Finding one's way home: Notes on the texture of moral experience

Studies in Philosophy and Education

Volumn 15, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 221-233

  Hansen, David T ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

Character; Conduct; Morality; Narrative; Virtue

Indexed keywords

EID: 53349107293     PISSN: 00393746     EISSN: 1573191X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF00419692     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. See, for example, Lawrence A. Blum, Friendship, Altruism and Morality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980);
2. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark, 1985; first published 1970);
3. Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984);
4. and Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962). These writers differ markedly in the tone and the terms they employ, and in their construal of the traditions from which they write. With respect to the purpose of this article, however, those differences pale in comparison with their sustained emphasis on issues of personal disposition and character in the moral life.
5. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books, 1984, p. 3).
6. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Viking Penguin, 1993, p. 168).
7. Martha Nussbaum employs and embellishes the idea of personal discernment at great length in her analysis of the moral value of literature; see in particular Love's Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
8. See also two recent treatments (both related directly to teaching) of what has been called "situational appreciation," still another concept that highlights the centrality of personal perception - as contrasted with principle - in the identification of what is at stake in a predicament and how one might act: Shirley Pendlebury, "Practical Arguments and Situational Appreciation in Teaching," Educational Theory 40 (Spring 1990): 171-179,
9. and David C. Bricker, "Character and Moral Reasoning: An Aristotelian Perspective," in Kenneth A. Strike & P. Lance Ternasky (Eds.), Ethics for Professionals in Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993), 13-26.
10. The film was recorded in black and white and is technically imaginative. Its use of light and shadows serves time and again to reveal an aspect of a human relationship or of a character's motives, dispositions, and feelings. It brings to mind George Eliot's description of the moral development of one of her central characters in her novel, Middlemarch: We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling - an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects - that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference. (New York: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 243)
11. It would take me outside the purposes of this paper to discuss the value of film as a form of art that illuminates moral life (although I hope to show this). Stanley Cavell's work comes to mind here, particularly "Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly: Bette Davis and Now, Voyager," Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990): 213-247.
12. Jo Jackson pointed this fact out to me.
13. On the possibilities that accompany a realization of the tragic, see Nicholas C. Burbules, "The Tragic Sense of Education," Teachers College Record 91 (Summer 1990), and the response to this paper by René
14. Vincente Arcilla, "Tragic Absolutism in Education," Educational Theory 42 (Fall 1992): 473-481.
15. Also see Stanley Hauerwas with D. B. Burrell, "From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern for Rationality in Ethics," in Stanley Hauerwas (with R. Bondi and D. B. Burrell), Truthfulness and Tragedy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 15-39.
16. For a recent argument that seeks, in part, to wed ethical principle and inner disposition, see Debra Shogan, Care and Moral Motivation (Toronto: OISE Press, 1988).
17. For arguments on the embeddedness of moral understanding in narrative, see Stephen Crites, "The Narrative Quality of Experience," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 (1971): 291-311;
18. Stanley Hauerwas with D. B. Burrell, "From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern for Rationality in Ethics," in Hauerwas (with R. Bondi and D. B. Burrell), Truthfulness and Tragedy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 15-39;
19. and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Second Edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).