Etica
& Politica/ Ethics & Politics, 2006, 1
http://www.units.it/etica/2006_1/DEGRANDIS.htm
The Rise (and Fall?) of Normative Ethics. A Critical notice of Sergio
Cremaschi’s L’etica del Novecento
Department for Continuing Education
|
Abstract Sergio
Cremaschi’s L’etica del Novecento
offers a clear and careful account of the development of ethical theory in
English-language and German Philosophy. The focus on meta-ethics and normative
concerns allows the author to offer a very concise, reliable and comprehensive
overview of philosophical ethics. In this respect the book effectively fills
the gap left by the lack of a good, updated history of ethics. Although those
qualities establish Cremaschi’s work as a valuable reference book, a few doubts
are raised about the highly theoretical approach adopted. On the one hand this
choice proves not to be very hospitable to some traditions (like most of French
philosophy, Marxism, Virtue ethics etc.) and overlooks the connections between
ethics and the socio-historical world, with the effect of giving a picture of
moral philosophy as a very abstract and academic discipline. On the other hand
it is not clear whether the emergence of applied ethics is to be greeted as the
culmination of the resurgence of normative ethics, or whether it is conspiring
with other trends to undermine the whole enterprise of constructing normative
theories. If, as I suspect, the latter is the case, the moral of Cremaschi’s
narrative may be different from the one he suggests. |
1. Sergio Cremaschi’s L’etica del Novecento: Dopo Nietzsche(Carocci, Roma, 2005, pp. 282, € 23) is
the first volume to appear of a trilogy aimed at covering the history of
ethics. The other two volumes will cover moral philosophy from Pythagoras to
scholasticism and from Grotius to Nietzsche respectively. The whole project is
to be welcomed as it addresses a regrettable gap in philosophical publishing:
not only is there no history of ethics in Italian, but also the international
scene does not offer much on this topic. Furthermore the gap to be filled by
the trilogy is one that needs filling, since the undeniable revival of ethics
witnessed in the last forty years has failed to bring with it an adequate
attention to the history of ethics, and it is hard to deny that much
contemporary discussion suffers from a lack of familiarity with many strands of
the western ethical tradition. If Cremaschi’s books will help to encourage a
better knowledge of our ethical inheritance they will no doubt render a very
valuable service to our philosophical culture. However, here I am concerned
only with the volume dedicated to the 20th Century, a period that poses a
special kind of challenge, since the difficulty is not to bridge the distance
with ways of thinking and feeling that are extremely remote from us, sometimes
even outlandish, but rather to take a detached view that allows the author to
discriminate between what is of lasting interest from what is more ephemeral.
Let us begin to illustrate the task that Cremaschi has set for himself.
He states his purposes at the beginning of his preface as being:
1) to give a historical introduction to ethics;
2) to follow the development of the discussion through the analysis of a
selected number of authors;
To these he adds a third which I am not sure I have grasped:
3) to offer a picture of ethics not simply as a branch of philosophy but
as an ongoing dialectic «between “moral” doctrines and their “ethical”
enlightening» (p. 11).
I thought that this was to be interpreted as an attempt to see ethical
theories in the light of actual moral beliefs and practices, that is, not as an
attempt to work out abstract systems of principles, but rather as an attempt to
make explicit and sort out the morals of existing societies and
communities. Such a project would deserve to be highly praised and welcomed and
would have contributed to root ethics in the social, cultural and historical
background from which it emerges. Moreover this would have served to meet the
minimal historicist requirements that seem to be implied in producing a history
of ethics. But this interpretation is soon shaken by the subsequent statement
that the book is a history of ethical theories, not of the relations between
ethics on the one hand and society, history, politics and literature on the
other. And this qualification is fully confirmed by the content of the book:
its subject is indeed an analysis of ethical (and meta-ethical) theories and
not their contextualization. I must confess I could not find another
interpretation of the meaning of Cremaschi’s third aim, nor could I persuade
myself that that was not a purpose well worth pursuing. Thus I found myself
unable to understand Cremaschi’s third aim and regretting that his history is
so focussed on the philosophico-theoretical side of morality.
However, one cannot fail to recognize that the failure to link ethical
theories to their socio-historical background enables Cremaschi to cover a very
large ground in a very short space: this broadness of scope and conciseness
could have never been achieved while also offering contextualisation. In this
respect it is worth noting that a maxim that Cremaschi has unfailingly followed
throughout the book - with a Kantian zeal we may say! - is the avoidance of any digression, aside, anecdote and generally of
anything that distracts the attention from the key features of the theories
presented. The amount of information that he gives us in less the 300 pages is
as amazing, as his ability to synthesize without trivializing and simplifying
complex and difficult ideas is remarkable. These achievements cannot but be the
outcome of a self-imposed iron discipline that commands great respect and
admiration. Of course, this gives the whole book a distinctly academical style
and a certain dryness. But here one has to qualify such affirmations, to make
clear that although Cremaschi makes no allowance to ornaments and rhetorical
tricks to seduce the casual reader, he makes a consistent and successful effort
to write in pure Italian and to avoid any unnecessary technicality and jargon.
Combining concision with this clarity and simplicity is an achievement that
deserves high praise - and if one considers the very poor editorial
assistance that publishers nowadays offer, this achievement is even more
praiseworthy.
2. Let us now turn to the methodological directions that have guided
Cremaschi’s work. He clearly states that the focus is on philosophical ethics,
although this has not been wholly isolated from the developments of social
sciences (or better Geistwissenschaften) and religious thinking, since
some of these have had an important influence on philosophical debates, while
contributions from disciplines such as biology, politics, anthropology have not
had such an impact and have therefore been ignored. Also ignored is the thought
of Foucault, on account of the little impact (and not of any lack of value or
interest) of his work on moral philosophers. In practice this comes down to a
treatment of Freud and Weber and to a whole chapter devoted to theologians and
religious thinkers. Even though the chapter devoted to them is interesting, informative
and valuable, yet the claim for their inclusion in the book - their influence
of 20th century’s ethics - seems not to be wholly justified from
what we read in the rest of the book, where those thinkers are almost never
mentioned (only Barth is awarded a reference in another chapter of the book);
in fact when it comes to that Freud does not score much better. This criticism
is not directed towards their inclusion in the book, but rather towards the
stated criterion for their inclusion and in favour of a broader one.
Theologians and religious thinkers deserve to be included, but not because of
their influence on philosophical ethical theories, but because of their great
influence on culture and customs, i.e. on morals. For the same reason I
would have discussed some anthropological theses that have given theoretical
support to ethical relativism (for instance Ruth Benedict). This broader
criterion would have allowed Cremaschi to deliver us a chapter on Foucault,
which would have helped moral philosophers to take account of his contributions
«as they deserve» (p. 12).
Another methodological suggestion to justify inclusions and exclusions
given by Cremaschi is that the thinkers had to be either English- or
German-speaking, with only three French exceptions to this criterion (Levinas,
Sartre, Beauvoir -what a
pity that Simone Weil was not included). Further reasons for this
geographico-linguistic curtailing are not offered. My conjecture is that
Cremaschi sees western philosophy as constituted mainly by three main cultural
traditions related to three broad cultural and linguistic areas: Anglo-Saxon,
French and Germanic. These are the traditions that have established themselves
as having a super-national relevance and have therefore gained a superior status
and importance. The further reason for partially excluding the French area is
that notwithstanding relevant and lasting differences German and
English-speaking philosophy have managed to establish a fruitful dialogue and
to converge over a similar understanding of ethics, while French philosophy in
the 20th century has either showed little interest for ethics or
pursued ethical inquiries along lines that have failed to attract much
attention in the international community of moral philosophers. In short, I
think that Cremaschi believes that Anglo-Saxon and German ethics have played
the major role in defining the topic and the methods of ethics in the 20th
century, and perhaps they also present more continuity with the preceding
tradition. If I am right, there is an obvious element of truth in these ideas,
since it is undeniable that today there exists a well established and
recognizable international community of philosophers doing ethics along the
lines of the Anglo-German tradition.
If quarrelling over this choice may be beside the point, there is an
observation which is instead worth making. In focusing on the traditions that
have established for themselves a recognised international standing, Cremaschi
seems to opt for a kind of objective, impersonal strategy of selection. The
schools and authors are not singled out according to some explicit
understanding of the subject and task of ethics, but rather in light of their
ability to establish an influence and a standing for themselves. It almost
looks like an ‘impact’ criterion for inclusion: whatever succeeds in gaining
influence and visibility in the international academic world deserves
attention. Such a strategy presents three main shortcomings. First, it presents
a risk of self-referentiality, since the set of cultural circles (universities,
journals and publishers) that are selected for measuring the relevance and
impact of different authors and schools will determine the outcome, and it will
do so not only on the basis of intellectual merits, but also national,
linguistic, economic, power, gender, racial factors will play a role. This
perhaps is too bold a suspicion, but the more modest worry is that first there
has been a choice of what counts as a respectable philosophical community today
and then a genealogy of it has been constructed.
The second problem of this “impartial spectator’s” strategy is that it
presents a curious contrast with the choice of focussing only on ethical
theories. I see a puzzling asymmetry between the critical, rationalistic conception
of ethics adopted (focussing on philosophical, speculative ethics and excluding
positive morality, morals, Sittlichkeit) and the positive,
sociological, a-critical conception of importance chosen. Alternatively, one
might wonder whether behind the choice there is the author’s own (easily
guessed at) preference for a given tradition of ethical thinking and that the
story told is ultimately a vindication of the rationalistic ethics which is the
heir of the Enlightenment. Indeed, reading the back cover and some of the
remarks at page 12, it is hard to resist the impression that Cremaschi has
written the success story of the post-war defeat of the destructors of reason
by the grandchildren of the Enlightenment. I am not claiming that this story is
false or uninteresting or unacceptably ideological, but only that Cremaschi
would have done better to be more frank about the value-assumptions that lies
at the basis of his subject-matter and methodological choices. Such choices
are, after all, defensible and can be respected and acknowledged even by those
who do not share them. Moreover, I think that a complete frankness about his
cultural aim (vindicating the richness, fecundity and force of rational
discourses on normative ethics) would have made even more apparent Cremaschi’s
intellectual honesty and fair-mindedness: qualities that can be appreciated
throughout the whole book.
The third weakness of the ‘impact’ criterion of inclusion is that it
gives very little help in giving a definite structure and plan to the book. I
think that this difficulty becomes apparent if we turn to a short analysis of
the content of the book and of the subdivision of chapters.
3. Let us quickly summarize the historiographical hypothesis put forward
by Cremaschi. It is briskly outlined in the back cover. In the first half of
the century scepticism about normative ethics prevails both in the
English-speaking and in the German world. The trend is overthrown in 1958: from
that year normative ethics regain the centre of the scene, but at the same time
a silent takeover is taking place: applied ethics undermines the idea that the
business of ethics is to deal with its rational foundations and little by
little affirms the more modest and pragmatic aim of finding reasonable
agreements and convergences on urgent and pressing issues. However, the plan of
the book does not reflect this hypothesis, and adopts instead that impartial
observer attitude of someone who is merely recording the events. The neutral
chronicle approach works fairly well for the first six chapters - although 5
and 6 already show a certain lack of obvious thematic unity - that cover
roughly the first sixty years of the century. Chapter 7 on theologians and
religious thinkers, clear and interesting as it is, remains in my view an
external body not obviously integrated in the book. Chapters 8 to 10 illustrate
the avowed revival of normative ethics, chapter 11 deals with applied ethics
and chapter 12 illustrates the new twists and turns of meta-ethics in the last
forty years.
What is wrong with the illustrated plan? Two flaws emerge while reading
the book. One is that it tells a story without a narrative or a plot. I am not
suggesting that Cremaschi should have produced a Hegelian history of ethics
with a clear direction and a rational dialectic that necessarily leads from
every stage to the following, but the structure of the book is on the whole
loose and, paradoxically, sometimes one would have preferred it even more so.
The problem is that there is no clear and consistent line along which the
narrative is unfolded. Cremaschi makes use of several criteria to order and
group his chapters: there is a certain chronological line, but loose; there are
geographical criteria, but they are often broken; sometimes a chapter is built
around normative affinities, sometimes around a recognizable ethical tradition,
sometimes on the convergence on an issue from different starting points. In at
least one case the grouping is random, not to say misleading. I am thinking of
chapter nine («Normative ethics: neo-aristotelianisms and virtue ethics») which
conflates Arendt, Gadamer, MacIntyre, Hampshire, Williams, and feminist ethics.
The chapter is incoherent because it groups together thinkers who are offering
first and foremost a diagnosis of an epoch and attempt to indicate the way out
of the traps of modernity (Arendt, Gadamer and MacIntyre), with thinkers who
are sceptical about the claims of normative ethical theories (Hampshire and
Williams) and thinkers who are trying to break away from the traditional
paradigms of Western ethics and to work in new directions, that in some respect
raise challenges that are akin to those that emerged from environmental ethics
and multiculturalism. None of the thinkers here grouped can be considered a
representative of a tradition of ethical thought that seeks to work out the
rational foundations of morality and to derive normative prescriptions from
them. And I want here to stress that nothing of what Cremaschi says of them
suggests that they do. So I am not accusing him of giving a distorted portrait
of their positions and points of view (he does not: as usual his presentation
is accurate), but merely of classifying them under a misleading label. The
effect of this mislabelling is not altogether innocuous, because it contributes
to giving an image of contemporary philosophical ethics as dominated by the
concern of constructing normative theories.
4. Some critical remarks are also raised by Chapter 11, which is devoted
to the rebirth of applied ethics and is at the same time one of the best and
most infuriating. It is incredibly rich in clear and reliable information, as
is the rest of the book, and it also has a greater liveliness that makes it
particularly gripping and pacy, so that the reader’s attention never drops. I
think that a reason for this more seductive character of this chapter is that
it has a definite narrative, as well as a brief but helpful historical
contextualization, that helps the reader to set the rich data into a clear
framework. The chapter begins by giving a short social, political and
historical background to the emergence of applied ethics and then, succinctly
but effectively, illustrates some of the main trends that emerged in this field
and the theoretical challenges that they have posed to philosophical ethics.
Here Cremaschi is at his very best and this part of the chapter is a pleasure
to read. In a few pages the reader learns a lot and is led by the author’s
admirable ability to summarize concisely and by his secure judgment in singling
out what is really important and fundamental. It is a pleasure to be led by
Cremaschi’s learning, scholarly accuracy and fair-mindedness.
After bioethics Cremaschi turns to public ethics and gives us an account
of the ideas of Rawls, Nozick, Dworkin and Sen. Once again Cremaschi’s
knowledge and reliability offers no occasion for criticism. What then is there
to infuriate in so excellent a chapter? Before answering let me go back to the
initial paragraph of the chapter, which has a particular interest since it
provides some further indications about the general hypotheses that underlie
the structure of the book. According to Cremaschi, around 1880 Sidgwick and
Nietzsche undermined philosophers’ trust in the possibility of normative
ethics, but such impossibility did not have terribly disquieting effects, since
it was accompanied by a widespread faith in the existence of a wide and
substantial agreement among civilized humans on fundamental values and norms.
So if normative ethics was impossible, that was not a serious problem since it
wasn’t really needed either. This accounts for the prominence of meta-ethics in
the English-speaking world and for the reluctance of European philosophers to
propose concrete normative guidelines, even by those authors that vindicated
the possibility of normative theories. In short, directives on how to behave
where left to the individual’s choice in the light of his grasp of a more or
less acknowledged common sense morality. This cultural climate finally broke
down at the end of the Fifties, when in both cultural areas a revival of
normative ethics took place and applied ethics began to emerge in the
Anglo-Saxon world. Cremaschi does not give any suggestions about the reasons
that prompted the return of normative ethics, while he ventures some hypotheses
about the motives that caused the emergence of applied ethics. He mentions the
following: the Vietnam War, the American civil rights movement, the growing
awareness of the problem of underdevelopment in the
Let me try to tease out what are the conclusions that Cremaschi seems to
suggest that can be drawn from this picture. The age of meta-ethics was useful
to sharpen the conceptual tools of moral philosophers, but was at the same time
a retreat into an ivory tower on the part of philosophers, and perhaps even a
partial dereliction of duty. Hence what took place from the end of the Fifties
was healthy and liberating. It is less clear what are the respective roles and
the reciprocal relations between normative and applied ethics in effecting the
change of agenda in moral philosophy. The impression is that up to a certain
point the two strands have worked towards the same goal - restoring
ethics’ practical relevance for urgent issues - although
from different corners: normative ethics proceeding top-down, while applied
ethics working bottom-up. However, it looks like little by little applied
ethics has undermined the ambitions and the importance of normative general
theories, showing that more pragmatic approaches not only can do without
theories, but actually work better in their absence. At least this is the
impression that I gain from reading Cremaschi’s account of the bioethical
trends, though he does not explicitly advocates any such conclusion. But if my
impression is not misguided, then applied ethics turns out to be closer to some
of the outcomes of the primacy of meta-ethics: namely we don’t need
comprehensive ethical theories to solve moral puzzles. In this respect it seems
also to converge with the so-called anti-theorists - a
trend unfortunately overlooked by Cremaschi - according
to which normative ethical theories are a misguided and useless enterprise.
Yet, this impression needs to be mitigated by noticing an important difference
between the scepticism towards theory recommended respectively by positivism
and irrationalism in late 19th and early 20th century on
the one hand, and applied ethics (and anti-theorists) in the late 20th
century. While the former undermined the role of reason in practical decision
and yielded to decisionism - or voluntarism - ; the latter
does not recommend the obliteration of reason, but rather a less ambitious use
thereof, aiming at consent, compromise and agreement rather than at true and
compelling clear-cut solutions. Normativity within the limits of plural
reasons, one might suggest, paraphrasing Kant! And from this remark arises my
complaint for not having treated the emergence of ethical pluralism in a
theoretical form. In the English-speaking area a good number of important
philosophers have tried to urge the necessity of acknowledging the reality and
inescapability of moral pluralism:
5. Let me now come back to the reasons of my irritation. First, chapter
11 suggests that applied ethics has a relevance - both
theoretical and practical - well worth a broader and more
inclusive treatment. Cremaschi mentions several branches of inquiry that have
gained academic acceptance: ethics of international relations and war, business
ethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics (he could have added media ethics),
but he only deals with medical ethics (and public ethics, but I’ll come to this
soon). This is a very regrettable loss, especially considering the importance
and relevance of the moral issues related to war and weapons of mass
destruction, and with environmental worries. The questions of collective and
group responsibility raised by the Holocaust, by the use of the atom bomb, by
the massacre of civilians (e.g. the infamous My Lai massacre) have prompted
philosophical reflection of paramount importance and I believe that some
reference to the Schuldfrage debate in Germany and to such authors as
Jaspers, Anders, Russell and Jonas would have been to the point.
Second, the chapter shows how helpful it is to have even a short
historical contextualisation, and the readers would have had an easier task in
ordering the wealth of information delivered by the book if the reflections
found at pp. 217-8 had been given earlier, and possibly articulated a bit
further.
Finally I strongly disagree with assimilating public ethics to applied
ethics. Apart from my personal dislike for the proliferation of such labels as
public ethics, that only tend to encourage the consolidation of self-centred
and self-referential disciplines, I think that it is very questionable even to
draw close boundaries between ethics, political philosophy and legal
philosophy. Such disciplines are too closely intertwined in the western
tradition to allow any strict separation, especially in works as broad in scope
as the present one. Surely Cremaschi neither wants to claim that Plato’s Republic,
or Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals are works of applied ethics, nor that
Plato’s Laws, Hobbes’s Elements of Law Natural and Political,
Hegel’s Outlines of a philosophy of right are merely works of legal
philosophy. But then why does he confine Rawls’s work to the section of applied
ethics? This to me makes no sense at all. First, the importance of Rawls is
such that in Cremaschi’s own volume there is only one other 20th
century’s author who manages to be mentioned more often (G.E. Moore). Every
serious anthology of normative ethics features some contribution from Rawls
(but very few readers in applied ethics do). There is no question that Rawls’s
writings played a major contribution in the normative revival that emerged at
the end of the Fifties. Papers like Outline of a Decision Procedure for
Ethics (1951), Two Concepts of Rules (1955), Justice as Fairness
(1958), The Sense of Justice (1963), are by no means pieces of applied
ethics and have been enormously influential. The proper place of Rawls would
have been in chapter 10 (Normative ethics: Kantian and rights-based theories).
Not having done so produces some quite bizarre results; Gauthier, Arendt and
Habermas turn out to have more importance than Rawls as ethical theorists, and
one might wonder why Harsanyi and Harrod (and Arrow) are treated as ethical
theorists while Sen and Nussbaum as applied ethicists. Obviously there is
something wrong with this. Similarly, there is something wrong in the complete
forgetfulness of the philosophy of law. Certainly a few words about legal
positivism and Kelsen would have thrown some further light on the heyday of
non-cognitivism, and a treatment of Hart would have illuminated further the
reaction against this climate; besides it would have provided a more suitable
setting for Dworkin and perhaps for other neglected figures like Perelman,
Alexy, Raz. Incidentally it is worth mentioning that a lively debate on the
philosophy of punishment was one of the first manifestations of the renewed
practical concerns of philosophers in the Fifties.
There are other good reasons for not considering public ethics as a
branch of applied ethics and as separate from normative ethics. I have already
mentioned that there are good historical reasons for keeping public and private
morality together (which does not mean that they cannot be distinguished,
indeed in many cases they need be separated) and further reasons can be added.
I shall quickly mention just a few. Utilitarianism, which has an important
place in the book, was born as a public ethic and only after World War Two was
proposed as a personal morality as well (with poor results). In its more
credible forms it is still presented as a public morality. Very few of the
ethical theories presented (Moore, the existentialists, the theologians, the
virtue ethicists) have much to say in matters of private morality and not much
attention is given to this side of ethics throughout the book (which clearly
accepts the idea of the priority of the right over the good, an idea that
thanks to Cremaschi now I know we owe to Prichard). Incidentally, the
difficulty in finding a place and giving a proper treatment of virtue ethics
stems from this general approach, and ends up in accepting the - misleading, but unfortunately well established - commonplace
that virtue ethics is a third kind of normative ethics, next to
consequentialism and deontology, while contemporary virtue ethics is mainly an
attempt to change the agenda and the methods of philosophical ethics, and in
this respect it bears more resemblance with feminism, particularism,
anti-theory and applied ethics than with consequentialism and deontology.
Finally, it would have been helpful to say a few words about the
socio-historical reasons that have contributed to make public ethics such a
major concern for moral philosophers in the 20th century. The
tension between the spread of individualist and libertarian aspirations and
rhetoric on the one hand and the sense of impotence, alienation and
meaninglessness fostered by mass society, bureaucratization and the triumph of
mighty organizations (nation states and capitalist corporations) have certainly
played a major role in urging the need to work out ways to give back some power
and control to the individual through the construction of public spaces
hospitable to ethical concerns. A chapter devoted to the authors who have
engaged with the task of producing diagnoses of the predicaments of modernity
would have helped in bringing such issues to the surface. It is worth noting
that the book itself features a valuable list of authors that would have made
up a good chapter: Weber, Freud, Adorno and Horkeimer, Heidegger, Gadamer,
Arendt, Habermas and MacIntyre. Unfortunately scattered in various different
chapters they fail to make much impression and they are easily forgotten as
minor figures in the (ghost-) narrative of the book.
6. I speak of a ghost-narrative because it is not explicit enough to
represent a helpful framework for the reader, while it obviously affects the
choice of inclusions and exclusions. The problem is that Cremaschi is committed
to bringing us good news about ethics, its usefulness and robustness. Such
hidden optimism vitiates against the narrative because it risks either to eliminate
or to curtail with a cordon sanitaire the unwelcome guests at the
ethical symposium: nihilists, sceptics, relativists, stubborn post-modernists,
anti-theorists, deep pessimists etc. The final picture of the metaphorical
ethical symposium should not look too bad: we are told, after all, that the
present situation is the best possible scenario, with people sitting around the
table and exchanging reasons on serious issues with good will. No doubt there
is much truth in that picture. But not the whole of the truth, and we should
not be satisfied with anything less. The problem is not so much that at the
ethical table some people have not been invited and some others are behaving
either rudely or annoyingly, that is refusing to play the game favoured by the
majority. Although this is true, this is not the worst feature of the picture.
The most disquieting feature of the metaphor of the dinner table is that it is
something more than a metaphor: it captures the weight and the impact that
ethical discourse has on the contemporary world: more or less that of dinner
table chats. Outside the philosophical symposium described by Cremaschi,
nihilism, scepticism, mistrust, glib relativism, disillusionment, fanaticism,
prejudice, selfishness and power struggles are alive and kicking. (Would this
situation have appeared more understandable had, say, Jung, Schmitt, Luhmann,
Strauss, Morgenthau, Girard, Bataille, Deleuze, Foucault, Croce, Gramsci,
Oakeshott, Bloom, Rorty been included in the book?) And now who is to blame? Is
the world too stupid and ignorant? Or are the philosophers a bit alienated from
the world?
Is it really possible that a community of philosophers that live in
societies that went through two devastating world wars were not at all affected
by that? Did they really take a further fifteen years after the end of World
War II to get rid of the spell of meta-ethics and decisionism? And yet from the
account offered by Cremaschi it looks like historical events did not affect
them until the noise from the outside world upset the quiet life of their
universities in the Sixties. I repeat the question: are the philosophers a bit
alienated from the world? (Curiously, from this point of view theologians come out
much better). Or is Cremaschi offering us a picture which is too partial? I
think that most philosophers in the past century have avoided engagement with
the world and the hard issues raised by historical events. Cremaschi did not
falsify the picture, but his choice of focussing on the more theoretical side
of moral reflection has left little space for attempts of some philosophers to
deal directly - i.e. without the mediation of theories - with the big questions of their time. In this way the impression that
ethics is a flight from reality has been reinforced. As a consequence it is
easy to predict that sceptics and pessimists will see their suspicion that
ethics is an idle and useless enterprise confirmed, while the optimists will be
more impressed by the happy ending represented by the picture of the
well-intentioned discussion mentioned above.