PEA Soup is pleased to host another book discussion, as Erin Kelly (Tufts University) looks at Stephen Darwall‘s recent book The Heart and its Attitudes, putting the book into conversation with Émile Durkheim’s fascinating book, Moral Education.
Heartfelt Connection and Broken-Heartedness
Erin I. Kelly, Tufts University
This comment concerns the role of empathy and love in ethics, as described in Stephen Darwall’s book, The Heart and its Attitudes.1 Darwall’s previous writings on morality have focused primarily on the role within morality of attitudes of the will, understood as reactive attitudes—respect, resentment, blame, and guilt—that arise in relations between moral equals. As he sees it, attitudes of the will express morality’s deontic or juridical character, representing claims each person has the moral authority to make on others. Darwall’s Kantian view is that this equal moral authority stems from personhood as such, and that morality essentially involves the authority to hold one another to account. He follows P. F. Strawson in maintaining that the practice of accountability is mediated by reactive attitudes, understood as natural responses to the fulfillment or disappointment of the moral claims we each have the authority to make on others to be treated with dignity and equal respect.(3) Reactive attitudes of the will implicitly address these justified claims and hold their objects accountable for meeting them.(135)
The Heart and its Attitudes expands Darwall’s account of the moral attitudes to include what he categorizes as attitudes of the heart—hurt feelings, remorse, forgiveness, love, and gratitude. He argues that attitudes of the heart are important components of ethical life, yet, in contrast with attitudes of the will, they are not deontic. They respond not to what we rightfully claim of other people but what we have reason to hope for—namely, heartfelt connection and a sense that we are worthy of love, possibilities that are realized when people care about and open themselves to each other as the particular persons we happen to be and could be together.
What unifies the reactive attitudes—of the will and the heart—according to Darwall, is their reciprocating structure.(33) Each reaches out to another person and invites a response. Darwall describes this call-and-response characteristic of reactive attitudes as “second personal,” an aspect he treats as a signature of morality. But why exactly does the mutual responsiveness of attitudes of the heart place them in the realm of the ethical? Clearly vulnerability and heartfelt connection are important to personal relationships. But what makes them important to morality? In fact, there is some reason to be wary. Personal attachments can be at odds with moral concern. Love and friendship sometimes lead lovers and friends to disregard the rightful interests and moral standing of persons outside of the relationship. In other words, the lover or friend might place morally costly and unjustifiable priority on the interests of the beloved. So how should we understand ethical relationships to call upon the heart without threatening morality’s impartiality?
One possibility is that morality does not actually depend on the mutual vulnerability and sharing involved in shared heartfelt experience. After all, Darwall makes it clear that heartfelt connection is not morally required. Perhaps, then, following the heart is better thought of as a way some people come to experience the concern for others that enables them to discharge their moral duties. Personal concern for others might be thought to fortify moral respect. Or maybe it prepares us to be open to what morality demands. Yet Darwall seems reluctant to demote the role of the heart to an auxiliary moral status, supplementing and supporting morality’s requirements on the will. Instead, he is drawn to the idea that attitudes of the will and heart correspond to “two fundamental sources of ethical motivation,”(33) a point he elaborates as follows: “there are two different senses in which we can do things for someone’s sake. We can act for them and their sake out of love and also out of respect.”(6) So, what do these two sources of motivation each tell us about the nature of morality? How does each source of motivation enable, expand, or deepen ethical life?
To explore possible answers, I will draw from Emile Durkheim’s lectures on moral education, which are rich in philosophical ideas. Like Darwall, Durkheim describes morality as appearing to us under a double aspect. Both aspects speak to us, but in different ways.2 On the one hand, Durkheim observes, we experience the imperatives of morality as a kind of discipline. We are bound by morality’s rules and recognize its authority over us. In this sense, it can feel like an external constraint though, in fact, it expresses the demands of our nature. On the other hand, we feel the attractions of moral community in the form of an attachment, namely, to a social group. We conceive society “as a thing desirable and good, such as a goal which attracts us, an ideal to be realized.”3 The attachment we form is a loving one, in the spirit of gratitude, to society, which appears as a cherished being to which we give ourselves.4
Durkheim relates these two aspects of morality to the overall function of morality, which is to organize and enhance social life. Discipline and attachment are two sides of what is required to maintain the viability of society. Both are necessary. The spirit of discipline motivates us to submit to the moral law out of respect for other people or, more specifically, out of deference to “the judgment of the group.”5 The spirit of love and gratitude motivates us to cherish society as a collective accomplishment. Otherwise put, the attitudes of the heart attach us to a group, and the will of the collective organizes and disciplines our commitment to it. Durkheim is clear, however, that in neither respect—discipline nor attachment—should moral motivation be reduced to acting for the sake of others. In his view, deference to the interests of other people is no better, morally speaking, than prioritizing our own interests: “If my particular interests are not worth anything so far as moral conduct is concerned, how can it be otherwise with my fellows’ idiosyncratic interests, which are in no way superior to mine?”6 In fact, even “the sum of all such interests, however numerous they may be, must also be devoid of morality.”7 Thus, “the judgment of the group” cannot be reduced to the interests of any faction or the aggregate. Morality’s attention includes but goes beyond the particular self or others. It belongs to the “we” of a relationship. It involves thinking about and responding to “the conditions of collective existence”—what enables us, together, to flourish.8 Morality begins where and when social life begins.9
Durkheim arrives at this conclusion by observing collective sentiments, beliefs, and tendencies, and the power they have for us, something he refers to as “the collective conscience.”10 The collective conscience represents our experience of the shared attitudes of approval and disapproval that signify the impact of individual actions on collective life. The centrality of these shared sentiments to morality resonates with the emphasis in Darwall’s Strawsonian naturalism on morally reactive attitudes as forms of mutual recognition within a relational morality. As Durkheim understands our moral psychology, and Darwall seems to agree, the reactive attitudes integrate the workings of the heart and the will such that they together enhance social life. The full span of reactive attitudes—mindful and heartfelt—facilitates our loving attachment to a collective and our willful acceptance of the laws, norms, and rituals that structure it. Still, as I have indicated, Darwall is more circumspect in his description of morality’s calls to the heart, perhaps because his theory of moral psychology bears a stronger affinity to Kant’s.
Durkheim criticizes Kant for turning the dual sources of moral motivation into a dualism in our nature—a bifurcation of ourselves into rational and nonrational parts, with the nonrational part rendering principles of reason obligatory for us. He observes, correctly, that for Kant, “obligation becomes an accidental quality of the moral law, for if we were purely rational it would be no constraint on us.”11 According to Kant, a purely rational being would spontaneously conform to the dictates of morality, for such a being would experience no natural incentives to the contrary. In contrast to Kant, Durkheim maintains that the need we have to discipline ourselves to recognize the authority of morality and to respect the rightful claims of other people does not result from a need to constrain the influence of the laws of nature upon our sensibilities. It stems, more specifically, from the demands of social life, which constrain the principles of practical reason as well as the inclinations. “Our whole nature,” he says, “has the need to be limited, contained, restricted—our reason as well as our senses.”12
I think what Durkheim means by saying that our reason as well as our senses must be limited is that what’s morally required and permissible will be shaped by the contingencies of culture and history, which influence social life and its character. We are not attached directly to the universal dimensions of morality. Our attachments are to embodied social groups, with historically rooted collective sensibilities. These attachments both animate and constrain our moral judgments by requiring that morality be sensitive to what people expect, count on, celebrate, and hope for together, dynamics that are informed by a society’s collective rituals, cultural values, and historically shaped identity. As any culturally aware person will acknowledge or, for that matter, any thoughtful person who spends time in another society knows—what informs collective sentiments is morally relevant, even though it is not always overriding, and we cannot grasp the relevance of this information simply by considering the requirements of rational agency. Durkheim insists that our grasp of the “general interests of humanity” is always in dialogue with a society’s own character, temperament, and history.13 We extrapolate from what we observe about what does and does not nourish social life, and the ideals we formulate are never fully universal.
Thus, according to Durkheim, our empirical nature as social creatures guides our moral sensibilities. Kant’s mistake, stemming from his determination to maintain reason’s autonomy from the senses, was to postulate that the rational will is not subject to the laws of nature; “[Kant] was obligated to create a reality apart from the world. One on which the world exerts no influence.”14 In rejecting Kant’s transcendental idealism, Durkheim emphasizes that the autonomy that is achievable for us is not autonomy from the forces of nature. Instead, it is the self-realization that comes with understanding and affirming what is natural to us. Of course, we seek to perfect society and to root out what is at odds with it. This includes confronting conflicts and forms of domination that disrupt the mutual recognition that is the heart of a relational morality. As moral creatures, we don’t simply accept the status quo. Our self-realization is more complex. Yet, it is by following our nature as social creatures, who form social bonds and have the intelligence to understand and meet collective needs, shaped as they are by culture and history, that we are enabled spontaneously and jointly to recognize and take joy in the concrete, imperfect, and perfectible forms of social life we experience.
Here, then, we might locate more precisely the contribution of attitudes of the heart to ethical life. For Durkheim, attitudes of the heart play a critical role in attaching us to a group and leading us to care about its good. “Morality demands that we love the group of which we are a part, the men who compose this group, the land they live on—all concrete and real things, which we must see as they are, even though we are trying to perfect them as much as possible.”15 Attitudes of the heart express the connectedness to others that comes naturally to us as social creatures. The joyfulness of heartfelt connection is reinforced when we realize that the demands of morality fit our nature. The right and the good are congruent. The attitudes of the heart enable us to embrace and to celebrate the truth that morality, including the social dynamics of its reason, is part of nature.
As we have seen, Durkheim believes our moral nature incorporates both discipline and attachment, and necessarily so. Even if one or the other is more prominent in some personality types, the heart is as critical to morality as the will. Darwall, by contrast, does not go so far as to assert that morality demands attachments of the heart. Discharging our moral duties, which is a matter of will, does not depend on heartfelt connection. Still, in the spirit of Durkheim, if not as expansively, Darwall emphasizes that a spirit of devotion and a willingness to sacrifice are critical elements in the attachment of individuals to one another.
Let’s now consider how the moral importance of devotion and sacrifice might come to be impressed upon us. My remarks will be guided by the opening and closing of Darwall’s book, where he discusses the ethical urgency of repairing the injustice done over centuries in the United States to Black Americans. We can read Darwall as asking us to consider attitudes of the heart as responses to serious moral injury. Love, devotion, and sacrifice can help us to mend the fractured body of civil society and the harms caused by its injustice. Darwall makes this point in conversation with James Baldwin’s powerful essay, “My Dungeon Shook: A Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.”16
Darwall attends to the tone of Baldwin’s essay, which is highly personal, and the fact that its content is delivered in the second person. Baldwin begins by describing the love he feels for “your father and my brother,” a love that reaches “far back” and “long,” and gives rise to “a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort,” which we learn is strange in contrast to the perspective of White Americans.17 Baldwin describes White Americans as trapped in a history they do not understand and around which they have built a false sense of reality—that black people are inferior to whites—even though many whites know better. Baldwin tells us that the only hope for White Americans to escape their fundamental identification with false narratives and fear of the truth is through being loved by Black Americans, a love that is critical to the country’s future since, as Baldwin addresses the point to his nephew, “[w]e cannot be free until they are free.”
Baldwin can be understood to imply that all Americans must reach beyond a sense of duty if there is to be any hope for the future of this morally dysfunctional American society. As Darwall reads the essay and related speeches, Baldwin exposes his commitment, through a heartfelt, loving, and public appeal, addressed second-personally to his nephew and, indirectly, to all Americans, to the idea that moral repair in response to injustice calls for love and a willingness to sacrifice, something that can’t be claimed as a matter of moral duty but is a critical source of connection, hope, and change. Baldwin demonstrates that, out of love rather than duty, Black Americans could empower White America to face its devastating collective ethical failures. He does this by opening his heart to his nephew and, more generally, to all that Black Americans have suffered. By sharing his heartbreak publicly, Baldwin reaches out to his audience to reciprocate his grief and thus to acknowledge the historical truth and need to transform American society. Notably, Baldwin’s plea is similar to the exhortations of Martin Luther King, Jr., who amplified the wisdom of appeals to the heart, declaring that, “[t]he ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable.” The vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws is also critical, King argued, “but something must touch the hearts and souls of men so they will come together spiritually because it is natural and right….[L]ove is mankind’s most potent weapon for personal and social transformation.”18
Empirical research suggests that openheartedness and empathy, as responses to moral injury, enhance the possibility of individual healing and social repair.19 One way to think about this is to recognize that injustice is always an injury to a particular person or group; it can’t be adequately acknowledged in the abstract. The particularity of moral violation is a corollary of Durkheim’s point that attachment is embodied. Accordingly, redress calls for a focused demonstration that the violated person or persons are worthy of care and respect, something that is acknowledged by an openhearted willingness to empathize with the pain of violation and to collaborate in building back better.
These considerations provide an angle on what Darwall has in mind regarding the indispensability of attitudes of the heart to ethical life: reparation for injustice calls for love. Resolving a wrong requires the heart. Morality is not only about what to do, assuming others also do their part, or how to protest the violation of obligations, when others fail to do their duty. It also concerns how to repair the breakdown of social relationships, to find hope in the face of collective failure, and to enable a willingness to sacrifice for a better future.
1 – Stephen Darwall, The Heart and its Attitudes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
2 – Emile Durkheim, Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education [1925], trans. Everett K. Wilson and Herman Schnurer, foreword by Paul Fauconnet, ed. and intro. by Everett K. Wilson (New York: The Free Press, 1961), 96.
3 – Durkheim, Moral Education, 92.
4 – Durkheim, Moral Education, 92-8.
5 – Durkheim, Moral Education, 91.
6 – Durkheim, Moral Education, 65.
7 – Durkheim, Moral Education, 65, 81.
8 – Emile Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, trans. D.F. Pocock, intro. J.D. Peristiany (New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2010), 30.
9 – Durkheim, Moral Education, 64, 79.
10 – Durkheim, Moral Education, 91.
11 – Durkheim, Moral Education, 109.
12 – Durkheim, Moral Education, 110.
13 – Durkheim, Moral Education, 77-8.
14 – Durkheim, Moral Education, 110.
15 – Durkheim, Moral Education, 271.
16 – James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook: A Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” The Progressive, Dec. 1, 1962.
17 – I refer to “White Americans” and “Black Americans” as particular, historically rooted identities, rather than as racial groups. See Lionel K. McPherson, The Afterlife of Race: An Informed Philosophical Search (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2024).
18 – Martin Luther King, Jr., A Gift of Love, foreword by Coretta Scott King (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981), 30.
19 – See, for example, Meredith Rossner, Just Emotions: Rituals of Restorative Justice (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), and Brett T. Litz, Leslie Lebowitz, Matt J. Gray, and William P. Nash. Adaptive Disclosure: A New Treatment for Military Trauma, Loss, and Moral Injury. (New York: The Guilford Press, 2016).
Let me begin by thanking Erin Kelley profusely for the care and insight with which she has read my “heart book,” as I call it. I argue there that gratitude is an attitude of the heart, a heartfelt appreciation that reciprocates a benefaction that is itself heartfelt itself. I say at the beginning of the book that it is far more personal than anything I have written before, so I have made myself vulnerable and opened my heart in this book in ways I haven’t before. So to be with Erin’s response gives my gratitude an unusual emotional resonance. Thank you, Erin, from the bottom of my heart. And thank you also for introducing me to Durkheim, Moral Education, which I now want to study closely.
It might help in responding to the substance of Kelley’s comments to make two preliminary points. One concerns the use of the word ‘morality.’ To avoid purely verbal disputes, I tend to follow Bernard William’s usage of ‘morality,’ in contrast to ‘ethics,’ in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. There Williams uses ‘morality’ to refer to the distinctively deontic concepts of obligation, duty, rights, wronging, which are conceptually connected to blame. As I put the thought: It is a conceptual truth that an act is morally obligatory if, and only if, it is an act of a kind that would be blameworthy to omit without excuse. This ties deontic morality to accountability and, I argue, to the second-person standpoint. I follow Strawson in holding that reactive attitudes like blame (Strawson says “indignation,” which I don’t think is quite right) are held from a “participant” stance, which is essentially what I mean by the “second-person standpoint,” since it is a perspective of implicit address and, therefore, reactive attitudes are naturally expressed with the second-person standpoint. Thus resentment and blame are naturally expressed by saying “you should not have done that and need to hold yourself accountable.”
Williams uses ‘ethics’ in formulating what he calls “Socrates’ question” of how to live. Roughly, ethics comprises all normative questions concerning how to act and feel, with issues of deontic morality being a subset of those.
In the language of my heart book, deontic morality is mediated by “attitudes of the will.” These are second-personal attitudes, like blame, that implicitly hold their objects accountable and that simultaneously express and expect or demand respect, which, I argue, is the central attitude of the will. This places “attitudes of the heart” outside morality, deontically conceived, but within ethics. Attitudes of the heart do not express respect, neither do they expect it. Indeed, there is nothing that they expect of their objects. Rather they implicitly open one’s heart to another in the hope, not the expectation, that their hearts will be open in return. They express love, which is the central attitude of the heart.
We should all acknowledge that nothing of philosophical interest turns on how we use words. If someone else what to use ‘morality’ differently, then I happy for them to do so and will conform to their usage while I am talking to them. I can then just speak of deontic morality as a subset of morality and make all the points I am interested in making. I do think, however, that we would do better to have an agreed usage and suggest Williams’s as something we might converge on.
The second preliminary has to do with my relation to Kant, which, to be honest, has been growing less close over the years. I continue to admire Kant’s signal moral idea of the dignity of persons—that persons are never to be treated as mere means and must always be treated as ends in themselves. All persons have, therefore, a claim to recognition as an equal. In Rawls’s terms, all persons are “self-originating sources of valid claims”—in my terms, persons all have equal basic second-personal authority.
I also agree with the basic idea of Kant’s critical practical philosophy that fundamental practical ethical truths must be able to be grounded in practical reason, as well as a constructivist reading of this thought according to which they can be grounded in necessary presuppositions of deliberation. In The Second-Person Standpoint, I argue, however, that contra Kant and some of his interpreters, like Christine Korsgaard, deontic moral claims cannot be grounded in presuppositions of first-person deliberation but can in the second-person standpoint. Only the latter is capable of founding morality’s second-personal character.
More recently, I have extended my critique of Kant in ways that are similar to Kelley’s and Durkheim’s criticisms. Kelley writes, “According to Kant, a purely rational being would spontaneously conform to the dictates of morality, for such a being would experience no natural incentives to the contrary. In contrast to Kant, Durkheim maintains that the need we have to discipline ourselves to recognize the authority of morality and to respect the rightful claims of other people does not result from a need to constrain the influence of the laws of nature upon our sensibilities. It stems, more specifically, from the demands of social life, which constrain the principles of practical reason as well as the inclinations.” I agree entirely. In Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant (325-333), I critically analyze Kant’s claims that the concepts of deontic morality only arise for “finite rational agents.” This means that deontic morality is entirely epiphenomenal from the point of view of pure practical reason. And since Kant believes that what we finite agents should or have most reason to do is what we would do if we were perfectly rational, this has the radical, and by my lights, radically unacceptable, implication that deontic moral considerations give us, in themselves, no normative reasons for acting whatsoever. To make the point vivid, if you have a right that I not step on your foot, that fact gives me no reason to remove my foot or to hold myself accountable for having stepped on your foot.
So I agree with Kelley’s and Durkheim’s critique of Kant and hold, with them, that morality is grounded in “the demands of social life.” And I agree that they give us normative reasons for acting, indeed, I argue, conclusive reasons (see my “On Making the Hard Problem of Moral Normativity Easier).
That said, I roughly agree with Kant’s distinction between “practical love” and “pathological love,” and I agree that though there is a duty to have the former, there can be none to have the latter. Kant’s “pathological” refers to inclinations, which, in his lexicon, provide any motivation other than that of pure practical reason. So heartfelt love is “pathological” in this sense as, indeed, are all attitudes of the heart.
The reason there can be no duty to have a heartfelt attitude is, I argue, is that it is part of the very idea of obligation that it is something that can be complied with out of respect (this is a Kantian thought), which carries with it a motive to do what is required just because it is required. If there were a duty to feel love, consequently, it would have to be possible to comply with that duty through respect. But this is impossible, since love and respect are fundamentally distinct attitudes. One is an attitude of the will, the other, an attitude of the heart.
Kelley concludes: “Morality is not only about what to do, assuming others also do their part, or how to protest the violation of obligations, when others fail to do their duty. It also concerns how to repair the breakdown of social relationships, to find hope in the face of collective failure, and to generate a willingness to sacrifice for a better future.” If we use ‘morality’ to refer to deontic morality, I am inclined to respond as follows. Precisely because respect and justice are impotent to speak to emotional wounds directly—“only love can heal a broken heart”—we can only be morally obligated to put ourselves in positions to elicit love and other attitudes of the heart, for example, by disarming our defenses and opening our hearts to others. In the last chapter of the heart book, I argue that this includes creating practices, institutions, memorials, and the like that can speak to the heart wounds of chattel slavery and its legacy.
As Kelley notes, I argue that a central claim of James Baldwin’s was that white supremacy harms not only the victims of oppression but also disfigures the hearts of white oppressors. About Sherrif Jim Clark who clubbed civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in1965, Baldwin writes: “he doesn’t know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun and to use the cattle prod. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts, for example. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse.” (These words come in the famous Baldwin/Buckley debate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tek9h3a5wQ.) We are obligated to make possible the kind of healing and reconciliation that can come only when we connect with one another’s hearts.
Oops. I meant “Kelly”, not “Kelley”. Apologies to Erin.
My gratitude to Steve for his detailed and thoughtful response to my comment. In his response, Steve expresses the view that there is no duty to love, since love is an attitude of the heart, not the will. I agree that talk of a duty to love is awkward and implausible, partly because love involves feelings that are not voluntary and morality is oriented to conduct. Nevertheless, Steve writes, “we are morally obligated to put ourselves in positions to elicit love and other attitudes of the heart….We are obligated to make possible the kind of healing and reconciliation that can come only when we connect with one another’s hearts.” These are powerful and, to my mind, attractive ideas, that imply that the interpersonal life of a moral community, within which morality demands that we treat one another with respect, depends on attitudes of the heart. In particular, morality depends on heartfelt efforts at healing and reconciliation in the wake of moral wrongdoing. In other words, moral life, which is never perfect, depends on practices of restorative justice, which involve and foster attitudes of empathy, compassion, grief, and mutual vulnerability. So even though we can’t be said, as individuals, to have a duty to love, our interpersonal and communal life and, hence, the possibility of deontic morality, depends on heartfelt connection as well as respect.
Erin, this was an inspired and inspiring essay. I’m temped to leave it at that. But I suppose that wouldn’t be philosophical. So let me add just this: I don’t know what kind of dependence you have in mind in your reply to Steve. It can’t be moral *necessity*. Surely there are dutiful people who are as Kant depicted the man who find it hard: moved by a sense of duty (respect) not love (heart). And Kant has to be right in a way: one moved by a sense of duty can then try to discern the content of duty and do it out of a sense that duty requires /that/ too, much as one might reason about theoretical matters. So is this a statistical dependence: /most/ people need to feel it to be moved by moral duty? Or maybe the reverse: /most/ people who are moved by moral duty will also feel it in a way that will lead them to a deeper appreciation of their communal life and its commitments? Or they tend to be mutually reinforcing?
Here’s another level of question: do you care what you have to say to Kant’s cold-hearted but morally well-regulated person? And more importantly, what lesson do you want to draw for this day in which such a large number of our compatriots, and of people around the democratic world, seem moved to cut off their hears from the foreigners, who seem to have room in their hearts only for people very much in their /little/ tribe?
Hi Alec. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree that duty is important and central to deontological morality. It is also important that we care about fulfilling our obligations. So, how should we think about the nature of the concern for others that accompanies and enlivens a sense of moral obligation and commitment? I doubt the formal, lawlike character of duty itself suffices to generate it. It is too abstract. Another possibility, which I explored in my comment, is to construe the relevant mutual concern as a matter of relational connectedness and belonging, experienced as attachment to other people. Of course, tribal versions of connectedness and membership come with problems and, to my mind, Durkheim had too much reverence for the nation state. I don’t believe moral concern depends on patriotism or, worse, nationalism. Better candidates are shared experience, history, and culture, which contribute to a lived recognition of our common humanity. What I like about Steve’s view is his analysis of the second-personal stance as bringing with it a sense of both responsibility and connectedness to other persons. I think of the approach as phenomenological, focusing on what is it like to participate in social life. The relationships we experience and develop could be local or global, but they won’t be morally sound unless they include both respect and concern for the people involved in them. I don’t see how a society, group, or relationship can be reliably guided by moral rules –or the rule of law, for that matter—without an underlying sense of mutual attachment between its members or, at least, many of them. In that sense, attitudes of the heart are necessary to the moral health of a group.
First off, thank you so much to both Erin Kelly and Steve Darwall for this discussion! A wonderful book and a wonderful comment; it’s a pleasure and a privilege to discuss both here. This work on attitudes of the heart is an important contribution from Darwall, and I think Kelly is exactly right to interrogate how these attitudes might be indispensable to ethical life, without being relegated to some auxiliary moral status.
I must admit I find the idea of “non-deontic morality” somewhat mysterious, though Darwall’s comparison to William’s morality/ethics distinction was very helpful. I may stick with the term “non-deontic morality” within my comment, but by that I only mean the non-moral subset of ethics in Williams’ schema, exactly as Darwall suggests. That said, I do want to press a bit on what non-auxiliary moral work these non-deontic attitudes of the heart may be doing.
Proceeding with the example of reparations for racial injustice in the United States, what exact role are we suggesting that attitudes of the heart might play in successfully responding to this serious moral injury? It seems clear to me that we have a duty to provide reparations and redress for past injustice, and that that is squarely within the realm of deontic morality. I’m less clear on where something like heartfelt connection fits in, in anything more than an auxiliary role.
Perhaps opening our hearts to others and recognizing them as worthy of love, care, and respect is the best way that we can rectify past injustice. Perhaps these attitudes of the heart provide unique motivation that reaches beyond a sense of duty as Baldwin suggests. But even if people’s motivation for rectifying past injustice doesn’t originate from a sense of duty, and rather from heartfelt connection, don’t we still in some sense “care” about their being motivated because it is important that they satisfy their rectificatory duties?
It seems entirely plausible to me that attitudes of the heart are very useful in satisfying moral duties, such as those to make reparations for racial injustice in the United States. Maybe opening our hearts to each other is necessary for feeling motivated to satisfy their duties, and maybe we can only successfully satisfy some moral duties when we incorporate attitudes of the heart. But it still seems to me that we care about cases such as reparations for racial injustice in the United States precisely because they represent pressing demands of deontic morality. And it seems that in these cases, attitudes of the heart are still playing a merely auxiliary role in helping satisfy duties that originate in deontic morality.
Part of my concern here is similar to the point Alec brings up. What do we mean that heartfelt connection is necessary for satisfying the moral duty to provide reparations for racial injustice? Even if we think heartfelt connection is ineliminable from reparations par excellence, that heartfelt connection still seems to be playing an auxiliary role to the deontic part of morality that demands reparations in the first place, by simply helping us satisfy those duties more effectively. Perhaps attitudes of the heart do provide a moral guide as Kelly suggests in her response to Alec, but a guide to what? A guide to satisfying the demands of deontic morality which originate with attitudes of the will? That doesn’t seem to me to be enough for Darwall’s view, but I’m not quite sure.
Here is another way of putting my concern. We might interpret the proposed account as follows:
1. We have a moral duty to make reparations for racial injustice in the United States.
2. Attitudes of the heart explain why we must make reparations for racial injustice in the United States.
3. Attitudes of the heart themselves are non-deontic.
But that doesn’t seem to work. If attitudes of the heart are non-deontic, then how could they explain a duty of reparation and redress? Luckily, I don’t think Kelly or Darwall are advocating for (2). More plausibly we could interpret the account as follows:
1. We have a moral duty to make reparations for racial injustice in the United States.
2′. In order to most effectively make reparations for racial injustice in the United States we must employ attitudes of the heart.
3. Attitudes of the heart themselves are non-deontic.
This doesn’t involve any contradiction with the switch to (2′), but it does seem that on this interpretation attitudes of the heart play a merely auxiliary role, helping us better satisfy our moral duties. In many ways this seems fine to me! Opening our hearts to others and recognizing them as worthy of love, care, and respect does seem crucial to successfully responding to serious moral injury. And this is still an important place in our ethical life for attitudes of the heart! But as Kelly rightly points out, Darwall is suggesting something more for the role of attitudes of the heart.
So all of this is to say, how exactly should we interpret the role of attitudes of the heart in cases like reparations for racial injustice in the United States, which do also involve deontic morality? If there already exist obligations to make reparations, what unique, non-auxiliary work is done by attitudes of the heart?
Jacob: These are very astute comments and helpful for clarifying the issues. Thank you very much. Perhaps we could say this: attitudes of the heart play an important supporting role in relation to deontological morality, since without the attachments they foster, most people will not be sufficiently motivated to comply with the moral demands of social life (Alec’s point). (I don’t know whether attitudes of the heart are necessary in the sense that no one could be morally motivated without them. Is that an important question to answer?) They are also a source of independent value, since they are integral to personal relationships that are, as Steve emphasizes, a great source of meaning and importance to us as individuals. In other words, attitudes of the heart are auxiliary to deontological morality and an independent source of ethical value, more broadly speaking. Furthermore, since they are important to the moral health of actual social relationships, we have a duty to cultivate them, which Steve comes close to saying in his comment above.
Thanks Erin for a lovely post, and to others, especially Steve, for commenting. I had a question about conflict between morality and the heart. One comforting view that has different defences in moral philosophy is that there is no conflict between what we have reason to value and what we are required to do. If we value correctly, we should not feel conflict in fulfilling our moral duties. Some of the post suggests something like this. But I think there is conflict – that we are required to do things that are painful, to promote outcomes that we have reason to value, and to regret the fact that morality demands of us that we sacrifice things we value. To take one example:
Lifeboat: The captain on a ship that is going down must allocate places on the lifeboats. There are not enough places for everyone. The captain’s child is on board. As he believes he is required to do, he uses a fair randomised process to allocate places, and his child isn’t allocated a place.
I think 1) the captain is required to use and abide by the fair process for allocating places. But 2) he has good reason to regret this feature of morality and to wish things were otherwise, so that he could save his child.. (Suppose he’s reading up on moral philosophy to decide how to act; he has good reason to hope that the best arguments permit him to favour his child in allocating places – my impression is that many people, including moral philosophers, form their moral beliefs for reasons like this). So in this kind of case, reasons of the heart pull one way; morality another.
So if that is right, not only is Steve right to think that attitudes of the heart and attitudes grounding compliance with morality are less closely related; these attitudes also generate the familiar experience of moral conflict that Kant, for example, seems to deny.
Thanks so much to everyone for their comments. Just a couple of thoughts: one for Jacob and one for Victor. Jacob, my thought is to distinguish reparations, which is a deontic matter of justice, and repair, where what is being repaired or healed are wounds to the heart. Imagine that there is a completely just reparation (i.e., not just rectification of the injustice through compensation, but the uprooting of the system of white supremacy). That would not necessarily speak to the profound emotional hurt that has resulted from chattel slavery and its continuing legacy. The only thing that heal heart brokenness are forms of love. So attitudes of the heart might play no role in reparations; their signal place is heal emotional hurt, despair, etc.
Victor, I agree entirely that such conflicts occur and that we can be torn between our moral obligations and the (warranted) entreaties of heart.
Thanks again!
Thank you so much Erin and Steve for your responses! Both have been very helpful, and gave me much to think about!
Particularly in response to Steve, this idea of distinguishing between reparations as a deontic matter of justice and repair as a matter of the heart is really fascinating. One question I’m left with is where the normative force behind non-deontic matters of the heart such as repair comes from? When someone tells me that I *should* fulfill my deontic duties, I understand that “should” perfectly fine. The reason that we should provide reparations is all of the familiar moral reasons that make that right.
But conversely, when someone tells me I *should* open my heart to others, what kind of “should” is that? In the example of repair for racial injustice, it seems to me that we have deontic reasons to repair profound emotional hurt, but that doesn’t seem to be the kind of normativity that we mean here. (This is where my concerns about an auxiliary role for attitudes of the heart would enter.)
The example of Sheriff Jim Clark does seem like a good clue. By failing to recognize others as worthy of love, care, and respect, we might think that Clark suffers his own moral injury “much, much worse” than being stuck with a cattle prod. We have reason to avoid suffering moral injuries, but is it just a pragmatic reason? It seems that the kinds of “should” provided by attitudes of the heart aren’t just matters of pragmatic normativity either.
In other words, there seems to be something puzzling about what kind of normativity we find in the domain of ethics that is outside the domain of morality (in Williams’ schema). The work on attitudes of the heart seems like a good entry point into understanding what normativity that might be, but it still seems a bit mysterious. Perhaps that is a bigger question for normative ethics though. It does seem clear that attitudes of the heart play some important role in our ethical lives, especially in cases of repair.
Thank you again to all in this discussion, and especially to Erin and Steve! Very appreciative of hearing your thoughts!
Jason, there’s nothing fancy going on here. The kind of normativity here is that of nondeontic reasons and oughts. Take the fear of people like me not that many years ago, that I am not loveable, that I am not worthy of love. I take that to be a normative claim, and depending on your favorite theory of the fundamental normative concept–ought, reasons, or fittingness–my fear was that I was not a fitting object of love. Now I think that everyone is worthy of love, that is, that there is reason to ) everyone. Though weighty, these reasons do not trump all-things-considered moral obligations. I have argued (in “Making the Hard Problem of Moral Normativity Easier) that there is never sufficient reason for violating all-things-considered moral obligations.
Sorry about the underlining. Can’t figure out how that happened or how to stop it.
Victor, thank you for hosting this discussion on Pea Soup. It has been very interesting! Regarding your above comment—I think it’s pretty clear that love can lead us into moral trouble and, vice versa, that morality can put uncomfortable pressure on personal relationships. This does not seem surprising. We human beings have a variety of sensitivities that reflect various aspects of our relationships with other people. Sometimes our values come into conflict with one another (e.g., love versus duty). Other times they line up nicely. If morality is compatible with living well—and I think there is reason for optimism here, despite the current political horrors—then there is hope that, overall, our sentiments, attitudes, and reasons could line up well enough. Yet it is sometimes a painful fact that living in civil society with other people involves learning to compromise, to be fair, and to balance our various interests—and even to sacrifice—for the sake of living well together, which means acknowledging that the demands of public life extend beyond the desires and needs of particular individuals, couples, families, etc. There is bound to be tension between our desire to merge in boundless love with another person and the discipline and self-control required to live in peace with fellow members of our global society. Moreover, we haven’t discussed our natural aggression which, as Freud describes, is not easily tamed. We are complicated beasts!
Good Content!!