Impossible Dreams

Rationality, Integrity And Moral Imagination

Susan Babbitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429979545
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Both contemporary philosophy and commonsense morality presuppose a personal autonomy and integrity that an unjust social system may make impossible for some people. Babbitt examines the implications of this insight, drawing on feminist and antiracist political theory, contemporary analytic ethics and philosophy of mind, and nonphilosophical literature. She argues for the role of moral imagination in discovering and defending a more humane social vision. }Conventional wisdom and commonsense morality tend to take the integrity of persons for granted. But for people in systematically unjust societies, self-respect and human dignity may prove to be impossible dreams.Susan Babbitt explores the implications of this insight, arguing that in the face of systemic injustice, individual and social rationality may require the transformation rather than the realization of deep-seated aims, interests, and values. In particular, under such conditions, she argues, the cultivation and ongoing exercise of moral imagination is necessary to discover and defend a more humane social vision. Impossible Dreams is one of those rare books that fruitfully combines discourses that were previously largely separate: feminist and antiracist political theory, analytic ethics and philosophy of mind, and a wide range of non-philosophical literature on the lives of oppressed peoples around the world. It is both an object lesson in reaching across academic barriers and a demonstration of how the best of feminist philosophy can be in conversation with the best of mainstream philosophyas well as affect the lives of real people. }

1 Myths, Fantasies, and Realism: The Story of Sethe

IN THE OPENING SENTENCES OF Willful Virgin, Marilyn Frye writes that the feminist project is impossible and inconceivable within the system of meanings and symbols that defines current societies. In her view, feminism requires “a persistent project of weaving a matrix of meanings, a world of sense, a symbolic order, in which I can place myself and in which I and all women have original (not relational or derivative), positive, liveable meaning.”¹ At least arguably, one of the most significant contributions of feminist theory to ethics and political theory in general is this recognition that systems of meaning—the concepts and terms in which information and events are understood, and questions are formulated—preclude the understanding, even the imaginability, of certain important ethical and political possibilities.

But what does it mean for the pursuit of liberatory goals that the systems of meanings and symbols with which we live deny the very meaningfulness and understandability, even the identification, of such goals? What does it mean for the possibility of engaging in good reasoning, for devising and following strategies likely to promote liberatory goals?

Feminist legal theorist Drucilla Cornell is one who explicitly asks the question of what it means to be imposing on the world more adequate unifying concepts, particularly in theorizing oppression.² I take Cornell’s work on ethics and deconstruction to be epistemologically significant for two reasons in particular: First, she suggests that some questions about essentialism are, in part at least, epistemological questions about how to achieve the right sort of ordered view of the world. They are often questions not so much about what it means to be a sort of person but rather about how best to classify people for the purposes of understanding a situation as a whole. Cornell recognizes what is rarely made explicit in discussions of essentialism, or of what might be called “identity politics”—namely, that understanding the world consists in achieving a unified vision of it and that identity questions are often issues about how we impose order on the world. Second, Cornell’s treatment of issues of “difference” recognizes, as many such treatments do not, that properly identifying differences presupposes the possibility of properly identifying unities. Cornell’s emphasis on myths and storytelling I take to be an important development of the role of the right sorts of unifying concepts for the proper identification of the differences in experiences and interests upon which effective political theory and strategy depend.

In discussing Cornell’s remarks about Toni Morrison’s Beloved,³ I argue for the following two claims. First, questions about epistemic standards that arise in regard to issues about theorizing oppression cannot be answered without also asking questions about personal and political identities: Defining epistemic goals and standards often involves ethical and political questions about the appropriateness of general beliefs about who and what people are. I argue, for instance, that the significance of Sethe’s story as regards understanding slavery presupposes general beliefs about what she ought to be able to be and to aspire to.

Second, questions about personal and political identities, about sorts of people, are dependent upon consideration of certain epistemic consequences. I suggest that questions about which characteristics and relationships appropriately define a group or an individual depend, in part, on questions about the role of certain kinds of categorization in an ongoing process of understanding and acting effectively in actual social and political circumstances.

I intend the discussion of Sethe to provide a kind of overview for the general argument about the relationship between rationality and integrity that follows. I argue on the one hand that the reasonableness of Sethe’s choice to kill her children is explained in terms of the significance of such a choice to her claim to human worth—for herself and her children: Her choice is reasonable in terms of the role of such a choice in a process of acquiring a more adequate sense of self, including certain cognitive capacities, where adequacy is understood in terms of possibilities for acting in her real interests. On the other hand, I suggest that a more adequate sense of self is a result, in part, of actually acting in her interests: What it means for her to possess a more adequate sense of self only becomes evident when Sethe makes certain choices, choices that constitute the possibility of her pursuit of self-respect and dignity. Thus, individual rationality is often importantly dependent upon claims to personal worth and value—claims that sometimes constitute the disruption of one’s settled sense of self. Moreover, the moral significance of such claims to worth and value is often defined in terms of facts about what does and what does not actually realize the individual’s best interests—interests in acquiring a genuine sense of self-respect and dignity.

In discussing the reasonableness of Sethe’s choice, I am interested primarily in nonmoral reasonableness, the significance of Sethe’s choice relative to her idiosyncratic desires and aims. As I make clearer in Chapter 2, I take the notion of individual rationality to distinguish between cases in which individual agents do and do not act in their best interests, a distinction plausibly employed in everyday talk. In Sethe’s case, we might think that she acts not only immorally but also irrationally as an individual. For her choice has a number of undesirable consequences for her, given her personal ends and values. My point in discussing examples such as that of Sethe is that whereas individual rationality depends to some extent on morality, in some cases the moral component is dependent upon the claim to individual rationality for certain choices and actions—that is, upon a claim to a conception of the agent and her society according to which her reasons for her choices and actions are indeed good reasons for her.

Similarities and Differences

Consider the wonderful image of the opening paragraphs of Elizabeth Spelman’s Inessential Woman describing the relationship between a certain conception of unities and a desire for intelligibility.⁴ In Iris Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good, Uncle Theo is distressed by the “manyness” of the pebbles on the beach. Spelman writes:

The beach is a source of acute discomfort to Uncle Theo. While the children’s noise and exuberance bother him, what really seems to make him most anxious is the multiplicity of things. As if twinness weren’t already enough of an ontological disturbance, there are on the beach all those pebbles, each clamoring in its particularity, the totality of them threatening the intelligibility, the tractability, the manageability of the world. Theo is a man who can only negotiate the possibility of plurality if the many can be reduced to a few or, best of all, to one. The horror of the manyness of the pebbles could then be stilled by the awareness that they are all instances of a single thing, pebblehood.⁵

The concern in Spelman’s book is not just the fear of manyness; rather, it is the implications of such a fear for the achieving of feminist antiracist goals. For such a fear, Spelman points out, inspires the desire for a certain imposition—the imposition of concepts and standards defined in advance of active antiracist, anti-imperialist, antisexist struggle.

Spelman’s connection between a problem about essentialism and one about intelligibility is significant. We cannot make sense of our experience or of information without applying unifying general concepts. As emerged from Hume’s attempt to give an account of judgments of causality, there is a question about how we judge one experience or entity to be similar to another. Hume suggested that after we have experienced one event being followed by another a number of times, we come to expect the second sort of event whenever we experience the first sort.⁶ But he did not provide an account of how we judge those events to be ones of the same sort to begin with. Any two events are similar in some respects, but when we make generalizations on the basis of experience of regularities, and when we use such generalizations to find explanations, we make judgments about some respects of similarity and difference being more significant than others. And the problem of essentialism in philosophy, as I discuss in Chapter 6, has been a problem about knowledge, about how or whether we can identify the real similarities and differences between the events and the phenomena we are trying to understand.

The problem for political theory is not that there don’t exist the kinds of unities Uncle Theo was looking for—unities that can be defined in advance and to which manyness can effectively be reduced. Clearly, there are no such Platonic unities, but this is not the main worry motivating discussions about essentialism. Rather, the problem is, as seems evident in Spelman’s discussion, that to the extent that political theorists assume they ought to look for things like real essences, they end up defining concepts like “humanity” or “women” incorrectly—in terms, specifically, of the experience and interests of currently dominant social groups. The assumption of real essences seems to be that relevant respects of similarity and difference can be defined a priori, in advance of empirical investigation, and the tendency to define unity a priori precludes proper appreciation of differences that become apparent only as a result of political engagement and struggle.

The worry about essentialism seems to be, in large part, that although there are no essences of the sort Uncle Theo was looking for, we seem not to be able to get along without them or something like them. Indeed, Cornell suggests, importantly, that the problem of defining unities may be the central problem of feminist theory. In her view, “If there is to be feminism at all, we must rely on a feminine ‘voice’ and a feminine ‘reality’ that can be identified as such and correlated with the lives of actual women, and yet at the same time all accounts of the feminine seem to reset the trap of rigid gender identities, deny the real differences between women … and reflect the history of oppression and discrimination rather than an ideal or an ethical positioning of the Other to which we can aspire.”⁷ Political theory, especially radical political theory, depends on being able to identify real similarities and differences. More specifically, identifying real differences— differences, say, in terms of possibilities for acquiring important human goods—presupposes assumptions about real respects of similarity—similarity, for instance, in terms of human status.

The question of what it means to make claims about real similarities and differences is not the same question as that which preoccupied Uncle Theo. We need not identify “pebblehood” or “womanness” in some fixed way, in advance of action and engagement, to make nonarbitrary judgments about how pebbles and women are to be classified and related to each other. The issue is one of objective epistemic standards: We want to know whether there are determinate answers to questions about how best to order things and, consequently, of how best to proceed—answers, in particular, that are not simply the result of certain discriminatory traditions. It may be, and I argue in Chapter 6, that the question of determinate epistemic standards is one not about the possibility of defining concepts and standards in advance but rather about the possibility of determining real similarities and differences in the specific context of an ongoing process of development of the right sort, where the “right sort” is defined in terms of the best available general moral and political theories, as well as ongoing empirical investigation. It may be, as Cornell appears to suggest, that the question of objective epistemic standards has to do not with questions about ultimate, fixed unities at all but with the relationship between the raising of certain kinds of questions and the application of certain general categories, and ongoing development of a specific sort in a particular direction.

A Social “Unconscious”

In a recent work, Cornell suggests that because all judgments and perceptions depend on traditions and some traditions are, in large part, racist and sexist, we need to pay attention to the social myths and fantasies that determine certain sorts of interpretations and preclude even the conceivability of others.⁸ She calls the underlying myths and fantasies of a society a “social unconscious.” Her proposal, roughly, is that we can sometimes derive standards for properly identifying relevant similarities and differences by examining the relationship between the retelling, or reformulating, of social myths and fantasies and political consequences.

Now, what could a “social unconscious” have to do with questions about ethical and political theory development? Cornell identifies as a problem for theories about oppression the tendency to analyze structures and meanings from within the realm of concepts and meanings that are consciously accessible to us—what deconstructionists have called “logocentrism.” She suggests that to the extent that feminist theorists take for granted the conceptual machinery that is available and the perceptions and judgments the current conceptual traditions make possible, we cannot expect feminist theory to advance beyond the racism and ethnocentrism that often currently characterize it. Yet it is difficult to see how to effectively criticize such conceptual machinery. Her suggestion is that if we are even to be able to begin to identify the ways in which a society is deeply racist, sexist, and imperialist, we need to examine and retell the myths, or background stories, that explain our seeing and understanding some things and not others.

Consider Cornell’s union organizing example.⁹ She describes a situation in which the attempt to organize workers in an electronics plant in Silicon Valley, California was complicated by sexual relationships between an African-American man and a white woman who were both members of the organizing committee. After the work of the organizing committee was stopped by the (emotional and physical) tensions that arose around this relationship, it was suggested that the work of the committee could not continue without an explicit discussion of the dynamics of “whiteness” and “blackness” as they had been played out on this particular “theatre of desire.”¹⁰ Cornell points out that the decision to engage in examining questions about cultural representations of whiteness and blackness in this struggle was motivated by a realization that available conceptual representations of the conflict were both inadequate and distorting. Traditional conceptions of how to classify public and private spheres fail not only to make sense of the significance of this “private” sexual relationship for the “public” activity of political organization; such a conception of how things divide up also precludes the kind of understanding that is especially significant for this particular project—namely, an understanding of the significance of racist sexual stereotypes for the possibility of building nonracist workers’ solidarity.

Cornell’s suggestion is not that feminists need to examine the “underlying” myths and fantasies of a society to get it right about political organization. It does not make sense to suggest that theorists should aim to examine underlying myths and fantasies since such myths and fantasies are, after all, underlying. We cannot just go “look and see” what the underlying myths of a society are because we have only those very myths and fantasies upon which to base our observations. Instead, her suggestion is that the connection between the retelling of some myths and fantasies and certain political consequences—consequences identified in action—provides some basis for judging that some myths and fantasies are better than others and thus for identifying distorting assumptions. For instance, we may find out, when we offer certain alternative stories, that we are able by doing so to draw more appropriate connections, identify more aspects of oppression, act more effectively, and so on.

The idea that acquiring a more adequate understanding requires storytelling is not new; neither is it unique to feminist discussions. Philosopher of science Philip Kitcher argues that successful science provides the right sorts of storytelling resources.¹¹ Darwin’s theory, for instance, provided a family of problem-solving strategies, related by their employment of a particular style of historical narrative.¹² Stories involving descriptions of ancestral populations, modification through subsequent generations, and selection and inheritance of characteristics could be told to answer a host of biological questions. Thus, Kitcher argues that it is a mistake to think of scientific theories as small sets of propositions. What Darwin proposed was a set of storytelling strategies, and his success consisted in the fact that such strategies could be employed again and again to explain complex and diverse phenomena that were in need of explanation.

Abductive inference, after all, is just a kind of storytelling: When Mendel crossed his pea plants and produced certain results, he looked for a story that, if it were true, would be able to explain his results. His story was not arbitrary. He proposed the most plausible story in light of background beliefs—some of which would have been well supported—and observable results. Many have argued that the justification of beliefs is not a matter of the logical relations between propositions but is, instead, a feature of the processes, including psychological processes, by which people arrive at beliefs. And part of such processes is the telling of stories, the invention, in some cases, of alternative ways of unifying the world, of classifyi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Myths, Fantasies, and Realism: The Story of Sethe
• 2 Transformation Experiences and Rational Deliberation
• 3 Objective Interests, Nonpropositional Knowledge, and Conversion Experiences
• 4 Leading Life from the Inside: Individuals, Minority Rights, and Some Problems About Indeterminacy
• 5 Personal Integrity, Politics, and Moral Imagination
• 6 Feminists and Nature: A Defense of Essentialism
• 7 Reason and the Erotic: The Moral Significance of Personal Relations and Commitments
• 8 Philosophy and Literature: Recalling the Archangel
• Epilogue
• About the Book and Author