Alice Crary

Narrative philosophy is the Australian philosopher Raimond Gaita’s answer to the question of how to philosophize in a manner that directly informs efforts to answer the classic philosophical question of ‘how best to live’. Gaita claims, provocatively, that getting the world in view in a manner relevant to arriving at an answer involves challenges that, far from being merely theoretical, are such that we can only meet them by working on ourselves or, alternately, by reshaping our sense of what matters. A productive philosophical intervention would thus need to be in the business of directing our attitudes and would have to have the hallmark of literary discourse or “narrative.” This chapter lays out Gaita’s case for thinking that we need narrative philosophy, and it discusses some of Gaita’s efforts to present us with such a philosophy, specifically in relation to ethical thought about human-animal relations. An important virtue of Gaita’s approach is that it equips us to overcome the philosophically influential, but morally questionable, idea of tension between the moral standing of animals and the moral standing of severely cognitively disabled human beings.

This chapter provides a roadmap of ongoing conversations about cognitive disability and moral status. Its aim is to highlight the political stakes of these conversations for advocates for the cognitively disabled while at the same time bringing out how a fundamental point of divergence within the conversations has to do with what count as appropriate methods of ethics. The main divide is between thinkers who take ethical neutrality to be a regulative ideal for doing empirical justice to the lives of people with cognitive disabilities and those who reject this methodological precept as unduly restrictive. What results is a debate between, on the one hand, fans of various familiar forms of moral individualism and Kantian approaches in ethics and, on the other, a range of disability scholars and activists who implicitly or explicitly make use of philosophically more radical methods.

This dissertation is concerned with how feelings figure in the moral life. Within contemporary ethics, attempts to characterize how they do so typically take for granted a set of constraints on ways in which they can inform moral thought---constraints determined by: a traditional philosophical conception of objectivity on which a property, in order to be objective in the familiar sense of being qualified to figure as the subject-matter of a judgment to which no decisive objections can be raised, must be such that an adequate understanding of what it is for an object to possess it can be developed apart from any reference to affective responses the object elicits and a corresponding conception of rationality on which it must be possible to grasp the connections constitutive of a rational line of thought independently of the possession of any particular affective endowments. Each of the three chapters of the dissertation critically examines these twin conceptions of objectivity and rationality by first discussing how they shape the way in which certain central questions in contemporary ethics are formulated and by then arguing that adequate answers to the relevant questions need to be sought in a problem-space structured by revised conceptions of objectivity and rationality. The larger aim of the dissertation is to motivate the kinds of revisions that are called for and, in doing so, to describe a philosophically unorthodox vision of the role of feelings in the moral life which suitably revised conceptions of objectivity and rationality make available to us