Michele Moody-Adams

Mills’s theory of corrective justice departs too far from Rawls’s theory to count as Rawlsian. His theory depends on identifying historical wrongs that cause present unjust racial inequalities. He uncharitably accuses Rawls of epistemic injustice for failing to theorize these wrongs. Rawls had good reasons to avoid controversies over historic wrongs because whites were using such controversies to avoid responsibility for correcting racial inequalities. Some black activists in Rawls’s day also advocated a purely forward-looking vision of justice. Mills nevertheless is correct that Rawls’s approach cannot bridge the gap between his ideal theory and the practical pursuit of racial justice. For Rawls limits that pursuit to actions that can be justified by public reason. Civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. aimed rather to extend the boundaries of public reason by non-discursive means such as art and civil disobedience. To achieve racial justice, we must move beyond Rawls.

Philosophy best supports and advances human flourishing when it acknowledges and deepens understanding of the contributions that art can make to a satisfying and well-lived life. Philosophers who promote what Arthur Danto called the “disenfranchisement of art” thus divert us from a critical source of human flourishing. Art can promote constructive transformations in individual lives, encourage and sustain social and political reconciliation, and provide unmatched consolation in response to suffering and adversity. Yet, as John Dewey urged, if communities are to fully realize the contributions that art can make to human well-being, they must find ways to restore continuity between art and everyday experience. This means acknowledging that art is the exercise and application of imagination, creativity, and skill in many domains of interest and concern that are not limited to the preoccupations of the “fine arts.” Further, it means recognizing that living well is itself an art that draws on ways of knowing, and sometimes creatively reimagining, the world that are not accessible except by means of art. If individuals and societies hope to promote human flourishing, they must therefore restore continuity between art and “everyday” experience in their individual lives, as well as in the social, political, and economic institutions within which they lead their lives.

This chapter addresses the charge, implicit in justice-based arguments for intellectual “safe spaces” on college campuses, that protecting academic freedom undermines equality of educational opportunity for students targeted by harmful expression. The discussion clarifies this argument’s central concepts and assumptions, including the concepts of expressive harm, psychological trauma, and “triggers”; the notions of microaggression and implicit bias; and the idea (articulated in the work of Jeremy Waldron) that there is a connection between a community’s “aesthetics” and its capacity to assure its members of respectful consideration. It is argued that limiting or eliminating academic freedom would stifle the critical reflection and robust debate most likely to promote justice in the face of contemporary challenges. A university that is safe for robust debate about justice cannot provide the comforts of “home.”

This paper shows that Nussbaum's Aristotelian essentialism effectively combines resources for constructive social criticism (even in “traditional” societies) with concern for the concrete particulars of realized ways of life. Many critics of Nussbaum’s views have failed to appreciate its many virtues in this regard. Yet Nussbaum's confidence in the broad possibilities of internal social criticism demands a better account of the moral openness of human cultures than anything Nussbaum has herself provided. Even Nussbaum's reading of Aristotle – as well as the ethical antirelativism on which it depends – demands a richer account than Nussbaum has so far offered of the essential openness of human world interpretations.

This paper shows that moral progress is a substantive and plausible idea. Moral progress in belief involves deepening our grasp of existing moral concepts, while moral progress in practices involves realizing deepened moral understandings in behavior or social institutions. Moral insights could not be assimilated or widely disseminated if they involved devising and applying totally new moral concepts. Thus, it is argued, moral failures of past societies cannot be explained by appeal to ignorance of new moral ideas, but must be understood as resulting from refusals to subject social practices to critical scrutiny. Moral philosophy is not the main vehicle for disseminating morally progressive insights, though it has an important role in processes that lead to moral progress. Yet we have grounds for cautious optimism, since progressive moral insights can be disseminated and can, sometimes, have constructive social effects.

ABSTRACT Lawrence Kohlberg’s ‘Stage Six’ moral reasoning expresses a critical component of moral maturity best characterized not as the application of Kantian principle, but as an expression of humane regard: combining respect for human agency with concern for the human capacity to suffer. However, Kohlberg’s account of how moral maturity develops has three fundamental flaws. First, Kohlberg fails to show that the study of ‘moral theory’ is an essential prerequisite of moral maturity. Second, Kohlberg fails to appreciate the importance of sympathetic imagination to deepening moral understanding, strengthening moral affect, and engaging the will. Finally, Kohlberg provides no compelling evidence that the path to moral maturity is either linear or invariant, or that it involves progressing through increasingly ‘hierarchical’ stages of moral judgment. Yet despite these flaws, we should continue trying to learn from Kohlberg’s account of moral maturity, and to encourage the development of moral exemplars who embody it.

Progressive social movements correctly presume that justice demands treating people with humane regard: combining respect for human agency with concern for human vulnerability to suffering. Promoting humane regard is a critical means of acknowledging the moral claims of humanity. Some critics reject the underlying concept of a universal humanity, in virtue of which human beings form a distinct community of reciprocal moral obligation. Critics charge that the concept presumes indefensible dualisms (of mind and body, and humanity and nature); that it wrongly assigns a privileged status to reason; and that it involves an unsupportable belief in human exceptionalism. I argue that we can assert the moral claims of humanity without privileging reason, repudiating nature, or denying that there are many valuable ways to be human. I also defend an account of human moral exceptionalism that does not imply human moral superiority, to show that we can meet morally weighty obligations to humans while affirming morally substantive connections to non-human communities and domains.

This study examines Hume's attempt, in the Treatise and the Second Enquiry, to treat moral philosophy as a branch of the science of human nature. Hume's effect to naturalize moral philosophy includes more than a causal inquiry into the workings of the human mind. He takes moral practices to originate both in psychological sources and in social conventions . His naturalism thus includes a 'natural history' of morality; a causal inquiry into the likely origins of the complex social practices which we call morality. He considers some moral practices--those which he calls 'artificial'--to be more dependent than others upon the development of social conventions; however, even the 'natural' elements of morality are inextricably bound up with social conventions. ;The artificial virtues require special explanation, since they embody forms of social cooperation that are not 'natural'. Yet Hume rejects the contract view: conventional regularites in behavior bound up with the artificial virtues could not have arisen from explicit promise alone. He also rejects the contractarian claim that there is a standpoint independent of our practices from which we can assess their rational acceptability. He would reject, on similar grounds, any utilitarianism on which the standard of utility provides a tool for social reform. ;Hume's natural history of morality, and the 'science of man' of which it is a part, are consistent with his scepticism because he is not a radical inductive sceptic. He accepts a 'mitigated scepticism' on which knowledge of nature is comprised of probable claims about experience. His mitigated scepticism might have led to an 'epistemology naturalized' analogous in important ways to moral philosophy naturalized. However, as a mitigated sceptic, Hume is prepared to treat inductive practices as revisable, whereas mitigated scepticism in morality leads him to view moral practices as too fragile to withstand revision. This view raises doubts about the capacity of moral philosophy naturalized to provide an adequate understanding of moral practices

This paper shows that Nussbaum's Aristotelian essentialism effectively combines resources for constructive social criticism (even in “traditional” societies) with concern for the concrete particulars of realized ways of life. Many critics of Nussbaum’s views have failed to appreciate its many virtues in this regard. Yet Nussbaum's confidence in the broad possibilities of internal social criticism demands a better account of the moral openness of human cultures than anything Nussbaum has herself provided. Even Nussbaum's reading of Aristotle – as well as the ethical antirelativism on which it depends – demands a richer account than Nussbaum has so far offered of the essential openness of human world interpretations.

Readers should be aware that the present author’s views are criticized in Moody-Adams’ book. Very few moral theorists escape criticism in this interesting alternative to relativist and realist approaches in contemporary ethical theory. Moody-Adams rejects the relativist claim that there are irresolvable moral disagreements, but does not rest that rejection on the idea of an independently existing moral reality. Indeed, she resolutely rejects attempts to explain moral differences based on the idea that some cultures have a lesser access to a moral reality than others do. All cultures, she holds, have the same fundamental conceptual resources for moral reflection and debate. Such reflection and debate, she goes on to argue, is more a matter of interpretation of the common conceptual resources, rather than inquiry into the nature of an independently existing reality. In staking out such a position, she comes closest to Michael Walzer’s view that the main task of moral philosophy ought to be interpretation of existing tradition, and to Hilary Putnam’s rejection of both relativism and “metaphysical realism.”