Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase
- 1 Content and Form
- 2 Anthony Trollope on Akrasia, Self-Deception and Ethical Confusion
- 3 Justifying Anachronism
- 4 The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot on the Sources of Normativity
- 5 Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound
- 6 Robert Browning, Augusta Webster and the Role of Morality
- Epilogue: Between Immersion and Critique – Thoughtful Reading
- Index
4 - The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot on the Sources of Normativity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase
- 1 Content and Form
- 2 Anthony Trollope on Akrasia, Self-Deception and Ethical Confusion
- 3 Justifying Anachronism
- 4 The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot on the Sources of Normativity
- 5 Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound
- 6 Robert Browning, Augusta Webster and the Role of Morality
- Epilogue: Between Immersion and Critique – Thoughtful Reading
- Index
Summary
In a notebook of 1876, George Eliot engages at one point in a bit of philosophical musing. The 24th page of the notebook reads thus:
The impulse of virtue
The criterion of virtue
The sanction of virtue
Of what stuff is virtue made?
How do we discriminate the genuine from the false?
By what means is the making to be stimulated?
How far is virtue knowledge, feeling, habit?
Is it to be tested by its relation to human welfare, or is it to be ascertained a priori?
Where is the scourge of the unwilling?
We see Eliot here speculating on some of the hardest questions in moral philosophy. While musing about the role of emotion in moral judgement and the tension between utilitarian and Kantian ethics, Eliot goes further and asks about the real motivational force supporting moral norms – what she calls the ‘sanction of virtue’. Of course, the rubber hits the road on this question when one asks about moral sceptics: how is it possible to persuade those who deny the existence of moral reasons? Where might one find ‘the scourge of the unwilling’?
In asking this question, Eliot was participating in the analysis of a problem that deeply worried her contemporaries. As John Stuart Mill put it, ‘The question is often asked, and properly so, in regard to any supposed moral standard […] what is the source of its obligation? Whence does it derive its binding force?’ Mill is looking for what analytic philosophers call an explanation of ‘normativity’, for an account as to how it can be true that agents are obliged to do something. Christine Korsgaard calls this ‘the normative question’; as she writes: ‘the day will come, for most of us, when what morality commands, obliges, or recommends is hard […] And then the question – why? – will press, and rightly so. Why should I be moral?’
Mill's own answer to the question was famously inadequate. He writes in Utilitarianism:
No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness.
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- Information
- Reading Ideas in Victorian LiteratureLiterary Content as Artistic Experience, pp. 140 - 172Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020