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This book explores historical changes in the words and concepts we use to describe morally significant experiences and events. Focusing on cases like the invention of the term "genocide" in 1942 and the development of the concept of "sexual harassment" in 1975,
Moral Articulation offers a philosophical account of the historical process of moral concept formation. Author Matthew Congdon calls this process "moral articulation." The book explores two philosophical questions raised by such examples. First: are morally meaningful experiences always capturable in words or do they sometimes extend beyond what we can make linguistically explicit? Congdon answers this by defending a theory of moral meaningfulness as extending beyond what we can express in language. Second: do new developments in moral language simply label pre-existing phenomena, or do they have transformative effects upon the experiences and situations they newly describe? Congdon answers this by defending a theory of moral truth as a complex historical result of collective efforts of articulation.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Changing Our Concepts
- �1. Discursive Breakdown
- �2. Meaning and Discourse
- �3. The Discursive Theory of Meaning as a Questionable Supposition of Much Contemporary Ethical Theory
- �4. Changing Conceptual Schemes
- �5. The Expressive Logic of Articulation
- �6. Conclusion
- 2. Thinking Beyond Language
- �1. Concepts and Language
- �2. Concepts and Reality
- �3. Dissonance in the Space of Reasons
- 3. Creative Resentments
- �1. The Problem
- �2. Norm-Creative Resentments
- �3. The Prior Norm Requirement
- �4. The Articulation Model of Emotion
- �5. Conclusion
- 4. Is Morality Loopy?
- �1. A Problem in Critical Social Philosophy
- �2. Hacking on Child Abuse: A Case Study in Causal Discursive Construction
- �3. Rational Discursive Construction
- �4. From Intimate Articulation to Moral Articulation
- �5. Some Formal Features of Moral Articulation
- �6. Conclusion
- 5. Changing Our Nature
- �1. The Immutability Thesis
- �2. Human Natural History
- �3. Articulating Our Nature
- 6. Moral Progress and Immanent Critique
- �1. An Inescapable Circularity?
- �2. Five Theses on Moral Progress
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Matthew Congdon is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. His work has appeared in The Philosophical Quarterly, Analysis, The European Journal of Philosophy, Episteme, and Philosophical Topics, among another publications.
Summary
This book explores the historical development of new moral concepts. Starting from examples of new moral terms invented in the twentieth century, like 'sexual harassment', 'genocide', 'racism', and 'hate speech', this book asks: what we are doing when we bring ethically significant acts and events under new descriptions? Are we simply naming moral phenomena that already exist, fully formed and intact, prior to their expression in language? Or are moral phenomena sensitive to the descriptions under which they fall, such that new modes of moral expression can reshape the phenomena they bring to light?
Moral Articulation outlines an ethical framework that allows us to embrace a version of the latter, transformative view without sacrificing notions of moral truth, objectivity, and knowledge. The book presents a view of moral meaningfulness as extending beyond what we can presently put into words, urging that expansions in our moral vocabularies often begin in dissonant experiences of conceptual and linguistic limits. Resisting a tendency in contemporary ethics to start with situations and dilemmas whose descriptions are already given, this book argues that the struggle to piece together a discursively articulate picture of a situation is an ethical task in its own right. The result is a picture of ethical life that emphasizes the role of language in shaping who we are.
Additional text
How we come to engender new ethical and political concepts in the face of initially nameless but nonetheless meaningful experiences is the driving concern of Matthew Congdon's remarkable book, Moral Articulation: On the Development of New Moral Concepts. In this text, Congdon offers a highly original account of how initially inchoate experiences can lead us to produce new ethical concepts, contending that the articulation of these concepts contributes to the constitution of the very ethical reality they seek to capture.
