#charles larmore

[houseoforange]

Though the text that we read is not another person, it was written by a person to embody his or her thinking and feeling. I think this point is right and, moreover, absolutely crucial. If a text is not conceived as being the expression of its author’s intention, then the practice of reading cannot itself be of intrinsic ethical significance. We may consider the ways that reading enriches the lives of readers or gives them instruction about how to treat others well, and in this sense we can talk about the ethical importance of reading, that is, about its beneficial consequences. But there can be an “ethics of reading” that regards the practice of reading as itself a matter of ethical moment only if the relation of reader to text is ultimately a relation of the reader to another person.

— Charles Larmore, p. 50, The Humanities and Public Life

[houseoforange]

I find my own sympathies falling in line with [Derek] Attridge’s careful modifications of [Charles] Larmore’s thesis, which lead him to a restatement that emphasizes that writing a text is an act in which one makes oneself “vulnerable” to others—and that our treatment of the vulnerable is a test of our ethical character. This, for Attridge, touches on the ethical thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, based on our recognition of and responsibility for the other. If texts represent an attempt—fragile, vulnerable—by someone else to communicate with us, we might conceive our responsibility to be one of respectful attention to the communication. Tho me, this does not necessarily entail evocation of the person or persons who created the text—who are largely inaccessible as persons—but to the act of attempted communication itself.

— Peter Brooks, p. 7, The Humanities and Public Life

[scowlofminerva-blog]

We have learned to expect that in a free and open discussion reasonable people tend to disagree about justice and the human good – if not about simple points (the elementary rules of morality such as keeping one’s promises and respecting the bodily integrity of others, the importance of both agreeable experiences and actual achievement in a life lived well), then certainly about more complex questions as well as about the underlying principles that justify these judgments and explain the nature of the right and the good.

Charles Larmore, What Is Political Philosophy? 

[scowlofminerva-blog]

The expectation of reasonable disagreement is not, I should caution, the same as the doctrine often called value pluralism, which is a positive doctrine holding that the ultimate sources of the good and the right, objectively speaking, are not one but many. Nor is it tantamount to skepticism, which claims that the proper response to intractable controversy is to suspend judgment or at least to regard one’s own position as more an article of faith than an item of knowledge. Pluralism and skepticism are reactions to the pervasiveness of reasonable disagreement: they are attempts that aim, respectively, at explaining or at evaluating the phenomenon, and consequently they too form prominent movements in the history of modern thought.

Charles Larmore, What Is Political Philosophy?

[scowlofminerva-blog]

“[D]isagreement about the nature of the right and the good is not merely a recurrent phenomenon and not solely the expression of inexperience and error, but the natural outcome of people reasoning freely and conscientiously about how one should live. The realization that moral disagreement is likely to be the outcome when reasonable people discuss among themselves the ultimate questions of life, or when a single person ponders them in his own mind, has been one of the seminal experiences of modernity. “By sowing questions and dividing them up,” Montaigne wrote, “one makes the world flourish and teem with uncertainty and disputes… Difficultatem facit doctrina [learning creates difficulty]… Never have two men judged similarly of the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men, but in the same man at different times.” Or as Hobbes himself declared (palpably echoing Montaigne), “Divers men, differ not only in their judgment on the senses of what is pleasant, and unpleasant to the taste, smell, hearing, touch, and sight; but also of what is conformable to reason, in the actions of common life. Nay, the same man, in divers times, differs from himself, and one time praiseth, that is, calleth good, what another time he dispraiseth, and calleth evil.”

The important element in this outlook is not the mere realization that opinions vary. That people often disagree about ethical issues is a fact of life known from time immemorial. Aristotle himself began his Nicomachean Ethics with a survey of the competing notions of the good life (pleasure, honor, wealth, virtue, knowledge, and the various combinations of these). What Aristotle did not envision, however, and has become a leading theme in modern thought is that reasonable people, exercising their general capacities of reason in good faith on questions having to do with how the individual should live and society be organized, tend to come to different conclusions – not through any defect of reason, but instead because of their different backgrounds, their different senses of what is salient, their different ways of weighing opposing considerations.It is the realization that reason does not lead naturally to unanimity on these questions that represents the break with the past.”

-Charles Larmore, What Is Political Philosophy?