Moral theory and the moral life : against dissociation in philosophical accounts of morality

Abstract

My central thesis is that philosophical accounts of morality are often insufficiently informed by the lived experience of the moral life. This results in distortions in their pictures of morality, distortions in philosophy’s sense of its role in moral reflection, and neglect of the connections between morality, moral experience and the rest of human life. I argue for this thesis in two stages. First, I examine aspects of philosophical accounts of morality in the light of the concept of dissociation. I argue that much philosophical writing about morality tends to embody, linguistically, a dissociation from moral response which both limits its capacity to extend our moral understanding and distorts its sense of the critical concepts to which its thought is answerable. I argue further that in dissociating their picture of morality from its connections to human life, philosophers tend to have a distorted sense of what is required to justify our moral responses, and of what underwrites the truth or objectivity of moral judgement. In these discussions, I draw particularly upon the work of Cora Diamond, Raimond Gaita and Iris Murdoch. These philosophers have already developed substantial criticisms of such dissociated discussions of the moral realm, and of the methodological assumptions that underpin them, but the significance and distinctiveness of their work has, in my view, been neglected. In the second part of the thesis, I consider how taking these arguments seriously might alter philosophical approaches to understanding morality and moral questions. I argue that neither philosophical reflection nor critical moral thought require the construction of normative theories of morality. Indeed, I argue that in the absence of theoretical distortions, we recover a truer sense of the connections between morality and our responsiveness to human life and of the relationship between a deepened moral understanding and a deepened sense of life and its meaning. I then consider the implications of these claims for the philosophical treatment of a concrete moral question, taking as a focus for discussion the issue of euthanasia. I argue that dissociations in philosophical approaches to morality have left many philosophers insufficiently critical of the standard arguments concerning the moral permissibility of euthanasia, and too unreflective about the role of philosophy in thinking about such issues. Philosophy’s primary role, I claim, is not to argumentatively generate wholesale solutions to problems like euthanasia, but to deepen our understanding of what is at stake in them and to make available conceptual resources through which we can better deliberate about them, both individually and as a community. Show more