An Audience Assumed …

Abstract

It would seem that when I characterize a certain philosophical account of morality as inaccurate or speak of a certain moral theory as distorting the character of morality — and this is what I have done in speaking of ‘the politicization of morality’ — I also give expression to a particular conception of morality. I must at least say something about what it is that I take to have been distorted or inaccurately described. But I might seem also to assume that the author of that account or theory that I mean to criticize shares with me that same conception or understanding of morality. I assume, it might be said, that critic and author have their attention fixed on a common object; for otherwise the charge that the author has misdescribed or distorted this object would seem to be out of place. You have not misdescribed the city of London if you set out to give me and succeed in giving me a description of the city of Paris. Of course, it may be doubted that different descriptions of morality can amount to descriptions of different ‘objects’ in the way that different maps of different cities are descriptions of different ‘objects’. But the challenge to the force, as argument, of any appeal to ‘grammatical facts’ which was met at the close of Chapter 4 does, I think, at least raise the question whether an assumption that critic and author have their attention fixed on ‘the same object’ is so unproblematic as one might have thought.