Abstract
This article explores one central assumption that is guiding large portions of contemporary (analytic) moral philosophy: the idea that moral philosophy has to be forward-looking and action-guiding. By paying attention to a number of examples, it is argued that this guiding assumption flies in the face of important aspects of actual moral life. Moral situations are not (always) of the nature that we can plan for them, and reason about them in advance. Rather, the moral reality, or the moral contexts, are often such that the moral situation is created in the scene, and hence something that is only available to reflect upon in hindsight. There are, at least, two central reasons why this is so: The first is that the sense, meaning, of the actions and the concepts we use in reflection about them, are not locked beforehand, and our understanding of them are formed in the process. The second reason is that moral situations come about in a responsive, rather than planned, way. That is, we discover our moral world by means of our reactive interactions, rather than in theoretical reflection that aims to produce “anticipated beliefs.” Thus, this article suggests a way of exploring morality’s backward-looking nature that does not misrepresent moral reality.
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Notes
Actions are indeed complicated things, and so are the ways in which we fail to be transparent to ourselves, and our efforts to understand our own tomorrow’s selves will always be clouded and difficult. I think Stanley Cavell marks out some of the ways in which philosophers are prone to go absolutely wrong because they trust too simplistic distinctions well, when he said. “The philosopher who asks about everything we do, “Voluntary or not?” has a poor view of action (as the philosopher who asks of everything we say, “True or false?” or “Analytic or synthetic?” has a poor view of communication), in something like the way a man who asks the cook about every piece of food, “Was it cut or not?” has a poor view of preparing food.” (Cavell 1976: 36) For further discussions of these themes, see (Forsberg 2022a: Chap. 4.)
There are mainly two philosophers’ thoughts in the back of my head here. One is Iris Murdoch and her emphasis on vision over choice. (See Murdoch 1999c; Forsberg 2013; 2020) The other is Ludwig Wittgenstein and his claim that “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.” (Wittgenstein 2009: § 22) And similar trains of thoughts are also explored among the remarks collected in (or as) On Certainty ((Wittgenstein 1969) There are, of course, a large group of other thinkers that point in the same direction such as Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, as well as a wide range of phenomenological (and post- phenomenological) thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, to name a few.
This trend is much more dominant in analytic moral philosophy than it is in so-called “continental” schools of thought, where the emphasis on structural and historical elements of moral life have been more heavily emphasized.
This formulation is taken from (Svensson 2010: 255).
I discuss this in more detail in (Forsberg 2022a: Chap. 4).
These kinds of questions are thoroughly discussed in (Paul 2015).
A well-argued version of this line of thinking can be found in (Beran 2022).
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Funding
The research was supported within the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value,” registration No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic
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Forsberg, N. In Hindsight: An Essay Concerning My Limited Moral Understanding. J Ethics 28, 383–404 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09461-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09461-6