On the Moralization of Moral Theory

Abstract

Abstract In the concluding lines of Part Three of The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell writes: ‘If the moralist is the human being who best grasps the human position, teaches us what our human position is, better than we know, in ways we cannot escape but through distraction and muddle, then our first task in subjecting ourselves to judgment is to tell the moralist from the moralizer’ (Cavell 1979, hereafter ‘CR’, p. 326). Cavell then proceeds to characterize the moralizer as one who is ‘speaking in the name of a position one does not occupy, confronting others in positions of which one will not imagine the acknowledgement’ (CR, p. 326). Beginning with an exposition of Cavell’s notion of ‘moral position’, I will offer an interpretation of the distinction he draws between the moralist and the moralizer; I will then explain how the moral philosopher’s (attempted) use of morally significant words may come to resemble the moralizer’s; and then I will argue that contemporary English-speaking moral philosophy as represented by the recent debates concerning ‘moral testimony’, or ‘moral deference’, has been failing its moralist aspirations, and that, by Cavell’s lights, the morality reflected in those debates is, in essence, that of the moralizer.