Indignation, practical rationality and our moral life : a grammatical investigation

Abstract

This paper offers a grammatical investigation of some important aspects of our moral life taking a scene from the movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town as a test case. The main question I try to answer is whether there are situations in our moral discussions in which the proper and rational attitude is to show disagreement (e.g. by expressing indignation), as opposed to continuing the dialogue. Many philosophers seem committed to a conception of moral reasoning that takes as its end rational agreement among agents; from that perspective, expressing indignation would just amount to an irrational way of trying to get rid of the burdens put upon the agent's shoulders in the context of a moral discussion. Against that widespread view I will defend a Cavellian version of moral perfectionism, which takes rational disagreement as a legitimate (and even productive) outcome of moral arguments. That view, as we shall see, will be predicated upon a distinctive understanding of practical rationality, hence the importance of comparing moral discussion to other forms of rational engagement (e.g., aesthetic, scientific and mathematical).