Jack Samuel is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He mostly works on ethics and metaethics, with a little bit of political philosophy and philosophy of law in the mix, and 19th-century German philosophy looming in the background.
In one of your essays, you discuss Iris Murdoch’s concept of agency, relating it to that of Hume and Kant, for the purpose of providing a better account of moral progress. Describe Murdoch’s account and what you think it offers Ethics.
On my reading Murdoch is thinking of agency as the capacity to cultivate, occupy, and refine a distinctive practical standpoint through which the world is disclosed as normatively saturated. The thought is that we are constantly active in reflectively engaging with the world, not just in the “needle-thin” moment of choice. For Murdoch this means that most of what we do emerges naturally out of this process, out of the standpoint it constitutes, and if we look only at the act of choice in search of agency we will miss most of what it does.
I want to be careful about ascribing a conception of agency to Kant or Hume, but I do try to bring out what I think is interesting and unusual about Murdoch’s by contrasting it with toy Kantian and Humean views, on which agency is understood either as the capacity to act on the basis of inclinations that one reflectively endorses as reasons or as the capacity to channel conative states into action through a combination of beliefs and rational scrutiny. (Not only Kant and Hume but real-life Kantians and Humeans like Korsgaard, Street, and Schroeder have considerably more sophisticated views than the toy versions I work with, and in the end I’m comfortable with seeing the Murdochian view I sketch as compatible with many of their insights. The real contribution I hope revisiting Murdoch’s understanding of agency makes is to highlight an aspect of agency that has been overlooked, but I’m agnostic about the extent to which it’s strictly ruled out by competing discussions.)
I think this view can do a lot for ethics, beyond just offering a more complete picture of the kinds of creatures that we are and the ways that we relate to the world around us, especially the people (and other animals) in it. In the paper I discuss the ways that this picture of agency quite naturally hooks up with themes of alienation and ideology, and in particular that it provides the resources to make sense of the ways that coming to self-consciously stand in relation to concrete, particular others (“individual realities”, in Murdoch’s phrase, “separate from oneself”) is at the heart of ethics.
What is most interesting to me, however, and is largely off-stage in my work (though it comes out at the end of the paper) is the role that agency, on this picture, plays in politics. Briefly, the practical standpoint is conditioned by social relations, and reflective self-consciousness as an agent is thus partly a matter of being reflectively self-conscious of the historical, social, and political context in which one is embedded. I’m attracted to a picture of politics on which it involves the struggle to achieve a shared political standpoint, and with this in mind the upshot of Murdochian agency is that moral progress for the individual and political progress are interwoven. This may not seem like something that Murdochian agency has to offer ethics, but what I’m after here is a way of thinking of ethics and politics as similarly interwoven. Being able to explain the way that that is is a feature of the view.
In several places, you contrast the ideological standpoint, from which others are occluded, from a realistic standpoint that provides clear vision. How are you conceiving of ideology and reality here? How would you respond to idealists who argue reality requires ideas?
Well for one thing I would say that Murdoch is an idealist in precisely that sense. And for exactly that reason I think it would be a bit misleading to suggest that ideology and reality (or clarity) are exclusive. For Murdoch reality is a normative concept, a moral concept even, so clear vision is a matter of among other things having a correct moral awareness. The kind of moral obscurity I want to associate with ideology is the result of failing to see others through self-conscious social relations and instead seeing only morally and politically corrosive narratives about them. In other words, the social relations that structure individual relationships provide misleading forms of moral awareness, and making that explicit to ourselves is part of how we achieve a realistic standpoint. Clarity is thus not getting ideological concepts out of the way, it’s getting better ones.
That said, I think that to some extent the concept of ideology is misleading, in that the negative association is so strong it’s maybe just part of the meaning that it’s bad. So, one way to put the same point would be that all perception, all concepts, and all worldedness is structured by narrative, history, and value, and it’s ideological when it’s bad and it’s clear when it’s good. What’s important is just that getting ideology “out of the way” is a moral project of achieving a standpoint, not a neutral project of leaving all standpoints behind. If you want to reserve the term “ideology” for something bad then I’m happy to call that a way of escaping ideology, though I’m partial to the Althusserian “ideology has no outside” line.
I try to cash this out in terms of the theory-ladenness of perception, which I imagine is slightly more familiar to most analytic philosophers. I think the same kind of thing is happening in McDowell’s Mind and World, where experiencing the world as it really is involves the exercise of conceptual capacities developed through the process of being inducted into the space of reasons, and thus the conceptual is “unbounded”. The unboundedness of the conceptual and the Althusserian claim that ideology has no outside are, I think, ways of getting at the same thing.
Are there particular practices or attitudes that bring about clarity or help us to develop the moral awareness you and Murdoch discuss? And is the goal to find one set of ideas that are morally aware and clear, or will the ideas that bring moral awareness and clarity change over time?
Murdoch characterizes the process in terms of taking public concepts “into privacy” and working on them. I’ve argued, in a way that I hope captures the spirit of her view though it goes beyond what she says, that we should think of these concepts as reflecting (among other things) contingent features of the socio-historical, political context in which we develop our practical standpoints.
So the second part of the question is a bit easier: they will change over time to reflect the changing political scene, at least until the Hegelian end of history if there is such a thing. There’s a dispute that’s largely confined to a footnote in the paper between what you might call “humanist” readers of Murdoch and “political” ones, over the centrality of the concept of the human in moral awareness. To be brief, I’m pretty skeptical, though it may be in the end that the process of getting things right converges on an understanding of the human, such that the general concept is an important component of moral awareness all along but is largely empty absent the refinement of more local, contingent ones. That there are some concepts that structure moral awareness across time and circumstance, but which are only gradually made determinate, and which are in the meantime insufficient for doing what Barbara Herman calls “middle theory”, is a conciliatory note I strike largely because it offers a way to fuse Hegel and Murdoch. In the end I’m not so sure.
The first part of the question is trickier. Murdoch says that the “moral life… is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices,” and I think in principle just about anything could contribute to it. She doesn’t offer a lot of examples of what it looks like in practice, beyond the famous and much-discussed M and D case. She also talks quite a bit about the role of making and experiencing art in cultivating one’s own perspective, and while I’m certain that this is important to her it’s a side of her thinking that I relate to less, and so I don’t have much to say about it.
Ultimately, however, I think what’s important is that improving one’s moral awareness results from doing whatever it is that you’re doing in a certain way. To use an example I personally find more compelling (and which has the benefit of emphasizing, again, the political potential of Murdoch’s thought), consider getting involved in activism or organizing. Beyond whatever benefits a particular effort immediately brings about, getting involved with them can be a way to build solidarity, class-consciousness, and so on, but they can just as well be a way to build or leverage social capital or individual power over others. I think at least part of the difference is whether one brings a reflective, self-decentering mindset into those spaces and that work.
What place do you provide for normativity in your moral philosophy?
The main move in the Murdoch paper can be seen as a way of locating normativity in the world, rather than in the attitudes or choices of the agent, while at the same time holding that getting oneself in a position to be responsive to it is itself an achievement of agency. I feel pretty confident in attributing that view to her (bracketing complications about what she means by “world”), and I think there’s a lot to be said for it. Nevertheless, I would hesitate to unqualifiedly endorse it myself. That’s partly because as a matter of philosophical sensibility I tend to be less committed to a view the more abstract it is—I tend to think there’s something right about a lot of ostensibly competing theoretical positions, in this case quietist realism, constructivism, and even expressivism, and my sense is that it’s becoming increasingly popular to think that the traditional metaethical divides are illusory. But here in particular the commitment that animates my work is that normativity is at least some of the time located in historically-conditioned social relations between concrete individuals.
In the paper we’ve been talking about I try to work out what that looks like in Murdoch, and I take her to have something similar in mind when she talks about attending to the individual reality of another person, which I read as involving a recognition of how another stands with respect to oneself. Elsewhere I come at the same idea from a different direction: I argue that if we think of agency as constitutively depending on the agent’s standing in relations of mutual recognition with other agents there’s a variety of metaethical constructivism that can succeed in some of the places that Kantian constructivism is generally thought to have failed. That paper is situated in a different dialectical space from this one so they aren’t directly in conversation. I’ve given some thought to how the two stories can work together and I’m optimistic, but to the extent that they turn out not to be consistent I’m not yet prepared to pick one or the other. What’s important is that both vindicate a way of seeing the recognition of others as normatively fundamental.
If recognition of others is fundamental for your ethics, how do you determine who counts as an other? And what ethical status do you give to animals or plants?
Well the glib answer is that everything that is ethically significant is or potentially is an other in this sense. It’s just a term for that which shows up in moral awareness in a certain way. It’s meant to emphasize the concrete particularity, external reality, and at least in most cases, the subjecthood of the object of moral concern. So at that level it’s compatible with any normative theory–even a utilitarian could think that recognitive relations are involved both in constituting moral agency and in establishing what beings are going to count towards aggregate utility.
My own view is that the question of who (or what) is an other is itself an ethical question. In other words I don’t think there are any non-moral criteria for assessing whether or not something has moral status–I think of the notion itself as fundamental. That’s because the mental act of recognizing another–of placing them with respect to oneself in a moral nexus–cannot be grasped on the model of mere predication. It is not an act whereby we take a concept we are competent with and then attribute it to a particular that we have knowledge of in advance of grasping it through that concept. But that last part is more than I’ve really tried to defend in any depth, and if you find it mysterious (I’m still working out how to articulate it better and at this point it’s admittedly still a bit mysterious to me) I can just leave it at that while the idea of an other is, as I said at the outset, consistent with different normative theories, about which I officially do not have a position, my work leans particularist.
I do want to find a way to make sense of including non-human animals here (I’ve been vegan for 15 years), and while that isn’t an issue I’ve confronted head-on I’m pretty sympathetic with Korsgaard’s approach, which is roughly that while being awoken into ethical subjectivity involves standing in relations of mutual recognition, and there’s a sense in which mutual recognition is the paradigmatic ethical attitude it can’t be the only one. To the extent that a creature isn’t capable of standing in such a relation we can nevertheless recognize them asymmetrically as having certain important things in common with ourselves, e.g. the capacity to desire and strive and suffer. I do sometimes share a moment with my dog that makes me wonder how close to mutual recognition we really can get!
What other writers have influenced your research? How do you incorporate them into your work?
Well probably the most obvious historical figure looming over this discussion is Hegel. The paper I mentioned a couple answers up is partly an exercise in working out what a Pippin/Brandom-style reading of Hegel can offer to metaethics. I’ve mentioned Korsgaard already and she’s someone whose work I’ve spent a lot of time struggling with, because there’s a lot that I think is right about it and identifying exactly where I disagree has been a productive challenge.
I could list a dozen people whose work on social morality and recognition, metaethics in general, and social/political theory have influenced my thinking, and they’d be exactly the dozen you’d probably guess from reading what came before. And of course the influence of my teachers and advisors at Pitt, and Kate Manne, who is also on my dissertation committee, is easy to spot. So I’ll mention a few that I think are maybe a bit surprising given my background and interests. One is Peter Railton, whose paper “Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality” I’ve probably read more times than anything else. It’s the best defense consequentialism can muster and on about one out of every seven days I think it works, but even on the other six I still think one can learn a lot about the role that morality can and should play in the life of an agent from seeing how far the defense goes before failing. On top of that there’s a real sense of humanity in that paper, and some enticing hints of the importance of politics to individual morality.
Another is Mark Schroeder. I think I disagree with him about almost everything he defends in print and yet I’ve gotten more out of beating my head against Slaves of the Passions than almost anything else in metaethics. David Velleman is a figure whose work I would not say has been influential on me broadly speaking (though I of course have enjoyed and benefited from it), but his paper “Sociality and Solitude” has turned out to be something of a touchstone for me. His discussion there of joint attention is at the nexus of a lot of questions I spent a couple of years circling around, and since discovering it I’ve found myself constantly returning to it. Finally, Rebecca Kukla’s paper “Myth, Memory, and Misrecognition in Sellars’ Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” turned me on to a lot of the issues that became central to my work. Her dissertation is one of the few I dug up and read all the way through, and there’s a good chunk of mine that is secretly an attempt to re-do a lot of what she did there but in a different philosophical idiom and context.
You can ask Jack Samuel questions about his work in the comments section below.
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