Daniel Brudney

When literary texts are included in a course on moral philosophy they tend to be classical tragedies or existentialist novels: texts filled with major moral transgressions and agonized debates over rights, wrongs, and relativism. Recently, however, the focus of much discussion on literature and moral philosophy has been Henry James’s last novel, The Golden Bowl. This ought to seem surprising. For The Golden Bowl is a quintessential Jamesian novel. Almost nothing happens. In the course of more than five hundred pages there are two marriages, one affair, and a single act of violence, the smashing of the golden bowl. The rest is reflection, nuance, detail: the creation and preservation of a “‘brilliant, perfect surface,’” one “scarcely more meant to be breathed upon, it would seem, than the cheek of royalty.”1 There are no extreme actions or high-flown speculations. The moral issues among the four central characters either go unspoken or are raised expressly to be suppressed, banished from articulation. And what counts as the expression of the moral maturity and insight of the heroine, Maggie Verver, is her extraordinary ability to keep the truth silen00to put it precisely, to lie. If even there was a novel in which the protagonists shied away from moral debate, it is The Golden Bowl.The challenge for the philosophical critic, it seems to me, is to argue that it is just this stress on surface and silence that makes this novel of interest to moral philosophers, that makes it exemplary for how literature can do something philosophically important that philosophy cannot. 1. Henry James, The Golden Bowl, pp. 445, 172; hereafter cited by page number. Daniel Brudney is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.

argue that there are two forms of perfectionism in John Stuart Mill's work, two ideals of the person. One, the self-development ideal, is found in On Liberty. The other, the strong identification ideal, is tied to Mill's advocacy of a 'religion of humanity' and is found in Utilitarianism, 'Utility of Religion', and other texts. My first concern is to show that Mill's work contains this latter ideal. Next, I situate the strong identification ideal historically. Finally, I ask whether both ideals could be substantially realized in a single life. The ideals are not logically incompatible. Their incompatibility will be one or another form of practical incompatibility. Most importantly, any form of perfectionism concerns the kind of person to be: it involves a distinctive habit of mind. The fundamental tension between the Millian ideals concerns the difficulty of combining their different habits of mind.

In current American medical practice, autonomy is assumed to be more valuable than human life: if a patient autonomously refuses lifesaving treatment, the doctors are supposed to let him die. In this paper we discuss two values that might be at stake in such clinical contexts. Usually, we hear only of autonomy and best interests. However, here, autonomy is ambiguous between two concepts—concepts that are tied to different values and to different philosophical traditions. In some cases, the two values (that of agency and that of authenticity) entail different outcomes. We argue that the comparative value of these values needs to be assessed.

In this essay, I raise the question of whether some degree of noncoercive state support for religious conceptions(broadly understood) should be left to the majoritarian branch of government. I argue that the reason not to do so is that such state support would alienate many citizens. However, to take this as a sufficient reason to constrain the majoritarian branch is to accept the thesis that not being alienated from one’s polity is a significant part of the human good. Those who would prohibit even a small amount of noncoercive support of religious conceptions must appeal either to pragmatic considerations (the worry that noncoercive will lead to coercive support, i.e., to tyranny) or to a conception of the good that puts great value on the agent’s sense of connectedness to the polity. And the latter is something that reasonable citizens in a modern democracy could reasonably reject.