Moral Articulation: On the Development of New Moral Concepts

by Matthew Congdon

This book explores the historical development of new moral concepts. Starting from examples of new moral terms invented in the twentieth century, like 'sexual harassment', 'genocide', 'racism', and 'hate speech', this book what we are doing when we bring ethically significant acts and events under new descriptions? Are we simply naming moral phenomena that already exist, fully formed and intact, prior to their expression in language? Or are moral phenomena sensitive to the descriptions under which they fall, such that new modes of moral expression can reshape the phenomena they bring to light?

Moral Articulation outlines an ethical framework that allows us to embrace a version of the latter, transformative view without sacrificing notions of moral truth, objectivity, and knowledge. The book presents a view of moral meaningfulness as extending beyond what we can presently put into words, urging that expansions in our moral vocabularies often begin in dissonant experiences of conceptual and linguistic limits. Resisting a tendency in contemporary ethics to start with situations and dilemmas whose descriptions are already given, this book argues that the struggle to piece together a discursively articulate picture of a situation is an ethical task in its own right. The result is a picture of ethical life that emphasizes the role of language in shaping who we are.

Genres: Philosophy

258 pages, Hardcover

Published November 10, 2023

Reviews

[Alina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t read the full book but only the parts which spoke to my interest in making sense of how we can come to understand the significance of our situations, under the starting assumptions that there is some sort of significance which we apprehend in a non-intellectual, non-deliberate manner, independently and prior to reflecting upon our situations and communicating about them. I was disappointed in what was offered in this book on this issue.

But it’s very much possible that the primary contribution of the book is supposed to be to questions in ethics, and Congdon may be stellar in addressing those (I’m not positioned to assess this, as a person who has rarely thought about ethics philosophically speaking). These questions are include: How might we avoid relativism of ethical value once we acknowledge that various concepts of ethical value (e.g., sexual harassment, genocide, blasphemy) arise at particular historical points, under certain cultural contexts?

Congdon’s answer to this starts from a claim about the issue regarding significance I mentioned above, an issue which I’m familiar with from debates in philosophy of mind and epistemology. His claim is that there is “proto-discursive apprehensions of elusive moral significance,” or in other words, some form of meaning we register in encountering a situation which is not yet formatted in a sentential or linguistic form and so in itself cannot be communicated. Rather, this form of meaning has a sort of inner drive or function as to promote for us to find ways of communicating it, where our communicative act here must involve upon some form of creative interpretation or contribution of our own, on top of the meaning that we were initially hit by. Congdon calls this creative process “articulation” [of such “proto-discursive” meaning].

The position doesn't seem implausible, but it should be argued for. Without any argument supporting it, we’re in the dangerous place of being capable of thinking about the various elements of the position in a diversity of different ways. Some of these ways might contradict one another, which is bad; and moreover, caught up in this ambiguity, it is difficult to arrive at further details of the process of “articulation.” For example, it leaves open the following issues: What exactly do we contribute to the “proto-discursive” meaning of our situation? What are the constraints upon our creativity here, other than the vague and weak constraint Congdon invokes, such as our “normative outlook” or various “social norms”? How do these constraints figure into our creativity here, other than the minimal idea that they rule out certain articulations (for example, compare the different nature of the constraints of hunger over our mood vs. the law of noncontradiction over reasoning)?

Congdon doesn’t argue for his position. He thereby doesn’t offer any resources for addressing these further questions. Instead, he just provides examples and states his position next to them; this gives the reader the sense that his position is readily intelligible or has explanatory power. That’s a way to convince a person, but that’s not an argument. Again, this way of proceeding might be appropriate, or even the best way of doing it, given Congdon’s goal of addressing issues in ethics. I’m not sure.

As a whole, for readers interested in threats of relativity (e.g., Nietzsche on ethical value; Kuhn on the truth of scientific claims) in general, or in particular, the application of this sort of threat in the domain of ethics, this book will be interesting.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25/5

The prose was flowery and almost poetic at times. In fact, many sentences were phrased so beautifully I was regularly distracted from the content. It reminded me of Charles Taylor and Linda Martín Alcoff's style. A very pleasant read on a fascinating topic.