Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-1-2010
Abstract
This essay focuses on the significance of disagreem ent in what Cavell has coined“Emersonian” perfectionism. This moral outlook hold s that everyday moral duties andchoices, unlike epistemological cases, ultimately r est on our personal assessment andjustification of an action. It is therefore possible (and likely) that disagreements point notto moral incompetence, but to a conflict of desires – crucially including a conflict of onesown desires. As a consequence, the demand of making oneself intelligible is a primary andconstant moral duty, without which we lose sight of the means of coming to an agreement.Perfectionism further assumes that, since people ar e not transparent to themselves,conversations with friends form a decisive part of the moral life as well. Thus touching atonce on individual needs and desires as well as on the foundations and limits ofcommunity, these assumptions challenge both models dominating American moralthinking: (Mill’s) utilitarianism and (Kantian) deo ntology.1 I will primarily engage with acritique of the latter model, according to which di sagreement merely signifies moralflaws. Moreover, to the extent that self can be distinguished on the basis of inclinations,desires, opinions, and a voice of one’s own, Kant, in his demand for the moral realm to bepure and for the voice to be universal, seeks to ke ep this self out of the moral realmaltogether, thus founding what a perfectionist woul d call as a selfless and friendless moral fantasy. To Cavell, the self and its desires and inclinations do not pose a seriousthreat to moral reasoning – not per se at least. In stead, he aligns himself with a tendencyhe sees recurring throughout the history of philoso phy (and literature, film, etc.); atendency of thinkers who take conformity of the sel f to the community speaking for it tobe the most threatening attitude, especially in dem ocratic societies. The importance offriendship becomes yet more apparent in this contex t, as I shall illustrate throughCavell’s discussion with Saul Kripke on the moral i mplication of Wittgenstein’sPhilosophical Investigations in the second half of this paper. I shall first out line theimportance of the self for a perfectionist moral ou tlook by contrasting it to Kantiandeontology.
Publisher Attribution
Author retains copyright and grants the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Gerrits, Jeroen, "“Disagreement as Duty: On the Importance of the Self and Friendship in Cavell's Moral Philosophy.”" (2010). Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship. 62.
https://orb.binghamton.edu/comparative_literature_fac/62
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Comments
https://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.937 This essay is an edited version of a paper presented at Université de Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens, France) in June 2008 and at the NYU comparative Literature conference entitled “Disagreement” in March 2010.