THE IDEA OF ETHICAL VULNERABILITY

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of whether there might be secular analogues of the theological virtues. Beginning with a Kierkegaardian account of the unity and structural underpinnings of Christian accounts of faith, hope and love as distinct from moral virtues more generally, it utilizes ideas from Stanley Cavell, John Stuart Mill and Jonathan Lear to develop a phenomenology of familiar moral experiences whose underlying logic points us in the direction of an essential role that might be served by secular inflections of the theological virtues in living out a full awareness of our finitude. I argue that they help embody a perfectionist orientation to the world, one in which the experience of women is pivotal, and which places great emphasis on the moral value of a certain kind of vulnerability.

Keywords:

• theological virtues
• perfectionism
• Kierkegaard
• Wittgenstein
• J.S. Mill

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The project was led by Professor Beatrice Han-Pile and Dr Daniel Watts. The project website is at <https://powerlessness.essex.ac.uk/> (accessed 6 Jan. 2020).

2 Pamela’s paper, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability: Towards a Politics of Care?,” was published in Exploring Vulnerability, eds. Heike Springhart and Günter Thomas (Göttingen and Bristol, CT: Vandenhoeck, 2017) 147–62.

3 The two papers can be found at <https://powerlessness.essex.ac.uk/category/research/green-papers> (accessed 7 Jan. 2020).

4 London: Chapman, 1994: Part Three, Article 7.

5 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, eds. and trans. H.V. and E.H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) 387.

6 Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005) 118.

7 Themes Out of School (San Francisco: North Point, 1984). Hereafter TOS.

8 Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990) xxx.

9 Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981).

10 Ibid. 58.

11 Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Secker, 2003).

12 J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999) 26.

13 Ibid. 25.

14 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 61–62.

15 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, eds. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962).

16 A Case for Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011).

17 Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006. Hereafter RH.

18 For the former, see the essay “The Fact of Television” in TOS; for the latter, see Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003).