An individual reality, separate from oneself: alienation and sociality in moral theory

ABSTRACT

I argue that the social dimension of alienation, as discussed by Williams and Railton, has been underappreciated. The lesson typically drawn from their exchange is that moral theory poses a threat to the internal integrity of the agent, but there is a parallel risk that moral theory will implicitly construe agents as constitutively alienated from one another. I argue that a satisfying account of agency will need to make room for what I call ‘genuine ethical contact’ with others, both as concrete objects in the world external to ourselves and as subjects who can recognize us reciprocally.

KEYWORDS:

• Alienation
• moral theory
• Bernard Williams

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 (Murdoch 1971, 52).

2 Or at any rate they are part of what it is to be a human agent, to be the kind of embodied, embedded agents that we in fact are. I am not attributing to Williams a claim about agency as such (as theorized by, for example, metaethical contructivists), nor do I intend to make any such claims myself. In what follows, ‘agency’ should be understood to have this narrower meaning.

3 See e.g. (Sturgeon 2008, 112): ‘Visual experience is remarkable for two reasons. It seems to involve conscious portrayal of the world; and it seems to involve perceptual contact with the world;’ the term is also used by other contributors throughout the same volume (Haddock and MacPherson 2008) and throughout the literature on perception. As Sturgeon notes there is little agreement about what perceptual contact amounts to, but near consensus that whatever it is, a theory of perception must make good sense of it. (Sturgeon’s suggestion that experience ‘portrays’ the world is probably not quite right, at least in the context of the discussion of perceptual contact in §2 – better, perhaps, to say that experience reveals the world.)

Another advantage to the term ‘ethical contact’ is that, having no existing technical use, it has accreted none of the associations or competing precisifications that might incline a skeptical reader to reject the letter of my proposal without first at least considering the spirit. This is also a disadvantage, however, insofar as it may be entirely unclear just what it is (aside from psychic harmony) that I think moral theory risks theorizing away. I’ll try to say more to characterize it positively later, once I’ve put in place the analogical basis in perceptual epistemology – I hope that at this stage there is some appeal to the vague idea that there is some sense in which moral theory risks alienating us from others.

4 Compare Michael Stocker, whose central case (1976) involves someone explaining their choice to visit a friend in the hospital by appealing to the duties of camaraderie. For Stocker, ‘moral schizophrenia’ consists in a disunity of one’s motivations and values. ‘One mark of a good life,’ he claims, ‘is a harmony between one’s motives and one’s reasons, values, justifications’ (1976, 453). If moral theory is to help us understand what it is to live a good life, it must be able to make sense of how such harmony is possible.

5 As a criticism of Kantian ethics this is incomplete. Christine Korsgaard and Barbara Herman, to name two influential examples, have powerfully made the case that a commitment to the moral law is something we each make on our own through the spontaneous activity of practical reason, so Kantian ethics is not only compatible with personal integrity but better fit than the alternatives to promote it. Elsewhere I discuss the ways that Kantian constructivism in particular is well-suited to address psychological alienation (see Samuel MS), but what is important for my purposes here is that whether or not Williams succeeds in tarring the Kantian with an alienated conception of agency, we can see in his critique a pervasive concern for alienation within the self, and not between persons.

6 Though Kolodny (2003) doesn’t directly address the question of reducibility with respect to love-relationships, in treating loving relationships as the source of at least some reasons – and thus the relation as prior to the having-a-reason property of an individual – Kolodny is in a sense closer than Setiya to Buber. He also speaks of ‘alienation’ from other persons in a way similar to the one I propose (157,161), though it is nowhere near his central concern.

7 I suspect, however, that the importance of intra-psychic harmony is sometimes exaggerated. Not only, as I will shortly propose, might personal integrity depend on social integrity, but in some social circumstances the demands of social integrity may even require accepting personal alienation. Sufficiently non-ideal political environments, for example, may require that some agents distance themselves from their projects and values, and even learn to distrust their own inclinations.

The same may be true of social alienation, however: some political contexts may require not only distance from parts of oneself, but distance from problematic social relations in which one is involved. Railton notes, similarly, that ‘the alienation of some individuals or groups from their milieu may at times be necessary for fundamental social criticism or cultural innovation’ (Railton 1984, 148). Conversely, some political circumstances may make both social and personal integrity unavailable, at least for those who occupy subordinate social positions – see generally (Fanon 1952). For Fanon both individual and social alienation can only be overcome through revolutionary social change, the outcome of which will be, ‘the birth of a human world, in other words, a world of reciprocal recognitions’ (193).

8 The objection is probably first expressed by Sextus Empiricus – see the introduction to (Brewer 1999) for a review of the literature framed around this question. A rare instance where the term ‘alienation’ is used in this context is the title of Mike Martin’s ‘On Being Alienated’ (2006), though he nowhere uses the word within the paper. In addition to those cited throughout, Charles Travis has done a lot to push in this direction, and much of the discussion here draws indirectly on (Travis 2004).

Another vocabulary for what I take to be essentially the same worry is Merleau-Ponty’s (1945). He charges orthodox theories of perception with falling into either either ‘intellectualism’ or ‘empiricism:’ the first mistakenly interiorizes perception as internal representation, the second reduces it to a purely causal process. What he wants to make space for instead is our perceptual grip on a world that is external to us but which we ourselves are in (a grip in turn grounded partly in our bodily presence in the world, what he calls ‘motor intentionality’ 112/140), which results in our being ‘geared into the world’ (passim). See (Sachs 2014) for a helpful discussion of some of the parallels between Merleau-Ponty and analytic philosophers of perception, specifically McDowell and Wilfrid Sellars.

9 See, e.g., Soteriou (2000).

10 Tyler Burge (2010), for example, argues on empiricist grounds that we ought not to expect a metaphysical difference of this kind.

11 Perhaps these are two independent criteria, perhaps they are different ways of specifying the same one – this question is not important for me here

12 In addition to the Brewer and Travis cited above this view is probably closest to McDowell’s – see (McDowell 1983, 1984, 1994). See Pritchard (2012) for an overview of epistemological disjunctivist approaches to perceptual experience.

13 The phrase ‘openness to the world’ appears throughout (McDowell 1994).

14 Even though it is not the structure of every experience of another, it is perhaps the structure of paradigmatic moral relationships: the most fully realized form of self-other relation. At the least it is one important form relating to others can take. Setiya (forthcoming) and Korsgaard (2018) argue for different reasons that important moral relationships are often asymmetrically recognitive, Setiya in the case of love and Korsgaard in the case of non-human animals. What I say here is intended to be consistent with both, contra Levinas (1961), for whom the fundamental moral relation is radically asymmetric. However, part of what Levinas is trying to do with this asymmetry (which he glosses as the ‘invisibility’ of the other – see e.g. 35) is to emphasize how forcefully the other resists being assimilated to a mere representation, in what I take to be more or less the same move as the one captured by the individual reality condition above. Whether and how to reconcile this shared aim with Levinas’s conviction that achieving it is inconsistent with treating recognitive relations as paradigmatically mutual is well beyond the scope of this paper.

15 This discussion draws on (Velleman 2013).

16 See (Lederman 2018a) for an review of the literature on common knowledge, and Lederman (2018b, 2018c) for additional criticism of the notion’s viability. My objections to theorizing joint attention in terms of common knowledge are less technical, though Lederman’s points are well-taken. I don’t have the space here to discuss why I find common knowledge accounts of phenomena like these unsatisfying, though I am broadly sympathetic to those offered be Michael Thompson (2012).

Richard (Moran 2018, 120) makes what I take to be the roughly same point, within a framework congenial to my own, although the reader will note that I have avoided explicitly incorporating the distinctions in grammatical person that are key to Moran’s approach (for reasons I don’t have the space to elaborate here): ‘the difference made by a genuine encounter between the two people cannot be made out by any elaboration of further levels of beliefs and intentions they may have with respect to each other.’ This is because the difference is made ‘by [the two parties to a communicative act] being in a position to address each other, with the interplay between first-person and second-person pronouns.’

17 Disjunctivist theories have their own difficulties, and in the end we may find that disjunctivism is the way to theorize shared self-consciousness or just a convenient stopping place along the way.

18 This is the structure of what is sometimes called ‘Hume’s circle’, wherein one cannot make a promise without using the concept of promising, and thus the term is partially constituted by the practice to which it refers while the practice presupposes the use of the term (see Anscombe 1978). The common feature of the two cases is a state of affairs (a promissory obligation between two parties, a recognitional nexus) that is partially constituted by the fact that those involved are aware of it.

19 The ideal of structurally similar authority can be heard in a way that risks reinforcing dominating social relations, especially those of men over women, wherein women are socialized or conditioned to treat the authority of such men as superseding their own in even the most private and personal matters. The point I want to make here, however, is fairly weak: insofar as we regard others as legitimate sources of moral authority, this authority is at least some of the time interwoven with our own agency, but this should not be taken to validate overcorrection in the other direction. Further, there may be good non-ideal reasons to reassert the superiority of individual authority under social conditions where some people’s agency has been compromised or subordinated.

20 One may hear an echo here of the core Hegelian thought that, as Honneth (1996, 92) puts it, ‘one can develop a practical relation-to-self only when one has learned to view oneself, from the normative perspective of one’s partners in interaction, as their social addressee.’ Honneth, however, wants to naturalize this notion via the social psychology of George Herbert Mead, and thus casts the role of mutual recognition in more broadly psychological or psychoanalytic terms than I would. In particular he focuses on the role it plays in grounding self-respect – necessary for psychological development, but in that way theoretically interiorized as a causal contributor to personal integrity, in the terms above. Something closer to my approach may be found in Pippin (2008) and Brandom (2019), a suggestion I develop in more detail in (Samuel MS).

21 I do not mean to suggest that Murdoch conceives of the individual reality of others in objectifying terms, but she has little to say about return-to-self by way of mutual recognition that I have argued is a requirement for making sense of shared self-consciousness. These Hegelian remarks are, however, consistent with what I take her to have in mind.

22 Special thanks to Liam Bright, Sophie Cote, Eleanor Gordon-Smith, Nathan Howard, Ned Howells-Whitaker, Kate Manne, John McDowell, Japa Pallikkathayil, Christa Peterson, Francey Russell, Keshav Singh, Michael Thompson, and Jake Wojtowicz, all of whom have offered feedback, support, or helpful criticism throughout the unusually long life of this paper, which began, in Michael’s seminar on the second-person in 2016, as an attempt to spell out the ‘puzzle about justice’ as applied to Korsgaard’s constructivism.