Dialectics of Alienation and Abnormality

This chapter portrays dialectically intertwined issues of alienation (in the Frommian sense of estrangement from self and others), abnormality, anxiety, and authenticity. Giddens theorizes that modern society is undergoing a ‘transformation of intimacy’, where love and sex are freed from patriarchal traditions, and people increasingly value ‘pure relationships’ where authentic connection is the only motive and can be fully realised. We claim that this desire for authenticity extends beyond this in the society of the selfie, the persistent unrequited thirst for it directly clashes with the alienated status quo. ‘Authenticity strain’ haunts the social terrain with loneliness, anomie, and the threat of volatility and transgression of personal boundaries. The desire for authenticity, and the moral sense that surrounds it, dovetail with the frustrated voyeurism of life under the spectacle in the age of Web 2.0. Fromm says that the inability to genuinely connect with other people can inspire people toward sadomasochism instead, which primes them for authoritarian social movements. And once again we turn to Foucault, to describe his theories about the designation of ‘abnormal’ people. Today, the fear of abnormalities of self and Other, both inner and outer—of becoming or falling victim to predatory, psychologically unhinged Others such as cyberstalkers, violent obsessives, pedophiles with fake avatars, mass shooters, etc.—has become a rampant new nightmare. It is a nightmare that fuels a common desire for greater protection from ‘deviants’ and outsiders through an increase of coercive force, i.e., for authoritarianism.

Benevolence and Abhorrence of Incest (the Case of Francis Hutcheson)

В статье реконструированы представления Фрэнсиса Хатчесона об истоках и моральном статусе запрета на инцест. Интерпретация этого запрета создает затруднения для любой теории морали, которая отождествляет ее содержание с непричинением вреда и помощью другому человеку. Степень морального осуждения инцеста не соответствует его относительной безвредности для других (в категориях, используемых Хатчесоном, участники инцестуальных отношений не проявляют явного «недостатка благожелательности»). Автор показывает, как Хатчесон, обсуждая универсальность морального чувства и моральные препятствия для заключения брака, пытается редуцировать «отвращение к инцесту» к благожелательным переживаниям. The paper reconstructs Francis Hutcheson’s view on the moral status of incest and origins of the incest prohibition. The phenomenon of incest creates problems for every theory of morality that identifies its content with other-regarding requirements. The intensity of moral blame that incestuous behavior faces is not consistent with its relative harmlessness in comparison with violence or refusal to help (in Hutcheson’s terms, participants of incestuous relationships do not express ‘want of benevolence’). The author shows how Hutcheson reduces the ‘abhorrence of incest’ to benevolent affections in his discussions of the universality of moral sense and moral impediments of marriage.

A Multilevel Analysis of Moral Functioning Integrating Socio-Bio-Evolutionary Science, Socio-Constructionism and Constructivist-Developmental Theory

Tensions chronically exist in the research literature among bio-evolutionary scientists, constructivist-developmental psychologists, and socio-constructionist scholars about how to describe, understand, and predict our moral functioning. An analysis of the assumptions of each of these theoretical paradigms, the disciplinary fields that inform their conceptual models, and the empirical evidence they use to sustain their claims reveals the tensions that exist, as different communities of scholars assign different roles to nature and nurture, reason and intuition, and to the private minds of individuals and the social intelligibilities available to them in a given time and place of history. Using simple multilevel structures, it is possible to see that the divisions that exist within these scientific communities can be conceptualized in terms of their use of different levels of analysis, as they each focus on different populations and employ different underlying units of time and space. Bio-evolutionary scientists study humans as species, using slow-paced time units of analysis such as millennia, and their studies focus on the epigenetic dimensions of our moral sense, documenting inter-species variance in moral functioning. Socio-constructionists study humans as members of groups, using moderately paced time units of analysis such as decades and centuries, and their studies focus on cultural variations in what different groups of people consider to be good or bad, according to the social structures and intelligibilities that are available to them in a given time and place of history. Constructivist-developmental psychologists study humans as individuals, using fast-paced time units of analysis such as months and years, and their studies focus on the maturational dimension of our moral sense, documenting within- and between-individuals variation throughout their lifetime. Unfortunately, by focusing on different populations and time units, these communities of scholars produce research findings that highlight certain aspects of our moral functioning while downplaying others. Interestingly, complex multilevel structures can illustrate how different levels of analysis are nested within each other and can demonstrate how different scientific endeavors have been striving to account for different sources of variability in our moral functioning. The use of complex multilevel structures can also allow us to understand our moral functioning from a dynamic, complex, multilevel theoretical perspective, and as the product of (a) genetic variations that occur between and within species, (b) variations in the social structures, discourses, and intelligibilities that are available in the culture and regulate what social groups consider good and bad at different places and times of history, and (c) variations in the personal experiences and opportunities of interaction that individuals have in different environments throughout their lifetime. Researchers need to clarify the epigenetic, historical, and developmental rules of our moral functioning, and the ways in which different dimensions interact with each other.

Sympathy and Empathy

Sympathy and empathy are complex and entwined concepts with philosophical and scientific roots relating to issues in ethics, aesthetics, psychology, biology, and neuroscience. For some, the two concepts are indistinguishable, the two terms interchangeable, but each has a unique history as well as qualities that make both concepts distinct. Although each is associated with feeling, especially the capacity to feel with others or to imaginatively put oneself “in their shoes,” the concepts’ sometimes shared, sometimes divergent histories reveal more complicated origins, as well as vexed and ongoing relations to feeling and emotion and to the ethical value of emotional sharing. Though empathy regularly is considered the more advanced and egalitarian of the two, it shares with sympathy a controversial role in historical debates regarding questions of an inborn or divine moral sense, prosocial behavior and the development of human communities, the relation of sensation to unconscious mental processes, brain matter, and neurons, and animal/human difference. In literary criticism, sympathy and empathy have been key components of aesthetic movements such as sentimentalism, realism, and modernism, and of literary techniques like free indirect discourse (FID), which are thought (by some) to enhance readerly intimacy and closeness to novelistic characters and perspectives. Both concepts have also received their fair share of suspicion, as the capacity to feel, or imagine feeling, the emotions of others remains a controversial basis for ethics.

Revisiting the Social Origins of Human Morality: A Constructivist Perspective on the Nature of Moral Sense-Making

A recent turn in the cognitive sciences has deepened the attention on embodied and situated dynamics for explaining different cognitive processes such as perception, emotion, and social cognition. This has fostered an extensive interest in the social and ‘intersubjective’ nature of moral behavior, especially from the perspective of enactivism. In this paper, I argue that embodied and situated perspectives, enactivism in particular, nonetheless require further improvements with regards to their analysis of the social nature of human morality. In brief, enactivist proposals still do not define what features of the social-relational context, or which kind of processes within social interactions, make an evaluation or action morally relevant or distinctive from other types of social normativity. As an alternative to this proclivity, and seeking to complement the enactive perspective, I present a definition of the process of moral sense-making and offer an empirically-based ethical distinction between different domains of social knowledge in moral development. For doing so, I take insights from the constructivist tradition in moral psychology. My objective is not to radically oppose embodied and enactive alternatives but to expand the horizon of their conceptual and empirical contributions to morality research.

2. Morality

‘Morality’ considers Hume’s moral thought as developed in Book Three of A Treatise of Human Nature, various of his essays, and, especially, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Hume engages with the moral sense theory of Francis Hutcheson in the Treatise. He then turned to essay writing, in relation especially to the essays of Joseph Addison in The Spectator. This turn to essay writing sees Hume modify the purely ‘anatomical’ philosophy of the Treatise in favour of a more practical engagement with the morality of common life. In his work, Hume considered the damage done to natural moral sentiments by religion, and by Christianity in particular. Hume displayed a lack of confidence in moral progress, and showed a sense of the persistence and pervasiveness of human unhappiness. Hume also made an important contribution to aesthetics.

Le Physiologus grec: 1. La réécriture de l’histoire naturelle antique by Stavros Lazaris

The Greek Physiologus is an early Christian collection of some 40 shortchapters on animals (and a few plants and stones), each describing the appearance and the properties of the creature and disclosing its theological or moral sense. The text is the basis of a long and rich tradition of versions in various languages, currently known as bestiaries in Latin and in the European vernacular languages. This tradition has been studied since the 19th century and its bibliography is abundant. Its initial version, however, is still subject to debate and this recent book by Stavros Lazaris takes up the question in a fundamental way. Reviewed by: Baudouin Van den Abeele, Published Online (2021-08-31)Copyright © 2021 by Baudouin Van den AbeeleThis open access publication is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (CC BY-NC-ND) Article PDF Link: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/aestimatio/article/view/37738/28737 Corresponding Author: Baudouin Van den Abeele,UCLouvain UniversityE-Mail: [email protected]

Ressentiment

This chapter attempts to circumscribe the character of ressentiment, the affect that plays a prominent role in Nietzsche’s genealogical account of Christian morality. This affect, and the revengefulness that is closely associated with it, is a response to suffering when it is construed as challenging the agent’s standing, understood in a fundamental non-moral sense of having the world reflect her will, or having her presence in the world make a difference in it. Suffering is so construed when it is experienced from the perspective of a special drive, the will to power, or the drive toward bending the world to one’s will. Revenge aims to bolster or restore power when it is threatened, and the adoption of the conceptual apparatus of Christian morality, including its new values, is a particular way to do so: by altering the agent’s will (her values), it alters what counts as power for her.

In defence of newborns: a response to Kingma

Recently, I argued that subjects inside of artificial wombs—termed ‘gestatelings’ by Romanis—share the same legal and moral status as newborns (neonates). Gestatelings, on my view, are persons in both a legal and moral sense. Kingma challenges these claims. Specifically, Kingma argues that my previous argument is invalid, as it equivocates on the term ‘newborn’. Kingma concludes that questions about the legal and moral status of gestatelings remain ‘unanswered’. I am grateful to Kingma for raising potential concerns with the view I have presented. In this essay, however, I argue that (most) of Kingma’s objections are unpersuasive. First, my original argument does not equivocate on terms like ‘newborn’ or ‘neonate’. The terms denote human beings that have been born recently; that is what matters to the argument. Charges of equivocation, I suspect, rest on a confusion between the denotation and connotations of ‘newborn’ (or ‘neonate’). Next, I show that, contra Kingma, it is clear that—under current law in the USA and UK—gestatelings would count as legal persons. Moral personhood is more difficult. On that subject, Kingma’s criticisms have merit. In response, however, I show that my original claim—that gestatelings should count as moral persons—remains true on several (common) philosophical accounts of personhood. Regarding those accounts that imply gestatelings are not moral persons, I argue that advocates face a troubling dilemma. I conclude that regardless of which view of moral personhood one adopts, questions about the moral status of gestatelings are not ‘unanswered’.