1
Introduction
The aim of normative theorizing is to establish principled ways of thinking about and
reaching answers to normative questions. The most important normative question is, of course,
“What ought I to do?” But there are other important normative questions as well. “When is
blame warranted?” requires some account of the criteria for moral responsibility and excuse from
responsibility. Related to such questions about responsibility are normative questions about the
reactive attitudes: “When is it appropriate to feel each of the self-directed reactive attitudes of
shame, guilt, pride and the like?” and “When do are other-directed attitudes such as resentment
and forgiveness warranted?” Normative theorizing should also help us to determine which
character traits are virtues, which are vices, and in what those virtues and vices consist. In short,
the task of normative theorizing is to give moral agents guidance, at the most general level, about
what to do, what kind of person to become, how to feel about their own and others’ moral
performance, and when to let themselves and others off the moral hook.
In addition to providing guidance, normative theorizing has a second, equally if not more
important function: to enable moral agents to engage in critical moral reflection and thus to
become autonomous from others’ opinions and shared social views on normative questions. One
of the central moral tasks of agents is to “get it right”—to latch on to the correct normative
principles and apply them correctly, to grasp what traits are really virtuous or vicious and not
merely thought so, to figure out what they really should feel ashamed or guilty for rather than
just what they are made to feel ashamed or guilty for. Normative theorizing, and the critical
reflective point of view it supports, supply the necessary wedge between what is commonly
taken to be so and what really is so.
2
In going about this work, how, at a most basic level is the normative moral theorist
thinking about morality? To answer that, suppose we begin by reflecting on the phrase “morality
requires . . .” which appears often enough in moral theorizing. Thinking about what morality
requires is like thinking about what justice requires. We are tempted in both cases to capitalize: it
is Morality and Justice that require. The capitalization draws attention to the fact that we are not
thinking about what people think morality or justice requires; nor are we thinking about
culturally local standards. We are thinking about real or genuine, as opposed to supposed moral
requirements. The merely supposed moral requirements that provide the contrast might be those
proposed by some moral theorist. Kant thought that morality requires exceptionless truth-telling,
but (we think) he was wrong; morality does not require that. Or the merely supposed moral
requirements might be those that a social group accepts as moral requirements. At one time in
our not so distant past, women were thought to be under the moral obligation to take their
husbands’ last name; this was a duty of love, loyalty, respect for husbandly authority. But people
were wrong; morality does not require this of women who marry.
As these remarks suggest, one central conception of morality is brought into sharpest
focus by contrasting moral requirements with what people have mistakenly supposed those
requirements to be. That contrast might then naturally lead to two additional thoughts. First, the
work of the normative moral theorist, as I suggested above, is to help us get it right—to latch
onto what morality actually requires—as well as to help us see why morality requires these
things—to latch onto the correct justification of moral requirements. Successfully doing this
work will establish when the various reactive attitudes, for example of resentment, gratitude, and
forgiveness, are appropriate and justified. It will also help to establish what actions are
blameworthy, and thus when actually blaming other people is justified.
3
The second thought that the contrast between real and supposed moral requirements
quickly leads to is that the normative moral theorists can conduct her work only by going
hypothetical. As the contrast between what morality actually requires and what people think it
requires reminds us, there is no guarantee that the set of moral requirements that the normative
moral theorist helps us to latch onto will match what real people, operating within a social
practice of morality that they accept, will see as moral requirements. So the system of capital-M
moral requirements will be, to varying degrees, hypothetical in the sense that we are imagining
the moral norms that would effectively operate as requirements in a hypothetical social world
that endorsed those norms.
By “effectively operate as requirements,” I mean that it would generally be the case that
individuals within that social world would do such things as address moral demands and
complaints to each other, feel and express resentment, blame, guilt, and pressures of conscience,
and offer excuses and justifications predicated on the acceptance of the legitimacy of those
(correct) moral norms. Although we say, “morality requires”, morality is not a person who can
issue and enforce commands. Whatever moral requiring gets done will be done by people who
require things of each other and of themselves and whose requiring activities stand a good
chance of uptake because the targets of those activities believe the demands are legitimate, or
they at least find them intelligible. Thus talk about “moral requirements” makes most sense if we
have in mind some social world where the requiring activity is to take place and receive uptake.
If we think that what actual people are morally requiring of each other is misguided and want to
talk about genuine moral requirements, then we will have to understand those requirements by
thinking about the requiring activity and uptake of that activity that would hypothetically take
place in a counterfactual social world.
4
The contrast between real and supposed moral requirements also encourages the moral
theorist to go hypothetical in a different way. Suppose we think that morality is a system of rules
that is endorsable by all because each has good reason to accept those rules. What we mean by
“endorsable” and “having reason” cannot be what particular, socially located individuals find
endorsable, nor can the good reasons be limited to the reasons that those particular, located
individuals are presently capable of recognizing as reasons. Genuine moral requirements will
have to be conceived as ones that are endorseable by all within a hypothetical social world
populated by people who are capable of accessing the good reasons that there are to endorse
those requirements.
Going hypothetical is not the same as going ideal. One of the things we might be
concerned with as moral theorists is what morality requires under nonideal conditions where
people have misguided moral conceptions and wrongdoing is conventionalized. To figure that
out, we will have to pay attention to facts about the actual social practice of morality and the
larger social world in which it takes place, facts that will include the systematic failure to do
what morality requires and systematic misconceptions that morality requires or permits
something that in fact it forbids.
Despite the need to pay attention to social facts, answers to questions about what morality
requires under nonideal conditions may still involve going hypothetical in both of the senses I
just mentioned.1 Suppose, for example, you think that the best way to produce racial equality is
1
Chapter 6, “Kant and Compliance with Conventionalized Injustice,” is an instance of nonideal
theorizing that goes hypothetical in both senses.
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through integration and that morality requires taking steps to bring about that integration.2 Given
that racial segregation in social life is thoroughly normalized and that a point of pursuing
integration is to effect conditions under which people will be less able to sustain their prejudices,
to think about integration as being morally required will involve thinking about a hypothetical
social world where the requiring activities of agents was guided by just that imperative. And in
thinking that this integration rule is justified, one would have to think about its endorseability in
a hypothetical social world of people who are capable of accessing the good reasons for
integration—reasons that many will have in the real social world only after integration is
achieved.
So far, I’ve presented this conception of morality--as genuine rather than supposed
morality--as the conception employed by normative moral theorists in order to do their work. But
of course it isn’t just employed by moral theorists. It’s the conception that everyone uses
whenever they stand back from their own social practice of morality and look with a critical,
reflective eye at what is actually being morally required (or permitted, or forbidden, or
recommended) within that social practice. A gap may then appear between what one’s fellows
generally endorse as a correct moral norm and what one thinks the moral norm ought to be. Or at
least a potential gap appears. One wonders, Is this generally accepted moral norm really correct?
Appreciating the gap, or potential gap, between socially accepted moral norms and correct moral
norms may then lead one to think about the whole of social morality in a particular way. Social
morality isn’t really morality. It is a set of social norms that individuals in a social world
generally regard and treat as moral requirements. Social norms, however, even when they
2
Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010).
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coincide with the (genuine) requirements of morality are still just that—social norms. Morality
consists in the set of genuine moral requirements (permissions, prohibitions, recommendations),
which may or may not also be embodied in the requirements of social norms.
To clarify this point: the features that make a norm a social moral norm differ from the
features that make a norm a genuine moral prescription. Most significant, answers to normative
questions within a social practice of morality get settled by achieving social agreement. And
reaching that agreement will occur through social processes of moral dispute in which
individuals stand up for their own views on moral matters without being entitled to claim
authority to have settled the question no matter how good their arguments are. In a social
practice of morality, it is collectives of people that settle moral disputes, since what is to be
established are shared understandings about what can morally be expected of fellow participants.
Among the shared understandings are broad agreements on which moral matters are still
reasonably under dispute and which may reasonably be taken to have been resolved. At one time
in U.S. history, for example, the equality of the races was a matter of social dispute. Today it is
not, even if some individuals continue to believe in racial inequality.
By contrast, moral philosophers and participants in a social practice who take up a
critically reflective point of view “settle” disputes by making up their individual minds about
what views are best supported by reasons. Of course it may be critical to consider what views
would be endorsable by all (not just by oneself) in a hypothetical world of people who have
access to the good reasons for endorsement. Even so, it is the goodness of the reasons, not the
fact of actual agreement that is doing the work. From a critical point of view, what settles a
normative question is not social agreement but the correctness of the justificatory argument. It is
this fundamental difference in how moral questions are settled that makes social moral norms
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distinctively different from genuine moral prescriptions, even when the two have the same
content.
To summarize this first conception of morality: We reach it by taking up a critical,
reflective point of view where our concern is with getting it right, that is, with latching on to
those moral rules that would be the focus of the requiring activities of persons in a hypothetical
social world populated by hypothetical agents who are capable of accessing the reasons there are
for everyone’s endorsing just this set of rules, where those rules differ in kind from social norms.
None of the remarks so far have been meant to be controversial. Indeed, they might have
the air of the obvious. The questions that interests me are: “What is the relation of the actual
social practice of morality to the capital-M conception of morality just sketched?” And “To what
extent is reflection on the content of the social practice of morality a proper part of the work of a
normative moral theorist?”
By “social practice’ of morality,” I have in mind a number of things. Most obviously, a
collection of people that “practices” morality together will develop what Margaret Walker calls
shared moral understandings about what the moral norms are, how they are to be applied, what
excuses are acceptable, who counts as a responsible agent, and the like.3 A social practice of
morality settles the same range of questions that moral philosophers aim to settle when they
engage in normative theorizing or that individuals aim to settle when they take up a critical,
reflective point of view. A social practice of morality will also involve its participants in various
requiring activities, such as demanding, blaming, shaming, and exhorting.
3
Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics, 2nd ed. (New
York, Oxford University Press, 2007).
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In thinking about the relation of the actual social practice of morality to capital-M
morality, the first thing one might note is that there is a danger of exaggerating the extent to
which the critical, reflective point of view, which aims to latch onto genuine morality, escapes
the point of view of the social practitioner of morality and thus escapes dependence on the
available shared moral understandings. Our efforts to get it right are always limited by, and draw
on, the resources provided by socially available concepts and methods of moral reasoning. The
concepts of moral obligation and the moral equality of persons haven’t always been around, nor
have consequentialist and Kantian methods of moral reasoning. If we think that our predecessors
were limited in their critical, reflective thought by the unavailability of these concepts and
methods, we should also think that we, too, may be similarly limited in our efforts to get it right
by the unavailability of concepts and methods that our successors may have. In addition, moral
philosophers’ appeal to intuitions, something that it is virtually impossible to imagine doing
entirely without, is at bottom an appeal to shared moral understandings that have emerged from a
social practice of morality.4 So here, again, critical, reflective thinking will not be entirely freed
from ties to the social practice of morality. All of this is just to say that knowledge is always
socially situated, even when we are trying our best to escape that social situatedness and gain
critical purchase on what we think we know, and that social consensus on some elements of
morality will be important to the conduct of critical reflection.
There is an accompanying danger, too, of exaggerating the extent to which critique is not
part of the social practice of morality. While there would not be a social practice of morality
4
Margaret Urban Walker pointed this out in Moral Understanding: A Feminist Study in Ethics
(New York: Routledge, 1998), 66-68. The advent of experimental philosophy has brought the
point to prominence among philosophers.
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were there not broad consensus on what the moral norms are and the reasons for endorsing them,
social practices of morality are also sites of contest and negotiation over the acceptability of
particular norms, conceptions of the virtues, standards of accountability, and so on. This will be
particularly so in complex societies where individuals move between a variety of social practices
of morality—work, family, religion, and so on—and in societies which acknowledge diversity of
moral view and value the open exchange of ideas. A critical moral point of view is relevant not
only to practitioners’ decisions about when to contest elements of social morality in an effort to
transform them, it is also relevant to their decisions to comply with and enforce social moral
requirements. Social morality has the stability it does in part because most people think that the
moral norms on which there is social consensus are in fact the correct moral norms and are
justifiable from a critical, reflective point of view.
So the distinction between supposed and genuine morality, which seems central to
understanding the work of the normative moral theorist, is also central to the position that
participants in a social practice of morality can find themselves in. On the one hand, participants
know what the social moral norms are, what they will be subjected to social shame and reproach
for, how they can (and cannot) successfully communicate important moral attitudes like respect
and toleration, which moral positions others will find disputable and which they will not, who
counts as a competent, well-formed, responsible moral agent, and the like. On the other hand,
they are well aware that social moral norms, shaming and reproaching practices, some socially
prominent arguments, and so on, may be misguided. That is, participants in a social practice of
morality are (or know that they ought to be) also critical moral thinkers about that very practice.
As critical moral thinkers, they are positioned both to describe what the social practice of
morality is and to engage in normative reflection on what it ought to be. To this extent, the
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familiar distinction between a social practice to be described and a critical normative theory to be
applied captures something about the social practice of morality itself: its practitioners are
“outsiders-within”--both insiders to a shared moral practice and critical outsiders to those social
norms they reject. In short, within the social practice of morality itself, we occupy the double
role of being participants in the practice of morality and of being autonomous individuals who
aim to latch onto the correct moral principles even if these are socially unacknowledged or
rejected.
What about our question, “To what extent is reflection on the content of the social
practice of morality a proper part of the work of the normative moral theorist?” Given the
distinction between supposed (social) morality on the one hand and genuine morality on the
other, it would seem that reflection on the social practice of morality will, at most, make an
indirect contribution to the proper work of the normative moral theorist by suggesting which
questions need to be addressed. There will, for example, likely be lacuna in the set of shared
moral norms. New social arrangements, technologies, and bio-medical advances may all raise
moral questions that shared moral understandings are ill-equipped to address. For example, who
is responsible for rectifying climate change? Who has an ownership claim to tissue samples
acquired during medical procedures? There will also be periods where shared moral
understandings are shifting under the pressure of widespread contestation that focuses attention
on the question of what our shared moral understandings should be. The charge leveled by some
social conservatives against gays and lesbians, for example, that their demands for coverage by
antidiscrimination laws amounted to claims for special rights, invited us to get clearer about the
conditions under which a social group has a legitimate claim to legal protection against
discrimination and when it does not. There are also likely to be at least some ways in which
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injustice and wrongdoing are socially conventionalized and thus rendered both invisible from
within the social practice of morality and difficult to change. Since the normative moral theorist
is also embedded in social practices of morality, the conventionalization of wrongdoing and
injustice raises questions about how normative theorists can avoid their own blind spots; and the
normalization of wrongdoing raises questions about how best to effect changes in social
understandings and practices. The work of the normative theorist in these cases is thus to
recommend supplementary norms to cover new circumstances, to adjudicate social dispute over
what the correct understandings are, and to reveal and critique widely shared moral
understandings.
In short, it would seem that the social practice of morality can appear in normative theory
only as kind of datum to be described and as that for which we need to develop correct normative
principles. Features of the social practice of morality may suggest questions for our normative
theories to address, including questions about what conceptual and methodological tools are
needed to carry off these tasks of supplementing, adjudicating, and critiquing. But neither the
fact that we actually share moral understandings in a social practice of morality nor the content
of those understandings have any importance independent of the correctness of those
understandings. What matters are the shared understandings that people would reach were they
able to access the reasons there are. In short, what has significance is the hypothetical social
practice of morality that is governed entirely by correct moral norms. Thus it is social practice
conceived as ideal and goal that has significance. The actual sharing of moral understandings
(regardless of the correctness of their content), the requiring activities and reactive attitudes that
shared understandings make possible, and the social processes involved in collective settling
upon and contestation of shared understandings, have no moral importance in themselves.
12
It might seem that that is exactly the right conclusion to reach. If morality concerns what
we ought to do, require, and feel, then getting it right is what matters. Actually sharing moral
understandings in a real world practice of morality has no independent importance. But notice an
implication of this view. That we actually do share moral understandings is, as I suggested
earlier, what makes effective requiring activities, and thus moral requirements, possible. Those
requiring activities include the addressing of moral demands, expressing resentment, reproaching
and blaming, and relatedly, offering excuses and justifications in response to the demands,
resentments, reproachings, and blamings. The success of these requiring activities depends on
the existence of shared understandings about their bases. I cannot effectively make a moral
demand on you that is not intelligible to you as a moral demand. This doesn’t mean you must
agree with me. So long as the demand is intelligible as the sort of demand people do make, I put
you in the position of needing to respond to that demand with either an excuse, or a justification,
or a defense of an alternative view. There is a real sense in which the social practice of morality,
whatever its imperfections may be, is the only moral game in town.
Given this, one might wonder whether the conception of capital-M morality that led us to
assign no independent importance to the social practice of morality is the right one. One of the
effects of focusing on the task of getting it right, and thereby latching onto genuine as opposed to
merely supposed morality, is to focus our attention on what moral philosophers do: develop the
tools for correct moral deliberation (for example, versions of Kantian or consequentialist
theories), specify what particular virtues consist in, work out accounts of what responsibility
consists in and under what conditions individuals can be held accountable, argue for particular
normative principles, and the like. Morality appears to be centrally a matter of moral knowledge,
as Margaret Walker stresses in her extraordinary and oddly neglected (outside feminist circles)
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book, Moral Understandings. Walker dubs this knowledge-oriented conception of morality the
“theoretical-juridical model of ethics.” In her words, it is a conception on which “Moral
philosophy has as its central aim the discovery/construction, testing, comparison, and refinement
of moral theories…which exhibit the essential core of a pure or proper moral knowledge, in
distinction from merely collateral practical, psychological, sociological, anthropological,
historical, etc. (i.e., merely factual, nonmoral) information.”5
Walker pursues a number of important critiques of this model both of morality and moral
philosophy. But what interests me here is the alternative conception of morality she proposes,
which she calls the “expressive-collaborative view.” That view “supplies instead the picture of
morality as social negotiation in real time, where members of a community of roughly or largely
shared moral belief try to refine understandings, extend consensus, and eliminate conflict among
themselves. ‘We’ are the members of some actual moral community, motivated by the aim of
going on together, preserving or building self-and mutual understanding in moral terms.”6
This is, in her view, what morality really is. Morality on this conception, we might say, is not
only about the shared moral understandings and the social processes that produce, contest, and
refine them. It is also an actual, rather than hypothetical, scheme of social cooperation that is
enacted in real time. And morality is, perhaps most importantly, embodied not in what people
know but in what they do and feel in light of that knowledge. It is a matter of how we actually
treat each other, the things we do to hold each other to account, and the moral sentiments we feel
and express. It is also a matter of the moral identities we actually come to have for others, not
merely our private self-conception of our character traits. If we ask ourselves why we care about
5
Walker, Moral Understanding, 37.
6
Ibid., 64-65.
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acquiring moral knowledge—getting it right—it is not for the sake of simply having that
knowledge (of having an action guide in our back pocket, as it were). It is because we live and
interact with other people and we need to find a collective way of doing this well.
Like Walker, Barbara Herman emphasizes that “A reasonable morality is well-integrated
into ordinary living, not something we are endlessly at war with (like a diet), nor a distant goal
toward which we direct substantial amounts of energy.”7 On the contrary, in her view, a central
function of morality is to secure routine action in everyday life. That function is possible only if
there is an existent local practice of morality into which agents are morally educated, resulting in
moral values being “seamlessly” integrated into the structure of desire and perception being
attuned to morally relevant facts. Routine moral performance depends on individuals’ acquiring
moral literacy in a social practice-- a “moral intelligence that can read and respond to moral
facts, incorporating their evaluative import into a shared way of life.”8 One expects the normal
moral adult to be morally confident about acting in everyday life, a confidence that depends on
her experiencing “no profound rupture between her own moral sensibility and the moral norms
that govern her social world.”9
The conception of morality I sketched earlier is not entirely divorced from the idea that
morality is centrally a shared cooperative scheme. Nor is it entirely divorced from the idea that
participants in that scheme must be able to see reason to endorse it. But as I said earlier, the aim
7
Barbara Herman, “Morality and Everyday Life,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association 74, no. 2 (2000): 29-45, 31.
8
Barbara Herman, Moral Literacy. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Delivered at
Stanford University April 23-24, 1997, 372. http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/lecture-library.php#g
9
Herman, “Morality and Everyday Life,” 37.
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of getting it right forces us to go hypothetical about that cooperative scheme, the participants in
it, and their process of negotiating an agreement. That move to the hypothetical, however
necessary it may be to our envisioning an ideal practice of morality has the unfortunate side
effect of obscuring an important point: there are no shared cooperative schemes, no treatments of
others, no moral identities, no reactive attitudes that effectively hold people responsible—other
than in actual social practices of morality. The social practice of morality is, to repeat, the only
game town. Absent a social practice, there is no morality, although there might be moral
knowledge. This is why I have been pressing on the oddity of thinking that actual shared
understandings, actual processes of negotiating agreements, and actual requiring activities are
not significant in their own right.
What Walker and Herman propose, and what is central to this book, is a second
conception of what genuine, capital-M morality is. It is a conception shaped not by the aim of
getting it right or the contrast between correct and supposed moral requirements. It is a
conception shaped by the moral aim of engaging with each other on shared terms. It is also
shaped by a different contrast--not that between correct and supposed, but rather, the contrast
between actual and hypothetical social practices. If practices based on misguided moral norms
seem not to be genuine morality under the first conception, merely hypothetical practices seem
not to be the genuine article under the second conception.
To summarize this second conception of morality as I see it: We rely on this conception
of morality insofar as we are practitioners in an actual social practice of morality where our
concern is with making what we are morally up to and who we morally are intelligible to others,
reaching shared moral understandings, and communicating moral attitudes and demands to coparticipants.
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Return now to the questions I posed earlier: “What is the relation of the actual social
practice of morality to capital-M morality?” And “To what extent is reflection on the content of
the social practice of morality a proper part of the work of a normative moral theorist?” The
response suggested by this second conception of morality is that the social practice of morality
just is capital-M morality. It is what has claim to the title of being genuine morality. The
hypothetical practice of morality governed by hypothetical agreements is not morality at all. This
is, as I understand her view, Walker’s position. “Morality needs to be seen as something existing,
however imperfectly, in real human social spaces in real time, not something ideal or noumenal
in character.”10 Reflection on the content of the social practice of morality is what normative
moral theorizing should be about. The theorist is not to begin by ignoring actual social practices
of morality, including those that shape the theorist’s own thought, in order to construct an ideal
normative standard to then be applied in evaluating actual practices. The task, on Walker’s view,
is to start with a rich, empirically informed description of some actual social practice and then
test “whether moral understandings really are intelligible and coherent to those who enact them,
whether they are similarly so from diverse points of view within them, and whether they are the
kinds of understandings that can be so.”11
How are we to choose between these two conceptions of capital-M morality? The
difficulty is that neither by itself seems entirely satisfactory. Consider, first, the unhappy
implications of the first conception. If we insist that what matters is determination of and action
on the correct moral standards, then our advice to all individual agents must be to focus on
getting it right (in thought and action). Individuals are not barred from caring about what others
10
Ibid., 18.
11
Walker, 11.
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think; indeed, if they care about getting it right, then they ought to care that others do so as well
and so ought to be interested in persuading others to the correct views. They are also not barred
from factoring in others’ moral misconceptions in deciding how to proceed; indeed, getting it
right extends to getting it right under non-ideal conditions. But there will be limits to how far one
can accommodate others’ different moral views and still claim to aim at getting it right. At some
point, commitment to getting it right will entail being willing to incur others’ incomprehension,
contempt, resentment, unwillingness to stay in dialogue, and the like. In particular, one must be
prepared to buy out of the social practice of morality and do and think about things differently
from others. Since the injunction to get it right applies to all agents, one must also be prepared
for others to buy out of the social practice of morality at whatever junctures it seems to them that
capital-M morality requires this. At the limit, one must be prepared for there to be no social
practice of morality.
Being prepared to buy out of the social practice of morality when one thinks it wrong
may seem admirably high-minded. It will seem especially so if one focuses on cases where a
largely well-functioning social practice of morality seems obviously misguided on some limited
dimension. You might, for example, think that our social practice, while getting many features of
morality right, is misguided on the question of whether it is permissible to purchase meat in
grocery stores. Buying out of the social practice of morality at this particular juncture may,
indeed, be admirably high-minded. But notice how focusing critically on isolated imperfections
in—and opportunities for high-mindedness in response to--a social practice of morality allows us
to continue tacitly taking for granted the importance of there being a larger, background social
practice of morality and to evade thinking about how much we depend on it in order to do much
of anything connected with morality at all—make demands, offer counsel, present excuses,
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justify our choices, express moral attitudes to others, have an identity as a kind or honest person,
get uptake on our resentments and the like. In addition, because such criticisms typically proceed
on the assumption that (some) others share our objections to this feature of our social practice,
we are able to evade thinking about what a loss to one’s moral life it would be were one unable
to find others who agree with, or at least find intelligible, one’s objections and alternative ways
of living.
What I am suggesting here is that socially critical normative theorizing that assumes that
genuine morality consists in the correct set of norms is guilty of taking out an unacknowledged
loan on the social practice of morality. It simply takes for granted the importance of there being
an actual social practice of morality--complete with shared moral understandings that enable
moral theorists to make their criticisms intelligible--while at the same time working with a
conception of capital-M morality that rejects the importance of the (imperfect) actual in favor of
the (correct) hypothetical.
Annette Baier was the first to observe how normative theorizing takes out
unacknowledged loans.12 She argued that contractarian moral theory has to “take out a loan” on
the loving parental care and socialization of children that produces people who are willing to
trust other people, to take morality seriously, thus to contract with each other and abide by the
terms of the contract. Contractarian moral theory has to assume a natural duty of parental care
that it cannot afford to acknowledge. My point here is a similar one: what is unsatisfying about
using the first conception of morality is that we then cannot afford to acknowledge that the
12
I take the idea that moral theory has to take out a loan from Annette Baier, Annette C. Baier,
“What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory?” Nous 19, no. 1 (1985): 53-63.
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actuality of a social practice of morality, independently of whether the practice “gets it right,”
matters.
Equally unsatisfying—and surely more obviously so for moral philosophers, who are
concerned with identifying correct moral principles—is the second conception of capital-M
morality as nothing but social morality. One shouldn’t, of course, exaggerate the lack of
resources for critical reflection within a social practice of morality. There might be, for example,
widespread familiarity with a diversity of moral practices (family, work, political) as well as
shared higher order moral concepts and methods of moral reasoning that can usefully be drawn
on to engage in critique both of and from within a social practice.13 But there will be limits to
how divergent from generally shared understandings one can be in one’s moral thinking and
action and still claim to be operating within the social practice of morality. At some point, taking
the social practice of morality seriously will entail being unwilling to incur others’
incomprehension, contempt, resentment, unwillingness to stay in dialogue, and the like. If you
think that capital-M morality is like a legal system—it exists only so long as there is in fact a
shared scheme of cooperation—there will be a point where deviance from the scheme is not just
a violation of it but inconsistent with commitment to having such a scheme at all.
Here again there is a danger of focusing on misleading cases that make it difficult to see
the unsatisfactoriness of the particular conception of morality. When there has been substantial
progress in a social practice of morality—for example in shared understandings concerning
same-sex sexuality and marriage—retrospective, historical stories about how we were able to get
13
Michelle Moody-Adams, “The Idea of Moral Progress,” Metaphilosophy 30, no. 3 (1999):
168-185, argues that such resources will indeed be available given the semantic depth of
fundamental moral notions.
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conceptually to the enlightened here-now from the unenlightened there-then invite us to think
about morally progressive historical actors as latching onto what are obviously more defensible
moral views. From our present perspective, the improvement in moral thinking is indeed
obvious. And because what enlightened historical actors thought and did fits comfortably with
our moral practice now, we are able to evade thinking about the lack of fit between what those
historical actors did and thought and their own social practice of morality. Because the story is
told from the perspective of greater knowledge, it is difficult to grasp what it was like for
historical actors in their own, historical practice within which these morally progressive views
were not obvious and conflicted with what “everyone knew” at the time. Retrospective stories
thus obscure how little connection there may be at any particular historical moment between the
right views and the social practice of morality. In doing so, they allow us to evade thinking about
the reasonableness of co-practitioners’ rejecting individual efforts to “get it right” because the
conceptual resources for recognizing that individuals have indeed gotten it right are generally
unavailable. In short, the unsatisfactoriness of (nonevasively) using this second conception of
morality is that it is overly deferential to the content of the social practice of morality.
It is easy, both as moral philosophers or as social practitioners, to overlook the fact that
we rely on two very different conceptions of morality, commitment to the importance of which
has the potential to pull us rather seriously in different, and equally unsatisfying, directions. That
we overlook the bifurcation between morality as correct action guide and morality as effective
(because actual) scheme of social cooperation is due to an entirely contingent circumstance. In
point of fact, questions about what the moral views would be arise on the backdrop of a social
practice of morality whose general correctness we assume; so we never have to confront the
implications that the conception of morality appropriate to the aim of getting it right has for the
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importance we are entitled to attach to actually being able to do morality with others. We never
have to go fully hypothetical in our conception of morality as a shared scheme of social
cooperation. In addition, in point of fact, our social negotiations with others over moral norms
typically have the character of entering an already on-going fray where there are established
opposing viewpoints that are familiar and intelligible to everyone; so we never have to confront
the implications that the conception of morality appropriate to the aim of sharing a practice of
morality with others has for the importance we are entitled to attach to the aim of getting it right.
We never have to go fully social in our conception of morality, acknowledging that not all
attempts to get it right can be intelligible within the current social practice of morality.
In short, contingent features about the context in which moral questions are raised create
an illusion. The illusion is that there is no problem requiring a solution in being committed to the
importance of getting it right, with the commitment to going hypothetical that this entails and at
the same time being committed to really enacting morality, with the commitment to going actual
that that entails. Suppose, now, that we want to get beyond these illusions What then? Picking
just one or the other conception of morality is, for the reasons I’ve suggested unsatisfying.
The third option is simply to acknowledge that there are two legitimate and important
conceptions of capital-M morality neither one of which is dispensable. That is because we have
two moral aims. On the one hand, we want to get it right. Both as normative moral theorists and
as critically reflective practitioners, the distinction between what morality really requires and
what it is supposed, by some or many, to require is an important one. And thinking in terms of a
hypothetical social practice is valuable for that purpose. On the other hand, we want to be
practitioners of morality, which requires our being located and literate in, as well as taking
seriously, the shared moral understandings of a social practice. If both are important conceptions
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of genuine morality, then both should be the proper business of the normative moral theorist. But
exactly how is that to be accomplished? How is the moral theorist to go about working
simultaneously with two such different conceptions of capital-M morality?
The place to begin is, I think, to focus on cases where the two conceptions are in sharpest
and most painful tension. Those are not cases where we—critically reflective individuals—are
spectators on some moral practice which isn’t our own (e.g., the moral practice of another
culture, or a different religion, or a profession that isn’t hers). Rather, the painful tensions arise
when the participant in her own social practice of morality—a practice in which she is held to
account by others, has to make what she is morally up to intelligible to others, and bears a (good
or bad) moral identity for others—has come, in virtue of her critical moral reflection, to disagree
with some part of that practice and to act contrary to it. If we pay careful attention to what it is
like for those who occupy this uncomfortable position of being, in some respect, outsiders within
the only moral game in their town, we can begin to see how a normative moral theorist might go
about building into her theorizing an acknowledgment of the importance of the social practice of
morality.
This is what I do in the two essays in Part I. The project is not to construct some
overarching theory or methodology for handling the two conceptions of morality. The project
instead is to provide case studies of that work being done. Both essays focus on developing new
moral concepts or refining old ones so that it is possible to articulate what is going on in the
moments of tension between the critical reflective point of view and the point of view of the
participant who takes her moral practice seriously. The central new concepts developed in these
chapters are those of moral failure in virtue of getting it right within a social practice that gets it
wrong (chapter 1) and the non-epistemic notion of the practical weight that co-participants’
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moral assessments can have for each other even when they regard those assessments as
misguided (chapter 2). I also argue that we need to revise our conception of a moral mature and
autonomous agent so that it can accommodate the importance that both getting it right and taking
the social practice of morality seriously have for agents (chapter 2).
Second, we can look for places where our account of moral requirements or of moral
virtues would be improved if, instead of thinking that the social practice of morality is irrelevant
to specifying the content of those moral requirements or virtues, we instead tested the opposite
assumption: the content of shared moral understandings directly determines what those norms or
virtues are. The essays in Part II are all case studies in taking this approach. First, I argue that we
get an improved account of the virtue of civility and the way civility norms operate if we think
about how civility functions in our moral practice with others (chapter 3). I begin with what is
likely to seem an uncontroversial way that normative moral theorizing needs to accommodate
shared moral understandings: sometimes what we need to do morally is communicate moral
attitudes—in this case, attitudes of respect, consideration, and tolerance. We can do that only by
relying on a shared behavioral language for doing so—namely, the “respectful,” “considerate,”
and “tolerant” behaviors required by social norms of civility. Furthermore, we get an improved
account of the bounds of civility if we give up the idea that the viewpoints and behaviors that are
not owed a civil response are to be determined by reference to some critical moral viewpoint.
Philosophical work on civility typically sets the bounds of civility by arguing that some views
and behaviors have gotten things so morally wrong that they do not deserve a civil response. A
critical function of civility norms, however, is to keep dialogue afloat long enough to resolve
moral disputes. Civility norms cannot serve that function if individuals are left free to set the
bounds of civility by appealing to their own conceptions of what it would be correct to dignify
24
with a civil response and what it would not. Instead, civility norms can serve their dialogue
supporting and dispute resolving function only if the bounds of civility are set by appeal to social
consensus on what falls within and what falls outside the bounds of civility. Thus the content of
both normative prescriptions for civil speech and action as well normative permissions not to
dignify with a civil response is directly determined by the social practice of morality.
We can also get an improved account of the puzzling features of common decencies if
we work from the assumption that shared moral understandings play a role in determining which
actions count as common decencies (chapter 4). The category of common decencies is puzzling
because common decencies don’t seem to fit either the category of the obligatory or the category
of the supererogatory. Holding doors open for others, making pleasant conversation, and
forgiving minor moral errors, for instance, do not fit the model for obligatory actions such as
keeping promises or telling the truth. But nor do these common decencies fit the model of
supererogatory actions whose nonperformance is not criticizable. The puzzle can be solved, I
suggest, by noting that any social practice of morality will have to have some conception of what
a minimally well-formed moral agent is like. That conception will include a conception of which
“moral gifts” a minimally well-formed agent can be normatively expected to elect and thus
criticized for not electing. Social practices of morality determine which elective acts qualify as
common decencies. They do so in part because have shared social expectations about what a
minimally well-formed agent will elect to do for others contributes to those expected actions
being obviously good and motivationally non-taxing to do. So here, too, as in the case of civility,
the social practice of morality directly determines the content of normative claims.
Finally, we can get an improved account of integrity if we give up the exclusive
concentration on the connection between having integrity and being committed to living
25
according to what one regards as the correct evaluative views (chapter 5). The aim of the essay is
not to severe the connection between having integrity and getting it right but instead to draw
attention to why it is important within a social practice of morality to have people who think
carefully about how to get it right and who are willing to stand before others for their own best
judgment. Integrity is not just a personal virtue but a social virtue that includes being mindful of
the place of affirming one’s own best judgment among co-practitioners who aim collectively to
get it right. One of the disadvantages of linking integrity exclusively to agents’ efforts to get it
right, I argue, is that the various ways of doing so end up reducing integrity to something with
which it is not equivalent—to the conditions of unified agency, to the conditions for continuing
as the same self, and to the conditions for not cooperating with evil. By contrast, we can get an
account of the distinctive nature of the virtue of integrity by focusing on the social function of
that virtue.
Third, we can pay special attention to theorizing non-ideal conditions where misguided
moral understandings have been socially conventionalized. Sometimes actions and dispositions
that in fact satisfy correct standards of what morality requires appear within the social practice of
morality to be morally criticizable. The essays in Part I, examine these kinds of cases, focusing
on what it is like for individuals aiming to get it right in social contexts where right action elicits
resentment and shaming treatment, and where the individuals who are striving to act correctly
fail to be able to make what they are morally up to intelligible to co-practitioners. Under nonideal conditions it can also be the case that actions and dispositions that fail correct standards of
what morality requires appear within the social practice of morality to be morally permissible or
obligatory. Wrongdoing is conventionalized. The pair of essays in Part III take up this latter
26
phenomenon, focusing particularly on what it is like for individuals immersed in the assumptions
of their social practice of morality.
One problem, faced acutely by moral philosophers, is to find some method for detecting
conventionalized wrongdoing and for explaining what makes it wrong (chapter 6). Since getting
it right involves going hypothetical and imagining what moral norms would be endorsed within a
hypothetical social practice of morality, we need guidance on how exactly going hypothetical is
to be conducted. Given that many social practices of morality involve some level of
conventionalized wrongdoing that is rationalized by cultural ideologies and culturally available
knowledges and given that socialization into social practices of morality aim to produce general
acceptance of and compliance with those practices, we cannot go hypothetical merely by
imagining individuals who are better reasoners. As a test case, I explore how Kant’s
universalizability test—his Categorical Imperative procedure—would need to be revised in order
to be able to detect and explain what is wrong with forms of wrongdoing that are socially
conventionalized. The idea is to try to construct a procedure that does not implicitly assume that
we, moral philosophers, already know what social practices are morally misguided and then
simply articulate why similarly enlightened parties to a hypothetical social practice would agree
with us.
Focusing on what it is like for social participants most of whose moral knowledge is
derived from their social practice and is simply what “everyone knows,” raises difficult questions
about when individuals can be held responsible for conventionalized wrongdoing and what the
relation is between responsibility assessments and the blaming practices by which we hold
individuals responsible and encourage them to improve their moral performance (chapter 7). In
addressing those questions, it is useful to keep front and center the social function of blaming. If
27
it turns out, as I argue that it does, that individuals can sometimes be exempted for behaving
badly because their social practice of morality does not enable them to discern the wrongfulness
of their behavior, then the warrant for blaming cannot be exclusively agent culpability without
undermining the social function of blaming. In emphasizing the point or function of moral
phenomena, such as blaming, chapter 7 uses a methodological approach that was central also to
chapters 3 and 5, which explored the social function of civility norms and the virtue of integrity.
As in some of the book’s earlier chapters (especially chapters 2 and 3), I do not attempt to
resolve in chapter 7 the tension between the conception of morality as correct action guide and
the conception of morality as effective scheme of social cooperation. In discussing civility, for
example, I leave unresolved how to handle cases where we cannot simultaneously correctly treat
people with respect and communicate attitudes of respect. In chapter 7, I leave unresolved how
to handle cases where we cannot simultaneously exempt from responsibility those who deserve
to be exempted and preserve the point of holding people responsible via our blaming practices.
Fourth, we can shift from an exclusive focus in moral theorizing from developing correct
action guides to developing the conceptual resources for describing the full range of moral
transactions between people within social practices of morality. Not all of our transactions, for
example, fit the model of wrongdoing agent-resentful patient and rightdoing agent-appreciative
patient. There are also interesting ways in which we mediate between agents on the one hand and
their own actions, their reactive attitudes, and the patients of their actions on the other hand.
The pair of essays in Part IV examine this different sort of transaction. In a very short
essay, I explore the phenomenon of emotional work and the mediator-centered role that we
occupy while doing it (chapter 8). In chapter 9, I take up the mediating work involved in
aspirational forgiveness—that is, forgiveness offered to culpable, unrepentant wrongdoing. We
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can elect to tell the kind of story for those who treat us badly that makes possible forgiving those
who deserve to suffer the reactive attitude of resentment. In doing so, we mediate between the
wrongdoer and the patient who happens to be us. This closing chapter on forgiveness also
suggests another way we could think more broadly about the full range of moral transactions that
take place within social practices of morality. Sometimes life is morally unfair. Individuals may
acquire histories of failed moral interactions, for example being repeatedly denied the “moral
gifts” I discuss in chapter 4 and repeatedly receiving morally bad treatment. I briefly introduce
the notion of “making biographical sense” of one’s moral history as a way to capture
considerations other than “getting it right” that may enter into individuals’ moral decisionmaking.
As this last comment suggests, this closing chapter puts front and center a project that I
think is important for moral theorists to take up and that is implicit in some of the earlier
chapters. It is not the standard project of developing the tools for and carrying out assessments,
critiques, and the making of moral prescriptions. It is instead the project of developing the
conceptual tools for understanding—especially sympathetically understanding—the difficulties
that individuals face in their efforts to get it right while simultaneously practicing morality with
others.