Beyond Moral Judgment

What is moral thought and what kinds of demands does it impose? Alice Crary's book Beyond Moral Judgment claims that even the most perceptive contemporary answers to these questions offer no more than partial illumination, owing to an overly narrow focus on judgments that apply moral concepts (for example, "good," "wrong," "selfish," "courageous") and a corresponding failure to register that moral thinking includes more than such judgments. Drawing on what she describes as widely misinterpreted lines of thought in the writings of Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, Crary argues that language is an inherently moral acquisition and that any stretch of thought, without regard to whether it uses moral concepts, may express the moral outlook encoded in a person's modes of speech. She challenges us to overcome our fixation on moral judgments and direct attention to responses that animate all our individual linguistic habits. Her argument incorporates insights from McDowell, Wiggins, Diamond, Cavell, and Murdoch and integrates a rich set of examples from feminist theory as well as from literature, including works by Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Tolstoy, Henry James, and Theodor Fontane. The result is a powerful case for transforming our understanding of the difficulty of moral reflection and of the scope of our ethical concerns.

Politics & Social Sciences

Crary, Alice

Philosophy

Harvard University Press

What is moral thought and what kinds of demands does it impose? Alice Crary's book Beyond Moral Judgment claims that even the most perceptive contemporary answers to these questions offer no more than partial illumination, owing to an overly narrow focus on judgments that apply moral concepts (for example, "good," "wrong," "selfish," "courageous") and a corresponding failure to register that moral thinking includes more than such judgments. Drawing on what she describes as widely misinterpreted lines of thought in the writings of Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, Crary argues that language is an inherently moral acquisition and that any stretch of thought, without regard to whether it uses moral concepts, may express the moral outlook encoded in a person's modes of speech. She challenges us to overcome our fixation on moral judgments and direct attention to responses that animate all our individual linguistic habits. Her argument incorporates insights from McDowell, Wiggins, Diamond, Cavell, and Murdoch and integrates a rich set of examples from feminist theory as well as from literature, including works by Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Tolstoy, Henry James, and Theodor Fontane. The result is a powerful case for transforming our understanding of the difficulty of moral reflection and of the scope of our ethical concerns.

Alice Crary’s Inside Ethics is a transformative account of moral thought about human beings and animals.
We have come to think of human beings and animals as elements of a morally indifferent reality that reveals itself only to neutral or science-based methods. This little-commented-on trend, which shapes the work of moral philosophers and popular ethical writers alike, has pernicious effects, distorting our understanding of the difficulty of moral thinking. Inside Ethics traces the roots of existing views to tendencies in ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. Crary underlines the moral urgency of revisiting our approach in ethics so that, instead of assuming we confront a world that itself places no demands on moral imagination, we treat the exercise of moral imagination as necessary for arriving at an adequate world-guided understanding of human beings and animals.
The book’s argument is both rich and practically oriented, integrating ideas from literary authors such as Raymond Carver, J. M. Coetzee, Daniel Keyes, W. G. Sebald, and Leo Tolstoy and bringing them to bear on issues in disability studies and animal studies as well as elsewhere in ethics. The result is a commanding case for a reorientation in ethics that illuminates central challenges of moral thought about human and animal lives, directing attention to important aspects of these lives that are otherwise hidden from view.

Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought

Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory

Review\n"Animal Crisis presents the reader with the most thorough research into the ways in which animal lives are understood. The arguments are illustrated with stories of individual animals or groups of animals who have been cruelly treated. It is a must for all those who want to understand why we should treat animals ethically." 
Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute & UN Messenger of Peace\n"So radical, so morally unsettling, that you have to take your courage in both hands to read it. But read it you should." 
Raimond Gaita, author of The Philosopher’s Dog\n"A deeply moving book that calls on us to reconsider our relationship to animals and to other humans and ecosystems we depend on." 
Sally Haslanger, author of Resisting Reality\n"[A]n inspirational and comprehensive book on animal ethics: concise yet packed with an impressive amount of potent information." 
Leonardo Reviews\nLeading philosophers Alice Crary and Lori Gruen offer a searing and desperately needed response to systems of thought and action that are failing animals and, ultimately, humans too. In the wake of global pandemics, mass extinctions, habitat destruction, and catastrophic climate change, they issue a clarion call to address the intertwined problems we face, arguing that we must radically reimagine our relationships with other animals. 
In stark contrast to traditional theories in animal ethics, which abstract from social mechanisms harmful to human beings, Animal Crisis makes the case that there can be no animal liberation without human emancipation. Borrowing from critical theories such as ecofeminism, Crary and Gruen present a critical animal theory for understanding and combating the structural forces that enable the diminishment of so many to the advantage of a few. With seven case studies of complex human-animal relations, they make an urgent plea to dismantle the “human supremacism” that is devastating animal lives and hurtling us toward ecocide.

Gruen, Lori

Polity

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Books by Crary, Alice

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Crary, Alice. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Beyond Moral Judgment

Beyond Moral Judgment

Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought

Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory

Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory