Feel free to email me at tayfun [dot] gur [at] duke [dot] edu for manuscripts of draft papers.
Moral dialogue is often seen as a space of all-or-nothing confrontation, whether of arguments in a rational search for truth or of attitudes in an arational clash of wills. I defend a hermeneutic account of moral dialogue as instead a continuous negotiation of alternative interpretative perspectives against an overlapping social background. As with texts, not all interpretations are equally plausible, but nor is there always a definitive or “correct” one. Hence on the hermeneutic view an adequate assessment of moral disagreements and dilemmas requires a situated exploration of their interpretative sources. Since the usual all-or-nothing view ignores this task, I argue that it tends to drive moral dialogue into an impasse, closing off possible avenues of compromise and mutual understanding. I illustrate by focusing on the case of abortion, drawing on early anthropological and sociological studies of the political debates in the US after Roe v. Wade, such as Faye D. Ginsburg's Contested Lives (1989) and Kristin Luker's Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1985).
I offer a novel account of “thick” ethical terms whose use, as Williams put it, is both guided by the world and action-guiding. Recovering Ryle and Geertz’s original conception, I argue that acts of “thick description” are best understood on the model of offering interpretations. Our use of a thick term such as ‘brave’ is guided not by the world per se but by our standards for interpreting the ethical significance of certain patterns of behaviour encountered in it. These interpretative standards are both (i) selective and (ii) open-ended: they constrain which thick descriptions of behaviour are intelligible as descriptions of bravery within our form of life, but the plausibility of particular interpretations can always be disputed in context. The ongoing dialogue of a community of interpreters over how to use such thick terms provides criteria which are partly shared, hence not merely matters of personal choice, but also historical, hence not invulnerable to change.
I argue that a logical is-ought gap or fact-value distinction is only intelligible if we are committed to a view of moral inference as both strictly deductive and abstracted from all social context, but that this commitment is uncalled for. I illustrate this using counterexamples to the fact-value distinction from MacIntyre and Anscombe which show how one can get from a description to an evaluation, or from an “is” to an “ought”, within the context of practices and institutions. A “gap” yawns open only when we abstract from all such contexts and resort to as “thin” a descriptive and evaluative language as possible, occluding from view the shared interpretative standards we ordinarily use to justify our moral judgments.
In Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle characterizes eudaimonia as ‘activity of the soul in accord with virtue … in a complete life’ (1098a17–20). Commentators have disagreed about what he means by a ‘complete life’ (bios teleios) in part because the relevant parts of the ethical works appear incongruent. I offer a new interpretation which (1) affords a way to understand Aristotle consistently, and (2) sheds light on how his ethical and aesthetic thoughts inform each other and his conception of a life of virtue. Drawing on the Poetics account of plot (muthos) and tragic action, I argue that the best way to make sense of Aristotle’s use of teleios in this context is as indicating a coherent and intelligible temporal whole, and that pairing this with a conception of a bios as a way of life can make sense of his seemingly disparate suggestions in the NE and EE concerning how a life can remain “incomplete”. What emerges is a conception of deliberate virtuous activity as simultaneously highly stable (a view he inherits from Plato), and also potentially vulnerable to impediments through luck (tuchē) or error (hamartia) which can compromise eudaimonia (an insight he adopts from the tragedians). This synthesis results in Aristotle’s nuanced view of the virtuous way of life as the best and most choiceworthy which is possible for human beings, giving us greater control over our happiness, even though it offers no final guarantee against uncontrollable factors which can ruin it.
Philosophers, psychologists, and others have been debating about the “narrative self”, and “narrative identity” in the singular, but their accounts involve a variety of kinds of selves and identities. In particular, we may distinguish between narrative selves conceived as (i) abstract or embodied, (ii) fictional or historical, (iii) phenomenological or linguistic, (iv) authentic self-authors or cast into a role, (v) coherent or disunified, (vi) spanning a whole life or only parts of it. The usual questions “Do human lives have a narrative structure?” and “Is it ethically desirable to see one’s life as a narrative?” cannot be addressed without first asking, “What kind of narrative?”, i.e., having a clear position on each of the earlier distinctions (at the least). This gives some support to critics who object that the concept of narrative is too vague and inclusive to be useful in philosophical analysis, but only if our aim is to provide a metaphysical account of the self or establish the direct ethical implications of such an account. A more promising aim, I argue, is to make narration the central tool for a hermeneutic approach to understanding the role of conceptions of the self in ethical life and theory. On this approach the variety of dimensions is not an obstacle, but instead grounds the richness of narrative tools for interpreting and comparing different pictures of the good life, which I illustrate using several approaches to morality which are not normally stated in narrative terms.