred in taking a stand on moral matters.

Once we give up the philosophical quest for an objective, moral “should,” as resting on an understandable but ultimately misguided, and potentially morally problematic, philosophical fantasy, it should no longer be clear what might be gained by claiming that the human and animal characteristics Crary talks about are objective. Granted they could be objectivized. But what would be gained by that morally? Why, given the aims of Inside Ethics as I understand them, should it matter to Crary that the ways in which human and animal behavior is expressive of what the creature cares about and how they could be objectivized, and in this sense are “part of the objective world”? Wouldn’t it have been better, both philosophically and morally, to present Inside Ethics as an invitation to its readers, or as urging them, to look at and see, pre-objectively, things a certain way, to experience the same objectively-identified things differently, where seeing and experiencing them that way would be internally linked to affective-motor responses on the part of the perceiver?16 That would seem to leave the author of Inside Ethics at the mercy of her readers, so to speak, needing to rely on their willingness to accept her invitation, and on their sharing (enough of) her sensibilities. But isn’t it one of the main upshots of Crary’s reading of Wittgenstein on rule-following that that, at the end of the day, is true of anyone who genuinely tries to communicate herself to others? And, if so, wouldn’t it better—morally, philosophically, and rhetorically—to acknowledge that vulnerability at the outset, rather than claim objective authority for one’s argument?17

References

Baz, A. 2003. “On When Words Are Called For—Cavell, McDowell, and the Wording of Our World.” Inquiry 46: 473–500.

———. 2016. “Aspects of Perception.” In Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation: Seeing-as and Seeing-in, edited by Gary Kemp and Gabriele Mras. New York: Routledge.

———. Forthcoming. “Bringing the Phenomenal World into View.” In Wittgenstein on Objectivity, Intuition, and Meaning, edited by James Conant and Sebastian Greve. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Coetzee, J. M. 2003. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Penguin.

Husserl, E. 1970. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Translated by D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

———. 1998. The Paris Lectures. Translated by P. Koestenbaum. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic.

Kant, I. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by P. Guyer. Translated by P. Guyer and E. Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press.

McDowell, J. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

———. 1998. “Having the World in View.” Journal of Philosophy 95: 431–92.

———. 2007. “What Myth?” Inquiry 50: 338–51.

———. 2009. “Avoiding the Myth of the Given.” In Having the World in View. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. 1996. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. New York: Routledge.

Strawson, P. 1974. “Imagination and Perception.” In Freedom and Resentment. London: Methuen.

In Inside Ethics, Alice Crary argues for a moral realism revolving around the ideas that the bare fact of being a human being or an animal has moral importance that is best understood on the basis of empirically informed life-form-relative modes of thought. In this way, Crary brings out a strong analogy between our ethical understanding of humans and animals and ensures that this understanding is an integrated part of our general understanding of reality by arguing that ethically relevant empirical forms of knowledge about humans and animals is at home within wide notions of objectivity and rationality. Not only do I agree with these overall claims, I also find that Crary’s project moves in the only right direction if we are to develop an adequate form of moral realism. In this essay, I therefore refrain from adhering to the standard model for a philosophy paper, which is to identify one or two possible points of criticisms of the positions in question, and from there try to dismantle it. What I will do instead is to try to think with Crary’s project and humbly suggest two ways in which it would benefit from being developed further—in a maybe philosophically less tidy way.

Part of what makes Inside Ethics an important book is that Crary here develops a conception of ethics that takes seriously our fundamental and ethical experiences of the way that human beings have moral importance, independent of their actual capacities or properties, and in doing so, she paves the way for a philosophical account of the equally common experiences that animals matter in the same way (experiences that are often less available to us because of the way that we currently live—or rather do not live with animals). In one of the book’s more radical moves, Crary brings this possibility into view by discussing the ways in which we may fail morally if we do not respond to the moral importance of the corpse of a human being or of a dog. Crary manages to connect her conception of ethics with our fundamental experiences of the importance of humans and animals in part by showing that ethically relevant forms of knowledge are not available within a hard or scientistic naturalism, where an understanding of reality must be established independently of a specific human point of view, but rather depends on a wider conception of objectivity that mirrors the concept of objectivity found in ordinary language. What Crary points out is that our ordinary understanding of objectivity allows for concepts that include certain forms of subjective responses as objective in a straightforward sense, namely those that can be the subject of reasoned agreement and disagreement; a wider conception of objectivity that also allows for a wider notion of rationality where a person’s affective responses may contribute internally to rational understanding and reveal to us facts of actual moral importance.

Wittgenstein’s philosophy plays a crucial role in Crary’s line of reasoning because it brings out how shared human responses makes an independent contribution to our ability to know how the world is. By developing a view of language as non-abstract and practice-bound, he shows how subjective qualities contribute to an objective understanding of the world, including qualities loaded with affect, which allows for the practicality of moral thought. In line with this, Crary shows that we cannot understand what it is to be a competent thinker about human beings’ and animals’ modes of expression and inner lives without this competence including “a sense of the psychologically significant ways in which human beings and animals of different kinds can behave,” a sense that “is equivalent to a sense of the point of behaviour of human beings and animals of different kinds, or, alternatively, to a sense of what matters in human and animal lives, and such a sense belongs to ethics” (79; italics added). According to Crary, what brings ethics into focus in our understanding of humans and animals is the fact that if we are to understand the expressions, reactions and actions of humans or animals, we need to understand the point of these forms of behaviours—a point that is internally related to what is of importance in human or animal life and ultimately to an ethical conception of such lives. We will return to this idea below.

Another point of vital importance for Crary is that such an ethical conception of what matters in human and animal life cannot be established on an individualistic approach to ethics, where the moral status of an individual is determined by its own particular characteristics; an approach exemplified in the influential positions of animal ethicists Tom Regan and Peter Singer. One ethically disturbing consequence of ethical individualism is that human beings with severe impairments have a lesser claim to moral consideration, and, against this, Crary points out “that a conception of what is humanly important is the right reference point for understanding the expressive lives of all human beings, without regard to how well or poorly endowed they are mentally” (14–15), making a parallel point for dogs. This offshoot is that the ethical importance of being a human or an animal only clearly comes into view when looking at the individual through the lens of its particular life-form, of what it would be for a creature of this kind to live a good life. If we are to think morally about humans and animals, we therefore have to understand individuals through empirically formed modes of thought relative to their particular life-form.

In the remaining part of this essay, I want to discuss further two interconnected elements in Crary’s position: her conception of the right analogy for moral judgment s and the intimate connection she makes between point, importance, and ethics within a life-form of a living creature.

In the investigation of Crary’s suggestion of the best analogy for moral judgments, I depart from her discussion of the similarities and differences between her position and that of Philippa Foot. Foot aims to show that there are facts that are objective and at the same time ethically normative, and that an account of these facts will provide us with a unified theory of natural goodness. This project is inspired by Michael Thompson’s groundbreaking notion of natural-historical judgment s about a species such as the judgment “the domestic cat has four legs, two eyes, two ears, and guts in its belly” (Thompson 1995, 281). Natural-historical judgment s are non-statistical, immune to counterexamples, and characterised by a teleological form of generality directed at the aims of the species in question, and they provide objective norms or ideals for a specific species that serve, as Crary puts it, as “standards for how, in some sense, members of a species are supposed to move through time” (173).

Departing from Thompson, Foot insists on an analogy between the way that the word “good” is used in such species-relative assessments of non-human organisms and the way it is used in moral judgment s. In this way, she sees moral judgment s as analogous to species-relative assessments in biology, with the addition that moral judgment s are always also exercises of practical reasoning. This means that for rational human beings, nature is not normative, rather an account of the best human life is to be based on deliverances of practical reason, and even if such an account is analogous to natural-historical judgments, it cannot be reduced to such judgments, because it is inherently rational and ethical. Still, the analogy holds because we should see moral judgments about human beings as describing a form of natural goodness that sets “a necessary condition of practical rationality and therefore [is] at least partly determinate of the thing itself” (Foot 2000, 63). There is a necessary link between furthering good in human life and reasons for action because anyone who does not respond to such reasons, at least when this is the only rational thing to do, “is ipso facto defective” (ibid., 59). The natural patterns of normativity arising from the life-form of human beings do in fact work as rational norms that can be followed by people with the appropriate rational capacities, the virtues.

Crary worries, like other commentators, that Foot’s view may be problematically conservative because of its dependence on existing moral judgments (see also, e.g., Whyman 2018). Above all, however, Crary worries that Foot is wrong to insist on a naturalistic analogy between moral judgments and species-relative assessments of non-human organisms. According to Crary, we do not—as Foot does—need to move from the claim that the lives of human beings are not determined by biology to the claims that human natural history cannot be given in strictly animal terms, and that moral judgments are instead to be understood as assessments of humans’ exercise of practical reason. Against this, Crary insists on the possibility that “in natural history we are concerned with what it is for creatures of a kind to move ideally though time in a strictly biological sense, without regard to whether or not their lives are governed by strictly biological constraints” (184; italics added). Because Foot holds a too narrow understanding of what a biological understanding of a life-form may involve, she fails to see that “if we are in search of a workable naturalistic analogy in ethics, we should compare moral thought about human beings, not, as Foot recommends, with natural-history thought about non-human organisms, but rather moral thought about animals” (190). What moral thought about animals shows us is the possibility that empirical attention to a life-form may reveal real and empirically discoverable values which means that we can understand moral judgments as the appropriateness of our responses to such values. That is, it shows the possibility of a form of moral thought that is life-form-relative and exactly analogous to life-form-relative modes of moral thought of animals.

Now, my question is whether we really should be looking for only one analogy to throw light over moral judgments, whether the value of the analogy that Crary points to between life-form-relative modes of thought and moral judgments really make superfluous the invocation of the transformative nature of practical reason that Foot explores. I want to suggest that we should rather see the field of moral judgments as characterized by variety, which means that we need to turn to a variety of analogies for its elucidation. Moral judgments not only concern various aspects of human life, but also that it they may take various, related forms. We may, for example, think of the difference between moral judgments that primarily concern features of human life that is tied, to a high degree, by our specific life-form, such as evaluations of our responses to cases where a human is starving or drowning or to cases concerning features of human psychology such as emotions of fear or trust, and moral judgments that primarily concern features that are highly enculturated, such as our responses to cases of individuals feeling alienated or to the introduction of new forms of genetic testing. With regard to these last cases, considerations of norms established by the human life-form provide us with very little help, and accordingly, I would suggest that moral judgments should here rather be understood as primarily as assessments of humans’ exercise of practical reason.

My suggestion is that we should give up the search for one analogy that will fit all moral judgments and instead turn to different analogies to describe various forms of moral judgments. What I think we will find is that some moral judgments are best understood as evaluations of our responses to life-form relative and empirically discoverable values as described by Crary, while other judgments are best understood as evaluations of exercises of practical reason, as suggested by Foot. That is, we should not see Foot and Crary’s positions as two mutually exclusive and competing suggestions for one analogy for a homogenous group of judgments but rather as two supplementary suggestions for analogies of two different areas within a heterogeneous group of moral judgments connected by something like family resemblances.

This bring me to my second consideration. As noted above, Crary suggests that if we are to understand the expressive behaviour of humans, we need to understand the point of such behaviour—an understanding that draws on a conception of what matters in human life and ultimately on an ethical conception of human life. Crary makes this rather brisk movement from point, over to importance, and then to ethics several times, at central places in her argument (see, e.g., 76, 79, 144–45); but she does so without unfolding the relation between the three in much detail. In this way, she seems to imply a uniform connection between the point of our behaviour, what matters in human life, and ethics. I do agree that the three are often related, but I want to challenge the implied uniformity of this relation. The point of seasoning my food or choosing a flattering pair of glasses connects in some ways to what matters in human life (such as eating delicious food or making a good impression on others), but in these cases the point of my behaviour can be understood independently of anything that would count as an ethical conception of human life. This becomes apparent by the fact that I can agree or disagree with someone about the right seasoning or the most flattering glasses without worrying about her ethical standing, and I can be persuaded by that person’s reasons in the case of disagreement, even if I find her completely ethically depraved. However, this is not so if a person fails to see the point in my responding to a child crying for help in the street. In this case, I would come to worry about the ethical standing of the other because the point of my behaviour connects directly to a full-fledged ethical conception of human life.

What I am suggesting is that there are important differences between various forms of moral judgments and between the way that point, importance, and ethics connect in our lives, and that these differences can be easily overlooked if we simply adopt as general Crary’s admirable analogy between moral judgments and life-form relative judgments. What we should do instead is to develop the framework of Crary’s common sense moral realism with descriptions of the various forms of moral judgments and of the many different ways that ethics may connect (and may not) to the human life-form.

References

Foot, Philippa. 2000. Natural Goodness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thompson, Michael. 1995. “The Representation of Life.” In Virtues and Reasons, edited by R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence, and W. Quinn, 247–96. Oxford: Clarendon.

Whyman, Tom. 2018. “Radical Ethical Naturalism.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 44.2: 159–78.

In her new book Inside Ethics, Alice Crary continues her argument, familiar from previous work, for what she calls a broader conception of objectivity. She argues that such a conception is necessary for an adequate account of humans and animals, and thus for a discerning moral philosophy.

Her fundamental point of contention is a persistent tendency in mainstream contemporary moral philosophy—stemming from a materialist or dualist metaphysics—to condemn moral reasons, properties, and values, etc., to a ghostly existence as projections, preferences, or products of human reason. She traces this outlook in meta-ethical non-cognitivism, the work of utilitarians like Peter Singer as well as Kantians like Christine Korsgaard, concluding that “moral philosophers, together with popular ethical writers who take their cue from moral philosophy, by and large operate with the . . . assumption that, qua observable, human beings and animals don’t have any moral features” (11).

In contrast to this she presents a view of both human beings and animals, which grants them objective, empirically discoverable moral features. That is, learning more about people and animals is a path to (objective) knowledge also about their moral properties. The moral claim on us made by a dog is not a function of our moral propensities but a consequence of what kind of creature the dog is: a creature with a life, capacities for enjoyment and companionship, distinctive needs and potentials. Moral thought, thus, is about learning to see the world as it is. In this sense, both humans and animals are always already inside ethics, whether we recognize it or not.

Proponents of the mainstream view tend to picture our subjective endowments as obstructions to an objective vision of reality. But when it comes to living and minded creatures, Crary argues, we need developed subjective sensibilities and a cultivated responsiveness to their needs and interests, to bring them properly into view. Thus, a broader conception of objectivity (and rationality) is necessary.

Sharing much of Crary’s philosophical background, I find myself in sympathy with her critique of a prominent form of moral metaphysics, her world-guided, realist take on moral understanding, the way she accommodates animals, and the way she considers narrative literature as a central medium of moral thought. Against this common background, I have, however, some reservations concerning how she proceeds to argue for her view. To explore these, I will here focus on her mode of engaging the contemporary scene of philosophy in different parts of her book and the possible philosophical implications of her choices.

Who Is There and Who Is Not

I have previously thought of Crary’s work on a broader conception of objectivity as a kind of diplomatic mission: of presenting a certain (broadly Wittgensteinian) view of the moral life, language, rationality, the mind, and metaphysics, in a context of mainstream analytic philosophy where this view is considered controversial.

The present book is large and ambitious, and regarding her thorough style of argument, it has required difficult choices of inclusion and exclusion. In order not to clutter the text with a heavy apparatus of references, she has chosen to represent her philosophical opponent in terms of rather broad, influential approaches (internalism/externalism) and on the other hand, in terms of particularly interesting individual philosophers (Singer, Korsgaard, McDowell) whose work she uses as a ladder to climb past problematic views.

What puzzles me, however, is the way she repeatedly emphasizes that her views are controversial, even when there are substantial contemporary traditions to back her up. Ideas of the nature of the moral life, sympathetic to her view, are thus rendered invisible in the text. These include, first, Wittgensteinian philosophers like Peter Winch, D. Z. Phillips, Cora Diamond, and Raimond Gaita, along with their colleagues and disciples, who are, today quite numerous. Diamond is acknowledged as a central discussion partner and mentor, and her work is cited sympathetically, but it is quite possible to read the book without realizing her role as intellectual precursor to many of Crary’s basic philosophical tenets. Of explicitly Wittgensteinian thinkers, only MacDowell makes a major appearance. Second, there is Iris Murdoch and the philosophy influenced by her work, with a critique of the philosopher’s fact value dichotomy and the materialist metaphysics, and defense of a philosophy of mind, a (broad) conception of thought and rationality, which seem to me obvious precursors of Crary’s own. A quotation from Murdoch stands as the epigraph of the introductory chapter, but apart from that she figures only once as an Alzheimer patient and once in a footnote.

Third, there is a tradition of pragmatist philosophy where Crary’s ideas hardly stand out as controversial. Reading William James in tandem with Crary’s book it strikes me how many of the painstakingly argued points of her book resonate with James’s conceptions of what human thought and our human relation to the world are like, and similar observations can certainly be made concerning pragmatist ethics of a later date. Fourth, there are major figures of late twentieth-century and present anglophone ethics: Charles Taylor, Alasdair Macintyre, and Bernard Williams, along with feminist ethicist Margaret Urban Walker and bioethicists like Hilde Lindemann who certainly agree that moral philosophical inquiry must start from a perspective where value and the ethical are part of the picture from the start, rather than some strange add-on that needs to be accommodated to a materialist metaphysics. Also, the phenomenological tradition can be mobilized for this cause.

Furthermore, the idea that our understanding of the world is evaluative/moral all the way down is fundamental for thinkers like Foucault and Bourdieu, and their influence permeates large discussions in the social sciences where the analytic view of a world of plain objective facts and added subjective values is bound to look awkward as a basis for learning more about human life.

It is not difficult to imagine reasonable rationales for not engaging these traditions. One is that Crary has a complex relation to some of these more sympathetic traditions and figures that she does not want to delve into in the present book. Another is that she might not recognize the points of affinity that may look obvious to others, or consider them relevant for her assessment of the general scene of discussion. A third might be that she considers the status of many or some of these precursors problematic in the context of philosophy she wants to address, and thus feels that they may hinder, rather than help, her in her pursuit. One rationale could be that she does not want to rely on precedent but wants to argue her case independently. Or maybe some of these contexts are simply too obvious to be mentioned. Etc.

I am not suggesting that she should have discussed all or any of these traditions, but rather that the support they offer could have played more of a role in her description of the scene of discussion. The result of her choices is that the outlook she opposes becomes rhetorically normalized. Is it a worrying trend in moral philosophy, as Crary labels it in the first chapter, or is it the view endorsed by everyone who counts? In other words, isn’t there a risk that she caters for a kind of narrowness in contemporary (broadly) analytic ethics: the academically convenient but intellectually destructive tendency to ignore any view that is not part of the current (narrowly conceived) debates?

The Role of Wittgenstein

The one precursor who does get full attention and credit in Crary’s book is Wittgenstein. In the atmosphere of analytic moral philosophy to which and against which Crary speaks, this can be controversial enough, considering Wittgenstein’s declining influence among mainstream analytic philosophers in the past few decades. Defying this tendency, she engages Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind to argue that our subjective responses contribute to our capacity to bring the world objectively into view. Our understanding is mediated by our shared linguistic practices, and these practices bequeath to us an engaged, evaluatively immersed manner of knowing the world, which is distorted in a narrow conception of objectivity.

I am sympathetic to this large picture of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its potential significance for ethics, but there is one aspect of it that I find disconcerting: the way Wittgenstein is, perhaps inadvertently, placed as a gatekeeper to the right way of going against the materialist moral metaphysics of contemporary moral philosophers. What we need is, according to Crary, “a very particular understanding of psychological discourse.” It is a view that “invites us to conceive our categories for thinking about psychological qualities as ethically inflected categories that resist any meaningful reduction or translation to physical terms, and it also asks us to consider these categories as essentially matters of sensitivity to how things really are” (37).

Since Crary also observes that her view of objectivity is continuous with a commonsense realism about morality, we may ask: aren’t there other ways of arriving at a philosophical elaboration of such realism? Isn’t there a risk that readers who find Crary’s reading of Wittgenstein difficult or unattractive, may think that there is, then, no good reason to consider the commonsense realism as a philosophically fruitful starting point?

The Role of Literature

In chapter 6, Crary discusses literary texts, Seebalds Austerliz, Coetzee’s Disgrace, and Tolstoy’s story Strider: The Story of a Horse, to illuminate the kinship of humans and animals, and to show by means of literature what kind of engagement with the world and with other creatures may be necessary to get a proper view of their moral nature. We find Strider, the old gelding, much reduced due to age and mistreatment, and we see his previous owner’s neglect of the horse as an aspect of his general moral incapacity. We engage in Coetzee’s character David Lurie’s evolving sensitivity to animals. We also encounter the parallel between Jaques Austerliz—the art historian who once was a Czech Jew, uprooted from his past by a kindertransport to England—and a compulsive raccoon that the book’s narrator sees at the Antwerp Zoo. These readings work well to illustrate how literary works can present humans and animals as creatures with a life, with necessary conditions for flourishing, and thus objective moral traits that we can learn to know. Literature, on this view, contributes to moral thought precisely in power of its literary qualities, strategies, and ways of engaging the reader.

Having considered this a prominent way of understanding the ethical role of literature in contemporary philosophy, I am surprised to find that Crary considers the contemporary scene of conversations on ethics and literature largely unable to accommodate these kinds of insights. “The standard view” in Crary’s terms, is one which harvests literary work for descriptions and arguments, and neglects the moral thought involved in literature in its own right. Central figures like Stanley Cavell, Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum are merely mentioned in a footnote as critics of the “standard view,” and the large number of contemporary scholars taking their cue from them is rendered invisible. Thus, paradoxically, Crary’s argumentative strategy runs the risk of normalizing a philosophically superficial take on the ethical roles of literature, and conceding the privilege of making the field to philosophers whose main interests lie elsewhere (analytic moral theory, analytic aesthetics, epistemology).

Objectivity

Emphasizing the discussions where Crary’s ideas are controversial and effacing discussions where they are at home has some potentially problematic consequences for her substantial take on moral philosophy. Her insistence on a broader conception of objectivity, encompassing moral features as central aspects of reality, reads on a first glance as a natural elaboration of the line of moral realism endorsed by Murdoch and Diamond. Moral discernment, for them, is about being in touch with real aspects of the real world. It is thus about trying to be objective and responsive, to overcome bias and subjective projections.

But Crary’s recurrent emphatic return to the words “objective” and “objectivity,” give a clue that something slightly different is going on here. We catch a glimpse of this something in her critiques of Foot’s naturalism and Cary Wolf’s posthumanism in chapter 5. What interests me here is the common denominator of these critiques: the failure of both Foot and Wolfe to account properly for the objectivity of moral features. In Foot’s case, the problem is one of negligence: “Although Foot assumes that human beings have observable moral characteristics, she doesn’t present an argument for this assumption” (191). In Wolf’s case, it is his reliance on Derrida’s work, which undermines the possibility of proper objectivity: “It appears not only that any authority our words have is at bottom context-relative but also that there can be no question of satisfying a familiar ideal of objectivity that encodes the idea of universal authority” (195).

What she seems to demand is not the casual objectivity of “try to be objective for once, will you please!” (meaning “this is not the time for spilling out your emotions/prejudice/fears”), or “I think Paul was there: he can give an objective account of what happened” (meaning let’s hear Paul, who is not a party in the conflict). What Crary is looking for is rather a robust philosophical (metaphysical) conception of objectivity as “how things really are” correlative to a philosophical anxiety of the relativity of subjective experience, which is conceived as a threat to the rationality of the philosophical endeavor. To convince or refute her philosophical opponents, she needs to counter them at this level: give them the heavy duty, though broad, objectivity they demand.

But, the question is, does she? Or can she? Crary censures Foot for just taking observable moral characteristics for granted, but maybe this not a mistake on Foot’s part. Murdoch at least was quite explicit about what she saw as the necessity to put value into our metaphysical picture form the start, if we want to have it there at all. If we want effective argument for the reality of moral features, it needs to be about starting points. But there is a limit to what can be achieved by means of argument, because the difference between two kinds of moral metaphysics is rather like a change of aspect. You can say: “Look at the ears,” and the rabbit comes forth. Or you can say: “Look at the (objective) ethical intelligence of Tolstoy’s portrayal,” and a broader conception of objectivity comes forth (or not). Crary does the latter well, as also Nussbaum, Diamond, Cavell and others have done. But whether she manages to do something more by means of her emphasis on argument and objectivity is uncertain.

Crary’s Ethics

The last issue that I want to raise concerns how to move on from Inside Ethics. I have suggested that Crary might be granting too much credence to standards and ideals of philosophers holding the view she is criticizing. This might put her in an argumentatively disadvantageous position, but it might also have problematic consequences for her substantial thinking about ethics. One such consequence or risk is that moral life is rendered too neat and tidy: once we sort out this issue of objectivity, and acknowledge the need for a developed subjective sensibility for understanding objective reality, we are fine. What remains, then, is developing our sensibilities and getting creatures objectively into view.

Missing in this picture is the way that any lived and shared morality is about sanctioned and systematic exceptions to the demands of other creatures; we could call it the agonism of (moral) life. Looking back at the economic realities of the agrarian societies from which the Western societies of late modernity have only just emerged, we see conditions where such compromises were keenly felt. Dependent on wool, leather, hides, as well as milk and meat for sufficient nutrition, most people lived day to day with animals, delighting in lambs and calves, finding comfort in animal company, and yet learning to do their share in slaughter and the preparation of food, leather, and other utilities.

From the mere acknowledgment of the objective moral qualities of a creature, that is, the claim to life and flourishing it manifests, very little follows. Exclamations like “It is a live animal, you cannot treat it like that!” or “For God’s sake, he is a human being” are efficient responses to wanton cruelty or neglect. But what is the appropriate treatment of a living being who is someone’s dinner or threatening enemy? To butcher without cruelty and without unnecessary suffering? To protect one’s home, family, and livelihood without undue violence? These are the materials of moral reflection and negotiation.

Living in a modern city, our fridges stocked with tofu and authorities for protecting our spaces, we can do our share to reduce cruelty. But we easily underestimate the amount of harming, maiming, and killing that goes on in our names: in modern agriculture, in keeping city spaces free from unwanted wildlife, not to speak of police violence, warfare, and exploitation. I agree with Crary that a proper acknowledgment of the reality of other beings, that is, their objective (moral) qualities, is essential. But even a pacified, modern, vegan society will have its own ways of perpetrating, tolerating, endorsing, and administrating the selective denial of respect and concern for other creatures. And even in such a society will there be a historically malleable set of things we need to suffer “for our own good,” and things that are considered genuinely damaging?

Thus, in a sense, Crary’s book ends before the real adventure of both social critique and moral philosophy begins—the real adventure being that of interrogating our and others’ ways of administering moral concern and recognition. And it might have to end there because once you let these negotiations in the equilibrium of broadly objective moral demands will be disturbed. This is because such negotiations concern, not only how to get acknowledgeable facts into view and how to deal with them, but our very concepts, categories, proprieties, emotional responses, and what things mean for us.

Crary would probably agree that we develop our moral discernment as children of a specific time and place; that a developed sensibility is a specific sensibility of a certain kind of people who have had quite specific conditions to cultivate their understanding. Creativity, partiality, individuality, and cultural idiosyncrasy play their roles in what it means to develop a moral sensibility. Thus, different people can truly see different worlds and still respond to the objective moral claims of another being. But this elaboration places a strain on the notion of objectivity. In the midst of social, moral, and conceptual change we reach for the (objective) reality of others. But this must be objectivity understood in a rather casual manner. Developed sensibilities (shared or individual) are of many different kinds and pick out different traits of reality. Objectivity, in some philosophically or metaphysically more ambitious sense, might be unhelpful to describe the approximation of the real at work in moral life. Demanding such a notion, as Crary seems to do, might be an incentive to underplay agonism and change.

Alice Crary’s Inside Ethics engages a wide range of sources, from philosophers Peter Singer and Phillipa Foot, to Leo Tolstoy’s novels and memoirs about pets. She weaves them into a coherent, largely persuasive argument about a new way for moral philosophy to value both human and animal life. Carefully surveying the various ways philosophers discern human life’s moral status, she argues all human and animal life, no matter its capacity, is “inside ethics” and worthy of respect and care. She does so by arguing that ethics does not have to turn to the natural sciences for evidence of human value or moral worth, arguing humans and animals have morally observable characteristics identifiable apart from recourse to the natural sciences.

I should disclose the academic and professional locations that shape my response. I am a hospital and hospice chaplain but continue academic engagement with both theologians and medical practitioners. My clinical work shapes my perspective. I work primarily not in moral philosophy but in Christian ethics and systematic theology. Also, as a dog owner, I have no doubt my half-Jack Russell, half Pit-Bull rescue dog has moral concerns, so I am more than theoretically sympathetic to those accounts.

Crary’s book is not theological in the typical sense, but her philosophical case has theological implications. As a moral philosopher, she engages with methods and language that theologians use, so I hope she finds my theological probing of her work at the end of the essay intriguing and worthy of engagement. I acknowledge, however, that these questions and musings are mine and fall outside the scope of her book.

I wonder what Crary would say about how one should shape one’s actions toward individuals who are limited, even if one does not contest her claim that they are “inside ethics.” Which is to say, in order to promote the flourishing of individuals once we are accepting that they are inside ethics, we must make a series of prudential judgements about how to best act toward them to promote that flourishing. I have a form of cerebral palsy that often causes my hands to shake when I try to use them. Certainly I am inside ethics. But no one with any prudential sense would urge me to be a surgeon since tying my shoes is challenging some days. Stitching together a small artery as some of my surgeon friends do, is simply outside my capacity. I still consider myself worthy of ethical attention. But trying to train me to be a surgeon would be unrealistic; no prudent person would urge me to chase that goal. While I agree that those of “limited capacity” are inside ethics, I think we have to address the reality that those limitations have to figure into our ethical, prudential actions and hopes for certain individuals based on those limitations.

The book’s discussion of dementia patients makes me think of a hospice patient I have visited for two years as she slowly declines, who I will call Ms. Smith. She had two daughters but cannot remember that one of them has died. She does not remember that her other daughter, who I will call “Sue,” visits regularly. Sue does not think she visits her mother often enough. Is Ms. Smith’s moral life a “coherent whole”? Legally speaking she is not a competent agent. Still, she can remember how to sing some of the hymns she often played in her five decades as a pianist in her rural Baptist church in North Carolina. Even though she cannot rationally articulate her faith, the fact that she can remember the hymns tells us something about what was important to her. I thus agree with Crary that “human beings and animals have moral qualities that lend themselves to empirical discovery” (31). Even if Ms. Smith cannot act on her faith in a consistent way, I know from her singing that it is important to her. The question, then, once we accept Crary’s argument that all humans are inside ethics no matter what their cognitive status, is how does our knowledge of Ms. Smith’s limitations shape our moral agency toward them?

If my visits are too short, Ms. Smith begs me to stay longer, and one time, grabbed me by the belt to inform me, “You will not go until I tell you.” Sometimes she can tell the nurse that I am the chaplain. At other times she claims that I am her boyfriend. She cannot long for her daughter’s visits anymore. Ms. Smith requires attention. However, her moral world is different than that of a fully aware adult. Is she inside ethics? Absolutely. Still, maintaining a pastoral relationship requires a different kind of “attention” than a patient without dementia. She cannot remember how long it has been since my last visit; she cannot use a telephone; she does not take offense at some of the things I am sure she would have when she was well. I found her last week covered in orange juice but sleeping peacefully, and I am sure that when she was well she would have never received company covered in orange juice. Now, she does not register the orange juice on her nightgown as an affront to her dignity. The fact that I register it as do her daughters and some of the other staff means that we still see her as “inside ethics” and worthy of a care she cannot always comprehend.

Ms. Smith’s ability to sustain complex forms of moral reflection, and her ability to engage in complex relationships of moral standing has been diminished, which is to say, she is incapable of registering affronts to her dignity, or lack of attention. Perhaps some rigorous moralists would tell her daughter to visit daily because it seems like the right thing for a child to do. I would tell her daughter that she enjoys daily visits. Sue and I know that she doesn’t remember if Sue was there or not. I tell Sue to do her best. The point is that ethically, and perhaps theologically, individuals must learn to act prudentially; humans are “inside ethics” and their capacities do not determine their humanity but they should shape how we seek to interact with them to affirm their humanity.

On one level, ethics is about the avoidance of harm. Crary does acknowledge that different sorts of people require different sorts of “attention.” However, “ethics” and “attention” are not necessarily the same. Our ethical actions toward individuals are shaped by our knowledge of them. Crary makes the argument about the comatose patient being “inside ethics.” We would, of course, reject the right of any other person to rape a patient who was comatose, even though she wouldn’t register harm in the way that a patient who is alert would. Part of the repugnance is about the perpetrator. We think, “Who would undertake such an act on a vulnerable patient?” It violates moral decency, but it also violates consent and other crucial ethical concerns. Consider again my patient Ms. Smith. She does require care, and my impulse is that her humanity matters.

Or take the case of another patient who I will call Ms. Robinson, who lived in a nursing home several hundred miles from her son. She was confused but alert. She insisted on wearing makeup every day. She was a devout Catholic and consented to prayer. Does Ms. Robinson have interests? Perhaps a desire to put on her makeup daily signals a moral interest in her appearance? (She was a wealthy socialite before her illness). Or is it simply a fragment that she remembers from earlier in her life that has no moral content? Maybe she puts on makeup every day simply because she is used to doing so. We can’t always ascribe moral significance to actions that look to have some significance, if the individuals who undertake them have no capacity to give them moral meaning. Moral actions require moral intentions. Not all persons are capable of them. But I think Crary is right to note that Ms. Robinson is “inside ethics” and perhaps the staff should take seriously that she wants to put on makeup, even if badly, because it seems to be part of her care. One time her son came to visit, and she said she had no idea who he was and promptly asked him to leave. So he did—in tears; he never visited again. Her son was unable to help her recall who she was, and in so doing help her overcome the condition that limited her ability to engage the world. Her disease compromised her ability to be in relationship with someone significant to her. But it did not obviate her from the need for certain kinds of care, food, shelter, prayer, medical attention. Did her son abandon the patient? Perhaps in one sense he did, yet he understood his visits as being ethically insignificant, since his mother did not recognize him. For Crary she is metaphysically “inside ethics.” However, from the perspective of her son, she is no longer able to receive his ethical action. Seeing that she no longer recognized him, he made a decision that her status compromised her ability to claim his moral attention. What would Crary make of his decision not to return? Was he being cruel or was he being prudential? It goes beyond Crary’s case to argue what morality requires of us when an agent’s status makes us unable to sustain their flourishing. Or, perhaps, Crary would say that what flourishing looks like has simply changed.

As someone who works with the dying, I find Crary’s argument about the moral significance of human corpses somewhat unpersuasive. Here the lack of consideration of religious concerns, while outside Crary’s project, is somewhat problematic. Crary is right that most human communities make provision to care for their beloved dead. However, many do so not out of intuition about the significance of the body, but because of religious commandments fulfilled to avoid offending a God, who in many traditions, may punish the living for their failure to care for the dead. Crary employs Raymond Carver’s story “So Much Water Close to Home” to discuss how repugnant the wife of a fisherman found her husband’s actions when he tells her that he had discovered the dead body of a woman on a fishing trip but did not attend to it, since it echoed his mistreatment and neglect of the living.

I believe the truth of our treatment of the dead is more complex. I know families who let the dead bodies of love ones go to the state morgue for cremation. I have even facilitated this process. Is this sad? Yes. But economics or severe estrangement can make some individuals feel that a deceased has no claim on their resources or emotions. I have worked with people who have been so estranged from immediate family members that they simply refuse to do anything with the bodies of their loved ones as a final act of protest. Since we want to call this sad, it’s as if we affirm that even the bodies of the dead are “inside ethics.” But it can also be an assertion that in death those who have wounded us can make no practical claim on us, that some individuals by their actions have placed themselves beyond the ability to claim the ethical attention of particular individuals (in a way that I do not think Crary’s argument permits) because of their cruelty and abuse. For Crary, humans cannot be “outside of ethics” because of the given fact of their humanity on a metaphysical level. However, I wonder if individuals, through their intentional actions, such as abuse and cruelty, put themselves outside the scope of being able to make a moral claim on particular individuals on a practical level?

Consider a less severe case. There is a nationally, publicly advertised service that cremates dead bodies for free in exchange for tissue for medical research. I have worked with dozens of families who choose this option for financial reasons. The people who do this are not evil—they often hate themselves, struggling to make a moral existence out of poverty. They affirm Crary’s point even in difficult circumstances. Even if a body contains no life, we must find some way, despite hardship, to attend to it.

Finally, I wonder what implications Crary’s book has for theology. I think, and this is just my hunch, that her work provides us with a way for theologians to think more empirically about human dignity. One prominent way theologians have “grounded” the concept of dignity has been the doctrine of creation. All human and animal life is “sacred” because it is created by God. Others regard human life as sacred because of the incarnation. If God took on flesh in Christ, then all flesh is sacred and can be used as a vehicle for the divine. In recent Roman Catholic ethics, the concept of “intrinsic dignity” has rested on this notion of creation and certain accounts of natural law, some of which seem to be problematically abstract. This book gives us an empirical way to talk about morally relevant characteristics of both humans and animals that will open up new avenues of theological exploration.

It is important to begin my reflections on Crary’s fascinating book by making clear the fundamental difference between Crary and me. That difference, moreover, is the source of our most basic disagreements. I am not referring to our obvious difference, which is that Crary is a philosopher and I am a theologian. I will suggest in this response that difference is not as significant as is often thought. In fact, I will use this opportunity to respond to Crary to say why I think the work Crary has done as a philosopher is important for the work of theology.

No, the basic and fundamental difference between us is that Crary is clearly a dog person and I am a cat person all the way down. Crary may object that she does not ignore cats because she does use Cavell’s report of his daughter’s learning “kitty.” But I think it is undeniable that Crary is more attuned to the ethics that are “inside” dogs than she is when it comes to how cats understand us. I believe her argument would have been stronger if she had attended to those intelligent creatures called cats, particularly Siamese cats, who clearly do not need, as dogs do, the constant affirmation of their “owners.” It turns out that cats own us.

I think I know what I am talking about. I cannot remember when I have had not had a cat. Tuck, a cat with great dignity, lived to be twenty-two, Enda and Eden lived to eighteen, and Faith and Hope have just turned three. These cats have always been ready to welcome us (Paula, my spouse, is also a cat person) when we return home at the end of the day, but they do so on their terms. I am persuaded by Crary’s argument that human beings and animals have empirically discoverable moral characteristics. But her case would have been stronger if she knew Faith and Hope.

Now that I have got that off my chest, I will develop a more conventional though quite distinctive response to Crary’s book. I do not intend, however, to engage the philosophical issues her book raises. That may seem odd, but those matters have been broached by the earlier respondents. Accordingly, I think there would be little use for me to go over ground that has already been well plowed. Crary, moreover, has responded to those questions and criticisms with admirable clarity. Of course there is more to say, but philosophically there is always more to say. Rather, I will hopefully open a different line of enquiry by asking why and how a theologian might have a stake in the kind of arguments Crary develops in Inside Ethics and also by suggesting how certain theological concepts might be implied or at least brought to bear on Crary’s work.

That said, however, I should make clear that I am sympathetic with the argument central to Inside Ethics as well as the arguments Crary uses to support her positions. In particular, I am sympathetic with her reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophical “method,” which I take to be the central argument Crary makes in defense of her “empiricism.” Like Crary, I have been influenced by Cora Diamond’s and Stephen Mulhall’s reading of the Philosophical Investigations. I have at least implicitly assumed something like her account of Wittgenstein’s philosophical psychology to suggest how best to think about the importance of habit for any account of the virtues.  I also think she is right—indeed, I have developed similar arguments—that there is a “pragmatism” in Wittgenstein’s account of how linguistic expressions “mean” such and such in relation to a judgment.

Therefore I found her criticism of modern ethical theory not only persuasive but one that provides an opening for theological interventions in ethics. Crary argues that moral philosophers have operated on the assumption that the observation of the behavior of human beings and animals is external to morality. In contrast, she argues that human beings and animals have moral characteristics that are available by observation. She rightly argues that most modern moral philosophy denies that to be the case, because most moral philosophers think such an acknowledgement would make the attempt to sustain the neutral or objective character of moral reason problematic.

Her critique of the character of modern moral philosophy is one that has significant theological implications. Theological considerations have been excluded from modern ethical theory exactly because it has been assumed if theological convictions were included in any account of moral rationality, their particularistic implications will subvert any attempt to sustain an account of moral objectivity. In short, most philosophical ethicists have assumed that if theological convictions were considered in moral argument, then there would even be less chance of providing a moral theory capable of overcoming disagreements.

In contrast to the ambitions of most Kantian inspired accounts of ethical objectivity, Crary argues that objectivity is only available by something like the kind of work done by Cavell and others in ordinary language philosophy. In the process, Crary’s account of “inside ethics” at the very least provides an opening for theological considerations that would make her position perhaps even more threatening to a large group of ethicists. Crary’s “method” means that the only “method” requires us to attend to how we say what we say.

Put in my terms, what Crary’s account of modern moral philosophy suggests is that her understanding of “inside ethics” tells, or at least presupposes, a narrative. But she does not make the narrative presupposed explicit. That story could come in a number of forms, but to say the very least it should be clear that at least one way the story is told is by Jewish and Christian accounts of creation.  That story makes clear that all animals, human and non-human, share a common characteristic—we are first and foremost creatures. “Creature” turns out to be a logically primitive notion that confirms the empirical observations that human and non-human animals can be observed to have moral sensibilities.

Crary quite rightly argues that modern ethical theory has a far too limited view of what counts as a moral concept. I think that is true. In particular, “creature” is one such concept that presumes a moral stance but isn’t normally classified as moral (19). As a concept, moreover, “creature” begs for narrative display. Crary comes close to suggesting the need for such a narrative when she reflects on creatures’ expressive behavior. That she uses the language of creature is telling (68), but equally significant is her suggestion she can tell a story about the behavior that is relevant for human beings and animals. I take such a claim to be the philosophical equivalent of the theological conviction that all life has been created to have a purpose. Thus her later claim that “to do justice to a human being’s expressive behavior it is necessary to look at her in the light of a conception of what is important in human life” (135).

Put in traditional terms, Crary’s claim about the necessity of having a conception of what is important in human life implicitly affirms that every form of life has a telos. Moreover, the telos makes possible the “seeing” of what makes the satisfaction of the purpose possible. That all life has a telos makes possible, indeed necessary, the stories that make our lives make sense. I think it would be very interesting for Crary to engage MacIntyre’s critique of Aristotle on telos in Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity, because I cannot help but think MacIntyre would strengthen her case by introducing the concept of the good.

I take Crary’s understanding of what makes life important to be the background presumption for her claim that it is morally significant that human beings are human beings and animal life is in like manner significant by being animal life. That significance is well on display in her reflections about mentally disabled persons and about those suffering from Alzheimer’s. Her views on the imperative to serve the former and care for the latter can be the beginning of an important conversation between philosophers and theologians about what it means to be a community capable of caring for those who so suffer.

Finally, it might well be asked what all this may have to do with God. I think it may work this way. Crary briefly discusses what it might mean to be creatures that grieves. It is often thought if you hold a certain set of beliefs about God, then you appropriately grieve about, for example, when someone close to you dies. But that is to get it backwards. We do not grieve because of our belief in God. We believe in God, at least the Christian God, because we are creatures for whom it makes sense to grieve. I should like to think Crary’s book (88, 91) helps us understand why we rightly grieve when our twenty-two-year-old cat dies and how such grieving can help us see and even begin to understand what it means to be a creature.