Session 6: Horrific Morals and Philosophies

Session 6: Horrific Morals and Philosophies
Chair: David Carter

The Moral Significance of Fear and Horror in Agent-at-Fault Dilemmas
Nathaniel Sharadin
University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, USA

Ethical theories must give some account of the phenomenological experience of moral dilemma. This account must, at least in part, consider the deliberating agent’s own standpoint. An adequate theory must confront the practical and moral significance of the emotions an agent experiences both during and also in the aftermath of a moral dilemma. I will not argue for this claim here. It is a common-place, it seems to me, that any ethical theory ignoring the significance of the emotions in shaping agents’ experience of moral dilemma will grossly mischaracterize agents’ experience of ethical conflict.
Moral dilemmas come in many flavors. Some are resolvable, others irresolvable. Dilemmas can be tragic, as when Agamemnon must decide between loyalty to his daughter and to his army. Dilemmas can be pleasant, or at least not unpleasant, as when I am ‘forced’ to decide between donating to Oxfam or to a local shelter. With respect to an agent’s prior wrong actions, we can describe a dilemma as having been ‘avoidable’ or ‘unavoidable’. By this I mean we sometimes justifiably say of an agent that ‘She got herself into it’, ‘She dug her own grave’, ‘She’s reaping what she sowed’, etc. and that at other times we think an agent’s predicament is merely the result of bad moral luck.
In this paper, I am concerned with a particular kind of avoidable moral dilemma that I will call agent-at-fault dilemmas. These dilemmas may be either resolvable or irresolvable, but I limit my discussion to dilemmas in which there is some all-things-considered (a.t.c) judgment available to the agent; in other words, the agent is in a dilemma where there is one thing that, all things considered, she should do. To narrow the field further, I will ignore the possibility of the agent failing in either deliberation or motivation. The agent fails neither to perceive the salient considerations in the dilemma—moral or otherwise—nor to act on the reason that an a.t.c judgment provides. In some sense of ‘acting rightly’, the agent acts rightly: she acts in accordance with whatever she has most reason to do. I argue in this paper that fear – in the form of prospective shame – and moral abhorrence are appropriate in certain cases of agent-at-fault dilemmas.

Hobbesian Fear(s): A Philosophical Exploration
Raffaella Santi
Department of Education, University of Urbino, Italy

In his autobiography, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) declared that he and fear were born twins…This was probably to emphasize the role of fear in his philosophical system. In fact, fear plays a central role in Hobbes’s anthropology as well as in his political philosophy, especially in his literary masterpiece, the  English version of Leviathan (1651; a Latin version will appear in 1668).
The aim of this paper is to show how fear – defined, in general, as “Aversion, with the opinion of hurt from the object” (Lev. VI 16) – characterizes for Hobbes human condition, being the moving principle of civil society.
Fear is at the core of the natural (pre-social) condition of mankind, the so called “state of nature”, with “the war of all against all” – if not always real, always menaced. It is one of the reasons why people decide to lay down their right to do everything (jus in omnia) in order to create the State that will protect them – fear in the latter sense is what scholars have called the “Hobbesian fear”. However, fear is also present after the creation of the State: people live in peace because of the State’s authority, and tend not to commit crimes for the fear of punishments. Moreover, fear is important also at a religious level. It is the cause of religion, since the latter, as Hobbes writes, is the “Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imaginated from tales publicly allowed” (Lev. VI 36).
The paper will seek to explore the various meanings of fear in Hobbes’s thought, and to reassess  their meaning – if any – for us today.

An Immediate Recoiling Approach: Bataille and Kearney on the Transmutations of Dread
Apple Igrek
Department of Philosophy, Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA, USA

In all of Bataille’s works, a contradictory impulse is methodically and obsessively studied.  Erotic debauchery and “flights of Christian religious experience” are said to have a common source.  The outcasts of society, the pariahs, the sick, the mad, the criminals, belong to the same world as the good, upright, and proper.  A single individual is moved by kindness and cruelty, serenity and rage.  Horrified by so-called freaks of nature, we are nonetheless fascinated by hermaphrodites, Siamese twins, and two-headed calves.  Bataille’s attempt to think through such ambivalent reactions and experiences is closely connected to his study of social taboos, the validity of which owes its strength to a dynamic movement of repulsion.  Bataille ultimately argues that the nucleus of society is formed by this recoiling movement of prohibition, which is likewise a manifestation of irrational terror.
An alternative approach to excess forms of experience, to the sublime limit of irrationality, is provided by Richard Kearney in his Strangers, Gods, and Monsters.  He thus argues that the relationship between repulsive forms of otherness and a dialogical perspective, between the unthinkable and practical consciousness, can be changed from an inhuman impossibility to a more thoughtful dynamic.  Critiquing the idea that the strangeness of things, or the strangeness of life itself, should be our primary focus in ethics and social life, Kearney demolishes extreme binaries in hopes of constructing a dialogue between the transcendent and concretely immanent.  While acknowledging the need for Kearney’s “middle path” as one solution to the disappearance of ethical relations in postmodernism, I will nevertheless defend Bataille’s position as a necessary condition of collective practices; for the urgency of social life is ineluctably bound up with its immediate horror of purposeless nature and absolute loss.