Matthew Congdon is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on ethics, social philosophy, and aesthetics. He is the author of the book, Moral Articulation: On the Development of New Moral Concepts (Oxford University Press, 2024). He has written articles on many topics, including emotions, moral change, interpersonal recognition, Aristotelian ethical naturalism, and the aesthetic dimensions of ethical life. You can find out more about his research here. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Congdon discusses why he wrote this book, ethics’ historical dimensions, and his future plans involving Murdoch’s philosophical writings.
What is your book about?
At its heart, Moral Articulation is about moral change and the deep role that new words and concepts play in bringing about that change. The book opens with a series of examples of new moral terms—“new” in the sense that they were invented only within the last century or so, not very long considering the human linguistic capacity is probably well over 100,000 years old. The list includes ‘racism’ (invented around the turn of the twentieth century but not used pejoratively until the 1930s); ‘genocide’ (coined by the Polish jurist Raphel Lemkin in 1942); ‘sexism’ (coined in the 1960s by Caroline Bird and Pauline M. Leet by way of analogy with the existing term, ‘racism’); ‘sexual harassment’ (coined in 1975 in a consciousness-raising group in Ithaca, NY); and ‘hate speech’ (first used by legal scholars in the 1980s). For me, examples like these raise a pressing philosophical question: when we bring moral situations under new descriptions, are we simply describing moral phenomena that already existed, fully formed and intact, prior to their expression in language? Or do moral phenomena bear a more sensitive relation to the terms and concepts we use to express them, such that the landscape of ethical life is also transformed by such linguistic and conceptual innovations? The book explores this question by painting a philosophical portrait of the phenomenon of moral articulation, the activity of developing new concepts and words to express previously inarticulate or marginalized forms of moral experience.
In addition to providing an exposition of the activity of moral articulation, the book has some critical ambitions. I argue that focusing on the process of moral articulation puts us in a position to criticize two assumptions that structure much of contemporary ethical theory. The first is the assumption that moral meaningfulness is exhaustively discursive in shape, an assumption we find, for example, in the idea that a special kind of propositional unit called the ‘moral judgment’ is the basic building block of moral thought. Against this, I defend a picture of moral thought and meaningfulness as beginning in what I call proto-discursive experience, experiences that strike us as meaningful yet frustrate our existing discursive frameworks. The second is the assumption that, if objective moral grounds exist, they must be traceable back to grounds that are historically inalterable. This assumption, which I call the immutability thesis, can be found widely in both defenders and critics of moral objectivity. Against the immutability thesis, I defend a historicized variation of moral realism, in particular, a historicized variation of Aristotelian ethical naturalism, which holds that moral values can be simultaneously objective and historical through and through.
Why did you feel the need to write this book?
I’ve been interested in the historical dimensions of ethics for a long time. Hegel was a massive figure in my graduate education. Though I haven’t gone on to become a Hegel scholar, I’ve never stopped being struck by how deeply he explores themes of historical change, especially as it pertains to the development of the institutions, relations of recognition, and norms that together comprise what he calls Sittlichkeit, usually translated as “ethical life.” This project was also motivated by what I think of as post-Wittgensteinian ethics, particularly authors like Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell, and Cora Diamond, who emphasize that an ability to put an experience into words isn’t something philosophers should simply take for granted, but is the result of a complex social activity that is ethical in its own right, and which often takes the form of struggle. Combining these Hegelian and post-Wittgensteinian influences, it was natural for me to want to work on a project like Moral Articulation, which combines a concern for historicity with an interest in the transformative power of new words and concepts. I also saw a gap in contemporary ethical theory, which, despite how much work has been done on the nature of moral concepts, says very little about moral concept development over time.
How have readers responded?
I’ve been really pleased with the book’s reception so far. I’ve heard from many readers who have affirmed my feeling while writing the book that a philosophical exploration of moral concept development was both missing and needed. So that has been validating. And I’ve been happy to see the book get uptake from a fairly wide range of audiences, including ones I hadn’t expected, such as education scholars.
The past year has been pretty busy with talks and events related to the book. It has also been very fun to talk about moral articulation a bit more informally on podcasts, including one of my favorites, The Iris Murdoch Podcast. I’m also very excited about an upcoming Author Meets Critics session at the APA Eastern in New York City, as well as a forthcoming book symposium to be published in Syndicate.
Probably my favorite aspect of the book’s reception so far, though, has been hearing from students, both undergraduate and graduate, who have engaged with the book and have creatively incorporated the idea of moral articulation into their own thinking.
What writing practices, methods, or routines do you use, and which have been the most helpful?
As I was completing the first full draft of the book manuscript, I was fortunate to have a wonderfully supportive book writing group, kickstarted by my Vanderbilt colleague and friend, Diana Heney. We met once a month to share drafts of chapters. Beyond receiving feedback, having those regular meetings (and being expected to show up with drafts to discuss!) was extremely important for keeping my momentum going as I completed the first full draft.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on three new projects at various stages. I’m in the early planning stages for a book on Iris Murdoch’s philosophical writings. Though I’m still figuring out the exact shape of the project, at the moment I’m particularly interested in her concept of void, which she inherits, in part, from Simone Weil, and her engagements with existentialism. I’m also working on a series of papers on emotions, thinking about experiences of jealousy, ressentiment, and love, among other emotions, as playing a framing role in human cognition and agency.
A third project, which I can say a little bit more about here, is on the aesthetic dimensions of interpersonal ethical life. This takes off from a paper I wrote called “The Aesthetics of Moral Address,” where I discuss a 1990 direct action in Washington, D.C., now known as the “Capitol Crawl,” in which disability activists cast aside wheelchairs, powerchairs, and other assistive devices to crawl up the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building, dramatically foregrounding that this building—a purported symbol of “the people”—was not designed with them in mind. They were demanding the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was then stalled in Congress. I’m interested in what cases like this can teach us about the aesthetic dimensions of making ethical demands upon one another. For one thing, cases like this keep firmly in the foreground that issuing a moral demand is not a purely intellectual affair but a bodily gesture that must make creative use of sensuous media and always involves authorial choices concerning one’s style of expression. This project is related in some ways to Moral Articulation since it concerns our struggles to express morally significant experiences. But it pushes the inquiry in a new direction, one less about linguistic innovation and more about modes of moral communication beyond what we can put into words.
Matthew Congdon
Matthew Congdon is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on ethics, social philosophy, and aesthetics. He is the author of the book, Moral Articulation: On the Development of New Moral Concepts (Oxford University Press, 2024). He has written articles on many topics, including emotions, moral change, interpersonal recognition, Aristotelian ethical naturalism, and the aesthetic dimensions of ethical life. You can find out more about his research here.
Richard B. Gibson is Editor of the Current Events in Philosophy and the Bioethics series. He is a bioethicist with research interests in human enhancement, emergent technologies, novel beings, disability theory, and body modification.
