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Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents
By Jeffrey Stout
Boston, Beacon, 1988. 338 pp. $27.50.

I

We recognize in the "confounding of language" and the "scattering abroad" of the people of the earth that take place in the story of Babel (Gen. 11: 1-9) conditions of chaos and confusion that pertain to our own situation, not only in language but also in the moral life. The story may make us nostalgic for a time when "the whole earth had one language and few words," moral pluralism, too, frightens us. It's not that we don't appreciate variety in human life (though some of us seem able to tolerate it only in small doses). But coming into contact with significantly different moral beliefs, norms, and ways of interpreting, speaking, and acting--distinct "moral languages," to use the shorthand-can make us worry whether any morality can be relied upon as true. Does the diversity of moral languages condemn us to a relativism that leads inexorably to nihilism? Is morality undermined by its own multiplicity?

Jeffrey Stout, Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Religion at Princeton University, provides in this book extended reflection on the problems of moral diversity and various modern attempts to deal with them. He finds our usual answers lacking-both those in current moral and religious theory and the ones we spontaneously bring to bear in everyday, practical activity. But Stout sees no reason why the failure of these answers should lead us to disperse sadly (or heroically) into nihilism and skepticism, or to be resigned to living nervously (or belligerently) in our own isolated moral universes. Our options, he argues, are not nearly so limited as they may seem.

Finding another way is not easy, however, so Stout does not proceed by simply stating and advocating his approach. Rather, he leads us through a careful and detailed discussion of the problems, carrying on in the process an illuminating and often witty conversation with some of the most important and influential people (philosophers, primarily, but also theologians, anthropologists, and sociologists) working on these issues today. In doing this, he (1) makes distinctions and clarifications

The subject of our Review Symposium is a work in moral philosophy of considerable significance for contemporary theology and theological ethics. Craig Dykstra begins with a synopsis of the book. George Lindbeck, James Wm. McClendon and Nancey Murphy, Sheila Briggs, and Cornel West provide the reviews. Jeffrey Stout concludes the Symposium with his response.

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that are extraordinarily helpful in understanding what the problems are really all about, (2) guides us ably through some of the most difficult but important (including theologically important) philosophical work being done today, and (3) illustrates the way of dealing with ethical issues that, in the end, he advocates.

Part I concerns "The Spectres of Moral Diversity." The general question, "Is moral relativism true?" is, it turns out, unanswerable. Too general to be meaningful or useful, it replaces and hides the variety of questions that are really at stake. And these have varying answers: Is it possible for people to disagree entirely in relation to moral issues? Are there moral truths, despite the fact that people in different cultures may be justified in coming to different moral conclusions? May cultures with different moral languages than our own know moral truths that we do not-and cannot-given our moral framework? Is there a single transcendent true morality to which every particular moral system should strive to correspond and by which the truth of each should be tested? Stout's answers are, respectively, "no," "yes," "yes, but … " and "the question is misleading." The answers are important, of course, but of greater value are the nuanced discussions that comprise them.

In the process of framing and answering questions like these, Stout shows how some dimensions of morality are indeed relative. But he also shows the importance of understanding what they are relative to. Moral justification, interpretation, expressibility, and blame, though relative, are not relative to just anything and everything. And morality itself is not evacuated of knowledge because of the relativity that does exist in it. It is possible, in fact, to speak of truth in morality and mean it. Therefore, we have no need to regard differences and disagreements in morality as grounds for skepticism or despair.

Stout's way of working with the problems does not require-indeed, it rejects-any attempt to build morality on "foundations," whether a transcendent moral law or fundamental moral principles. It also refuses related attempts to speak what he calls moral Esperanto: "an artificial moral language invented in the (unrealistic) hope that everyone will want to speak it." Moral philosophy since the Enlightenment has taken largely such tacks, but in Stout's view they turn out to be failed attempts to rebuild the tower of Babel. Part II of the book criticizes such approaches while explaining how their dominance is at least partly responsible for what he aptly calls "The Eclipse of Religious Ethics."

Stout's complaint is that modern ethics strives to deal with pluralism by getting above the fray. Kant is the key figure here, but he is not alone. Modern liberal ethical theory (though not modern practice-at least not so much as such theory assumes) is caught up in a search for some formal, universal, non-historical, non-culturally-mediated basis for morality that can be used to judge and test the adequacy of any traditional one. Indeed, it may be understood as a flight from the authority of tradition altogether (see Stout's previous book, The Flight from Authority [1981]).

The modern flight from tradition is, in part, flight from religious

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Authority-especially the kind that leads to religious warfare and dogmatic rejection of inquiry. Such an attempt to transcend tradition, to gain somehow "a God's-eye view," is, ironically, a major reason for the eclipse of religious ethics. For, over time, the claim that having any particular tradition's view of God is neither necessary nor desirable for ethical reflection has lead to the assumption of the irrelevance of God to philosophical and cultural discussion of morality altogether. And it is not only secularists who now make this assumption. Modern religious ethics does as well-largely by cutting the cloth of religious morality to fit the secular pattern, as Stout's discussion of some examples of it show.

Stout thinks that religious ethics could have something of interest to offer, even to secular philosophers. But it will not be by trying either to secure religious foundations for ethics or to make everyone else speak one's own religious moral language. Rather, it will be by showing how the many elements intrinsic to a rich religious tradition-belief, historical narrative, symbols and imagery, social norms and practices, skills, habits, and virtues-come together in sustaining a way of life. Unfortunately, in Stout's view, academic theology has, for the most part, failed to do this. Academic theology has cut itself off from living religious communities, and hence lost "its ability to command attention as a distinctive contributor to public discourse in our culture." Embarrassed by a piety not disciplined by serious thought, contemporary theology has gone off on its own, speaking neither to religious communities nor to a wider culture but only to itself.

Stout does not attempt to show theologians how to do their work properly. His chapter on "moral abomination" (the capacity to sustain moral revulsion in the face of evil) is suggestive, however. And his outline and discussion of six basic options in contemporary theology (in Chapter 8, "The Voice of Theology") together with his comments about some of David Tracy's work and a close reading of James Gustafson's Ethics From a Theocentric Perspective are sure to engender considerable discussion. His theme in all of this is that, somehow, theology must be recognizably theological, whereas "academic theologians have increasingly given the impression of saying nothing atheists don't already know."

In Part III, "Moral Discourse in Pluralistic Society," Stout proceeds to deal directly with his book's fundamental thesis. He finds his own solutions in the interplay between the liberal pragmatism of philosopher Richard Rorty, on the one hand, and the communitarianism of people like Robert Bellah and, especially, Alasdair MacIntyre. Bellah's widely read Habits of the Heart and MacIntyre's After Virtue have become very influential among religious thinkers, and the communitarian option is reflected in such theological ethicists as Stanley Hauerwas. Rorty's work is less well-known in this context. But Stout shows how the two positions ought to be read in relation to each other. Each helps, in Stout's hands, to clarify the strengths and weaknesses of the other, and both together reveal what is at stake for us now.

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Stout generates from this discussion three results, all of which are important for religious people. The first is a fundamental appreciation for the achievements and continuing potential of a modern, tolerant, liberal culture. In these days of liberal-bashing (political and religious as well as moral), such appreciation is much needed and hard to come by. The second is a renewed appreciation for communal tradition. The first and second results are not in conflict, because (despite its own dominant attitude toward tradition and its desire to transcend it) liberalism is a tradition itself. Indeed, liberalism's continuing power depends, in Stout's view, upon its self-recognition as such; it must put its own resources as a tradition to work.

To do this, however, any tradition, Stout claims, will have to carry on ethical reflection "with both eyes open." Such reflection must bring into focus simultaneously ("stereoscopically") not only individual rights and freedom and bureaucratic institutional organization (the typical emphases in liberal thought) but also historical, communal practices and the goods internal to them. Furthermore, it must involve continuing moral and social criticism. But this must be self-consciously "immanent" criticism, which does not seek, per impossible, to rise above its own cultural and historical situation.

Using a "vocabulary of moral description and assessment" borrowed from MacIntyre-particularly the distinctions and relations between "social practices" and "institutions" and between "internal goods" and "external goods"¹-Stout argues that our society is in some ways better off morally than we have been able to notice, as well as in some dangers we have heretofore been unable to articulate. What's most important, however, is that this way of thinking morally makes possible fresh mobilization of resources in our traditions (including religious traditions) for the moral struggles that face us. The third result, then, is an option for doing ethics after Babel, one that neither seeks a world without moral diversity nor strives to get above it all by building a tower to the sky.

Craig Dykstra

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey

¹ Stout provides a Lexicon at the end of his book in which many of his key terms are, often humorously, defined. Here are two:
Social practice (MacIntyre's sense): "Any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended" (After Virtue, p. 187); what baseball is and taking long showers isn't.
Goods internal to a practice: Those goods which can be realized only by participating in a given social practice (in Maclntyre's sense) and satisfying, at least to some significant degree, its standards of excellence; contrasts with "goods external to a practice," which are either internal to some other practice or external to all; in baseball, what Mattingly achieves, Red Smith appreciated, and Steinbrenner violates.

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II

Stout does not expect religion and theology to play any larger role in ethics after Babel than at present. Yet one group of theologians (Hans Frei, Ronald Thiemann, and myself are examples he mentions) may well feel more gratified than depressed, because Stout has produced a first-rate case for the theological approach to which Hans Frei gave the impetus in Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974). This new way of thinking about theology is the fifth of six options Stout lists as currently available to theologians, and it makes more sense to him than do any of the others. It is compatible with the postmodernism now intellectually regnant, with the kind of liberal society he favors, and with the integrity of religious communal traditions. Despite these advantages, it seems to him doomed to marginality. Let's see what is at stake.

From the point of view of a postmodern formulation (including Stout's and my own), language is primary for all aspects of life; theoretical, practical, and experiential. As Richard Rorty puts it in a remark Stout cites, "what is most important for human life is not what propositions we believe but what vocabulary we use." It is because of this that theologians who take Stout's fifth option insist on "valuing Scripture over science and experience." The latter depend on the vocabulary and syntax we employ in expressing, describing, and assessing them; and these in turn, are shaped by the texts that function authoritatively in a given tradition. Every major tradition has its canons of written texts, its scriptures. These textually inscribed linguistic paradigms have endowed communities that use them with a cross-cultural and trans-temporal tenacity and cohesion that no other human groupings can begin to match.

Once we recognize this, any attempt to justify using such a language by appeal to some supposed nonlinguistic or extra-linguistic basis (the attempt that the word "foundationalism" refers to) seems manifestly foolish. To try to ground acceptance of Scripture by theories of revelation or inspiration, as both liberals and fundamentalists have done in modern times, actually weakens its authority. It makes what needs no apologetics, depend on questionable ones. Besides, to stop using a language that works well dooms us to dumbness, or to the prolonged travail of mastering another tongue (or developing an Esperanto) equally lacking in foundational justification.

The contribution of such nonfoundationalist scripturalism to the integrity of communal traditions seem self-evident. But its congeniality with a marginal status in Stout's postmodern pluralistic society needs further comment. Such a society, as Stout envisions it, would be mercifully devoid of the imperial, Babel-producing claims of competing Enlightment liberalisms (and their reactive counterparts, modern fundamentalisms and fascisms) which now undermine the ability of communities of faith to cultivate secular and religious virtues in their members. But are the moral resources Stout thinks we can depend upon adequate to his vision?

A chaos of moral idioms is rampant in the churches no less than in

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other institutions. The languages and practices of utilitarianism and expressive individualism that flourish in the bureaucracies and the market place are seeping, with destructive consequences, into all areas of life and thought-including theology. Yet, Stout seems right to maintain that neither sectarian withdrawal nor revolutionary destruction of the present order is feasible or desirable. He has qualms about liberationist or political theologies, but he also argues against the communitarians with whom, in most respects, he agrees (MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Cornel West, and Christopher Lasch). They are mistaken in thinking that liberal institutions depend on liberal philosophy, and that the demise of the latter entails the collapse of the former. On the contrary, liberal institutional and political forms can be modified to supply the support now lacking for the necessarily nonliberal (not antiliberal) familial, local, educational, occupational, and religious communal matrices that are the seed-beds of true virtues (namely, those concerned with goods internal rather than external to good practices). Only thus, it would seem, can we have genuine pluralism: a pluralism that allows religious and nonreligious, Christian and non-Christian communal traditions to live without loss of integrity within a liberal public order.

According to Stout, churches would then once again have a chance to be effective agents of distinctively Christian formation in public and private virtues, just as they were in the American past (though one hopes less imperfectly). They would be at liberty to leave to their members qua citizens, not qua ecclesia, the task of engaging in prophetic protest and other forms of structural (not only interpersonal) service to the neighbor. They would be less corrupted by Constantinian aspirations to influence public policy directly; and their reforming effectiveness, though indirect, might be better and greater as a consequence. (The Quakers were once good illustrations of this point.) To be sure, liberal pluralism, as Stout emphasizes, is anything but a utopian social order. It constitutes a fragile and messy environment within which wheat and tares both grow. Its advantage is that it is more open than any other kind of polity to criticism and correction from within. It thus provides an especially favorable context for the struggle against the ever-changing injustices and oppressions endemic in the human enterprise. Biblical religion cannot ask for more. Marginal status within such a society may be, from a scripturalist perspective, the closest thing to paradise available within history.

My difficulties with this scenario are nontheological. First, I have my doubts about what Stout calls bricolage: arranging "bits and pieces of received linguistic material … into a structured whole." He seems to think that this can function as a kind of substitute for a lingua franca in which to formulate the minimal and ever-shifting ethical consensus that pluralistically liberal societies need for their survival. (In the absence of such a consensus, chaos can be avoided only by manipulation or outright coercion.) I suspect that we cannot effectively "take the many parts of

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[our] complicated social and cultural inheritance and stitch them together into a pattern that meets the needs of the moment," except when one of the combinatory idioms is dominant and, in effect, enriches itself by absorbing elements from the others. If so, however, the move from foundationalist to bricoleur does not avoid the problem of what will be the publicly dominant language.

Second, there is a sociological side to this conceptual difficulty. Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, has remarked that the liberal children of the orthodox are the ones who have the moral fibre, the selfsacrificing and incorruptible idealism, to make a pluralistic secular state work. The present Israeli problem is that secular Zionism has largely lost its fervor, and fewer children of the orthodox are becoming liberal. What is needed, in my view, is an orthodoxy religiously committed to a liberal polity. And this is as true in America as in Israel. When such a commitment exists, a biblically-rooted theological idiom develops that is public, in the sense that it is applicable to public issues. In societies where scriptural language is familiar, such a theology may also be public in the additional sense of being widely intelligible and persuasive. Biblical premises need not always be accepted in order for this to happen. Abraham Lincoln refused to identify himself as a believer, but he was no less effective than Reinhold Niebuhr or Martin Luther King, Jr., in moving multitudes of nonbelievers and believers by the power of his biblical rhetoric.

As it happens, the only sizable traditions religiously committed to liberal institutions are certain biblical ones; and the cultures in which these institutions have best flourished have been, at least until recently, saturated in biblical modes of discourse. Such discourse (including, not least, the language of divine commands) has provided a framework within which much effective bricolage has taken place in the populace. In short, given what the currently most plausible historical narratives indicate about the enabling conditions for pluralistic liberalism, it is not at all clear that the future Stout hopes for would be possible without much greater religious input than he thinks necessary.

As a theologian, I wish it were otherwise. But as a citizen, I find myself thinking that Stout is perhaps a bit of a utopian after all. The author of so good a book, however, may be forgiven so venial a sin and, indeed, much worse ones.

George Lindbeck

Yale Divinity School
New Haven, Connecticut

III

Characteristically, Jeffrey Stout's work is eminently readable and deals intelligibly with issues that matter. Whether one takes this book up as a report on the state of current philosophy, or as an indication of the

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attitude of the intellectual majority toward Christian faith, or as a guide to the current debate about public issues, it will reward its reader. We assume that THEOLOGY TODAY readers have an interest in all these matters, and that they are particularly interested to know whether and how this work matters to pastors and other theological leaders, so this will be our focus here. We find much to admire in Ethics after Babel, and much to agree with, but we will dissent sharply where necessary in order to bring out Stout's stance vis à vis Christian theology today. For clarity, we will gather our remarks under the headings of (1) philosophy (including philosophical ethics), (2) theology, and (3) public morality.

Philosophically, Stout belongs (as do we) to the generation that has found its way from the analytical methodology in which it was trained to an understanding more historical, more open in method, more engaged. We see afresh that we ourselves are caught in history's current, we are conscious that the presuppositions of "modernity" (from the Enlightenment to the present) are open to question not only from the standpoint of the past but also from that of the emerging future. Thus, we ourselves are part of a shift in worldview; the ground under our own philosophical feet is moving-a fitting fate, perhaps, for Californians, but one that has overtaken the rest of the West as well.

Stout is philosophically a perspectivist. This means that he doesn't hold, with hard relativism, that nothing can be really true, nor, with philosophical absolutism, that there is only one point of view that is coherent, or rational, or that matters. Given the work of Wittgenstein and Austin, perspectivists have the best arguments on their side these days (see McClendon & Smith, Understanding Religious Convictions). Yet, perspectivists are again and again in the position of having to explain why they are not to be understood in terms of one or the other of the extremes they reject. Stout expends considerable energy explaining. In our opinion, he strays too near the absolutists.

Theologically, Stout is a rather queer duck. He clearly prides himself on his sympathy for religion and its expression, and has devoted a great deal of his work to it. Yet, his earlier Flight from Authority announced the bankruptcy of Christian theology, and the present volume insistently declaims the irrelevance of all its current forms.

We take some pleasure in defending Stout's right to reject Christianity. Yet, it seems to us that there is a shrillness in the rejection that does not fit comfortably with the pluralism he avows. Is it not telling that, before religious considerations can be relevant to rational moral philosophy, Stout thinks we require "decisive confirmation" of "the existence of a specific sort of God"? The present reviewers do not think such proofs all irrelevant. But a genuinely postmodern or pluralistic philosopher knows that they are relevant (here appears the truth in relativism) exactly to those men and women whose convictions enable them to take account of the proof. Stout's conviction, by way of contrast, seems well expressed by the proposition that "the best account of everything, on the whole, does not necessarily postulate a loving God." Does it not?

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Another indicator of the convictions at work in this work is the ethicist chosen to represent theology's role, James Gustafson. Stout criticizes today's theologians in general for not saying anything the atheists didn't already know, yet he admits that Gustafson, who indeed fills that bill, hardly strikes most Christian theologians as a member of the company. Then why not choose a Hauerwas? Or a Yoder? Admittedly, these two, and theology that is philosophically au courant more generally, will not nowadays be proffering the sort of knockdown proofs of Christianity (or of "the God of Moses and Calvin") that Stout is content to demand. But Stout appears to have one standard of rationality for theology and another for his own constructive argument. In fact, we believe that recent Christian ethics or moral theology (if one prescinds from stubbornly "modern" exemplars) is neither speechless nor irrelevant; it proceeds by way of the very sort of many-sided argument that Stout holds up as the model of rationality.

Stout's name for this recommended style is "bricolage"-by which he means a skillful synthesis or intellectual construction, contrived of whatever is linguistically at hand without too great a care for the purity of its sources. His book is a good example. But so were the wide-ranging though methodologically mixed moral writings of Paul Ramsey. So are the moral essays of Stanley Hauerwas. So are the biblical and historical essays of John Yoder. These and other theologians draw, just as Stout says he wishes, upon the intuitive awareness of their community (its abominations as well as its drives, needs, and capacities); they draw just as he recommends upon the practices and institutions they communally share; they draw as well (though perhaps Stout regrets this) upon the intervention in human life of a gracious God, upon the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And their rational potpourri makes its moral claim not only by their reasoning but also by the witness of their community's life-a point that surely conforms to Stout's pragmatic leanings (though it may be uncomfortably self-involving for many readers of this review). Has Jeffrey Stout missed something, or have we?

We close with a brief reflection on the elements of public morality that Stout lifts up in his closing chapters. Some of these (international economic justice, for example) cohere with Christian moral convictions. We are shocked, however, by Stout's almost casual remarks about "religious freedom," which he is willing to assign to a much lower category than the prohibition of slavery. Religious liberty is justified, he says, "by conditions of discord and uncertainty that might not always obtain"-in other words, by the absence of knockdown reasons for belief in a certain sort of God. But this seems to be the same sort of "modern" argument into which Stout often lapses when he turns to theology. Put negatively, his rationale for religious liberty seems to lack the historical sensitivity that he elsewhere claims is the very stuff of contemporary moral reasoning. To be sure, a standoff between the state churches North and South created in America the political opportunity for our

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unpretentious Constitution with its saving First Amendment. However, without the support of some church leaders, notably Presbyterians and Baptists, religious liberty would hardly have been achieved in fact-as, for example, it has not been achieved (despite paper promises) in the USSR. In any case, Christian support for religious liberty in the West has not been based on the theory of the unknowability of God! In the thinking of such as Roger Williams, Isaac Backus, and John Courtney Murray, it is rather a principle that sets a limit to government intervention in a realm where government has no competence-as mouthpiece for Divinity. The struggle over "school prayer," symbolic though it is as a current political issue, makes it clear that religious liberty is hardly the agreed minor issue that Stout makes it. On a Christian understanding, this liberty's central aim is not to protect atheists from proselytism, but to protect us all from such state-sponsored idolatry as authorized school board prayers offered to authorized school board deities. By treating this liberty as a contingent or happenstance moral issue, Stout comes uncomfortably close to siding with that idolatry. We have to believe that a "secular consensus" that can so smoothly overlook such theological reasoning with regard to public policy is perilously sectarian.

Had we space, we would take up another crucial omission in Stout's book, the public concern for peace. He says almost nothing about it, yet it seems to us to underlie most of his issues, and is tellingly addressed by the contemporary theological ethicists we mention above.

James Wm. McClendon

Church Divinity School of the Pacific
Berkeley, California

Nancey Murphy

Whittier College
Whittier, California

IV

A frequently heard complaint today is that the ethical pluralism of modern liberal society denies moral truth. This, it is alleged, makes moral agreement impossible and nihilism in ethics inevitable. Jeffrey Stout contests the accuracy of this characterization of both ethical pluralism and the consequences expected to follow.

Stout maintains that there are moral facts, just as there are scientific facts. He takes the example of slavery. To say that slavery is evil is not to say that slavery is evil only in the context of the views of reality held in the modern West. Slavery would be evil even in a society where slaves as well as slaveholders believed that slavery was a natural part of the social order. But we know moral facts, Stout says, not through their correspondence to a Moral Law transcending all cultural and social realms, but through the moral languages that we speak, which are contextdependent.

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There can be moral languages that do not have the resources to speak of slavery as evil, of course. However, such languages are not self-contained or unrevisable. People can learn other languages, even ones quiste dissimilar from their own, and can understand concepts in them for which their own has no equivalent. Such "hermeneutic enrichment," as Stout calls it, can happen because people can come to perceive the foreign vocabulary and concepts as giving a better picture of reality than their own unenriched linguistic resources. But moral languages in which we can speak of slavery as evil are better than those in which one cannot, not because they conform to a transcendent moral prescription, but because they describe the reality of slavery better.

I would wish to go further than Stout in specifying the consequences of the existence of moral facts. Stout draws the distinction between saying that a moral proposition "is true" and saying that it "is justified." Slavery is always evil, he says, but in a given context a person might be justified in believing that slavery is not evil, because within his or her moral language one could give reasons for slavery being acceptable or even necessary. But Stout's contention that we are only morally blameworthy if we are unjustified in holding beliefs which turn out to be false about moral facts, although it seems intuitively reasonable, is, in fact, beside the point in evaluating the moral responsibility for the evil of social oppressions.

Stout seriously underestimates the role of ideology in forming our moral beliefs, and I believe that this results from a lack of examination of how moral discourse is embedded within the power relations of a society. The major social scientific study of slavery defines its basic character as a relation of domination.¹ The moral belief that slavery was acceptable or even necessary was the ideological product of this relation of domination. Although slavery was often sustained by subtle means of social control, including the ideological product of its moral legitimacy, it rested ultimately on coercion. Behind the happy slave and the kind master was the threat of the master's unkindness to the discontented slave. Slaveholders could never hold to the moral rightness of slavery ingenuously, because they were constantly engaged in social practices to preserve their domination of the slave, both its ideological defense and its coercive foundation.

In his treatment of moral abomination, Stout's omission of an analysis of power leads to a definition of it "in which reactions to such creatures as monsters and freaks and to such actions as cannibalism, bestiality, and homosexual sodomy are grouped together." This definition has a sound theoretical underpinning in such cultural studies as the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, which have shown how feelings of revulsion are generated when we encounter something that is anomalous or ambiguous in terms of the system of concept we hold. But can the disgust that some feel toward homosexuality be fully theoretically

¹ Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

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assimilated to our revulsion at the monstrous? Certainly, Stout is correct in pointing out that homosexuals are seen as confusing the distinct categories of male and female. But why should one wish so strongly to separate male from female? In the history of the West, the answer has been to preserve patriarchy and the domination of women by men. The ethnohistorian, Walter Williams, has shown how gender roles are accommodated to what Westerners call homosexuality in Native American societies, where the distinction of male and female is not part of a fundamentally patriarchal system.²

A similar aversion has been felt by white Americans towards African Americans and has had as its particular object of fear sexual relations between black and white. The widespread lynching of black men in late nineteenth and early twentieth America was motivated by the fear of the sexual confusion of the conceptually distinct and socially segregated black and white, but its main purpose was to "keep blacks in their place" and prevent their challenge to the socioeconomic and political power of whites (as well as to reinforce patriarchal control over white women under the guise of their protection).

In such cases, abomination has a politics. Stout recognizes that as our system of concepts changes, so do our abominations. But he can offer no explanation as to why such change occurs. Relations of power inhere in our moral sentiments as well as our reasoned moral beliefs. As the oppressed successfully contest their domination and claim a status, perceived as part of the identity of the dominant group, they risk becoming more an object of abomination than before. Yet, it is through such challenge that domination can be overthrown and with it its ideological product, the force of certain conceptual distinctions to induce abomination.

Stout intends in his account of moral languages to be sensitive to the historical and socio-cultural context in which ordinary human beings develop their moral beliefs and in which all ethical systems have their origins. In much, he has succeeded. But the history of moral languages and their sociocultural construction cannot be adequately understood unless political relations and the distribution of power between groups is grasped.

Sheila Briggs

University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California

V

Jeffrey Stout is one of the most penetrating and provocative philosophers on the American scene. He also is the leading moral critic of a pragmatic bent concerned with the relations between secular thought

² The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston:Beacon, 1987).

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and religious traditions as well as the history of modern Western ethics. In his exciting new book, Stout extends his concerns into the terrain of social criticism. Although he still grapples with the challenges of skepticism, relativism, and nihilism to his own sophisticated historicist perspective, it is clear that the 'elan vital of the text is the role and function of moral discourse in contemporary American society. In my brief response to Stout's fascinating book, I shall highlight what I consider to be the fundamental contribution Stout makes to how we should do our work as cultural critics. This contribution consists of his call for a new mode of social criticism-a mode I shall dub improvisational criticism.

Stout uses such phrases as "creative bricolage…. eclectic and pragmatic moral bricoleur," and "moral bricolage" to describe his conception of cultural criticism. He is well aware that these phrases must be understood contextually; that is, relative to the available traditions or fragments of traditions vital and vibrant at this particular moment in American society, namely, liberalism, civic republicanism, and religious traditions. What interests me here is not so much that Stout does not provide us with a fully elaborated account of what strands and streams of our traditions could and should be brought together in order to bring "into focus the resources that liberal society makes available for its own transformation." The concrete cases he treats give us some sense of how a subtle improvisational moral critic melts icy cold binary oppositions and breaks down rigid distinctions for the purposes of capturing the complexity and concrete character of an issue. Rather, I would like to note the degree to which Stout's mode of cultural criticism is an advance beyond Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatic defense of the Enlightenment and Alasdair MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelian trashing of the Enlightenment. This Rorty-MacIntyre debate-reproduced in various ways between liberals like Ronald Dworkin and communitarians like Michael Sandel, upbeat critical theorists like Jurgen Habermas and downbeat civic republicans like Robert Bellah-signifies a crucial shift for contemporary pragmatic thinkers such as Stout toward explicit engagement in social and political philosophy. Stout's improvisational criticism is the most significant attempt I know to advance the dialogue between neo-pragmatic liberals and neo-Aristotelian (or neo-Hegelian) anti-liberals.

The major strength of Stout's project is that it mediates the clashing perspectives by means of immanent criticism. It proceeds by highly sympathetic and charitable readings of both viewpoints, then teases out internal inconsistencies, blindnesses, and contradictions, all in order to disclose common ground between supposedly antagonistic positions. This approach is Socratic rather than Hegelian-and thoroughly dialectical. So, there is no grand third moment or emergent synthesis with elements of both positions intact, but rather a mutual recognition by both sides of fallacious assumptions and convergent values that bond them. The outcome is that the limited lenses through which they viewed

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each other are removed. This removal does not result in epistemic lucidity, but rather in possible convergence and potential solidarity. Stout's treatment of the widely-heralded liberalism/communitarianism debate is exemplary in this regard.

Stout's notion of moral bricolage-or improvisational criticism-is a much richer notion than the garden variety pragmatic idea of experimentalism and the relativist rendering of eclecticism. Stout's improvisational criticism is a telos-ridden, ideology-laden activity that requires thorough interrogation of prospective teleological and ideological candidates-yet, it is mindful of the inescapable character of teleology and ideology in our ethical stances. It thereby sidesteps the common criticism of certain pragmatic ideas of experimentalism in which technique tends to predominate over ends. Similarly, Stout's improvisational criticism puts a premium on rigorous thought, logical reflection, and warranted assertability. Therefore, it shuns any forms of sloppy thinking that settle for vast cathartic variety at the expense of high rational quality. In this way, it jettisons relativistic versions of eclecticism.

The major weakness of Stout's improvisational criticism is that it runs the risk of being so preoccupied with arriving at the golden mean between extremes that it often slights structural deficiences-in rhetorics, cultures, societies-that reinforce the very polarizations he wants to mediate. This weakness is rooted in the pivotal terms in Stout's discourse. These terms-"crisis…. impasse…. malaise," "dramatic resolution"-are part of a discourse centered on the therapeutic and the conversational. The influential figures here are Wittgenstein and Rorty. The problem is that Wittgensteinian and Rortian metaphors are not particularly useful for serious social criticism. The shift from epistemic argumentation and intellectual history to cultural criticism renders these crucial terms suspect. The content and character of an epistemic crisis, conversational impasse, or discursive malaise is quite different from a social crisis, societal impasse, or political malaise. In one sense, Stout is aware of this point. Yet, his social criticism often proceeds as if the key terms in his discourse have adequately grappled with issues of structural deficiencies, operations of social power, cultural capital, or economic constraints. This is why his ingenious arrival at common ground is persuasive at the dialogic level of philosophic reflection, but at most only plausible at the concrete levels of power and politics. Needless to say, he would have had to write another and different kind of book to do what I request. Yet, a social critic of Stout's talent and ambition must not only go about his work with both eyes open, but also with both hands dirty.

Cornel West

Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey

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VI

My reviewers have been generous with praise, and they have also raised objections of the highest importance. I am grateful for both. My response to most of the objections will be to argue that I have been misunderstood, but it concerns me that this mode of rebuttal may cause further misunderstanding by striking the wrong tone. So, let me emphasize at the outset that if my book is capable of being misunderstood in the ways I shall be discussing, then I bear much of the responsibility. The most fitting place to begin, under the circumstances, is with a question about my view of theology today.

1. Does my book declaim the irrelevance of all current forms of Christian theology, as Murphy and McClendon charge? Absolutely not. Part 2 of my book is largely an attempt to place the study of religious ethics back on the agenda of secular moral philosophy. It is also an attempt to explain what forces took theological ethics off that agenda. Most of the argument is directed against philosophers. Some of it is directed against theologians who, either by playing down their own religious assumptions or by imitating the tropes and methods of the philosophers, helped make theological ethics marginal. I take it to be a sociological fact, worthy of explanation, that theology (as distinct from religiously inspired prophecy or evangelism) is now marginal in our culture. As Lindbeck understands, marginality does not equal irrelevance.

2. Why Gustafson instead of Ramsey, Hauerwas, and Yoder? I discuss Gustafson at length because I think his response teaches us something important about what happens when theology approximates the working assumptions and ontological conclusions of the antifoundationalist secular thinker. What happens, I argue, is that the ontological conclusions differ from those of someone like myself only at those points where they are insufficiently explicated and defended. I argue further that the resulting critique of our culture's idolatries, though relevant and powerful, does not require specifically theological backing. As Lindbeck sees (but Murphy and McClendon do not), I imply that theology would stand a better chance of regaining its voice in our culture if it departed more radically than Gustafson does (and Schleiermacher did before him) from the working assumptions of the cultured among its despisers. But since my purpose was to explain the eclipse of religious ethics, I wanted to examine the theological tendencies that have contributed to that eclipse while also considering the best case that could be made for theology on the cultured despiser's terms. As for the others, Yoder is the purest example of an alternative approach, as Gustafson himself says. Ramsey and Hauerwas are instructive cases largely because of how they waver, a point they always delighted in making against each other. I would like someday to write at length about them all--especially about what they have said on violence and the public concern for peace. This book was not the place.

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3. Do I misrepresent Christian reasons for supporting religious liberty or feel any less strongly about it than Murphy and McClendon do? No. I am prepared to die, if need be, to defend religious liberty. I am, of course, aware that many modern Christians have supported religious liberty by appealing to a theological doctrine of conscience. But that doctrine cannot be my reason, and I would like to explain historically the transition from Aquinas' nonliberal interpretation of conscience to the liberal interpretations that abound today. I therefore place great weight on the facts of pluralism in modernity, in both my normative account and my historical explanation of liberty. I argue that the religious wars created a setting in which liberal interpretations of conscience could take root. In practice, we set limits to liberty. Where we set the limits depends on the level of rational agreement we are able to reach at a given time on religious questions and the good life. Seeing that the limits are sensitive to changes in socio-historical environment allows us to give a charitable interpretation of Aquinas's premodern view and to avoid the incoherence of what Herbert Marcuse called "pure tolerance." All this can be done without lessening our commitment to liberty under modern and postmodern circumstances even slightly. Barring nuclear catastrophe or the achievement of agreement by nonrational means, the facts of pluralism will not soon vanish from the face of the earth.

4. Do I think, as Lindbeck suspects, that bricolage can substitute for the common moral language our society needs for its survival? No. Bricolage is something individuals do. As I say in Chapter 3, it has only a small role in the development of a common moral language. To understand such development, we need a less individualistic model. The one I offer borrows concepts from evolutionary biology. The final third of the book argues that we citizens of pluralist America do have a common moral language-albeit one whose concepts and styles of reasoning are highly diverse in origin and function. It is a common moral language, yes, but this hardly guarantees that it will function well or that our society will survive.

5. Have I presented a utopian picture of a liberal future in which various moral languages mingle happily and religious input is minimal? I do not know where such a picture is to be found in my book. In fact, I worry that religious input is likely to increase, but in ways Lindbeck and I would both abhor. I would be pleased, as a fellow citizen, if the politically liberal children of the religiously orthodox returned to their former prominence in public life, but like Lindbeck I fear it will not work out that way. I am not especially optimistic about the prospects of anybody's politically liberal children. Religious people have reason to take offense at the old civic republican habit of trying to foster religion for nontheological political purposes. So I abstain. I seek grounds for moral hope, not grounds for optimism. I argue against critics who are too quick to write off our entire society as if it were the new dark ages, but in doing so I aim to make things better or to keep them from getting worse. I do not prophesy a utopian pluralism.

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6. Do I accord therapeutic imagery an unduly privileged place in my thinking, as West charges? My first book did make modest use of the Wittgensteinian image of philosophy as therapy. The new one does refer to the "malaise" associated with worries over truth and objectivity in ethics. It is not unfair to infer that I aim to be offering Wittgensteinian therapy for that malaise. The therapy, if you wish to call it that, is meant to cure a kind of compulsive obsession that disables social criticism by engendering loss of confidence in its legitimacy or possibility. Does West mean to deny that the malaise exists, that it is a disabling feature of contemporary ideology, or that my kind of philosophical treatment can be effective? I doubt it. His point must be that there is more to social criticism than the metaphor of philosophical therapy conveys. And I concur: the therapy ought to prepare the way for social criticism instead of trying to take its place. Therapy should not be our model of social criticism, and it should not be allowed to become a fetish, as it often has among Wittgenstein's lesser followers. That is why my first book, after introducing the metaphor of therapy, distanced itself from vulgar Wittgensteinianism by expressing hope for a kind of philosophy that would not "leave everything as it is." It is also why my new book concludes with programmatic recommendations for social criticism. Those recommendations have nothing to do with therapeutic metaphors.

7. Do I accord the Rortian metaphor of conversation a privileged place in my thinking, as West also charges? I do employ the metaphor of conversation, but I am borrowing mainly from Michael Oakeshott, not from Richard Rorty; and I use it to characterize the role of academic theology in the discourse of high culture, not more generally as a trope for all discourse. The metaphor helps me make three points: first, that excellence in theology as a discursive practice has more to do with being conversant with culture and tradition than it does with having a method; second, that the intellectual discourse in which many academic theologians would like to participate is not ruled by a philosophical arbiter; and third, that theology's challenge, if it wishes to win a hearing from the intellectuals, involves finding a voice of its own, sufficiently distinctive to be interesting but sufficiently critical to be respected. Theologians are free to turn their back on high-cultural conversation, to expose its professional pretentiousness and patterns of exclusion, and to address the intellectuals in a prophetic or evangelistic mode instead of a conversational one. When I assess the moral health of pluralistic society in Part 3, I drop the metaphor of conversation entirely. And in my extended critique of Rorty, I conclude that he "helps us little" with the task of describing and appraising the established order.

8. Do I fail to grapple with the realities of our institutions and struggles overpower, as both West and Briggs allege? My book is about features of contemporary ideology that make grappling with such realities more difficult than it needs to be. That, I maintain, is a topic worthy of book-length study. A principal purpose of Part 3 is to direct

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attention away from questions that have dominated the debate between liberals and communitarians (like "How much agreement on justice and the common good is required to sustain rational moral discourse?"). Another purpose is to attract attention to questions like the ones West and Briggs want addressed. To make the case, I spend a good deal of time discussing the former set of questions as treated by influential sociological, theological, and philosophical writers. My book does not wholly avoid the problematic traits of the discourse it aims to criticize and transform, and I therefore say less about institutions and power than I would like. That is one of the inherent difficulties of immanent criticism, much discussed by Jacques Derrida and Rorty. But in the final chapter, I spend more than two dozen pages on the troubled relationships between social practices and institutions and on the competition between goods like democratic self-government and goods like money and power. West and Brigg's say nothing about this, thereby leaving a false impression.

9. Do I invite misreading by making the main topic of my book, the diversity of moral languages, seem unrelated to what I say at the end about social practices and institutions? No. In fact, a major claim of the book (one given special prominence in the concluding list of central theses) is that the "languages of morals in our discourse … do not float in free air" but are rather "embedded in specific social practices and institutions." I offer hypotheses about which moral languages are related to which social practices and institutions, and I use those hypotheses to explain why the leading schools of moral philosophy are "unlikely to help us identify one of the most pressing systemic problems we face"-namely, the tyranny of goods like money, status, and power.

10. To take a particular case mentioned by Briggs, does my analysis of variations in attitudes toward homosexuality neglect institutional realities and relations of power? Hardly. The analysis stresses the sharpness of a society's line between masculine and feminine roles and "the importance of that line in determining matters such as the division of labor and the rules of inheritance." Now, what are such matters about if not institutional realities and relations of power? What could be a more powerful means of domination than adopting a social system that singles out a class of people as monstrous or abominable? Briggs may have been misled by the relatively low rate at which words like "dominance" and "power" appear per page in my book. My rhetorical strategy was self-conscious: to depart from the deadening jargon used by most of my fellow leftists, for whom certain terms have increasingly become mere mantras or shibboleths instead of instruments of critical thought.

11. Should I have gotten my hands dirtier by writing a different kind of book, as West seems to suggest? In intent, my book stands to social criticism as Irving Howe's Politics and the Novel stands to the political novel. I wouldn't think of criticizing Howe's book for not being a novel. If the point is that I have not yet put philosophical argument entirely to

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one side, rolled up my sleeves, and undertaken the kind of detailed social criticism called for in my book's final chapter, then West is surely right, and I thank him for encouraging me to get on with it before long. I can only hope that readers will find the book I have written valuable in its own right-not least for its attempt to describe what social criticism, at its best, can be.

12. Do I contend, as Briggs asserts, that we are morally blameworthy only if we are unjustified in holding moral beliefs which turn out to be false? No. There are many other ways to be morally blameworthy. One of them is to act against your moral beliefs. Another is to be negligent in action, even though you have not been negligent in appraising and revising your moral beliefs. I do contend that being morally blameworthy and being unjustified in holding moral beliefs are similar in that both involve a kind of fault which can be mitigated by facts about an agent's context. I also contend that in some cases you can be excused for acting wrongly on the ground that your deliberation was essentially influenced by a false moral belief you were nonetheless justified in holding, given the evidence and patterns of reasoning available to you. Such moral ignorance will not always excuse you; whether it does or not depends on other contextual details.

13. Do I hold that it is possible in principle for any community's moral language to be understood by outsiders? Only in this sense: if a given moral language can be used by a particular community, there is nothing about the nature of that language or about language as such which prevents outsiders from coming to understand it. The community's members, not least of all its children, had to be able to learn it. What is to prevent us, as outsiders, from doing so too? Well, perhaps many things. Maybe we are not smart enough or simply cannot as a matter of fact witness enough of their linguistic behavior. More likely, we lack the will, or are disabled by prejudice, sloth, and pride. Often, the empirical and moral conditions that would make understanding possible fail to obtain. I claim only that it is not a philosophical truth about the nature of concepts that explains the difficulty. Thinking otherwise too easily becomes an alibi for ignorance and distortion of other cultures from which we might learn much, if only we made the effort in a spirit of humility and hope.

Jeffrey Stout

Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey