1

What follows is the original text of the paper that I presented in response to Christopher
Grau and Robert Pippin at an “Author Meets Critics” session on my book Beyond Moral
Judgment (Harvard, 2007) at the Eastern Division Meeting of the APA in December
2008. Both Grau and Pippin had copies of my text, which contains a point-by-point response
to their main observations, before our shared APA session. Grau subsequently revised his
remarks, in significant part in response to the exchange at the session, and published them in
2009 as “On Alice Crary’s Beyond Moral Judgment” in Philo, vol. 12. no. 1, pp. 88-
104. In contrast, Pippin has now – in 2011, over two years after its presentation – chosen to
publish his original piece in essentially unrevised form, eliminating only the introductory
paragraph used at the APA and adding only minor stylistic edits. (Pippin’s piece appears as
a “Critical Notice” in Analytic Philosophy, vol.52, no.1, pp.49-60. There is a link to it
here on the “OLP & Literary Studies Online” blog.)

I had never planned to make my APA response to Pippin and Grau publicly available. But
given that Pippin has now published his piece from our session quite unaltered, it strikes me
as reasonable to post my response to it. With the posting of my response – and allowing for
changes that Grau made to his piece pre-publication – anyone interested can now access the
complete text of the 2008 APA session on Beyond Moral Judgment.
________________________________________________________________________

Alice Crary, “Response to Grau and Pippin”

Presented at an “Author Meets Critics” session on Beyond Moral Judgment at the Eastern Division
Meeting of the APA at the Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia, PA, December 29, 2008.

I want to start by expressing sincere thanks to the different people who made this

session happen – to Iakovas Vasilieu, who I believe was instrumental in organizing it, to the

session’s chair Duncan Richter, and, above all, to its critics Chris Grau and Robert Pippin. I

am grateful to all of them for their time and attention. To be sure, attention does sometimes

come in different forms. Given the striking divergences in tone and substance between

Grau’s and Pippin’s remarks, those of you who have been in the room thus far might be

forgiven for thinking that you were hearing about two quite different books. Thus, for

instance, whereas Grau is talking about a book that presents a distinctive view of moral

thought recognizable as an at least plausible variant of positions associated with, among

others, Cora Diamond and Iris Murdoch, Pippin is concerned with a book whose author is
 2

at risk of committing herself to the bizarre idea of “a ‘form of thought’ which does not

involve the application of concepts” (Pippin, p.4) and of denying the banal observation that

people “can share the same language without sharing much of anything else” (ibid., p.11).

Or, again, whereas Grau is talking about a book that showcases examples of feminist

thought in what is, as it turns out, a chapter-long discussion (Grau, p.3), Pippin is concerned

with a book whose author actually has yet to be struck by the interest of questions about

how to critically evaluate historical changes in assumptions about the moral relevance of

gender to social organization (Pippin, p.12). Alas, joking aside, it is clear that Grau and

Pippin are talking about one book – it is the only book – of which I am the author. Grau

limits himself to considering three general topics that he thinks invite further reflection, and,

although Pippin talks about a great deal more, he concurs in expressing interest in the first

two topics on Grau’s list. Since there can be no question of addressing every point these

critics make in the time that I can here appropriately take, and since I believe that the first

two points Grau makes are indeed fundamental (and hence that there is a good chance they

will shed light elsewhere), I focus my attention here.

Before starting, let me add one prefatory comment, taking my cue from something

Richter, our chair, has written about Beyond Moral Judgment. In a brief review,1 Richter

describes the book as “ambitious,” suggesting that it leaves room at many points for critical

questions and further reflections. I agree with Richter’s suggestion and also believe that, here

as elsewhere, criticism can have more or less foundation in the texts that it targets. This

brings me to a number of Pippin’s criticisms, including the three I referred to in passing a

1 See http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=3645.
 3

moment ago,2 that I take to have, to put it mildly, rather less than more foundation in my

book. Foremost among these criticisms is one I have not yet mentioned. It has to do with

my treatment of literary texts, and Pippin devotes almost a third of his time to developing it.

The criticism is multi-faceted, but at its heart is the charge, hinted at early in Pippin’s

remarks and emphasized with real force later on, that I impose on the texts I read an

“artificial separation between emotional engagement…and some form of reflective, more

general, active interrogation and assessment” (Pippin, p.18). I was surprised, and not just a

little, to read this. My main critical target in the book as a whole is a set of philosophical

assumptions that make this kind of reason-emotion dualism difficult to escape even for, among

others, literary critics and theorists who find it unattractive. I have no explanation of why

Pippin reads me as operating openly with the very assumptions I am throughout concerned

to attack, and he himself offers no explanation, relying on a somewhat scattered set of

citations and nowhere acknowledging that the central argument of my book speaks against

the literary methods he represents me as contentedly employing.3 In this connection, let me

2 I return in different parts of the text that follows to all three of these criticisms.

3 Although in passages like the one cited several sentences back Pippin reads me as working with the very kind

of reason-emotion dualism I attack, in other passages he rightly represents me, in a manner that opposes this
initial interpretative strategy, as having an interest in the kinds of emotional engagement some works of
literature invite that is simultaneously an interest in modes of reflection the works elicit. Indeed, at times Pippin
portrays me as believing that all works of literature are such that they thus invite mode of reflection in virtue of
strategies for eliciting certain reactions. This is a misrepresentation – I am in fact exclusively concerned with
certain quite distinctive works that resemble each other in, in different ways, placing importance on a vigorous
activity of moral imagination – and, in consequence of the misrepresentation, some of Pippin’s apparently most
cutting rebukes to my literary practice turn out to be jabs at a non-existent opponent. For instance, at one
point, after mentioning elements of works of Flaubert, Proust, Kafka and others, Pippin criticizes me for being
unable to accommodate the fact that, in his words, “the most powerful ‘emotional’ reaction we have from great
works is a kind of challenge that leaves us unsettled; even a kind of confusion, a disorientation that can be both
disheartening and inspiring” (Pippin, pp.17-18). One of Pippin’s goals in this passage seems to be to draw
attention to works, quite different from those I discuss, that are not rightly described as designed to elicit
reflection by engaging us in various ways. At the same time, given Pippin’s abhorrence of the kind of reason-
emotion dualism he claims to find in my writing, and given his expressed interest in isolating marks of those
works of literature that engage us without manipulating (pp.13-14), it seems unobjectionable to interpret him as
leaving open the possibility that the power of the reactions that some great literary works – say, works by
George Eliot, E.M. Forster, Jane Austen and Henry James – produce is rightly understood as a function of
ways in which those reactions directly contributing to modes of reflection that the works elicit. This point is
 4

add that, although I will be happy to discuss relevant portions of Pippin’s remarks later –

with an eye to setting the record straight – I don’t take them up in the text I am about to

read.4 The literary sections of my book follow up directly on its central argument, and,

insofar as the things I am going to say have to do with key parts of this argument, they will

help me to account for my sense that something has gone badly wrong with Pippin’s

commentary.

significant because one of the main emphases of my discussions of literature is bringing out how specific works
by Austen, Forster and others realize this possibility. When I turn to the particular works I consider, I describe
them as presenting readers with “forms of moral instruction” or “moral lessons,” and Pippin says he is
horrified by the use of these terms. (See, e.g., p.13 for his comment about “the ominous presence of that most
unfortunate phrase in philosophical treatments of literature, ‘moral lesson’.”) For this reason I want to stress
that, as I just suggested, the claims about particular works of literature that I am advancing when I use these
expressions have a close analogue in one significant strand of thought in Pippin’s remarks. The only
fundamental difference between my posture and Pippin’s, with regard to the particular strand of his thought in
question, is terminological. I am willing to speak of “lessons” in cases in which he is not. So let me close by
saying that it’s not clear to me that any feature of the meaning of the word “lesson” speaks against talk of
lessons in connection with the kinds of complex and simultaneously emotionally rich and critically reflective
modes of thought that, judging by his remarks here, Pippin and I agree in thinking some works of literature
elicit from readers.

4 Another feature of Pippin’s discussion of my treatment of different literary works strikes me as worth noting

here in the text. Pippin repeatedly if also briefly criticizes my handling of the work of various philosophers with
whom I disagree, and on a number of occasions his criticisms simply miss their targets. Consider the following
two examples. On p.14, in a passage in which he is discussing how the responses that individual literary works
elicit from us may be enormously complex and how in our efforts to assess what we inherit from particular
works we may accordingly be obliged to rely on different methods of critical reflection, Pippin says that he
“would not be so quick to dismiss so categorically, as Crary does, Onora O’Neill’s plea for the role of principles
in a fuller view of our deliberation and assessment.” Pippin’s reference here to my treatment of O’Neill is,
despite any appearance to the contrary, irrelevant to the point he is making. When I discuss O’Neill’s work in
the passage Pippin has in mind, I am raising a question about her tendency both to separate the growth of
responsiveness from exercises of reason integral to the formulation of principles and to appeal to the idea of
such a separation in concluding that, insofar as works of literature elicit different responses, we need to submit
our literary adventures to the scrutiny of principles arrived at independently of those adventures. This point is
not in tension with Pippin’s observation that the responsible assessment of literary works may require
principled critical reflection. My point is simply that, in contrast to what O’Neill would have us think, it is
wrong to insist that when we are assessing literary works in a responsible manner, we need to submit anything
the works suggest to us in virtue of their literary strategies to the authority of prior principles. Moreover, in light
of Pippin’s own assaults on the idea of a dualism of reason and emotion, it seems reasonable to think that he
himself sympathizes with this point. Let me turn to a second case in which Pippin’s criticism of my handling of
the work of a philosopher with whom I disagree misfires. When he is discussing my reading of Fontane’s Effi
Briest, Pippin alleges that I have no interest in Marcia Baron’s claim that it is not “fair to treat [the character]
Innstetten as a Kantian” and then adds, as though denying something I have asserted, that he thinks “Baron is
right about this” (p.19). In fact, when I discuss Baron’s work, I make just the point that Pippin here makes as if
in disagreement with me. I observe that Baron is right to challenge representations of Innstetten as a Kantian
(see Beyond Moral Judgment, p.218). My object in discussing Baron’s reading of Effi Briest is to point out that she
imposes on the novel an opposition between reason and feeling that is foreign to it, and, although Pippin has
objections to my reading of Effi Briest (to which I don’t have the space to respond here), it seems clear that he is
not recommending that we approach the text equipped with such an opposition.
 5

The two topics of Grau’s I am going to discuss – which are also picked up in

different ways by Pippin – have to do with my understanding of “the moral” and with the

conception of objectivity that I refer to as the “wider conception.” In what follows, I take

these topics in reverse order, addressing to the best of my ability the main questions Grau

and Pippin raise in connection with each.

(1) Objectivity. The difference between what I call the “narrower” and “wider”

conceptions of objectivity can be captured very roughly as follows.5 On the one hand, the

narrower conception places the following antecedent constraint on objective qualities: it tells

us if a quality is such that it is impossible to arrive at an adequate account of it apart from

reference to subjective responses that an object that possesses it elicits, the quality does not

count as objective. On the other hand, the wider conception of objectivity places no such

antecedent constraint on which qualities are rightly regarded as objective. This way of

describing the contrast between the two conceptions of objectivity that interest me

underlines the fact that the transition from the narrower conception of objectivity to its

wider counterpart is essentially a matter of the lifting of a metaphysical restriction on what

objective features of the world are like. Now it should be clear that, if a thinker says that she

advocates the wider conception, she hasn’t thereby committed herself to regarding any

particular qualities as objective. All that she has committed herself to is refusing to take a

5 This would be the right moment at which to answer Grau’s question about the sense in which ‘the wider
question of objectivity is objective’ (Grau, p.15). Philosophers talk about the concept of objectivity in different
ways, and I talk about it specifically in reference to our “concept of a feature of the world that is such that
anyone who fails to recognize it is missing something” (Beyond Moral Judgment, p.15). My point here is not that
there is anything novel about this choice of terminology. In choosing it, I am inheriting the concerns of a
number of philosophers who contribute to ongoing debates about ethics and objectivity. My point is simply
that the two different conceptions of objectivity that I discuss – the “narrower” and “wider” conceptions – are
different specifications of what falls under this concept and, further, that it is insofar as the wider conception is
thus a specification of a familiar concept of objectivity that it qualifies as objective. Let me add that, although I
don’t in these remarks discuss the things I say in my book about the wider conception of rationality, it would
be possible to offer a parallel answer to Grau’s question about the sense in which ‘the wider conception of
rationality is rational’.
 6

quality’s essential reference to subjectivity as antecedently preventing it from having

objective status.

Both Grau and Pippin are at certain junctures concerned with the observation, which

I just made – and which I also make in the book (see, e.g., Beyond Moral Judgment, pp.28-35) –

that in championing the wider conception of objectivity we aren’t yet saying anything

substantive about what things count as objective. This observation is what underlies Grau’s

question about whether a “fuller picture” of this conception is in the offing (Grau, p.16), and

Pippin is making the same observation when he asserts that the wider conception doesn’t

give us “the gold standard of objectivity…for free” (Pippin, p.9) – though, unlike Grau,

Pippin seems to think that the observation is lost on me.

Let me return for a moment to the passage from his remarks in which Grau raises

his question about the prospects for a fuller picture of objectivity on the wider conception’s

terms. Here Grau notes both that I oppose efforts to replace the narrower conception of

objectivity with an alternative metaphysical account of objectivity and that I believe that the

task of bringing the world into focus “devolve[s] upon our ordinary, non-metaphysical ways

of finding out how things are” (Beyond Moral Judgment, p.84, cited in Grau, p.16). The claims

of mine that Grau is concerned with are conclusions I draw from the argument I develop

against the narrower conception of objectivity. I take it to follow from this argument that

there is no such thing as a foothold for thought apart from subjectivity and hence no such

thing as a standpoint independent of our subjective endowments from which to

antecendently survey the world and discover what contribution if any subjective

endowments make to our grasp of the objective world. While it is not a consequence of this

line of reasoning that nothing useful can be said in philosophy about what getting our minds

around the objective world is like, it is a consequence that any useful philosophical
 7

reflections on such matters will have to reflect a study of how we bring the world into focus

in particular cases. Or, as we might also put it, it is a consequence of the line of reasoning

that, if, having embraced the wider conception, we wish for a Grau-style “fuller picture” of

objectivity, we will be obliged to proceed at least initially in piecemeal fashion, examining

different ways in which we get our minds around how things are.

I am inclined to think that a version of the type of account of moral thought

presented in my book is among the things that should be included in this fuller picture of

objectivity. But if Grau wants an additional suggestion about what should be included, it

seems to me that he could, for instance, turn to Michael Thompson’s contributions to

philosophical conversations about how to understand attributions to living organisms of

qualities and operations that they have as living beings. In pertinent portions of his work,6

Thompson brings out with great force that doing justice to the “vital features and

operations” of a living organism requires a reference to something beyond the physical

presentation of the creature in a given case. Thompson shows both that the required

external reference is to the natural history of the species to which the individual organism

belongs and that our accounts of the natural histories of species are composed of judgments

– “natural-historical judgments”– that possess a kind of non-Fregean, teleological generality

in virtue of which they are irreducible to other more familiar logical forms. The point I want

to make here is that, if we accept Thompson’s (epistemically anti-reductionist) story about

the representation of life, then (assuming that there is no question of combining the story

with a form of ontological reductionism) we can credit Thompson with teaching us that in

order to arrive at accurate descriptions of individual organisms we need to have an at least

6 See esp. Michael Thompson, Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought, Cambridge,

MA, Harvard University Press, 2008, Part I.

 8

unreflective appreciation of the significance of our knowledge of the pertinent species of

organism to what is before us. This is the kind of account of what getting our minds around

the world amounts to that I take to be a candidate for inclusion in the sort of fuller picture

of – wider – objectivity that Grau is seeking.

Now I want to move on to some of Pippin’s questions about things I say about the

wider conception of objectivity in reference to moral concepts. One of my goals in

discussing these issues in the book is showing that the transition from the narrower to the

wider conception of objectivity equips us to answer certain familiar philosophical objections

to representing moral concepts as modes of objective concern. In this connection, I start

from an observation about moral concepts that to a large extent accounts for the fact that

many philosophers regard these concepts as especially resistant to objective interpretation.

At issue is an observation about how moral concepts are such that recognizing that they

apply in particular situations is a matter of seeing that features of the situations merit certain

responses. In the book, I gloss this observation by describing our practices with moral

concepts as in an important sense circular. The basic idea is that, because the question of

whether something merits attitudes internal to a given moral concept is itself a moral

question, the observation is rightly taken to speak for an understanding of moral concept-use

as circular in the sense of being governed by standards that are themselves informed by our

moral beliefs. Whereas moral philosophers often take the presence of this kind of circularity

to speak decisively against representing moral concepts as essentially concerned with the

world, I aim to show that this metaphysical case against the objective claims of moral

concepts depends for its apparent force on questionable assumptions internal to the

narrower conception of objectivity. This point is hardly uncontroversial, but, if I understand

him correctly, Pippin agrees with me in making it. Pippin’s rather different point is that we
 9

don’t need metaphysical considerations to motivate skepticism and that, for instance, much

more mundane historical and anthropological considerations will suffice. The idea is that

once we recognize how people’s firm moral convictions have varied with the attitudes

inculcated in them in particular social and institutional settings, we will despair at the

prospect of arriving at moral beliefs with authority that is more than merely parochial

(Pippin, pp.9 and 12).

Because the form of skepticism that Pippin is contemplating here is historically

rather than metaphysically grounded, an adequate response needs to turn, in one way or

another, on consideration of actual, historical cases. In the portions of my book in which I

address relevant issues, I present and defend applications of moral concepts in two different

kinds of cases – cases involving what contemporary feminist thinkers have taught us to call

sexual harassment and domestic violence.7 (Let me again observe, as I did at the beginning of these

remarks, that Pippin never mentions the chapter of my book in which I discuss these

examples.) The processes of reflection I describe in favor of speaking of sexual harassment

and domestic violence take seriously the fact that the moral conclusions they seem to

support depend for their soundness on attitudes not universally shared. Now, let us suppose

that, having undertaken reflections along the lines I describe – reflections that involve

exploring real or imagined challenges from people differently placed – a reader makes claims

about sexual harassment and domestic violence in some specific cases. That the reader

arrives at her moral beliefs in this critically reflective manner is certainly no metaphysical

guarantee of their correctness (whatever that would be). But, insofar as our topic is a kind of

skepticism premised not on a craving for such a guarantee but rather on the conviction that

it is invariably possible to unsettle moral beliefs – and this is Pippin’s topic – it is legitimate

7 Beyond Moral Judgment, Chapter 5.

 10

to allow the strength (or challenge-resistance) of our case for particular moral conclusions to

be the measure of the success of our anti-skeptical rejoinder.

(2) The “moral.” Having now discussed some of Grau’s and Pippin’s main questions

about what I call the wider conception of objectivity, I turn to the some of their questions

about my understanding of “the moral.” The most straightforward question, which both

commentators raise (but with distinct preoccupations), is about how I use the word “moral.”

Pippin’s main concern in raising this question is to determine how my way of speaking

differs from that of philosophers like Bernard Williams or Hegel or Nietzsche who

distinguish the ethical and the moral (Pippin, pp.5-6), and this is a good place to start. While

each of the members of the slate of philosophers Pippin has in mind represents the moral as

some particular development of the ethical, I use the term “moral” interchangeably with the

term “ethical” to pick out what for these philosophers counts as the more general notion of

the ethical. (For the introduction of this terminology, see the first note on the first page of

my book, i.e., n.1, p.9.) I thus treat the notion of the moral as a vague but by no means

therefore useless or flawed one. I understand moral considerations so that they may include,

among other things, considerations about obligation, and about virtues and vices, and I

suggest that a helpful way to approach the idea of a person’s moral outlook is by talking

about her view of “how best to live” or, alternately, of “what matters most in life.” Grau is, I

believe, specifically concerned with my willingness to use formulations of the latter sort –

and even to gloss the idea of a person’s moral outlook by speaking of her view of “what is

most important in life” – when he asks whether my use of “moral” differs from the way

other philosophers talk about meaningfulness (Grau, p.10). Although, as far as I can tell, there

is no clear consensus among participants in the philosophical debates that interest Grau
 11

about what meaningfulness is,8 there is a consensus that it is possible to isolate some

concept of meaningfulness that is distinct from the concept of the moral. So, in response to

Grau, let me say that it is clearly possible to identify a notion of meaningfulness such that a

person could be guided by moral reflection in my sense and yet lack meaningful pursuits in

life or have meaningful pursuits yet not be guided by moral reflection.

These questions about how I use the word “moral” lead naturally to questions, of a

sort that Pippin raises insistently and repeatedly (Pippin, pp.4 and 10-11), about my strategy

for distinguishing between moral and non-moral thought. It is not hyperbole to say that

these further questions bring us to the heart of the matter. One of the guiding themes of my

book is that we need to reconceive the ways in which, in philosophy, we tend to classify bits

of thought as moral. In developing this theme, I call for dispensing with views on which

moral thought is monopolized by moral judgments, where moral judgments are understood

as judgments that apply moral concepts. My suggestion is that moral thought should be

understood as including more than moral concept-use, and, if I am to clarify this suggestion

in a way that equips me to respond to Pippin’s questions, I need to add to things I have

already said about my treatment of moral concepts.

A “moral concept,” in my parlance, is a concept that is as such in the business of

expressing or articulating a moral outlook. In the book, I mention both what get called thin

moral concepts (e.g., “right” and “bad”) and what get called thick ones (e.g., “patronizing”

and “gracious”), and, although I don’t attempt to formulate and defend a fixed list of moral

concepts,9 I am at various points preoccupied with certain characteristic features of these

8 See, e.g., the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy review article by Thaddeus Metz that Grau cites on p.12

(http:www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/archives/sum2007/entries/life-meaning/).

9I don’t attempt to formulate a fixed list of moral concepts because I am defending approach in ethics on
which disputes about whether particular moral concepts are legitimate are internal to legitimate moral
 12

concepts. Above all, I take an interest in the observation, which I have already mentioned,

that our use of moral concepts is circular in that it is guided by standards that in turn reflect

our moral beliefs. One of my local projects in the book is, as I have discussed, challenging

the widespread assumption that this observation speaks decisively against an objective

interpretation of moral concepts. Having already outlined my strategy for this project, I want

to add that in undertaking it I incur an obligation to account for the source of the moral

beliefs that I believe invariably inform the standards governing moral concept-use – and to

do so, moreover, in a manner consistent with the objective interpretation of moral concepts

that I favor.

Here it will be helpful to briefly survey some major elements of the book that I have

not yet touched on and that Grau and Pippin refer to only in passing. Central to the book’s

main argument is a defense of a view of language, associated with Wittgenstein and Austin,

on which certain sensitivities or modes of appreciation are internal to all linguistic capacities,

and on which possession of a natural language is inseparable from the possession of a

complex individual sensibility. (Since, as I noted at the beginning of these remarks, Pippin

worries that I am making the bizarre suggestion that, for instance, all speakers of a language,

say, English, have the same sensibility (Pippin, p.11), I want to emphasize here – as I in fact

emphasize in the text (see especially pp.41-43) – that there is a fundamental sense in which,

on the view of language I favor, the sensibility internal to speakers’ linguistic capacities is an

individual affair.) Having presented a view of language on which the possession of a natural

language is inseparable from possession of a complex individual sensibility, I argue that this

conversation (think, e.g., of nineteenth century feminists’ discussions about whether or not “chastity” picks out
a genuine virtue and qualifies as a moral concept) and on which antecedent insistence on a fixed set of such
concepts would be a sign of a questionable effort to limit possibilities for such conversation ahead of time. To
say this is not, however, to deny that my argument has bearing on discussions about which moral concepts we
ought to accept and use.
 13

sensibility at the same time qualifies as a moral stance. One of my goals in thus defending

the thought that we invariably occupy a moral stance as natural language-users is to suggest

that we need not be puzzled about the source or claim to cognitive authority of the moral

standards on which we invariably rely in employing moral concepts. A second, broader goal

is to suggest that we need to expand our conception of moral thought so that it reaches

beyond the use of such concepts.

The line of reasoning that I take to justify this expansion can be sketched roughly as

follows. It starts from the thought, internal to the view of language I defend, that, when we

are thinking or talking, we are, without regard to the kinds of concepts we are employing,

drawing on certain responses and that there is thus no reflective standpoint independent of

our responses from which to determine ahead of time how efforts to project our concepts

will call on us to further develop responsively. This line of reasoning also takes for granted

the thought – which, as I just noted, I defend in reference to my preferred view of language

– that the modes of responsiveness or sensitivities inseparable from individuals’ linguistic

capacities qualify as a moral orientation. The line of reasoning in question moves from these

two thoughts to the conclusion that, even when we are not using moral concepts, it is always

in principle possible – without regard to the kinds of concepts we are using or the subject

matter that preoccupies us – for our discursive moves to involve the expression or

development of responses that are fundamental for our moral outlook, responses that bear

directly on ways in which it is articulated in our lives. These are, in brief, the considerations

that lead me not only to call for an inventory of kinds of moral thought that includes more

than moral judgments but, in addition, to describe moral thinking – in a turn of phrase that

Pippin says he finds plainly objectionable (Pippin, pp.10-11) – as “subject matter

indifferent.” I hope my remarks have clarified what I take to speak for using these terms. I
 14

hope they also make it clear that – and here I address a comment of Pippin’s I cited early on

– that, in talking about moral thinking apart from moral judgment-making, I am not talking

about any strange ‘forms of thought’ that do not involve the application of concepts. And,

finally, I hope my remarks make it clear that – and here yet again I am responding to Pippin

– what interests me is a reconception and not a denial of the distinction between moral and

non-moral thinking. There is, according to the argument I just sketched, no suggestion that

every stretch of thought deserves classification as moral but only the suggestion that the

absence of moral concepts does not by itself demonstrate that a given stretch of thought

fails to deserve such classification. My idea is that we are right to describe a bit of a person’s

thought as moral when, without regard to whether that bit of thought involves the use of

moral concepts, we see that it is integral to the expression or development of her moral

outlook. [This does place me at odds with Kant. Pippin’s reflections about how for Kant

moral judgment isn’t at the center of the moral life aren’t to the point.]

There is a sense in which some of the terminology I use in the book may seem to

obscure the points I have just been discussing. In a number of passages of my book,

passages discussed by Grau at some length (Grau, pp.10-12), I characterize the view of

language I favor as one that allows us to speak of a moral dimension of all of language. So let

me stress that, in using this characterization, I am not somehow suggesting that all language

is somehow moral. I am making the same point that I also make by talking about the subject

matter indifference of moral thought. The idea is that any bit of thought, without regard to

the kinds of concepts it employs or the subject matter it addresses, may in principle qualify as

moral and that what decides its standing is whether it directly contributes to the

development or expression of a moral outlook.

 15

Let me wrap up. Out of respect for time, I have left out some of Grau’s suggestive

questions about rationality and moral disagreement, and I have also left out Pippin’s

extended discussion about my treatments of different works of literature, which, as I

mentioned at the outset, I find to be strikingly at odds with what I wrote. I am happy to

discuss these matters, too, and I again want to thank the session’s different participants for

their time.