HOME / books: Reading between the lines.

Whose Values Are They, Anyway?The peculiar politics of moral passion.

By K. Anthony AppiahPosted Tuesday, May 27, 2008, at 7:21 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

RSS

Related in Slate

Previously, K. Anthony Appiah weighed in on what students should study in college and reviewed the book Black Intellectuals by William M. Banks. Emily Wilson assessed the Loeb Classical Library. David Plotz blogged the complete Book of Genesis.

Yet Neiman may be a cannier reader of the canonical texts than she is of the contemporary political situation. Are progressives truly reluctant to heroize people? A million T-shirts say otherwise. Nor is it clear just how her detailed exploration of Odysseus' journey actually connects with the modern heroes she commends to us, who are distinctly in the fearless, self-sacrificing mold: Daniel Ellsberg, the Harvard-educated Marine with a Ph.D., a defense department insider whose conscience led him to leak the Pentagon Papers; David Shulman, an Israeli professor of Sanskrit and army veteran who risks injury to work with a group of Israeli and Palestinian peaceniks devoted to nonviolent resistance; Robert Moses, fearless leader of SNCC's voting rights work in the '60s, who went on to teach algebra in the inner city; and her cousin, Sarah Chayes, a former NPR correspondent who is helping Afghan women make soap in a collective in Kandahar. (A fellow as crafty and pragmatic as Odysseus would definitely have high-tailed it out of there.) Do we really need Homer's wily wanderer to inspire the relevant virtues?

When it comes to using the language of good and evil, too, it's unclear to me who really needs persuading. The treatment of prisoners by American soldiers and operatives at Abu Ghraib, which she offers as one of her paradigms of evil, is not an event that progressives (or most others) have been inclined to discuss in value-neutral terms. Neiman can leave you unconvinced that the things that horrify her in the Bush administration are really connected with a loss of moral clarity on the left.

If you are a humanist, there is something gratifying about the idea of claiming a rhetoric that resonates with the grandest of our texts and thereby moving our country in progressive directions. (It is also an idea congenial to the creators of the Einstein Forum, which describes itself as "an institutional context for intellectual innovation outside the university.") But I found myself wondering, as I read, whether Neiman had granted a little too much to the self-promotional claims of the Olin Foundation and its ilk. And I wondered, too, whether she might not be overly credulous toward conservative depictions of how liberals think. Though she doesn't discuss Allan Bloom, her project can be seen as a progressive alternative to his Closing of the American Mind. But she may be too quick to accept something like his vision of a liberal culture overtaken by mindless relativism.

It's true that the academy has been host to plenty of radical skepticism, not to mention postmodern posturing. And because the wilder ideas of academics have always attracted disproportionate attention—at least since Aristophanes mocked Socrates in The Clouds—it may have appeared to some that this was all there was. But even in the academy, not to mention the world rumored to be outside it, the ideal of moral clarity seems to be faring rather well. Consider just the field of ethics in our philosophy departments. There are more "virtue ethicists"—devoted to elaborating Aristotle's ideas of the virtuous and the vicious—than you can shake a stick at. (Not that a virtuous person would do such a thing.) Many other ethicists insist on Kant's stern regard for duty and oppose those who claim that the true morality is a matter of a subtle attention to the multiple values at stake in particular cases. Along with the Aristotelian virtue ethicists and Kantian deontologists, there are a slew of Thomists, Realists, and contractualists, all of whom believe in something like the universality of moral values. And that's before we have even come to discussing a single actual moral issue.

So far as applied ethics goes, there are large debates about the morality of abortion or physician-assisted suicide or stem-cell research, polemics about what we owe to the poor at home or abroad, arguments over whether corporations have moral obligations and about which rights, if any, are universal. Neiman suggests that "those whose business is to think about morality have been remiss" in various respects, but a great many ethicists are working on the very tasks she says have been ignored.

Not that any of this much matters on the hustings. Elections aren't final exams, and they aren't referendums on moral theory, either. Neiman's readings of the canon are inventive and illuminating in their own right, but, for better or worse, they don't amount to a political strategy. Maybe the real lesson that Democrats at the advent of the Bush era should have taken from Abraham's argument with God was simply this: Demand a recount.