Only Connect: The Place of Self-Knowledge in Ethics

Abstract

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.(E.M.Forster)How important is self-knowledge in moral life? What kind of self-knowledge, if any, is necessary for full moral agency? What kinds of self-knowledge are there? What is ‘full moral agency’? Despite the great proliferation of theories about the self in psychology in this century, questions like these have not been addressed very often in recent literature on ethics in the Anglo-American tradition. And, although in 1958 Anscombe recommended that we stop doing moral philosophy altogether until we have a better moral psychology, the main response to this suggestion has been a renewed interest in the virtues. Another approach to these problems can be found in feminist ethics, with its interest in caring relations. In this paper I shall describe a few of the connections between caring and self-knowledge. I shall then compare the insights generated by this approach with the views of two authors, who work from radically opposed frameworks, Richard Brandt and Charles Taylor. Both have produced interesting, but completely different descriptions of self-knowledge and its place in moral life.