This timely festschrift contains a collection of fourteen essays that celebrate the diverse philosophical contributions of Raimond Gaita. It is rare that a philosopher extends their work into the public domain. It is more rare for a philosopher to write literature. And yet Gaita's writings, in both form and content, have convincingly traversed traditional borders between academic philosophy, public debate, and literature. Now in its 2nd Edition, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception is his principal contribution to academic philosophy. Complex and penetrating, the text is concerned with arguing against what Gaita sees as excessive abstraction and rationalistic styles in moral philosophy as well as situating, both historically and conceptually, a distinctive conception of goodness. Central to this conception is what preoccupies much of his writings; what he variously calls ‘the infinite preciousness’ or ‘full humanity’ of every human being. Creatively extending this theme in the later volume A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice, Gaita addresses a wide variety of issues from the uniqueness of the Holocaust to the denigration and dispossession of the aboriginal peoples of Australia. Works like A Common Humanity and The Philosopher's Dog are distinctive in being engaged with public debates whilst remaining formidable contributions to philosophy. As the Editor of this volume aptly notes, ‘This is not philosophy simply “applied”. Gaita's writings in this vein are often creative contributions to philosophy at the very same time as they illuminate public debate.’ (2–3) This is due, in part, to Gaita's concern with deepening philosophical and moral understanding. Pushing farther into the public domain, Gaita's most personal contribution is Romulus, My Father, a memoir of his late father's life transposed into the eponymous film.
Written in tones of admiration by close friends and colleagues, many of whom are philosophers, the essays in this collection capture and reflect the distinctiveness, range and depth of Gaita's writings. At a cursory glance, the diversity might lend the collection a haphazard appearance, but on further consideration it becomes clear that Christopher Cordner has sequenced the essays (on at least one level) loosely in accordance with the corresponding form and content of Gaita's writings. The first seven essays, to varying degrees, focus on Gaita's academic arguments and themes, the eight and ninth essays attend to issues central to Gaita's public interest writings, whilst essays eleven through thirteen are concerned with Romulus, My Father. Though a number of the essays would reward further discussion, including Christopher Cordner's ‘Gaita and Plato: goodness, love and beauty’, Antony Duff's ‘Good and Evil and the criminal law’ and M.M. McCabe's “It goes deep with me”: Plato's Charmides on knowledge, self-knowledge and integrity’, the limitations of reviewing collections such as these prevents consideration of the ways in which each piece contributes to the scholarship. Given these constraints, I will limit myself to two essays, Stephen Mulhall's ‘The work of saintly love: The religious impulse in Gaita's writing’ and Jonathan Glover's ‘Insanity, crankiness and evil – and other ways of thinking the unthinkable’ because, they seem to me, to be among the most directly critically engaged with Gaita's work.
In Good and Evil Gaita traces a secular perspective which upholds an absolute conception of goodness and evil; a view in which every human being is understood as infinitely precious. We can hear this perspective and its distinctive conception of individuality, for example, in our talk of inalienable human rights or in the more Kantian expression of the unconditional respect owed to rational beings. Gaita claims that these ways of speaking and their force are expressions of ‘the language of love’. More controversially, he claims that these secularized expressions of the language of love have been historically and conceptually shaped by ‘the work of saintly love’, which facilitated the emergence of three interrelated features: ‘the relevation that such individuality was not forfeited by the afflicted or the radically evil; the radical singularity of victim and victimizer as revealed by remorse or guilt; and a qualitatively distinct conception of evil beyond vice.’(31) It is here, in the ‘work of saintly love’, where Mulhall locates the religious impulse in Gaita's writing.
Mulhall's essay aims to reveal an unacknowledged dependence on religious forms of language and understanding in Good and Evil. This would not necessarily make for an interesting line were it not for the fact that Gaita, as Mulhall makes clear, is aware that some readers regard Good and Evil as a religious work, or as requiring religious commitments for the arguments to go through. Though purportedly sympathetic to the reasons for this view, Gaita persists in disavowing religious preconditions of this kind. Challenging this picture of independence Mulhall asks, ‘Can what Gaita wants to say really be said with the necessary force and authority without invoking the specifically religious forms of the language of love?’ (28) More pointedly, he queries the assumption that secular versions of religious forms of language, such as the transposition of ‘the conception of human beings as sacred’ to ‘the conception of human beings as infinitely precious’, can be made without significant loss of meaning or without covertly relying on the religious tradition. Considering the understanding a religious believer might bring to the features revealed by saintly love, Mulhall argues that ‘the religious language of love might be thought of as deploying articulations and elaborations that intensify, extend and so deepen the emphases it shares with its secular variants.’(34) This raises the question: what, or whom, is doing the work of meaning in Gaita's work?
The extent to which Gaita should be understood as depending and partaking on an implicit religious perspective is left open. Gaita does argue that the relationship between the secular and religious perspective is an historical one; that we think of ‘Goodness’ in terms of saintly love because we've contingently developed the religious idea of saintliness. But, at the very least, if the possibility of the work of genuinely saintly love being performed by those who have no developed, living conception of a saint is to be compelling, then Gaita may need to show how his secular conception does not primarily depend on a living religious language for its depth. This is not to say that Gaita's secularized perspective might fully depend on a religious perspective, but rather that its relationship to its religious originals is rather more complex and worthy of deeper inquiry.
Glover's essay, by contrast, focuses on Gaita's defence of the view that some thoughts are simply unthinkable, and should therefore be outside the realm of serious reflective consideration. Though purportedly convinced by much of what Gaita argues, Glover takes the position to have undesirable conservative implications. Following Gaita's distinction between the unthinkable in factual thought and in moral and political thought, Glover maps Gaita's ‘three types of people’ onto the distinction: cranks, those who are insane, and those who are evil. Cranks and insane people, according to Gaita, are not lacking in rationality and critical skills, but are marked by a willingness to accept beliefs most others would rule out of consideration. An insane person dining at a restaurant is paranoid the cooks are trying to poison him. It is not that the insane person is incapable of presenting a sound argument for his paranoid belief, it is that most of us would not even have or seriously consider such a thought. Similarly, a crank who believes the earth is flat might present ‘ingenious and valid inferences, from premises based on creative interpretations of highly selected evidence’ (38) making it difficult for any non-expert to invalidate. For the crank and the insane person the normal plausibility constraints of thought are absent or disrupted; what Gaita calls ‘being out of touch with reality’. What the crank and the insane person therefore lack is ‘an essential condition of the exercise of rationality and critical skills’ namely that ‘reasoning is conceptually linked to the outlook of a culture.’(38)
What helps us to rule out or delimit the range of conceivable possibilities in our thinking are our culturally informed anchoring beliefs. There are general anchoring beliefs (i.e., ‘pigs cannot fly’) and particular anchoring beliefs (i.e., my first name is Elianna), which make up the boundaries between what is considered thinkable and unthinkable. Wittgenstein, according to Glover, thought that we cannot seriously doubt or, in some cases, reach these anchoring beliefs; they are so deeply embedded as to be absolutely beyond reflective reach. Whether or to what extent Wittgenstein intended this to be a description of our relationship to our beliefs in medias res is not addressed by Glover who takes Wittgenstein to mean that there are beliefs which should never be open to reflective scrutiny. In this way, Glover takes Wittgenstein, and the Wittgenstein inspired Gaita, to be representative of the conservative end of ‘the continuum of the unthinkable’ in which views such as Paul Feyerabend's – that, in science, ‘anything goes’ – are representative of the opposing extreme.
The worry at the ‘anything goes’ end is that all thoughts and arguments are given equal potential authority, meaning that the arguments of the flat-earther should conceivably be taken as seriously as those of the spherical-earther. Glover's worry at the conservative end is that it presents a position too closed to the changing of the boundaries between the unthinkable and the accepted. He cites Wittgenstein's example of the inconceivability of human beings travelling to the moon. Only nineteen years later, this previously unthinkable event occurred. For Glover this example of how we can come to fruitfully accept what was once unthinkable suggests an important sense in which we should, as part of making progress in our thinking, remain open to the possibility of revision. ‘There may be some beliefs which we will never have good reason to challenge or revise. But it is hard to see how we could know that any particular belief comes into this category… So we should be reluctant to make huge context-transcending claims about the absolute unrevisability of any particular belief.’ (45) Here, Glover seems to be arguing that, as we can never know in advance which factual beliefs will become thinkable we should adopt a theoretical position whereby we recognize that any belief (depending on the context) may become open to revision. If Glover genuinely wants to avoid this position coming too close to the dangers of the ‘anything goes’ end, then he has to address a variation of the question he poses to Gaita: what would the criteria be for determining which beliefs should be open, or closed, to reflective scrutiny in any given context?
Regarding the unthinkable in moral and political thought, Glover claims that, as with factual thought, Gaita argues for ‘a general avoidance of the unthinkable.’ (44) Gaita gives the example of a mother who takes her baby out for a walk, and is robbed by a thief at knifepoint. Once the thief gets hold of her valuables, he then slashes the baby's face and body. When the infant reaches the hospital it dies of its wounds. The thought that what the thief did was acceptable is something we simply rule out of serious reflective consideration. From this example, and others like it, Gaita claims that we rule some thoughts out because we judge them evil. Moreover, we justifiably fear to think that killing an innocent person, for example, is acceptable because we fear becoming someone who doubts the reality of evil. These ‘evil thoughts’ constitute part of the framework of our ethical thinking and thereby make serious moral judgment possible. Therefore the absence of such a framework opens the possibility of believing in anything, the consequences of which could be dire. Registering the potential danger, Glover agrees that if we have no framework, then we have lost one of the conditions of serious moral thought. But, as with factual claims, Glover thinks there's a position to take in which we can acknowledge the need for a framework whilst also recognizing that aspects of its boundaries can be and should be open to reflective scrutiny. Reiterating his position regarding the practice of science Glover writes, ‘in ethics too we can never know enough about future contexts to be confident that any belief is unrevisable for all time.’(45) But again, if these are Glover's grounds for justifying his ‘context-dependent’ position, one wonders how this can be reconciled with what, in any given context, we judge to be open or closed to reflective scrutiny.
The papers in this collection range across subject matter and in their degree of direct engagement with Gaita's work. Where the variation in topics mirrors the extended landscape of Gaita's concern, the fluctuating degree of direct engagement could be a source of disappointment for those readers interested in learning more about Gaita's arguments. Some of the papers, such as Mulhall's and Glover's, are directly concerned with critically reflecting on Gaita's themes and arguments, whereas others are rather honourary gestures in the direction of Gaita-esque considerations. But were this collection wholly confined to providing an impersonal critical analysis of his arguments, it would lack the spirit with which Gaita, the philosopher, pursues the philosophical. As the first edited collection which focuses on Raimond Gaita, and his contributions to and outside of academic philosophy, it is a fitting celebration of a philosopher whose unique voice is becoming increasingly heard.
