Paul Schofield (Bates College) on recent work of Jack Samuel (NYU Law Student)

Commentary on Samuel's “An Individual Reality, Separate from Oneself” (Inquiry 2021) and “Alienation and the Metaphysics of Normativity” (Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, forthcoming)

By Paul Schofield

In recent years, Anglo-American philosophers have joined the Continental thinkers in their concern that ethics bring “the other” into view. Stephen Darwall, Michael Thompson, and R. Jay Wallace, to name a few, have urged that we take seriously the thought that moral norms connect directly one person to another. These figures seem to me to be on about something deep. But it’s also fair to say that the very topic—its central concepts and questions—is still in the process of being clarified. What it is to keep “the other” in view, and why we should even care about such a thing, are very much live issues in the present milieu.

In a pair of forthcoming articles [1], Jack Samuel attempts to illuminate the topic via emphasis on the concept of alienation. That theory is prone to disconnect a person from aspects of herself, from her everyday life, or from the world itself is a perennial philosophical worry. Samuel surveys prominent examples of this anxiety and proposes to add another—an anxiety that contemporary metaethics will leave the individual alienated from her fellow human beings.

Take, for instance, Bernard Williams’s famous concern that utilitarianism alienates the agent from her deepest values, and thus from herself [2]. Because she must always serve the greatest good, those projects and relationships with which she most identifies are ones to which utilitarianism prevents her from fully committing. Whether a man can may save his drowning wife, who he loves, or pursue his art, which is his driving passion, will depend upon these activities’ ability to maximize utility. And this, says Williams, keeps at arm’s length what matters to him most.

Such alienation is real and worthy of attention. But Samuel insists that it misses something. While Williams is preoccupied with alienation occasioned by a disordered soul, he seems insensitive to the threat of social alienation, wherein an individual is kept at arm’s length from other persons rather than from his own commitments. By turning inward and attending to one’s inner constitution, a person risks turning away from others who help to constitute “a reality separate from ourselves,” to quote Iris Murdoch [3] (1971, 42). Whereas adherence to the principle of utility threatens to alienate me from my deep commitment to my wife, attention to my deep commitment itself focuses attention on my own mental economy and threatens to alienate me from her.  

What I take to be Samuel’s most original insight, though, is that those following Williams also get something profoundly right. Namely, the threat of alienation really does haunt metaethics, and it is imperative that we theorize with an eye to avoiding it. But because views that focus on self-alienation are comparatively better developed, we might hope that they will contain insight that will help illuminate concerns about alienation from “the other”—and in the process clarify what it might mean to bring “the other” into view.

A moral theory is alienating, roughly, when its analysis represents us humans—even when all goes well—as separated from that with which we ought to be united. Take Christine Korsgaard’s renowned critique of realism [4]. The realist, she says, populates her ontology with moral reasons, but does so without saying much about what these items have to do with us. Such things might purport to prohibit stealing or murdering, lying or manipulating. But how they get their grip on us, so as to place genuine requirements on our will, remains a mystery. That a theory leaves us alienated in this way from our moral reasons suggests it is deficient.

Those working in this space will no doubt have developed their own thoughts about what is meant, here, by alienation—what exactly it consists is, why it is troubling, what it would mean to avoid it. And part of what Samuel is suggesting is that in reflecting on this particular species of alienation, we philosophers might already have gained insight into the broader genus. That is, whatever we think it would mean for a norm or a commitment to grip us might help us understand what it would be for the particular, concrete “other” to grip us—or, instead, to be so alienated from us as to leave us wondering what they have to do with us at all. So, should we find obscure Continental talk of “bringing the other into view,” or find more recent talk of owning duties to another underspecified, then perhaps progress can be made by linking the topic to investigations of other practical alienations. The clarification allows Samuel to offer some suggestive remarks about the direction that metaethics ought to take if it is ever to be sufficiently “other-orientated.”

The exploratory and open-ended nature of Samuel’s two terrific essays do what the best philosophy does, which is reframe and reorient ongoing debates while opening up new lines of inquiry. In my case, I am unexpectedly left pondering anew what it means for me to be alienated from my own commitments or from moral norms in light of the idea that such alienations might be modeled of being alienated from other persons.  I am also left pondering the ways in which being psychologically integrated is different from being socially integrated, for surely it seems that successful social integration will admit of more disunity or tension than individual integration does. So how might these topics inform one another, given the differences between the phenomena they consider? I’ll be thinking about this for a while. I highly recommend both articles.

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[1] “An Individual Reality, Separate from Oneself” in Inquiry; “Alienation and the Metaphysics of Normativity” in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy

[2] Smart, J. J. C. & Williams, Bernard (1973), Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge University Press.

[3] Murdoch, Iris (1971), The Sovereignty of Good. Routledge.

[4] Korsgaard, Christine (1996), The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge University Press.