Sam Clark

Autobiography is a distinctive and valuable kind of reasoning towards ethical knowledge. But how can autobiography be ethical reasoning? I distinguish four ways in which autobiography can be merely involved in reasoning: as clue to authorial intentions; as container for conventional reasoning; as historical data; and as thought experiment. I then show how autobiography can itself be reasoning by investigating its generic form. Autobiographies are particular, enabling vivid display of and education in value-suffused perception. They are diachronic, enabling critique by ironic contrast. And they are compositional, enabling sense-making by placing in a temporal structure. But these features don’t distinguish autobiographies from novels. Should we therefore accept a deflationary account of a fourth generic feature of autobiographies, that they are self-reflective? I instead pursue a more ambitious account of self-reflection and the distinctively autobiographical reasoning it enables, involving a realism constraint, a reflexive explanation constraint, and unique address to first-person problems of the self. I conclude with an interpretation of an example work of autobiographical reasoning, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of George Sherston, against the idea that self-owning is necessary to the good human life.

What is the relation between roles and the human good? Between our construction, maintenance, and enaction of institutions, and the life which goes well for the person whose life it is? This chapter reads selected martial autobiographies to explore three relations and what they mean for the nature of the good: 1. _Tools for self-shaping_: roles are social technology for shaping ourselves towards good understood as fulfilment of desires which are independent of those roles. 2. _Good-making practices_: roles are parts of good-making practices which transform individuals by creating goods and initiating individuals into them. 3. _Self-discovery_: roles are a method for gaining self-knowledge. They help each of us discover her unchosen, seedlike, initially opaque self, and thereby discover her particular good, which is that self’s realization. The chapter concludes that some roles’ relation to the good is that they test and reveal the self and therefore its good.

This chapter explores three answers to the question, What is it to take Mill's Autobiography “as literature”? First, it is to attempt to understand the Autobiography as an artefact, made in a context by an author with particular aims and secrets. Second, it is to place the Autobiography in a generic context, as a paradigm but not defining case. Third and most importantly, it is to pursue the idea that the Autobiography's form is necessary to what it does. In particular, its diachronic, teleological, whole‐life self‐reflective form allows it to do a distinctive kind of ethics: arguing by example for a philosophy of ethical education; searching for a specification of the good life; and helping to educate its readers by developmental practice.

What does David Hume do with the dialogue form in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion? I pursue this question in the context of a partial taxonomy of uses for the dialogue form in philosophy in general—although I want to emphasize the word “partial.” My driving concern here is Hume’s use of dialogue, not to list all possible uses of dialogue or to draw conclusions about the uses of dialogue in philosophy in general. My question sits between two other related questions: a biographical and historical question, “What did Hume intend to do with the dialogue form?” and a question about reception by his audiences, “What did Hume actually achieve with the dialogue form?” Both of these are worthwhile questions..

This paper rereads David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion as dramatising a distinctive, naturalistic account of toleration. I have two purposes in mind: first, to complete and ground Hume's fragmentary explicit discussion of toleration; second, to unearth a potentially attractive alternative to more recent, Rawlsian approaches to toleration. To make my case, I connect Dialogues and the problem of toleration to the wider themes of naturalism, scepticism and their relation in Hume's thought, before developing a new interpretation of Dialogues part 12 as political drama. Finally, I develop the Humean theory of toleration I have discovered by comparison between Rawls's and Hume's strategies for justification of a tolerant political regime.

Velleman, MacIntyre, and others have argued for the compositional view that lives can be other than equally good for the person who lives them even though they contain all and only the same moments, and that this is explained by their narrative structure. I argue instead for explanation by self-realization, partly by interpreting Siegfried Sassoon’s exemplary life-narrative. I decide between the two explanations by distinguishing the various features of the radial concept of narrative, and showing, for each, either that self-realization is just as good an account, or that we should prefer the self-realization account, of the composition it is supposed to explain. I conclude that, if the shape of a life matters, it matters because some shapes are self-realizations, not because they are narratives.

I argue for a perfectionist reading of Mill’s account of the good life, by using the failures of development recorded in his Autobiography as a way to understand his official account of happiness in Utilitarianism. This work offers both a new perspective on Mill’s thought, and a distinctive account of the role of aesthetic and emotional capacities in the most choiceworthy human life. I consider the philosophical purposes of autobiography, Mill’s disagreements with Bentham, and the nature of competent judges and the pleasure they take in higher culture. I conclude that Millian perfectionism is an attractive and underappreciated option for contemporary value theory.

This paper uses readings of two classic autobiographies, Edmund Gosse's Father & Son and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, to develop a distinctive answer to an old and central question in value theory: What role is played by pleasure in the most successful human life? A first section defends my method. The main body of the paper then defines and rejects voluntarist, stoic, and developmental hedonist lessons to be taken from central crises in my two subjects' autobiographies, and argues for a fourth, diagnostic lesson: Gosse and Mill perceive their individual good through the medium of pleasure. Finally, I offer some speculative moral psychology of human development, as involving the waking, perception, management, and flowering of generic and individual capacities, which I suggest underlies Gosse and Mill's experiences. The acceptance of one's own unchosen nature, discovered by self-perceptive pleasure in the operation of one's nascent capacities, is the beginning of a flourishing adulthood in which that nature is fully developed and expressed.

This paper argues against particularism about social criticism of the form presented by Walzer. I contend that while limitation of the scope of criticism depends on the existence of our shared meanings, which are not shared by them, shared meaning itself depends on society. So, an account of society showing that societies are not discrete and mutually inaccessible refutes particularism. I argue for such an account. I deal with the objection that the focus of particularism is culture, not society, and conclude that the conditions of possibility of shared meaning have anti-particularist consequences.

This paper addresses questions of friendship and political community by investigating a particular complex case, comradeship in the life of the soldier. Close attention to soldiers’ accounts of their own lives, successes and failures shows that the relationship of friendship to comradeship, and of both to the success of the soldier’s individual and communal life, is complex and tense. I focus on autobiographical accounts of basic training in order to describe, and to explore the tensions between, two positions: (1) Becoming a soldier is a corrupting loss of individuality and moral sensitivity, and friendship is resistance to it. (2) Becoming a soldier is one form of flourishing, and comradeship—the soldier’s distinctive form of friendship—is one of its constitutive virtues. I draw particularly on George Orwell’s account of basic training and fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and on Tim O’Brien’s account of basic training and fighting in Vietnam.