Raimond Gaita

Narrative, Identity and Moral Philosophy

Abstract I distinguish what I call ‘minimal narrative’ from narrative of the kind that might disclose a persons identity in biography or autobiography. The latter exists in what I call ‘the realm of meaning’; a realm in which, in ways I try to make clear, form and content cannot be separated. The realm of meaning is also the realm in which we develop an understanding of what it means to lead a human life lucidly responsive to the defining facts of the human condition and, interdependently with that, our sense of what it means to wrong someone. To show to what degree assumptions about the realm of meaning set the stage for our understanding of what it is to wrong someone, of the nature of biography and autobiography and of what it is to learn morally from someones example, I detail the conceptual structure of a certain kind of racist perception. The racists distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, is essentially the distinction between lives that are lived in the realm of meaning and lives that are not. Much of moral philosophy, I argue, takes as it starting point a perception of human life that is little different from the racists perception of the lives of those whom he regards as less than fully human.

Refocusing Genocide: A Philosophical Responsibility

In the twentieth century, Geoffrey Robertson said in his book Crimes against Humanity, international law became accepted in the international community.1 The twenty-first century, he suggested, will be the century of its enforcement. Among the political and judicial advocates who fight for the development of international law, many are driven by a passion to ensure that respect for national sovereignty should not prevent the prosecution of political and military leaders who are guilty of war crimes or of crimes against humanity, especially genocide.

Goodness and Truth

I begin with the common distinction between study which is for its own sake and study which is for some other reason. It is often assumed that when study is not for its own sake then it is for the sake of a career. But there are many and subtle ways in which a students concern with his or her subject may be deflected from its intrinsic good. And there are ways of being concerned with its intrinsic good which are quite trivial. Therefore, if we are concerned with what may go deep in a students life—as surely we must be if we are concerned with its ethical or spiritual possibilities—then we cannot rest with the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goods. A student with a vocation for healing who studies medicine in response to it, or a student who loves justice and who studies law in that spirit and with a view to practising it, is doing something finer than is a philosophy or history student who is merely enchanted with natural pleasures which come with the disciplined exercise of the powers of the mind.

II. Virtues, Human Good, and the Unity of a Life

Maclntyres ‘disquieting suggestion’ concerning the apparently irretrievably anarchic state of contemporary moral discourse begs the crucial questions in any argument over the notion of ‘incoherence’ in moral thought and practice. Thus his attempt to establish the canonical authority of Aristotelianism fails. Nonetheless, the attempt to reconstruct a plausible Aristotelianism is of independent interest. Maclntyre introduces the quasi‐technical notion of a ‘practice’ to locate a non‐reductive teleology of the virtues. Though certain teleological expressions come naturally in a deepened understanding of the place of the virtues in a human life, they will not, at crucial points, bear the philosophically motivated teleological emphasis that Maclntyre places on them. This emphasis is a mistaken reaction to the inadequacies of expressions like ‘intrinsic’ and ‘for its own sake’, as often used by philosophers who argue against teleological construals of morality. It is also prompted by the mistaken belief that i...