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Herman on Moral Literacy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2011
Abstract
In her recent book, Barbara Herman explores a range of topics commonly associated with virtue ethics; her focus, however, is not so much on virtue as on normal moral competence and the basic moral capacity underpinning it. To explicate this competence, Herman introduces the idea of moral literacy, arguing that it reveals Kantian ethical thought to be better able than Humean views to account for our readiness to hold persons responsible even for conduct reflecting character flaws that stem from deficiencies in their upbringing. Examination of Herman's account raises a question, however, about how intimately moral literacy is related to the basic moral capacity.
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Notes
1 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, p. vii.
2 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Subsequent page references are to this volume.
3 In the words of one reviewer, ‘Herman develops a Kantian virtue theory’ (Martin, Adrienne, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (http://ndpr.nd.edu), 5 Sept. 2007Google Scholar).
4 Virtue is not even mentioned until the end of the first section, after the argument has been completed.
5 There are also the supporters of Hegel, of course, but since Herman does not engage that party directly in her discussion of moral literacy, I will not bring them in here.
6 To keep the discussion manageable, I will restrict attention to Herman's use of this notion in connection with motivation and responsibility, leaving to the side its relevance to the problem of new moral facts.
7 Of course, these two sides can come apart to an extent; a job applicant may profess to have merely a ‘reading knowledge’ of Greek or German, and it seems possible to have a mere reading knowledge of one's native tongue, though this would already put one well on the road toward having the ability to write, given that these skills build on the underlying abilities to speak and to understand the speech of others. (It is noteworthy that a deficiency of the opposite sort is wholly unintelligible: no one could have the ability to write but not the ability to read.) But if we consider these capacities in a general way, abstracting from the particular individual, the two sides clearly stand or fall together: there can be readers only where there are writers, and writers only where there are readers.
8 The case of musical literacy is particularly complicated, in that music can be written and read in a quite literal sense.
9 See also Herman's references to Kant's idea of the ‘ectypal world’ (pp. 201–2) and to ‘the value of giving, as much as we are able, rational and moral form to the world’ (p. 268).
10 Herman does not put it this way, perhaps in part because she wants to present the notion of moral literacy as a freestanding idea, independent of the trappings of Kantian doctrine, but if we wanted to press into application here the broad legal metaphor that informs Kant's representation of reason, we could think of moral literacy as comprising the experientially developed judicial and executive functions that complement the legislative function that rests originally in the moral law (the constitution).
11 Herman does not explicitly mention this point in the argument, but presumably it would figure in the ‘much more complex story about moral motivation’ that she acknowledges would need to be offered to cover ‘the full range of normal agents’. It is a main contention of hers that understanding normal moral agency requires a moral motive that ‘supports some unity for the agent acting’ (p. 104).
12 Herman's description seems not, however, to close off the possibility that she is conceiving of the abuser's deformity as, so to speak, layered on top of the more typical deficiency, modifying it.
13 There could, of course, be a ‘limited or selective’ range of instances where, say, he displays kindness, perhaps to intimates (possibly owing to a sympathetic strand in his temperament, strengthened by the influence of a doting parent), in which case he would be a kind of thoroughgoing opposite to Herman's abuser.
14 This article is a slightly revised version of a paper presented at a session on Barbara Herman's Moral Literacy at the meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in April 2009. I thank Andrews Reath, Sally Sedgwick and especially Barbara Herman for help with the issues discussed here.