Cora Diamond on Ethics

This collection offers an in-depth look at Cora Diamond’s distinctive approach to ethics and its philosophical significance. It comprises a new essay by Cora Diamond on the policing of concepts, followed by ten original chapters by world-class scholars covering conceptual loss, moral theory, the category of the human, the moral consideration of animals, and the meaning of narcissism. Including comparisons to the work of other contemporary moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, Jeff McMahan, Rai Gaita, Eva Kittay, Christine Korsgaard, and Edward Harcourt, the volume also creates interdisciplinary links between Diamond’s work and other fields of study, including psychoanalysis and contemporary ethology. Showcasing the vital importance of Diamond’s contribution to philosophy, this volume is essential reading for scholars working in ethics, philosophy of language and literature. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jan 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030592196

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

M. Balaska (ed.)Cora Diamond on EthicsPhilosophers in Depthhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59219-6_1

1. Introduction

Maria Balaska¹  

(1)

Department of Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK

There is something paradoxical and possibly misleading in the title of this book. It has the form ‘X on y’, yet one of Diamond’s great contributions is her illumination of the idea that ethics has no particular subject matter; rather, it is ‘an attitude to the world and life, [which] can penetrate any thought or talk’ (2000, 153). Unlike what happens in traditional moral theory, ethics in Diamond’s work is not demarcated with reference to certain concepts that are supposedly distinctively moral, like goodness, right, duty, obligation, virtue. This would make it difficult (if not impossible) to demarcate in Diamond’s work a part of it that focuses on ethics; rather we could say that Diamond’s work bears on ethics as a whole insofar as it aims to clarify what possibilities our forms of life open for us, the complexity of our lives with concepts, what arises as significant therein. In Diamond’s work, the look that passes between two people, how one responds to music, how we disagree, how we relate to the concept of a gift or that of a stranger can very much be part of ethics.

So, although the preposition ‘on’ in the title ‘Cora Diamond on Ethics’ might tempt the reader to imagine a well-demarcated subject matter and a separate sphere of discourse, the reader should resist that temptation—although not without paying attention to it; for just like there is a merit in recognizing how ubiquitous ethics is, there is also a merit in recognizing a tendency to think of ethics as a separate sphere with its own set of criteria. This may reveal not merely a fault or weakness on our part, but also the difficulty of remaining vulnerable to the world. The temptation to demarcate ethics may arise in the face of the ‘difficulty of reality’ as this makes itself manifest when things lay a claim on us unexpectedly, without asking for our permission, or even when they are not supposed to. Imagine, for example, the case of a butcher who, after 20 years in that job, is one day suddenly taken by the sight of animal blood, noticing its similarity to his own; imagine the difficult contradiction that this can create in him.

These contradictions that appear in everyday life but also in moral theories when they stumble on what does not fit under them, can remind us of how near other beings and things are to us, despite our attempts to keep them at a distance. Cora Diamond’s work can be regarded as an exploration of the nearness.

I have chosen the following five categories to organize the papers of this volume: Concepts, Moral theory, Animal, Human, Narcissism. These are not only some of the topics that Cora Diamond has illuminated with her thinking; they also function as knots in the tapestry of her work. There are also other important knots in her work that have not formed a separate category but are still present in this volume. One such case is ‘literature’ which has had a guiding role for Diamond’s thinking. In the same vein, Henry James, Primo Levi, Leo Tolstoy, Alexandros Papadiamantis (among others) are brought in here to think about some of the central themes in Diamond’s work.

The volume opens with Cora Diamond’s paper Suspect Notions and the Concept Police, in which she discusses cases where certain concepts may be deemed illegitimate on bad grounds; where—as she characteristically puts it—the concept police goes after an innocent. She examines the bad ‘concept police’ through two cases, a debate (sparked by the issue of the technology for choosing the sex of children) between Guy Kahane and Michael Sandel on the role that the openness to the unbidden plays in human life, and what she considers to be a structurally similar case of Jane Heal going after the idea that truth is of value.

Next, under Concepts, we find the chapters of Roger Teichmann and David Cerbone who examine the different forms conceptual loss can take.

Teichmann’s paper Conceptual Corruption brings Diamond’s ‘Losing our concepts’ in dialogue with Anscombe’s idea that some concepts, such as the concept of ‘moral obligation’, can be harmful, in order to ask the question: if some concepts are an ill for us because they are confused, is this confusion a result of them having no meaning (senselessness) or is it a result of them having a ‘special meaning’? In his attempt to dissolve this dilemma, he shows why the ‘autonomy of grammar’ response cannot be of adequate help.

Cerbone’s Losing Hope: Wittgenstein and Camus After Diamond also discusses cases where there is a call for the loss of certain concepts. He focuses on the concept of hope and its discussion by Camus as something that we should get rid of, just like his absurd man who has, as he says, forgotten how to hope. Cerbone brings in Wittgenstein’s remarks on the concept of hope to further explore a worry that Diamond also expresses, namely that any invitation for ‘conceptual amnesia’ must first pay close attention to how entangled the concept in question is with other concepts.

Under Moral Theory we find the chapters of Oskari Kuusela and Garry Hagberg; they both shed light on the different ways in which Diamond’s philosophy challenges traditional moral theory.

Oskari Kuusela’s Defending Diamond against Harcourt: Wittgensteinian moral philosophy and the subject matter of ethics defends Diamond’s idea that ethics has no subject matter against the reading (provided by Edward Harcourt) that it denies the existence of moral concepts. Kuusela stresses the modal character of Diamond’s claim (namely, that distinctively moral concepts are not necessary for ethical thought) and further supports his view by discussing Wittgenstein’s later remarks on goodness as distinct from any property that is additional to the genuine properties of the action.

Garry L. Hagberg in his Improvisation within the Range of Implication: Cora Diamond, Henry James, and the Adventure of Literature brings out an important difference between traditional moral theory and Diamond’s thinking on ethics through a contrast between two attitudes, obtuseness and improvisation. To further illuminate the concepts of ‘adventure’ and ‘improvisation’, two important concepts that Diamond discusses in response to Nussbaum, Hagberg explores examples from music and literature and shows how improvisation can help advance the ‘range of implication’ within which moral thought can occur.

Under ‘Animal’ we find Alice Crary as well as Ian Ground and Mike Bavidge, exploring the ways in which Diamond’s thinking has enriched and can enrich the moral consideration of animals as fellow creatures.

In her essay Seeing Animal Suffering, Crary brings together Diamond and Tolstoy to show what it is to look at the worldly lives of animals as already impregnated with moral significance. This way of looking is opposed to those views that, instead, treat animals as morally indifferent to begin with, and go on to add value based on external criteria (utilitarian or Kantian). She also tackles a potential worry in Diamond’s and Tolstoy’s portrayal of animals: is it a realistic portrayal or is it distorted by sentimentality?

In their essay Ethology and Ethical Change, Ground and Bavidge inquire on the role that ethological discoveries can play for Diamond’s conception of the moral life and the part that non-human creatures play in it, especially in the light of Diamond’s criticism of extensionism. How can moral consideration be informed by ethological discoveries, and what kind of ethology is required in order to not fall back into the simplistic extensionist model?

Under ‘Human’ we find Stephen Mulhall and Anniken Greve.

In his Moralism, Moral Individualism and Testimony, Stephen Mulhall focuses on the debate between moral individualism and its critics on what it is to regard a human being as subject of moral judgement, as well as on a frequent charge within that debate, the charge of moralism. Exploring Diamond’s examples of cases with severe cognitive impairments—as cases that moral individualism fails to do justice to—in dialogue with similar examples from Alice Crary and Rai Gaita, Mulhall discusses the central role that testimony plays in the sort of moral recognition that we find in Diamond’s work.

Anniken Greve’s What Is in the Look? focuses on a central feature that Diamond has explored in relation to the concept of human being and in opposition to capacities-based theories that give external criteria for what counts as human: the role of the look that passes between people. To do so, Greve returns to Diamond’s reading of a passage in Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and offers a different interpretation to Diamond’s.

Under ‘Narcissism’ we find the chapters of Richard Gipps and Maria Balaska.

In his The Narcissism of the Private Linguist, Gipps revisits Wittgenstein’s private linguist, to ask what it means to imagine that a private language is possible. As an answer, Gipps offers a psychoanalytic reading of narcissism that builds and expands on Diamond’s ideas on what it means to deflect from the vulnerability that a difficulty of reality can expose us to and the different ways in which imagination can be used in the service of a narcissistic deflection.

My chapter, When a mind goes up in smoke: thinking of evil and thinking, discusses a Greek story about evil, ‘The Murderess’, to shed light on a connection that Diamond draws between hubris and unintelligibility when she discusses The Fisherman’s Wife fairy tale. Similar connections between evil and a trappedness in the self can be found in the works of Iris Murdoch and Hannah Arendt, and I use those connections in dialogue with Diamond’s ideas to understand what it is for a mind to go off the rails and how this may relate to evil.

The categories I have used—Concepts, Moral theory, Animal, Human, Narcissism—are not to be seen as separate from one another, hence it would be possible to fit the chapters of the present volume under different categories. This, once again, reflects what I take to be an essential trait of Diamond’s work: inquiring into ethics is interwoven with an inquiry into how concepts work, what it is to recognize someone’s humanity, the role that imagination plays in our attempt to understand the world, our shared life with non-human animals. In Plato’s Sophist, we hear the stranger saying to Thaethetus that the ‘power of discourse is derived from the interweaving of the classes or ideas with one another’ whereas ‘the complete separation of each thing from all is the utterly final obliteration of all discourse.’ (2015, 259e) As I hope to show with this volume, this is one aspect of the power of Diamond’s discourse. Another related aspect of the power of Diamond’s discourse is expressed visually in the cover of this book. A stone, the most common example of a mere thing, a lifeless object that can be used up and disposed of, can in some cases make a call on us, tell a story, gather our history, our disagreements and difficulties. It is this attention not only to the particular but also to what can be missed or dismissed as unimportant that Diamond’s work teaches us.¹

References

Diamond, C. 2000. Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. In The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read, 149–173. London and New York: Routledge.

Plato. 2015. Thaetetus and Sophist. Translated and edited by C. Rowe. Cambridge University Press.

Footnotes

1

I am grateful to Anniken Greve and to Ben Ware for their suggestions and comments on an earlier version of the introduction.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

M. Balaska (ed.)Cora Diamond on EthicsPhilosophers in Depthhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59219-6_2

2. Suspect Notions and the Concept Police

Cora Diamond¹  

(1)

University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

2.1 Philosophers and the Criticism of Concepts

Philosophers have criticized a good many of the concepts we use—including such ordinary concepts as that of something that brings a person luck, but also philosophical concepts, as when Berkeley criticized the philosophical concept of matter. Kant famously brought up as a general question that of the legitimacy of our concepts—the question with what right we make use of this or that concept, or sort of concept, in our thinking. And he held that there were concepts to which we had no legitimate title.

When the concept police attempt to take some misbegotten concept out of circulation, we may want to thank them, but like other police, they may on occasion go after an innocent. I shall discuss two cases, structurally similar to each other, in which they do so. But there are lots of different sorts of cases of concept-policing, good and bad, and my discussion is not meant to suggest general morals about how concept-policing goes.

2.2 The Idea of Openness to the Unbidden: A Dispute in Bioethics

At a meeting of the President’s Council on Bioethics in 2002, the main topic was the technology for choosing the sex of children, and current practices. A member of the Council, William E. May, spoke of the role in human life of openness to the unbidden.¹ The example he used to bring out what he meant was that of choosing a mate: we may elect a mate, but many unelected things come along with that choice, including, for example, the in-laws we get, and (a very different sort of thing) the genetic load. But that this was only a partial way of getting at what he meant came out in the rest of what he said. He spoke of the way in which a relationship may be tested by how we rise to what is unbidden and unelected; and he then went on to connect this issue with that of having children. May our desires in relation to having children impede our ability to be open to what is unelected? He spoke also of the ways we may need sustenance and support in being open to the unbidden.

Michael Sandel (who had been present at the meeting of the Bioethics Council) quoted May and developed his ideas further in The Case against Perfection (2007) where he examined contemporary views about improving or enhancing our nature through technology. In arguing against attempts to use technology to design children in accordance with the desires of their parents, Sandel spoke of how parenthood teaches what May had called an openness to the unbidden. He described such openness as worth affirming, not just within families but more generally: It invites us to abide the unexpected, to live with dissonance, to reign in the impulse to control (2007, 86).²

Sandel’s critique of the pursuit of perfection has itself been criticized. But before I turn to the particular criticism that interests me, I should note that neither Sandel nor May, in their remarks about being open to the unbidden, are suggesting that whatever is not chosen by us is in general valuable on that account; nor are they suggesting that the kind of openness which they do regard as valuable is directed towards whatever is unelected by us, unchosen by us. Thus, for example, Sandel is explicit that neither he nor May was suggesting that we should give up trying to prevent or cure disease. Or again, if one is making a garden, many plants will appear unbidden, but it is no part of being open to the unbidden, in the sense in which May and Sandel speak about it, that one should allow them to stay. If one were open to every unbidden plant, there would be no garden; but in any case there is no presumption that an unbidden plant should be accommodated if one can do so.³ This isn’t an explanation of what May and Sandel mean by openness to the unbidden, but it helps to make clear what they don’t mean. The significance of the garden point is that it rules out objections to what they have said about openness to the unbidden, based on ascription to them of the sort of view that would assign a positive value to not removing chickweed from your garden, or the millet plants that grow from seeds knocked out of the bird feeder. Or rather, it should have ruled out such objections, but as we’ll see, it hasn’t.

What Sandel and May do have in mind may be clarified by setting another case alongside the one that is central in their discussion, namely parenthood. I mean the case of hospitality, including (as it did in the ancient world) the treatment of the stranger who turns up unbidden and in need. The particular example I have in mind is that of the lady in the van who turned up—she parked her van—near Alan Bennett’s house in Camden Town.⁴ In 1971, Bennett began letting her spend the night in a lean-to alongside his house, and in 1974, he let this extremely difficult and irritating woman move her van into the space between the gate to his house and the front door, where she and the van stayed for the next 15 years, until her death. What it came to for him is complicated, and I won’t try here to sum it up. One thing the case brings out is that one may rise to the unbidden while being decidedly unenthusiastic about it.

I turn now to Guy Kahane’s criticism of Sandel on openness to the unbidden, and on what Sandel takes to be opposed to such openness. In two essays devoted to this criticism (Kahane 2011, 2012), Kahane is concerned with what can be meant by the sort of claim Sandel makes. He regards Sandel’s remarks themselves as obscure; and his own approach is to take the constitutive terms of Sandel’s claims, namely what is unbidden on the one hand and mastery on the other, and to argue from his account of those notions to the conclusion that Sandel misunderstands the notions of mastery and the unbidden, and what follows from them (2012, 87), and that Sandel’s claims about the goodness of openness to the unbidden are baseless. Kahane’s argument is, as he himself makes clear, dependent on what he takes to be a proper understanding of the constitutive notions and a proper understanding of what being open to the unbidden would be.

As Kahane sees the overall issues here, there is a question that arises from Sandel’s approach to such particular cases as the selection of the sex of embryos, prior to implantation. If Sandel objects to the kind of mastery over reproduction that is exercised in such selection, on the basis of the value of openness to the unbidden, then we should (Kahane says) be able to give some account of the supposed value in other corners of human life. So he asks whether the unbidden does have such value That question then leads into Kahane’s general account of the unbidden, which is meant to be independent of the specific cases in connection with which Sandel and others have held that openness to the unbidden is valuable. Given Kahane’s explanation of what is meant by unbidden—that which does not happen through our agency—there would not appear to be any reason to take openness to the unbidden to be in general some kind of good disposition. Kahane’s discussion is dependent on what he takes to be the proper understanding of the terms involved, which leads him to a Let the chickweed grow! account of openness to the unbidden.⁵

Kahane briefly discusses a different sort of approach to these issues, an approach which would take acceptance of human limits to be a kind of virtue, and the exhibition of supposedly Promethean hubris to be a vice. Such a conception, Kahane says, can make sense only in connection with a religious conception of the world.⁶ This is an objection of the kind which Sandel discusses at some length,⁷ and the underlying issue, for Sandel and Kahane, is put by both of them in terms of what we can make sense of. What Sandel is talking about is a kind of understanding that can run through someone’s life. It is the sort of thing that was referred to by R.F. Holland as a spiritual demeanor (1980, 107); and it is hardly to be thought that the range of possibilities here (the range of what we can supposedly make sense of) can be laid out independently of the ways in which people do make sense of life—in their understanding of their own lives and in their reflection on what others have thought and written. Sandel’s phrases for what I have called a spiritual demeanor is a quality of character and heart (2007, 46) and (when he is talking about the opposite sort of trait) habit of mind and way of being (2007, 96). An important further kind of description here is that of the spirit in which something is done, which may not be readily discernible; and that point applies not only to openness to the unbidden but also to the kind of hubris about which Sandel is concerned. Sandel does use the word disposition for the traits he writes about, but that word can invite a kind of flattening of the conception. The words spiritual demeanor and way of being point towards a range of differences from many more familiar sorts of dispositions. That was the point originally made by Holland. Truthfulness can be a disposition, but what would usually be meant by thinking of it as a disposition is distinct from the concern for truth about which Holland wanted to say that it could be a spiritual demeanor. I will come back to this.

There are interesting questions raised by the disagreement between Sandel and Kahane, not least the question what exactly they are disagreeing over. It may at first appear as if there is some characteristic about which Sandel thinks it is good and Kahane thinks it is not in general good. But it is far from clear that that is what the disagreement is about. I shall want to suggest that Kahane has an understanding of the situation which does not leave room for some concepts. Hence when anyone appeals to such a concept, the appeal is read as if it involved a quite different concept. In the case of openness to the unbidden, what Sandel says is read as if what he meant were not only a concept different from the one he does mean, but one which no sensible person could take to be useful in thinking about practical issues. There is, in the background of the dispute, a view about the legitimacy and illegitimacy of concepts. But before I try to explain this, it will be useful to have in view a second case, involving an argument similar in structure to Kahane’s, about taking truth to be of value.⁸

2.3 On What It Would Be to Take Truth to Be of Value: One View

Jane Heal (1987–88, 97–108) has argued against the idea many people have, or claim to have, that truth is something of value. Her argument has two parts. She holds in the first place that, whenever it appears that truth is relevant to the goodness of some situation, a closer look will reveal that it is something else in the situation that is genuinely of value. The other part of the argument starts by examining what could be meant by speaking of truth as valuable. That part of the argument works by first setting out what kinds of thing can be described as true, and then looking at what could be meant, in each case, by taking the pursuit or promotion of truth thus understood to be of value. Heal notes that propositions, utterances, beliefs and judgments can all be described as true, but in none of these cases do we get a context of use of the term true within which the pursuit or promotion of truth is something it is even remotely reasonable to regard as, in general, good. Heal illustrates the point by a contrast between amusingness and truth. The fact that something is amusing can by itself give it some claim to be worth uttering; but the fact that something is true cannot do so: the truth just as such has no claim to utterance (1987–88, 99). In the case of beliefs, the argument is similar. While particular true beliefs will in particular circumstances be worth having, the mere getting hold of more true beliefs—for example, by counting the parked cars on one street after another—cannot as such be taken to be of any value. But you would have to hold it to be of value, if you thought that the truth of a belief simply as such made it a good thing to have the belief.⁹

The first thing I want to bring out is the resemblance of Heal’s argument to the chickweed argument. Against anyone who holds openness to the unbidden to be something we should value, one reply is that if you really were open to the unbidden, you’d welcome every weed in the garden. Similarly, if you really were committed to the idea that truth is of value, you would, on the Jane Heal view, be encouraging people to produce utterances merely on the basis of their being true, or to welcome to the garden of their minds as many true beliefs as they could form.

There are some striking features of chickweed arguments—features that can be clearly seen in both Kahane’s and Heal’s essays. In each case, there is a view they are targeting; and in each case the target view is that something or other is good, that it can be recognized as valuable. And Kahane and Heal, in each case, take the thing in question not to be valuable, but they also think there is a question what is meant by calling the thing good. They both think that the thing in question is taken to be valuable only through some sort of confusion. Both Kahane and Heal approach the view they want to attack by considering what can be meant when people put forward such a view—not what they do mean, but what can be meant, what can be made sense of. For Heal, what can be meant by calling truth valuable can be worked out by considering what different sorts of things can be described as true, and then by considering what promoting or pursuing truth would come to, in the case of each sort of thing For Kahane, what can be meant by speaking of openness to the unbidden as valuable can be worked out by considering what it is for something not to be chosen or controlled by us, but simply to be allowed to happen, and what taking that to be good would in general come to. Kahane and Heal each take it that we can work out what the target view would commit you to, in general; and they think that when it is clear what the target view commits you to, its unacceptability will also be plain. Their argument, then, in both cases, involves the supposed wide-ranging unacceptable consequences of the target view. That the target view has the alleged consequences depends on an underlying conception of what it is to take something to be of value. I will come back to this.

One further common feature of Kahane’s approach and that of Heal is that neither of them attends to the details of what might be meant by those who hold the target view. They don’t see the things that the holders of the target view have said, and their context, as shaping constraints on what they can be taken to mean. This is perhaps particularly obvious in the case of Heal’s attack on the view that truth is a good. She doesn’t ask who has ever thought this, and what they might have been trying to convey. So she also doesn’t ask how what they were trying to convey might be connected with the context in which they said such things. How has truth been something that matters to them? What sort of place in their lives did its mattering have? That one can attack the view that truth is a good while ignoring such questions and considering instead what people who say such things supposedly can mean is surely