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2 - The Scarlet Letter: “a tale of human frailty and sorrow”

Craig Taylor
Affiliation:
Flinders University, Australia
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Summary

I suggested in the previous chapter that moral thought may be expressed in responses that are immediate and unthinking: in responses that are not mediated by moral judgement. In particular, I suggested there will be cases in which moral thought does not issue in moral judgement at all but rather in immediate emotional responses such as pity or sympathy. In this chapter I shall begin to explain what I mean by that, and I will do so by focusing first on a situation where it is appropriate actually to make a moral judgement. My concern will be to show, in this case, what may be lacking in our moral thought beyond our judgement of another, and specifically how a person may be guilty of moralism even though their moral judgements are, in a sense, correct, which is to say even though they correctly apply certain moral concepts and principles to the person they are judging. As I indicated in the previous chapter, moral thought involves more than the application of moral concepts, principles and theories to actions, people and events. In this chapter I shall examine a particular example of moralism, an example of one way in which moral thought is distorted by moralism and, in so doing, begin to outline and explain the kind of wider conception of moral thought that I alluded to in the previous chapter.

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