Moral Agency in the Modern Age: Reading Charles Taylor through George Grant

Abstract

A shared concern with the nature of moral agency in modernity makes George Grant a useful interlocutor for Charles Taylor. Taylor sees human agency as constituted by moral affirmations, as given in the process he calls “strong evaluation.” He examines the “moral sources,” including reason, nature, and God, that inform the modern identity, explaining “technological society” in light of these affirmations. Grant’s analysis of technology shares much with Taylor’s, but underlines the irreducibility of technological civilization’s “will to mastery” to any of Taylor’s moral goods. This “will” is a distinctive and constitutive affirmation of modern agents (akin to a Taylorian “source”); but it is fundamentally amoral and, indeed, corrosive of morality. Reading Grant thus offers an important corrective to Taylor’s historical account of affirmation in modernity, while challenging his theory of identity as necessarily constituted by moral goods.