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 reasoning as both strictly inferential and abstracted from all social context, but that this commitment is uncalled for. I illustrate this using counterexamples to the fact-value distinction from Putnam, 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 our 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. Paying attention to our “thick”, ordinary moral reasoning instead reveals the situated ethical relevance and significance of factual descriptions, though the nature and extent of that significance will depend on (i) the substantive ends and values characterizing our social context(s), (ii) the trajectory of these values within the historical context of our form of life, and (iii) the situated identities and relationships of the agents involved. Or put simply, it will depend on where, when, and who the moral reasoner is.
Much of the recent literature on disagreement focuses on cases of epistemic peers who have similar capacities and access to the exact same evidence. Many of the classic cases are accordingly highly idealized and present agents out of any ordinary real-life context. I argue that this contextless picture of agents provides a misleading model when applied to our “deep” practical (moral, political, or religious) disagreements, which are characterized by their systematicity, the absence of a shared evaluative background, and the practical importance of the issues concerned. One such application is Feldman’s argument against the possibility of reasonably agreeing to disagree over moral, political, and religious questions—at best, he suggests, both parties should suspend judgment. Focusing on Feldman’s thought experiment involving a fork in the road, I argue that his account (1) fails to recognize the different ends and values which disagreeing agents may bring to discussions, given the implicit assumption of a common goal; (2) fails to take into account the mutual intelligibility of our beliefs and actions over time, by focusing only on the immediate epistemic reasonableness of beliefs; and (3) fails to adequately account for the practical costs of suspending judgment about our most fundamental practical beliefs, which is only achieved by imposing a questionably sharp separation between epistemic and practical rationality. This critique both vindicates the possibility of reasonably agreeing to disagree, and reveals how the assumptions of epistemic peerhood and completely shared evidence prove problematic when applied to disagreements with strong evaluative and practical components.
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. 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 bios as a way of life can elucidate the stability that makes a life of virtue choiceworthy. This interpretation both affords a way to understand Aristotle’s remarks about the complete life consistently, and illustrates how his ethical and aesthetic concerns can shed light on each other on the question of virtuous activity.
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.
I explore the implications of thinking of narratives as communal rather than individual, and as a part of public discourse rather than objects of private experience. This social grounding helps allay the worry that narratives are too subjective and self-biased to play a serious role in ethical thinking. The opposite worry that social structures which “prescribe” our roles and duties leave no room for ethical autonomy can be avoided by recognizing that self-narratives need to be told in an intersubjective public space, where our identities are “co-authored” by our own choices as well as the contributions of others. Ethical and political problems emerge when this balance is skewed towards either extreme, with overly subjective (or first-person) narrations leading to alienation and overly objective (or third-person) ones to social coercion.