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Moral Sanity or ‘Who Killed Boy Staunton’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Steven Burns
Steven Burns*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, CanadaB3H 3J5
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Extract

Kathryn Morgan’s paper, ‘Women and Moral Madness,’ is a rich compound of example and analysis, which deserves to be influential in moral theory. My rejoinder can be understood as having one main point. I take her analysis of moral madness to be profoundly helpful, and I claim that it implies an understanding of the human person which can be made more precise if we also pay attention to moral sanity. My paper, then, accepts Morgan’s work as fundamental, and attempts to contribute to its further development. I begin with some preliminary observations before proposing my main idea. My subtitle identifies an example which illustrates the main point, and concludes the paper.

Type
II—Critiques: Science, Ethics and Method
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 13: Science, Morality & Feminist Theory , 1987 , pp. 227 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1987

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References

1 ‘Women and Moral Madness’ was read by Kathryn Pauly Morgan to the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association, in Winnipeg in May, 1986 and is reprinted in this volume. I shall use page numbers in parentheses to refer to the version of her paper here reprinted. The present essay is a revised version of my contribution to the symposium discussion of Morgan’s paper.

2 Anscombe, G.E.M. ‘Modern Moral Philosophy,’ Philosophy 43 (1958)Google Scholar

3 ‘Moral Integrity’ and The Universalizability of Moral Judgments/among other papers in Winch, PeterEthics and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1972)Google Scholar

4 See, especially, Murdoch, IrisThe Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1970)Google Scholar

5 E.g., Williams, BernardMoral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar This builds on much earlier work; compare the 1965 inaugural lecture, ‘Morality and the Emotions,’ reprinted in Williams, BernardProblems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973) 207-29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 I am thinking, especially, of recent, unpublished papers by Mullett, Sheila and Sherwin, Susan butcf. Hintikka, M. and Harding, S. eds., Discovering Reality: New Perspectives on Women and Philosophy (Dordrecht: Reidel 1983),Google Scholar and Gould, C. ed., Beyond Domination: New Perspectives on Women and Philosophy (Toto-wa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld 1984).Google Scholar

7 ‘In Western civilization the Jew is always measured on scales which do not fit him,’ wrote Wittgenstein in Culture and Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1980), 16. Rush Rhees briefly discusses the analogy with measuring women on scales which do not fit, in ‘Postscript’ to Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, Rhees, R. ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1981), 206.Google Scholar This should not be read apart from its context, 191-231.

8 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section VIII (in the edition by Selby-Bigge, L.A. [Oxford: Clarendon Press 1966] 266).Google Scholar

9 Beauvoir, Simone deThe Ethics of Ambiguity, tr. Frechtman, Bernard (New York: Citadel Press 1964);Google ScholarSartre, Jean-PaulBeing and Nothingness, tr. Barnes, Hazel (New York: Citadel Press 1964),Google Scholar especially III:l:iv The Look.’

10 In discussion, Professor Jan Narveson raised the following question: Is it not an implication of Morgan’s paper that males should be less happy than females, and is there any reason to think that American males are not unhappier than their female counter-parts? American sociologists claim to have such evidence, but my reply is that Morgan’s paper is not about unhappiness but about moral madness. Narveson should ask whether there is not moral madness among males; I think that he might find analogous contradictions, double-binds, and so on. I would argue that such evidence would support, rather than undermine, the imperative to be suspicious of traditional moral theory and to pursue the issues raised in Morgan’s ‘prolegomena.’

I have since read Annette Baier’s splendid ‘Trust and Antitrust’ (Ethics 96 [1986] 231-260), in which she characterizes what I here call the ideal of the ‘self-made man’ as a case of ‘adolescent self-assertive individualism.’ This fine rhetorical inversion of Kohlberg merely hints at the useful work she has done on the underlying conception of the morally mature self.

11 There is also the answer of the Cabal: By the usual five, ‘himself first of all, by the woman he knew, and the woman he did not know, by the man who granted his inmost wish, and the inevitable fifth, keeper of his conscience and keeper of the stone.’ But what I say does not conflict with that account.

12 In the account given by Eisengrim at the end of World of Wonders Staunton is deeply shaken by the discovery that Ramsay had harboured the stone and that he was never just the compromised friend which he had seemed to be.

13 It is of further interest that according to Eisengrim’s final account, Staunton casts his self-recognition in interpersonal terms; he identifies with his political hero, King Edward VIII (Duke of Windsor), so that he now sees abdication not externally as an unfortunate event, but as his own fate.