Symposium Introduction
One hallmark of moral progress is that moral sensitivity and vocabulary emerges from a veritable darkness, where commitments and common sense that seem so clear in retrospect are at a time surprising and counter-intuitive. With Matthew Congdon’s new book, Moral Articulation, we have a theory of how some concepts have recently been developed and have made a transition from being objects of curiosity to matters of settled moral fact. Congdon’s examples are concepts of “genocide,” “racism,” “hate speech,” and “sexual harassment.”
A question those interested in the reality of these moral concepts ask is whether the moral facts these concepts track pre-exist and await their discovery, and Congdon’s answer is illuminating. Congdon’s view is that our moral concepts not only track moral reality, but are means we have for creating it, as we live our lives and value in light of those concepts. So, there is a productive loop of thought and language—that how we talk about moral concepts shape how we value, and how we value shapes how we live and who we are. Clarity on this fact helps us address those moments of cognitive dissonance that shows up in our moral lives when we ask whether we have the right words to describe our circumstances.
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Response
Moral Articulation, Historicized Ethical Naturalism, and the Good
It is not easy to criticize a book with which one finds oneself broadly in agreement, but it is even harder to criticize a book with which one finds oneself in deep agreement. When I say that I deeply agree with this book, what I mean is that I do not just think that it gets a lot of things right, but that what it gets right is also genuinely important. In her essay “Metaphysics and Ethics,” Murdoch famously wrote that human beings are creatures who “make pictures of [themselves] and then [come] to resemble the picture” (Murdoch 1999, 75). I think that this claim expresses a fundamental insight not only about the nature of moral agency but also the nature of moral philosophy. Moral Articulation is one of the best attempts that I have ever seen to make good on Murdoch’s insight, and in doing so to relate it to mainstream debates in contemporary moral philosophy. It is a wonderful book, and as I have said, it is one that I find it very hard to criticize. Nevertheless, I’m going to do my best.
The main part of Congdon’s argument that I want to focus on here is the historicized ethical naturalism that he develops in the second half of the book. I am fully on board with Congdon’s goal of developing a form of moral realism that allows—through the concept of moral articulation—for historical change and development. I am more skeptical of the idea that we can do this using the resources of Aristotelian naturalism. My argument will be that in order to make good on the goals of the book, Congdon needs to be even more Murdochian. Specifically, I think he needs to replace the Aristotelianism on which he is currently relying with something more like Murdoch’s Platonism. Let me try to explain why.
Congdon’s argument for historicized ethical naturalism is grounded in the rejection of what he calls “the immutability thesis”:
If objective moral grounds exist, they must be (traceable back to grounds that are) historically inalterable. (164)
The main problem for adherents of the immutability thesis is to reconcile it with the evident historical alterability of many of our moral concepts. We want to say that concepts like “sexual harassment” and “hate speech” pick out objective moral wrongs, but we also have to recognize that these concepts only came into use at a relatively recent point in human history. One example of a philosopher who has attempted to reconcile the immutability thesis with an acknowledgement of historical contingency is Michele Moody-Adams. Here is how Congdon summarizes her position:
Michele Moody-Adams argues that the fundamental moral concepts capable of condemning the subordination of women have always in principle existed (concepts like justice, equality, and dignity), yet we as a species have, for most of human history, either misinterpreted these concepts or failed to put them into practice. (192)
This position is a version of what Congdon calls “partial historicism,” i.e., the view that “though our beliefs and practices may change, the underlying fundamental concepts of morality remain rationally available and metaphysically immutable” (192–93). Other proponents of partial historicism include Kant, as well as “Kant’s own inheritors, variations of contractualism, utilitarianism, and some versions of virtue ethics” (168).
In order to understand Congdon’s project in the second half of the book, it is important to see his view as a rejection of partial historicism. The key difference between Congdon and Moody-Adams is that he wants to reject the immutability thesis, and with it the idea of any kind of “ahistorical core” to morality. The point of his own “historicized ethical naturalism” is:
to leave room for the idea that morally salient facts preexist and justify moral criticism, for example, genuine experiences of suffering, humiliation, anger, and domination, which social effects of articulation might contribute to uncovering, while maintaining that the ensuing linguistic and conceptual revolution involves a massive reshaping of basic human self-conceptions and experiences, including how humans understand kinship, social reproduction, childcare, sex, gender, marriage, love, law, waged work versus housework, the private/public distinction, notions of inequality, freedom, esteem, and respect. It holds that historical shifts as profound as this are not necessarily evaluable in relation to already existing forms of human flourishing but may articulate new ways of realizing a recognizably human life. (194)
On Congdon’s view, moral articulation does not merely allow us better to understand what it means to live a flourishing human life, but plays a role in shaping what a flourishing human life is (or might be). At least in principle, the changes brought about by the process of moral articulation can go all the way down to the very core of what it means to be human. In the form of a slogan: “being human is a condition we articulate” (195).
One way to see the contrast between Congdon’s view and the partial historicist’s is to look at the way each deals with the idea of universality. A Kantian partial historicist, for example, can say that morality applies universally to all rational beings, while still leaving room to acknowledge a degree of historical specificity in the way that different groups apply the categorical imperative in their own concrete circumstances. What Congdon wants to say is that on the historicized naturalist view, morality still applies universally, but only across members of the same life-form. Since the human life form is something that is “susceptible to rational discursive construction” (181) through the process of moral articulation, this move allows us to maintain the universality of morality without positing any ahistorical core.
The theory of historicized ethical naturalism strikes me as tremendously interesting and original, but it does have some initially counter-intuitive implications. For example, I think that the historicized ethical naturalist probably has to say that there is a sense in which human beings living thousands of years ago were not, in a certain sense, members of the same life form as you and I. I’m reasonably confident that Congdon can probably find a way to make this implication seem less counter-intuitive than it initially appears, but there is another problem that for the historicized ethical naturalist that seems more serious to me. Historicized ethical naturalism is a form of Aristotelianism that attempts to combine the explanatory power of Aristotle’s appeal to human nature with an acknowledgement of historical contingency. What it means to be human may change over time, but what does not change is the necessity—for human beings—of living a good human life. Congdon acknowledges that this way of putting it might appear to undermine the claim that his theory has no ahistorical core, since the idea that we should always seek to actualize the human form (or however exactly we want to formulate it) might look like an ahistorical principle comparable to the categorical imperative or the principle of utility. Congdon’s response is to say that this objection rests upon a conflation of substantive ethical principles with grammatical claims. To say that I ought to “be the kind of creature I am” is not a substantive ethical principle, but a merely grammatical claim that makes “explicit the logical connections between a certain class of concepts and judgments” (180).
It is at this point that I find myself coming back to Iris Murdoch. Throughout her career, Murdoch had a particular knack for pointing out the various ways in which philosophers would attempt to smuggle in substantive ethical claims under the guise of neutral logical analysis. My guess is that Murdoch would see the resort to the idea of “merely grammatical claims” as an indication that some kind of deeper problem was being swept under the rug. The problem in this case, it seems to me, is this: once the concept of the human is revealed as one that is subject to historical contingency, it can no longer play the role of grounding the absolute necessity of moral requirements. To elaborate: once we realize that what it means to be human has changed over time, and that there are profound differences in what human life looks like in one time and place compared to another, then the injunction to “be human” is no longer “merely grammatical” but morally fraught. One of the key moves in Congdon’s argument rests on Philippa Foot’s observation that the value of something like promising “would be different if human beings were different, and could bind the wills of others through some kind of future-related mind-control device” (quoted on 174). What Congdon wants to argue is that what it means to be human can change not only through science-fiction technological enhancement, but also through the activity of moral articulation. It is worth pausing, however, to consider what kind of difference the scenario that Foot envisages might make if it were actually to come to pass. What if, in the future, some (but not all) human beings did develop the capacity to read others’ minds, bind their wills, or perhaps avoid the effects of old age? How would these old and new breeds of human relate to each other? Would they take their primary responsibilities to be to “their own kind,” or would they see both old and new as equally valuable? In this scenario, the injunction to “be human” or indeed to “be the kind of creature you are” might stand as a powerful political statement or even a rallying cry on the battlefield. Either way, though, it would certainly no longer be possible to regard it as a “merely grammatical claim.”
Let me try to explain why I think that all of this constitutes an argument for Congdon to go “full-on Murdoch” and give up his Aristotelianism in favor of Murdochian Platonism. For Murdoch, the recognition that all of our moral concepts—even the concept of the human itself—are subject to contingency and change is part of the argument for the necessity of a transcendent, indefinable Good that is, as she puts it, “sovereign” over other concepts. Once we acknowledge that what it means to be human can change and develop, it is hard to resist the idea that it might be possible for some of these changes to be for the better (or indeed for the worse). In order to make sense of that possibility, however, we need the concept of the Good to stand over and above the concept of the human, as that in the light of which such judgments can be made. I can imagine, at this point, an Aristotelian arguing that there is a kind of danger in attempting to transcend our humanity, and a benefit to recognizing that the only way for us to be good is to be good as the kind of creatures that we are. The Murdochian reply, of course, is to say that this exchange simply serves to illustrate the point that the necessity (as the Aristotelian sees it) of putting our human nature at the center of our moral theory is neither a logical nor a grammatical necessity, but a moral necessity. To say that all of our moral judgments must be grounded in facts about our life form, which is itself not only something that is subject to historical change, but that we might even take ourselves to have a degree of responsibility to participate in changing, is to urge us to see moral life in a particular way. It is to attempt to get us to pay greater attention to some things and less attention to others, and to that extent it is a claim that carries moral weight.
I think that what Congdon is urging us to attend to in this book richly deserves our attention, and I have benefited a great deal from the opportunity to think more deeply about his arguments for the purposes of this symposium. If I am right, though, this means that his achievement in the book is not solely a logical or grammatical one, but a moral one too.
References
Murdoch, Iris. 1999. “Metaphysics and Ethics.” In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Penguin.
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Reply
Response to Mark Hopwood
Let me begin with an echo: I find myself in deep agreement with much of what Mark Hopwood says and therefore find the prospect of responding to his insightful criticisms daunting. He raises a fundamental issue by questioning the distinction between grammatical claims and substantive ethical claims. As he points out, a historicized Aristotelianism rooted in what human beings need to flourish is already an invitation to focus attention upon some things more than others. This, he argues, betrays a commitment to the sort of ahistorical core of morality my view claims to do without. To realize my historicist ambitions, he concludes, I should leave Foot behind and “go full Murdochian.” As Hopwood knows, I have Murdochian sympathies of my own, and so I want to take this challenge seriously.
We may begin by asking: is Hopwood’s appeal to a transcendent Good already a substantive ethical claim? If it is, and if it is not subject to change, this will spell trouble for Hopwood’s suggestion that Murdochian Platonism is more thoroughly historicist than ethical naturalism. Hopwood is clear that he is not appealing to the Good as a fixed point in the moral universe, one to which we have secure epistemic access and that infallibly grounds the demands of morality. The Murdochian Good, rather, reveals itself through the limitations and contingencies of our existing conceptualizations of it. Thus, far from committing us to an ahistorical core of morality, the Murdochian Good is dynamic and elusive in a way that fits my book’s emphasis on the ongoing nature of moral articulation.
Yet one might press the point: isn’t an appeal to the Murdochian Good inviting us to focus attention on some things more than others? For it invites us to focus on the idea that, no matter how developed our ethical conceptions, there is always the possibility of further striving toward perfection. In Murdoch, this comes out in her warnings against our egoistic tendencies to think we have others and the world “taped.” An emphasis on an indefinable, transcendent Good counsels against this sort of egoism, as well as any ethic holding that, through access to the right concepts, we can fix our picture of goodness once and for all. It therefore looks as though Murdochian Platonism harbors its own ahistorical core. While many Murdochians might welcome this result, Hopwood’s suggestion was that Murdochian Platonism could better accommodate thoroughgoing historicism than ethical naturalism. So, it looks like Hopwood’s proposed alternative faces a serious obstacle, namely, a variation of the charge he brings against my own view.
A historicized Murdochian might reply to this by emphasizing, precisely, the elusive character of the Good. To affirm a commitment to “the Good”—even if it captures something right about the ethical—is hardly informative or helpful in understanding how one ought to go on in particular situations. The substantive work of ethical struggle will involve, rather, attending to the messy details of situations themselves, where this work of attending is the concrete realization of the abstract idea of being good. So, while the postulation of a transcendent, indefinable Good captures something about the form of ethical struggle, it does not purport to offer any concrete guidance about how to go on in any given case. Once again, some Murdochians may welcome this result. Yet it returns us to the very distinction Hopwood views as dubious: it makes out the appeal to the Good as a claim about the grammar of the ethical rather than a substantive ethical commitment unto itself.
This amounts to a dilemma for historicized Murdochian Platonism: either (i) embrace the idea that the appeal to the Good is already an ethical gesture, yet one that is historically unchangeable, and so relinquish thorough historicism; or (ii) point out that appeals to the Good made in the abstract are not substantive ethical claims but, rather, claims about the form of the ethical, which means reviving the distinction between grammatical and substantive ethical claims.
Here I admit I’m torn. On the one hand, I agree with Hopwood that philosophers’ claims to ethical neutrality are often spurious. I agree, moreover, that a view asking us to focus attention on human flourishing is already ethical. On the other hand, I wonder whether a philosophically innocuous version of Foot’s distinction between grammatical and substantively ethical claims can be defended.
Perhaps a historicized ethical naturalist could take the latter option if we more carefully distinguish between the grammatical claim that ethical judgments are life-form dependent and the substantive claim that the relevant life-form for us should be characterized in terms of the human. Notice how minimal the grammatical claim is. Ethical naturalism takes the bare claim that I should orient myself toward the Good and gives it a further formal specification by claiming that “good” is always “good for a kind.” “The sort of creature I am,” then, is a formal concept serving as a placeholder. This placeholder can be given ethical content in any number of ways: one might commit oneself to the view that the relevant kind is nothing other than this idiosyncratic individual, a kind with exactly one member. One might commit oneself to some racist or ableist schema of what “creatures like us” are really like. I am committed, as many Aristotelians are, to a kind of ethical humanism that emphasizes human needs, vulnerabilities, and interdependencies. Yet I wish to emphasize that this ethical humanism is already a substantive ethical step beyond the thesis of life-form dependence, which only makes the formal point that, in pursuing the Good, one never does so as a bare particular agent, but always also as a member of a kind.
To specify the relevant kind is, precisely, a matter of moral articulation, which introduces all the historical drama and contingency that comes in its train. While this stops short of going “full Murdochian,” it foregrounds that the elusiveness and dynamism of the Murdochian Good equally characterizes the historically evolving life-form we bear.
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Response
Descriptions, Articulations, and the Development of New Moral Concepts
Matthew Congdon’s excellent new book1 argues that the development of new moral concepts involves a process of articulating, rather than merely describing, a new idea that best captures an experience of moral violation or a positive experience, say, of self-discovery. It usually follows an experience of discursive breakdown. While an agent might know they’re experiencing a moral wrong, they might nonetheless find it hard to say why, prompting them to search for a new description of their experience.
This process is epistemic, developmental, and emotional. One’s experience of relevant emotions doesn’t simply result from but is integral to the process of articulating new moral concepts. The goal is to reconcile a view of moral progress as developmental and emotional with an account of it as both historical and objective. The approach here is deliberately Aristotelian. It claims to be naturalistic, rooted in the sort of creatures we are.
For Congdon, moral articulation involves more than filling a conceptual gap in our existing hermeneutical resources. Rather, it is a transformation of our moral vision that goes beyond tracking a set of facts. This reorientation can take place absent a change in the relevant facts. The creation of a new moral concept, say, sexual harassment, leads to changes in how adjacent concepts, such as coercion, are conceptualized.
Congdon’s theory is impressive, but it is not without its difficulties. Two issues in particular need examining. First, it is unclear whether moral articulation (a) results from a conceptual gap in our existing hermeneutical resources or (b) occurs without such gap. Second, the distinction between descriptions and articulations appears to be a false dichotomy. I will begin with Congdon’s account before discussing these issues in turn.
The Account
Following Congdon, I categorize the main features of his account of moral articulation as epistemic, developmental, and emotional.
First, moral articulation is epistemic. It involves coining new moral concepts—often a collective enterprise—to capture one’s experiences of moral violation. These experiences are proto-discursive; they have structures and forms even though the subject struggles to find appropriate language to describe her experience. These experiences, moreover, involve an elusion-based discursive breakdown. This means not that the experience eludes the subject, as when someone fails to realize that her boss insults her. Rather, the subject finds the experience elusive. While the employee has an inchoate sense that the boss has somehow insulted her, she can’t quite say why.
Moral articulation is epistemically-oriented. The discursive act involved in coining new moral concepts sheds light on “genuine features of the object of discursive construction and can be criticized on that basis (i.e., the discursive act has objective purport)” (Congdon 2023, 135; emphasis in original). Importantly, moral articulation follows what Congdon dubs an “expressive logic,” i.e., it shapes rather than merely describes that very object of discursive construction.
Second, moral articulation is developmental because it is directed toward eudaimonistic growth. The discursive act “aims at maturing or developing the object of discursive construction in a direction of flourishing or goodness” (135). In some cases, the subject may experience a transformation of their self-understanding.
Third, moral articulation is emotional. This doesn’t simply mean that the discursive act is accompanied by emotions, but that emotions are integral to the discursive act itself. Emotions so understood are not only defensive but also norm-creating. Women’s feelings of rage at their experiences of sexual violations, for example, were put to work effectively in their coining the concept of sexual harassment.
Does moral articulation require a conceptual gap?
Since moral articulation is a process of developing new moral concepts that describe one’s experiences, it should track a conceptual gap in the existing shared hermeneutical resources. Of course, the gap might already be partially filled. Before concepts such as date rape or acquaintance rape were coined by feminists in the 1970s, for example, inadequate but somewhat accurate descriptions such as “male sex aggression in dating-courtship relationships” were used to describe the phenomenon.2 But without some gap, it remains unclear why a new concept is needed. For this reason, moral and political philosophers, among others, often think it is crucial to explain how their newly-coined concepts are distinct from existing ones.
Congdon’s account of moral articulation, however, tends to overlook important differences between: (1) not knowing how to put an experience into words, yet knowing that there might exist words within the shared conceptual repertoires that might aptly describe one’s experience; (2) a similar (yet different) experience of discursive breakdown in which no existing words and concepts could adequately capture one’s experience, prompting the need to create new concepts; and (3) having an experience that one thinks is literally beyond words. (3) is undergirded by the assumption that thought is always more complex than language. So, regardless of the degree to which our language and vocabulary expand, they can never catch up completely with the complexity of our thoughts, feelings or experiences in general.
While Congdon doesn’t adopt the assumption behind (3), his account overlooks important differences between (1) and (2). Unlike (2), (1) doesn’t give rise to the need for new concepts. This is because the agent might be aware, however vaguely, that some suitable words or concepts in the shared hermeneutical resources would aptly describe their experience. It is just that those words, concepts or descriptions don’t readily come to the agent’s mind in that moment. The agent nonetheless believes that at some future point, the relevant word, concept, or description—already existing in the shared hermeneutical resources—will come to mind.
This is a fairly common experience. When I try to formulate a philosophical thought, for example, I might struggle to articulate it in a satisfying way while believing that if I continue my efforts, I will eventually find an adequate formulation. Subsequently, I discover an author who has found the perfect words to capture my inchoate thoughts. This is a clear example in which articulation doesn’t require a conceptual gap. To use Congdon’s own examples, an experience of discursive breakdown when confronted by a painting that seems beautiful beyond words or an experience of deep yet ineffable love for another person are cases that demand articulation without necessitating new concepts. In contrast, Carmita Wood’s search for the right word to describe her experience of sexual violation by her boss called for the development of a new concept—sexual harassment.
It is important to distinguish cases of (moral) articulation that requires the development of new moral concepts from cases that don’t. For the individual, both can result in a reorientation of moral vision. For example, jointly coining a new term—sexual harassment—to name one’s experience of sexual violation in a consciousness-raising group might transform one’s understanding of one’s experience as much as redescribing one’s experience using that term for the first time (after it has already been coined). If moral articulation doesn’t always require new concepts, then more needs to be said about what exactly coining new concepts does in addition to articulating one’s experience of moral violation.
Description vs. Articulation
Moral Articulation also distinguishes too sharply between descriptions and articulations. Inspired by Charles Taylor, Congdon sees articulation as “an activity of conceptualization that strives to be faithful to an object that it simultaneously transforms” (8). The contrast here is with descriptions. While descriptions “predicate objects that are . . . indifferent to the ways we speak about them,” articulations “are directed at features of ourselves such as our desires, emotions, and inchoate senses of importance, which can grow and shift as we find new frames to think and speak about them” (8). A notable difference between descriptions and articulations, then, is that the latter are self-directed while the former are not. To use Congdon’s example, there is an important difference between describing the sea as tempestuous and describing oneself as experiencing tempestuous emotions.
This first difference pertaining to the self-directedness of articulations and the external-object-directedness of descriptions supposedly explains the second key difference between articulations and descriptions. In part because articulations are self-directed and an activity of self-interpretation, they have the power of transforming the subject’s understanding of herself and her experiences in a way that descriptions do not. Descriptions, one might say, “leave things as they are” even if they might transform how we understand those things.
While Congdon’s distinction between descriptions and articulations is illuminating and potentially helpful in explaining the emergence of new moral concepts, I find the contrast unduly sharp. There’s a class of so-called descriptions that doesn’t fall neatly into either the category of external-object-directed descriptions or that of self-directed articulations. These are self-directed descriptions of one’s experiences that need not amount to articulations but are nonetheless fundamental to the process of moral articulation itself.
Consider the consciousness-raising group led by Lin Farley that gave rise to the new concept of sexual harassment. The participants in the group’s ability to describe their markedly similar experiences was crucial to their coining the term “sexual harassment.” It was the very process of articulating their experience and learning that others shared it too that helped Carmita Wood and others realize that this phenomenon wasn’t unique to their own circumstances but more widespread than they had initially thought, prompting them to do something about it by speaking publicly about it.
The merit of the term “sexual harassment,” from the perspectives of Wood and others in Lin Farley’s consciousness-raising group, was that it better captured “a whole range of subtle and unsubtle persistent behaviors” than “sexual intimidation,” “sexual coercion,” or “sexual exploitation on the job” (Brownmiller 1999, 281). In the case of Wood, she was subject to “unwanted kisses” from her boss. While these words come from Brownmiller’s account of the story as told by Wood, descriptions like “unwanted kisses” seem to challenge the rather sharp boundaries between descriptions and articulations on Congdon’s picture.
“Unwanted kisses” is very different from descriptions like “the Earth is round” or “Mars has an iron-rich surface” which are prototypically directed at external objects, but “unwanted kisses” isn’t exactly an articulation either. Although it pertains to one’s own feelings and attitudes toward someone else’s behavior, it need not be accompanied by an inchoate sense of importance or experience of discursive breakdown in any robust sense, even if one finds the description somewhat inadequate. “Unwanted kisses,” one might say, is both directed at an external “object”—in this case, someone else’s behavior—while simultaneously describing one’s attitude toward such behavior. They are, so to say, “in-between” descriptions that lie somewhere along the spectrum between descriptions and articulations.
It is important, in my opinion, to explain why these “in-between” descriptions capture something correctly but are nonetheless inadequate, prompting the need for new concepts. Here’s one suggestion. Perhaps “sexual harassment” is superior to “unwanted sexual attention” as a description not because it was self-directed (in fact, one might think that “unwanted sexual attention” is more self-directed in this case) but because it purports to objectively describe the world. It shifts the attention from the lived experience of socially marginalized groups to the fact that these groups are in fact oppressed.3
Paying attention to these in-between descriptions, I posit, is crucial to (1) avoiding exaggerating the extent to which those experiencing moral violations fail to understand their experiences; (2) understanding moral articulation as a process of experimenting with describing and redescribing one’s experience; and (3) grasping why in some cases victims of moral violation might refuse to use a seemingly appropriate new moral concept to describe their experience.4
Conclusion
Moral Articulation is a wonderfully thought-provoking and illuminating account of the development of new moral concepts. Hopefully in future Congdon will clarify some of the questions it raises, including whether articulation always requires that new concepts be coined, and addressing that set of descriptions which are neither straightforwardly “descriptions” or “articulations” in the sense he described, but are nonetheless crucial to our understanding of moral progress.
References
Brownmiller, Susan. 1999. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. New York: Dial Press.
Congdon, Matthew. 2024. Moral Articulation: On the Development of New Moral Concepts. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dror, Liar. 2023. “Is There an Epistemic Advantage to Being Oppressed?” Noûs 57 (3): 618–640.
Kanin, Eugene J. 1957. “Male Aggression in Dating-Courtship Relations.” American Journal of Sociology 63 (2): 197–204.
Kitzinger, Celia, and Alison Thomas. 1995. “Sexual Harassment: A Discursive Approach.” In Feminism and Discourse: Psychological Perspectives, edited by Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger. London: SAGE Publications.
Mason, Rebecca. 2011. “Two Kinds of Unknowing.” Hypatia 26 (2): 294–307.
Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. New York: Oxford University Press.
I’m grateful to Scott Aikin and Kristina Gehrman for their invitation to participate in this book symposium. Thanks to Karl Landstrom and Luke O’Sullivan for helpful comments and suggestions.↩
See, for example, Kanin (1957, 197).↩
For example, it’s perhaps more important to be able to assert that one was hurt rather than one felt hurt. See Dror (2023).↩
Consider cases in which women who have been at the receiving end of “unwanted sexual attention” but don’t at the same time label their experience “sexual harassment.” See, for example, Kitzinger and Thomas (1995). For criticisms of Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice along the line suggested in (1), see, for example, Mason (2011) and Medina (2013).↩
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Reply
Response to Linh Mac
I am grateful to Linh Mac for her perceptive comments on my book, particularly her carefully delineated taxonomy of forms of discursive breakdown. Mac suggests that I elide the first two types of discursive breakdown on her list: type-1 cases in which an agent struggles to put an experience into words and concepts, yet has the conviction that appropriate words and concepts are available in their social context; and type-2 cases in which no such concepts or words exist, and so need to be created for the first time. She notes, rightly, that my focus in the book is the latter sort of case and presses me to say more about why this should be so.
Let me begin by addressing the concern that I overlook the difference between type-1 and type-2 cases. Although I do not explicitly draw the distinction as Mac does, I would point to several examples in Moral Articulation that indicate I am more alive to type-1 cases than Mac suggests. There is the case of Antonio in Bicycle Thieves who too quickly reaches for the concept, “theft,” to interpret the injustice done to him, thus shouldering out rival interpretations, which certainly exist in the time and place of this world: namely, critical concepts of exploited wage labor, alienation, and the conditions of crushing poverty that the film so vividly depicts. I would also point to my extended discussion of E.M. Forster’s Maurice, in which Maurice and Clive struggle to articulate their love for one another, not by inventing concepts and words that are without historical precedent, but by reaching for metaphors, allusions to works of art, and “the humblest scraps of speech” that they collaboratively piece together. I would also highlight the case of M and D, taken from Iris Murdoch’s “The Idea of Perfection,” in which a mother-in-law struggles to exchange one set of evaluative predicates for another in reframing her version of her daughter-in-law. In each case, the articulation of an inchoate sense of moral importance is at stake. And yet none of these cases result in a freshly coined term, at least in the explicit way we find in many of my other examples, like the inventions of the terms “genocide” and “sexual harassment.”
These examples notwithstanding, Mac’s question remains: what is special about the type-2 cases of discursive breakdown in which new concepts are developed, where those concepts are not only new to the individual or group in question, but new in the stronger sense of needing to be created for the first time?
The answer is that a focus on the development of new moral concepts is a central feature of the “historicized moral realism” I develop in the latter half of the book. If my book had been concerned solely with the intrapsychic dynamics of individuals as they face discursive breakdown and expand their conceptual repertoires in response, there would be nothing particularly special about type-2 cases. Their novelty matters, however, when we consider the life-form-level transformations I discuss in the second half of the book. My claim is that the development of new moral concepts can, at least in some cases, not only shed light upon but transform the sorts of creatures we are. It matters to my argument in favor of historicized moral realism that culturally specific manifestations of our life-form can be articulated in new ways that expand, rather than conform to, existing possibilities for our flourishing. We lose that thought if we focus solely on cases of individuals experiencing transformations by learning concepts and words that, though new to them, already exist within their broader social context.
Now let me come to Mac’s second suggestion, namely, that there exist certain “in between” cases that are neither straightforwardly articulation nor description. She points to the phrase “unwanted kisses” as simultaneously expressing something external to the articulator (namely, another person’s behavior) and internal to the articulator (their being unwanted). Let me make two points in reply.
First, I would caution against using the internality or externality of the object of expression as the sole basis for identifying a case as either articulation or description. An expression can focus on something “internal” to the articulator without following articulation’s expressive logic. More decisive for me are the following points of similarity and difference: like descriptions, articulations strive to be faithful to their object; yet unlike descriptions, articulations help transform their object. They transform the very object they bring to light.
Second, we should take a step back and ask: just what, exactly, is the object of moral articulation in a given case? In the book, I give a wide range of answers: it is, variously, an experience, an inchoate feeling of importance, an event, another’s behavior, an action-type, ourselves, our social relations, and, at the highest level of generality, a shared life-form.
This creates a great deal of ambiguity as to whether the object of articulation is something “inside” or “outside” the agent. Returning to the case of “unwanted kisses,” if we focus on the level of an individual articulating their own experience of violation, then the expression does indeed appear to be the sort of “mixed case” Mac points out: it simultaneously expresses something external to the articulator (the behavior) and internal (their attitude). Yet at the broader social level, which tends to be my focus in the book, moral articulation is an act of collective self-interpretation. At this level, both the behavior and the attitude toward it are “internal” to the collective engaged in this form of self-interpretation. This is especially the case when we focus on the highest level of generality, namely, the articulation of our life-form, or the kinds of creatures we are. That moral articulation’s “object” can fall under multiple levels of generality accounts, I think, for why the mixed cases exist. I am happy, therefore, to take on Mac’s suggestion, which helps foreground the complexity of any historically extended struggle to express the ethical.
Kristina Gehrman
Response
Moral Articulation, Practical Reason, and the Problem of Progress
This is a beautiful book.
Matthew Congdon’s core project here is:
I am entirely persuaded that “certain proto-discursive forms are . . . preconditions for the development of moral discourse itself. . . .” And that this “means rejecting a picture of moral meaningfulness as discursive all the way down.” (45) I am also persuaded that proto-discursive moral meaningfulness is paradigmatically exemplified in the experience of “discursive breakdown”—dissonance in the face of a normalized or accepted but morally problematic practice or act (or vice versa). (47)
I want just briefly to acknowledge, however, the powerful argument Congdon gives against the deep-rooted orthodoxy that “moral meaningfulness [is] discursive all the way down.” (34) The argument’s force is rooted in its phenomenological structure. When we consider what it’s actually like to be human moral agents, we can see proto-discursive moral meaning, all over the place. (For example, when my first child was born, I struggled to put into words what he meant to me. When my second came along, I struggled again to contain her vast importance and how it both was, and was not, different from his. In public discourse everyday we see signs of humanity’s ongoing struggle to articulate the inherent value of nonhuman natural phenomena. And so on.) I want to note that proto-discursiveness seems likely to be part of meaningfulness much more broadly, for example, in contexts of scientific inquiry, in art, in the development of new techniques and skills, when inventing. Change engenders new needs for articulation. This is part of the human condition.
Having said that, I am going to focus now on themes central to Chapters 4, 5, and 6. In particular, I will reflect on 1) the significance to moral articulation of practical reasoning as well as theoretical (and specifically evaluative) reasoning and 2) briefly, difficulties distinguishing moral progress from both mere moral permutation and outright moral deterioration.
I think that a fuller, more direct consideration of practical reason adds something important to Congdon’s picture of historicized moral objectivity, when practical reason is construed in a broadly Aristotelian way. Combining the views of David Wiggins and Gavin Lawrence we can think of practical reason as reason-involving activities aimed at realizing a particular specification of the practicable good, in a particular context, for a particular agent.1
What does this mean? Consider the example of promise-keeping:
So, practical reasoning, deliberation, is what we do when we’re trying to figure out whether we should keep a promise, and why, and what exactly “keeping our promise” looks like, in a particular context of action. Think of Cephalus, agreeing with Socrates in the Republic that the just person will break a promise to return weapons to a friend who is now out of their mind. If this is a live, practical question—Should I honor my promise to return these weapons?—the answer is not an evaluative judgment, but a decision. Here, Socrates and Cephalus agree that the good one can realize in action is not the action specified by the description honor my promise. It is the action specified by the description, shield my poor friend from harming themselves or others while they are in this state.
Now let’s think about how practical rationality figures in rational discursive construction. Congdon says that acts of discursive construction might be one, both, or neither of two things:
(i) epistemically oriented
(ii) developmentally oriented
Rational discursive construction is “normatively oriented in both [epistemic and developmental] senses and, moreover, in a way that relates (i) and (ii): it matures and develops the very object it strives to illuminate.” (136) I suggest we might add a third form of discursive construction, that I would propose also partly constitutes rational discursive construction. Rational discursive construction is:
Both developmental and combined developmental-epistemic forms of discursive construction certainly have practical dimensions and many practical implications. For E.M. Forster’s lovers Maurice and Clive, for example, “enriching their bond” is something they do together. Still, the “object of interpretation” in their joint act of moral articulation is their love; their powerful intimate bond (139). And there seems to me to be a range of further objects of discursive construction equally intimately connected to the epistemic and developmental forms of discursive construction.
These objects of practically rational discursive construction come into clearer focus when we consider the new possible specifications of the practicable good that are available to Maurice and Clive, and that are forged by them, thanks to their process of moral articulation. Now each can, for the first time, consider whether to take actions under novel, morally significant descriptions such as: “Ending our love affair” “writing a love letter” “grieving the lost love of my life/my first love” “being faithful” “honoring this long-suppressed part of me” “responding to subcultural cues from others like me in my social surroundings” “helping forge a broader underground community.” In particular contexts for action, they can ask whether these and other newly possibly intentional actions constitute the practicable good, and why. If deliberation is a search for the best specification, in one’s circumstances, of the good that can be realized in action—well, then adding further specifications by dint of practically-rational discursive construction increases one’s ability to realize the practicable good; that is, it changes the available paths by which one might attain some measure of eudaimonia, or wellbeing, or moral maturity.
Notably, there are certain goods which, in their repressive social and historical context, Maurice and Clive simply cannot realize in action: “getting married,” certainly; arguably, “coming out” as well. Epistemically and developmentally oriented moral articulation can give them a concept of a world where these things would be possible, much as Star Trek‘s Galactic Federation of Planets might give you and me a concept of a functional democratic world order. But what specific practical steps could they take, what intentions could they form, to bring that envisioned world into being?
These are practical questions, and one especially striking thing about them is that they call for collective answers. Maurice and Clive cannot just decide to live as an openly gay couple in their society; they would be imprisoned and “treated” for their perceived pathology. But they can be part of a developing movement that eventually makes it possible for people like them to make that choice.
To me this suggests that practically oriented discursive construction is a key part of the bridge from intimate to social (or public) moral articulation, including articulation of the human form of life. Congdon observes that
Joining together in social movements that initiate mass changes in the range of possibilities open to us is a centrally practical, or practically-rational, discursive construction—again, “practical” in the sense that it “helps to develop, in a direction of moral maturation,” new specifications of the practicable good (new things we can decide to do). And as I understand Congdon’s account of it, practically-oriented discursive construction is the engine of “immanent critique.” That is, seeking to realize new conceptions of the good through action literally puts us in new social circumstances from within which we can begin to critically evaluate moral change.
So, what of moral progress? Is it possible, and can we recognize it? Here is where Congdon winds up on the question:
I’m a bit of a misanthrope, so while I agree that the aim of moral articulation is not just change but betterment, I am pessimistic about humanity’s ability to actually better ourselves or to know when we have done so. There is a lot to say here; what follows is pretty gestural for the sake of brevity.
Consider American movements seeking to create and sustain an institution of same-sex marriage. “Same-sex marriage” is a moral and social concept that very plausibly exemplifies epistemic, developmental, and practical discursive rational construction. It articulates whole new practical and evaluative territories, exemplified by questions such as: “Should I propose?” “Does committing to him (to anyone) require monogamy?” and so on. But not everyone thinks the articulation of “same-sex marriage” is moral progress. And here I’m interested, not in people who think marriage is between a man and a woman, but in people who think that marriage itself is an inherently patriarchal, inequitable institution and that expanding it to discipline and oppress gay as well as straight lovers is terribly ill-conceived.2
Participants in the movement to morally articulate same-sex marriage might hope that subverting the heteronormativity of “marriage” would be sufficient to also subvert its patriarchal social function for same-sex couples; possibly for all couples. But we’re just not going to know whether that’s what will happen, until after we’ve already created this whole new feature of the human form of life and people are married and trying to have healthy marriages. And at that point, if it turns out that we were wrong about the liberatory impact of our collective act of moral articulation, and we’ve inadvertently extended the reach of patriarchal domination when we should have been united in trying to create a post-marriage society—well, it’s too late to undo bringing same-sex marriage into being.
If we’re only concerned with being able to judge moral worth objectively, maybe this is fine. But we’re also trying to make progress regarding how we live and what we do. And here, the very plausibility of Congdon’s account of immanent critique seems like it should undermine our confidence that moral articulation reliably produces genuine moral progress. So I’m going to close with this existential question raised, for me at least, by Congdon’s luminous discussion: Does the epistemic objectivity achieved through immanent critique give us grounds for confidence that through moral articulation we make moral progress? Or might it just as often simply give us a more vivid, tragic grasp of the all too human mess we’re in?
Gavin Lawrence, “The Rationality of Morality,” in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, edited by Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). David Wiggins, “Deliberation and Practical Reason in Aristotle,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76 (1975): 29–51.↩
Same-sex married partners can now, sadly, deliberate about whether the practicable good is best specified by “leaving even though I can’t prove abuse and he might try to take the kids in the divorce.”↩
1.26.26 | Matthew Congdon
Reply
Response to Kristina Gehrman
Kristina Gehrman’s generous commentary proposes that a more direct consideration of practical reason would enrich my account of moral articulation and provides some illuminating first steps in this direction. I am grateful for this suggestion, and in reply I will indicate roughly how I might join Gehrman in walking this path.
Gehrman asks whether moral articulation has a practically rational orientation in addition to the two sorts of normative orientation I emphasize, namely, an epistemic orientation aimed at illuminating moral articulation’s “object” and a developmental orientation aimed at maturation. In the book I defend a historicized ethical naturalism according to which the ultimate “object” of moral articulation is the life-form we bear. So, morally articulating new concepts like “sexual harassment,” “hate speech,” or “climate crisis” is ultimately a matter of articulating the sorts of creatures we are and what we need to survive, thrive, and be actualized. To say moral articulation has both epistemic and developmental orientations means that the development of new moral concepts strives simultaneously to illuminate who we are and, at least potentially, to create possibilities for flourishing that did not previously exist.
What does a practically rational orientation add to this picture? Gehrman suggests that, while the epistemic and developmental orientations have practical consequences, neither is explicitly oriented toward the realization of a particular specification of the practicable good. This leaves out the possibility that moral articulation results, not only in new evaluative judgments, but new forms of action. Building upon my example from E.M. Forster’s Maurice, she notes that Maurice and Clive’s activity of articulating the nature of their love will include specifying new action-types, like “writing a love letter,” that serve as new and previously unconsidered candidates for specifications of the practicable good. Articulating the nature of their love, thus, results not merely in new evaluative judgments, but in new actions, new forms of practicing their love. As Gehrman develops the point, “If deliberation is a search for the best specification, in one’s circumstances, of the good that can be realized in action . . . [then] adding further specifications by dint of practically-rational discursive construction increases one’s ability to realize the practicable good; that is, it changes the available paths by which one might attain some measure of eudaimonia, or wellbeing, or moral maturity” (3). Acts are always intentional under some conceptualization. Thus, a life-form whose members continually transform the set of conceptualizations under which they can understand themselves as acting intentionally will not be confined to a fixed set of possible specifications of the practicable good.
(As an aside, I think there are grounds for reading my book’s emphasis on the developmental orientation of moral articulation as already expressing something like this thought, and so I would press back against any suggestion that the sort of maturation I have in mind stops short of the genuinely practical. Yet rather than press this exegetical point, I want to take up Gehrman’s invitation to amplify and make more determinate this aspect of my view.)
Note two ways of interpreting Gehrman’s idea. On the first interpretation, moral articulation develops new specifications of the practicable good, i.e., new conceptualizations of action-types that expand the range of intelligible intentions that moral agents can set for themselves in their pursuit of eudaimonia. This suggests a kind of a two-step model, according to which, first, specifications of the practicable good are articulated and, second, those specifications are acted upon. This interpretation strikes me as failing to make good on Gehrman’s insight. For practical reason proper has as its conclusion not just a specification but a realization of the practicable good.
On the second interpretation, moral articulation’s practically rational orientation is at work when new specifications of the practicable good arise, in part, through attempted realizations of those very specifications. Suppose Maurice develops an articulate sense of what it means to “write a love letter” in and through writing a letter itself. “Specification” and “realization” of the practicable good would thus not be two separate steps but intertwined. Certain kinds of action become intelligible to us, and reveal their meaningfulness, in their actually being carried out, as in human phenomena like “friendship,” “becoming an artist,” “being a good parent,” and “writing a love letter.” We participate in such phenomena even when we have only an inchoate sense of what we are doing and why. In this respect, the practically rational activity of deliberating how best to realize the practicable good can be viewed as internal to the process of articulation: for in such cases, specification and realization coevolve.
I find this second interpretation compelling, though it raises a question about the distinction between theoretical and practical rationality. In Moral Articulation, I write that this is a “distinction that . . . the activity of articulation blurs” (54). I elaborate: “A classic formulation of the distinction between theoretical and practical rationality is in terms of ‘direction of fit,’ where theoretical rationality aims to conform contents of one’s mind to features of the world and practical rationality aims to conform features of the world to contents of one’s mind. . . . [A]rticulation cannot be sorted neatly into either option without remainder, because both aims are inseparably at stake. Moral articulation is . . . simultaneously world-disclosing and world-making” (54n39). If Maurice’s articulate sense of the specification of the practicable good, “writing a love letter,” emerges alongside and through his actually writing the letter, then here we have precisely such a case in which world-disclosing and world-making appear to merge.
This leaves all the room in the world for the existential problems Gehrman rightly foregrounds concerning the difficulties of both achieving and knowing moral progress. If articulation not only discloses a world but shapes it through newly specified realizations of the practicable good, a parallel point must be said of misarticulation. When we develop new concepts that distort the practicable good, we do more than make an intellectual mistake. We recreate the world in our own bad image.