As Jonathan Bennett has observed in his influential reading of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, when Huck at a crucial moment in the story fails to turn the runaway slave Jim in to the slave catchers, Huck manages to do the morally right thing despite what his conscience, a conscience distorted by racism, tells him he ought to do. Huck finds himself unable to act as his conscience dictates and acts rather, so Bennett suggests, on the basis of his feelings. As Bennett says, ‘[t]he crucial point concerns reasons, which are all on one side of the conflict. On the side of conscience we have principles, arguments, considerations, ways of looking at things. … On the other side, the side of feeling, we get nothing like that.’Footnote ¹ Further, as Bennett also seems to suggest, it is not merely that Huck performed, as we might say despite himself, the right action, but that in acting on his natural feelings, his sympathy for his friend Jim, he is morally praiseworthy. However James Montmarquet, arguing in this journal, takes issue with what he calls here Bennett's ‘anti-intellectualism’ in moral psychology, specifically, with Bennett's ‘opposition to the general idea that an intellectual grasp of some truth as to the right thing to do plays a decisive role in moral responsibility.’Footnote ² Against Bennett Montmarquet argues that the case of Huck Finn shows rather ‘the indispensible role of the agent's moral beliefs… in any suitable account of the moral praiseworthiness or blameworthiness of actions’ (ibid). For Montmarquet then, Huck's action, or rather inaction, is not morally praiseworthy. I will argue however that we should reject this conclusion. While it is true that Huck's moral beliefs, such as they are, provide him with no reason for allowing Jim to escape, what Huckleberry Finn serves to remind us of is the fact that many of our everyday moral responses to others, including our praise and blame of other people on the basis of their response to others, do not and need not depend on any particular moral beliefs we hold about them or their situation at all. At least, so I shall argue.

Huck, as we know, runs away from his demonic father, travelling up the Mississippi on a raft with Jim. As they approach Cairo where Jim will escape to the free states Huck's conscience tells him that in helping Jim escape he has wronged Miss Watson, Jim's rightful owner, and he determines to paddle ashore and inform on Jim. Here is what happens:

At that moment two men in a skiff looking for runaway slaves come alongside and ask Huck whether the man left on the raft is black or white.

Elsewhere I have argued that Huck's inability to turn Jim in here indicates what we may call a moral incapacity; not, that is to say, an incapacity to act morally but an incapacity that is itself expressive of an agent's positive moral character.Footnote ⁴ For the purposes of this paper though, the important point is just to suggest that what Huck takes to be a failure of nerve – and for him a wicked one at that – is in fact a genuine moral response, a response worthy of our moral praise.

But why should we think that Huck's response is not mere weakness on his part? Obviously a person's inability to act on conscience in a case like this may simply be mere weakness or something similar. For example when Huck meets up on his journey with Tom Sawyer, Tom's ‘eye lit up’ (HF, 296) at the thought of helping Jim to escape; Tom's helping Jim is clearly not a moral response but merely a kind of lark. Given that the two boys might act in the same way, how is it that Huck's response here is a moral one while Tom's isn't? In order to appreciate the difference here I suggest we need to attend not merely to Huck's inability to turn Jim in when given the chance but Huck's whole pattern of response to Jim and to others on his journey up the Mississippi. Consider for example the following exchange between Huck and Jim before Huck's moment of crisis. Earlier when Huck is paddling ahead of Jim on the raft he becomes separated from Jim in thick fog by an island in the river. It is a tense period and when Huck meets up with the raft again Jim has fallen asleep with worry and exhaustion and Huck decides to play a trick on him. When Jim wakes, Huck tells him he has been there all along and that it has all been a bad dream, offering to interpret Jim's dream for him. After a while, Huck asks Jim what the rubbish and broken oar on the raft – the remanets of Jim's struggle to navigate the raft and locate Huck in the fog – stands for in his dream, to which Jim replies:

The true meaning of Huck's inability to turn Jim in is not of course clear when viewed in isolation; it is only when viewed in the context of Huck's whole pattern of response that we can see if for what it is, a genuine moral response.

Of course Montmarquet accepts that ‘Huck may have all sorts of good character traits, some of which are exemplified in his act of helping Jim’. The crucial point for Montmarquet is rather that ‘these [character traits] are not exemplified in the right sort of way for him to derive credit for this’ (AIMP, 61). Why Huck does not deserve credit we will get to in a moment. Before that though, and to begin to explain my claim at the end of the first paragraph, I need to say something about my use of Huckleberry Finn. Specifically, I need to stress from the outset that the brief outline of the story that I offer here is in no way a substitute for reading the book itself. For it is crucial to my argument, remembering my claim at the end of the first paragraph, that my response to Huck, and specifically my conviction that his response to Jim is a moral response, is not founded on any beliefs I have (and might here convey) about Huck's character. Rather, my conception of Huck, my sense of the kind of person he is including my particular beliefs about his character, is itself founded on my response to Huckleberry Finn. Thus to share in that conception requires one to attend to something that I clearly cannot reproduce here; that is, all that Huck says and does, including Huck's responses both to Jim and to other people that he encounters within Twain's story. Though I must also flag that my point here will only become finally clear toward the end of this paper.

To return to Montmarquet's argument though, why should Huck's character traits, even though they may lead him to help Jim, earn him no credit? The crucial point for Montmarquet here is that since Huck's ‘exhibited traits are not connected to any relevant choice or deliberation… a distinctively Aristotelian character approach lends no support to his praiseworthiness for exhibiting them in the present case’ (AIMP, 60). As Montmarquet says in this connection Huck ‘does not exploit [the relevant traits]; if anything they exploit him’ (ibid). While I would accept that Huck's character traits are not subject to deliberation and choice, it does not follow that he is merely in some sense the vehicle of such traits. For often, I will suggest, it is precisely through the responses expressive of such traits that we recognise another as a fellow human being; that is, as the kind of being that may make a moral claim on us at all. Thus we might say that Huck's inability to turn Jim in is morally praiseworthy insofar as this involves his recognition of his shared humanity with Jim – and this even though Huck himself does not ever grasp the moral significance of this. Now, Montmarquet actually provides what might seem like a powerful argument against any such view in responding to Nomy Arpaly's discussion of the Huck Finn case.Footnote ⁵ On Arpaly's account Huck is morally praiseworthy for helping Jim because, against what Bennett says, he does help Jim for a moral reason; he helps Jim because he recognises Jim as a person.Footnote ⁶ For Arplay, moral praise depends only upon an agent doing the morally right thing for – as is the case here – the right moral reason, it does not require – as is not the case here – that an agent believe that the relevant action is right for that reason. Against such a position Montmarquet suggests that while Huck may help Jim escape because he recognises his shared humanity with Jim, that in itself is hardly praiseworthy since Huck may on another occasion help an escaped convict in the same way and for the same reason. Again the problem for Montmarquet is that a moral agent is more than ‘a mere conduit wherein “reason” issues in good or bad actions,’ and that what is missing once again for the attribution of moral responsibility, praise and blame is the requirement that an agent weigh reasons for action in moral deliberation.

Montmarquet's general point then seems to be this: In praising and blaming others we are not concerned merely with the traits or reasons that might explain their actions, but with an agent's reasons in the sense of what they take to justify their acting on these traits or reasons. Thus recognising another as a fellow human being might explain why I help them on some occasion but it does not in itself, as the case of the escaped convict shows, justify my so acting. What is required for moral agency, responsibility, praise and blame is that I recognise my reasons for action as moral reasons where moral reasons are essentially the product of deliberation over at least my moral beliefs and principles. This I take to be the core of the kind of moral psychology that Montmarquet wishes to defend. However I will suggest that such a moral psychology, plausible as it may seem, does not adequately represent our moral reflections on the lives and actions of others, including our moral praise and blame of them.

To explain, and leaving the case of Huck to one side, consider what might seem like a more everyday moral response to another. I ask someone ‘why did you stop that man?’, and they reply, ‘because he was about to walk into busy traffic’. But suppose I reply in turn, ‘no, I mean what moral reason, what moral justification, did you have for stopping him?’ Perhaps flummoxed my interlocutor may (eventually) reply ‘he would have got killed!’ or seeing I still wasn't getting the point he might say ‘we have a duty to prevent such road fatalities if we can’. But is that what he meant all along but has until now only expressed elliptically? No. For of course, in any ordinary case, none of this would ever have entered his head before he acted. In such an everyday case we simply act, come to another's aid, without thinking or deliberating at all. Such responses are an example of what I have called primitive responses to other human beings.Footnote ⁷ I call them ‘primitive’ to register that such actions are not explained by an agent's deliberation over their various moral beliefs and principles. Now to return to the case of Huck, his response to Jim strikes me as just this kind of primitive response, more specifically as the primitive sympathetic response of being moved to act (to help) in certain ways immediately, without thinking, by the suffering of another.

I said above that such primitive responses are everyday moral responses or actions, to register the vast variety of ways in which our dealings with other human beings are marked by these kinds of primitive responses to them. But I am not at the same time denying, what is also obvious, that such responses to others are by no means always forthcoming. What I do want to point out, though, is an important feature of our attitude, indeed our response, to such actions when they are forthcoming; to point out that in such cases where a person is moved to help another who is suffering we do not usually (this caveat to be explained directly) ask why that person's suffering should be, or be part of, a reason in the sense of a justification for helping them. But this is exactly what Montmarquet is asking; what Montmarquet thinks is required in the case of Huck is that he be able to provide a justification for helping Jim. Now I do not deny (to explain that caveat) that sometimes this question is appropriate, it is appropriate to ask it of course in the case of the escaped convict that Montmarquet discusses. My point is though that such cases are exceptional and that it is only for this reason that a justification for our sympathy seems at all required. But to say that we recognise or take such cases, for some particular reason or other, as exceptional is not to suggest that in what I am calling the ordinary everyday kind of case we take it that these particular (call them potentially sympathy defeating) reasons are absent – as if we classify cases into two basic types. For my point is we do not take (or classify) these cases in any way at all, even as cases!; we simply act immediately and without thinking.

Of course, and to anticipate an obvious objection, there is a sense in which Huck's sympathy for Jim is exceptional. That is, it is extraordinary given his upbringing that Huck should respond, at least on this one occasion, to Jim as to a fellow human being and not as a slave; that he should not see Jim as many in his society see Jim as belonging merely because of the colour of his skin to a whole class of exceptions. While for us sympathy for another human being may be withheld, though even here only in certain respects, by the fact that a person is a convict, for the slave-owner his sympathetic responses to a whole race of others are withheld, denied, or just absent in much more comprehensive ways because they are seen primarily as, taken to be, his (or another white person's) property. What is extraordinary then is that despite all that his racist conscience tells him, Huck still manages, what so few in his society could mange, to respond to Jim as to a fellow human being, that in his case certain natural sympathetic responses to another should triumph over all the reasons of a bad morality.

Still, someone might grant that many cases in which we come to another's aid our actions are in some sense automatic, but contend all the same that insofar as they are moral actions we need at least to be able to provide a justification for so acting. It may be, as in my example, that the justification is so obvious as to hardly require mention, nevertheless the moral status of my actions still depends one might say on my being able to provide a justification after the fact when asked. Thus, one might argue one needs to indicate what particular moral beliefs or principles justify acting, say, to help a person who is suffering on some occasion. That point though turns on how we understand the relationship between, on the one hand, our moral beliefs and principles and, on the other, the kind of primitive sympathetic response to others that I have highlighted. What I want to question is the presumed moral authority of our moral beliefs and principles over certain primitive, and particularly primitive sympathetic, responses to other human beings. Here it is important to note that in discussing Huck Finn Bennett was in part highlighting the ways in which our moral beliefs and principles can go badly wrong, and how our sympathies are, as he says (and this is a point that Montmarquet at least notes) one of a number of ‘valid pressures’Footnote ⁸ that we might subject our moral beliefs and principles to in order to avoid this. While I do not share Bennett's view of sympathy as mere feeling, it seems to me that there is an important point somewhere here. For I suggest that sympathy in my sense as an immediate and unthinking response to help another who is suffering itself helps found the very moral beliefs and principles that presume authority over it.

To begin to explain the above point, presumably one central moral belief relevant in the case of Huck Finn is the belief that slavery is unjust or even a terrible evil. But note that the moral principles or beliefs that might seem naturally to lead to, even imply, that conclusion were not unknown to Huck's society; in fact they were surely widely believed. Here are some such beliefs: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Are we seriously to suppose hardly anybody in Huck's society believed this, believed these words taken from the American Declaration of Independence, a document that is the foundation, including moral foundation, of their nation? That seems wildly implausible. So then what exactly is it that the slave-owners of the American South failed to see or understand here, and how might that failure be made good? Well, consider how Frederick Douglass, an American slave, tries to convince white Americans of the evil of slavery. He invites them to consider their possible response to the songs of slaves.

In order to convince his white readers of the evil of slavery Douglass is here, I suggest, relying on the enduring power of the experience of slaves, the ‘complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish’ (ibid), to move them, move them in the kind of primitive sympathetic ways I have highlighted.Footnote ¹⁰ But this is not, given the nature of his appeal, something that he is asking his white readers to deliberate about. That really would be of no help. For what the slave-owner is missing in relation to his slaves is not some fact, for example, that they suffer, that they are human beings (his treatment of his slaves assumes these things). Rather, as Stanley Cavell has put it, what he misses is ‘his internal relation to them,’Footnote ¹¹ or what I am calling his sense of human fellowship with them. That is what ultimately will reveal to Douglass's white readers the evil of slavery. But, as I say, fellowship with another in this sense is not something we deliberate about or choose – any more than Huck deliberates and chooses to act towards Jim as a fellow human being rather than a slave; Or, any more than we choose our fellowship with both Huck and Jim when we hope that Huck will not turn Jim in, not just for Jim's sake, but for Huck's. But if that is our response, and if Montmarquet is right, what sense does it make? For if Huck's actions do him no moral credit, how can we really hope for his sake that he does not turn Jim in? Montmarquet's final suggestion that Huck is an interesting case of ‘near praiseworthiness’ because he ‘expresses in his act qualities of openness that could easily have lead to a praiseworthy belief’ (AIMP, 63 emphasis added) hardly seems to answer that question. My suggestion is then that without this sense of fellowship certain moral beliefs like ‘all men are created equal,’ or that we have ‘certain unalienable Rights’, are just so many empty words. What gives them substance is our fellowship, our moral life, with other human beings.

I cannot develop these thoughts further here. But the supposed problem in any case with Huck for someone like Montmarquet is that Huck, as Bennett points out, is unable to provide any justification for helping Jim to escape. According to the morality that Huck has been taught, there is no moral reason for him to help Jim escape – and he never really considers (perhaps unsurprisingly since he is still a child) that his response to Jim might be the foundations of a better morality. Thus, for Montmarquet Huck's actions are not morally praiseworthy. My point however is that in attending simply to our response to Huck we may come to see that the supposed requirement that one be able always to provide a justification for helping another in need, far from clarifying the nature of our moral responses and relations to others in fact obscures this. To explain, if one views Huck's actions in light of the kind rationalist moral psychology that Montmarquet is committed to, then we cannot but conclude that his actions, though right, are not morally praiseworthy. However, if we simply attend to our own response to Twain's story and to Huck's inability to turn Jim in without this prior commitment, then the very idea that some justification is called for here, that the moral status of Huck's action somehow depends on this, may strike us as completely unreal. Further, what the case of Huck then throws light on is how in all those other everyday cases where, as I have noted, an agent could if pressed provide a justification for helping another in need, these supposed justifications are in fact idle, a kind of hollow recital that adds nothing to our understanding of our moral life with others and in fact obscures its fundamental form, a form, as I have suggested, that is partly determined by our primitive responses to other human beings.

Where I take issue with Montmarquet, then, is in seeing Huck as presenting a kind of problem, in his seeing Huck's actions as paradoxical (AIMP, 51) or Huck himself as presenting what Montmarquet calls a ‘hard case’ (AIMP, 63). Against this I want to suggest that there is nothing hard or paradoxical about this case at all, that it is only the presumption of a certain moral psychology that makes it appear so. Thus attending to my own response to Huckleberry Finn and to Huck's moment of truth on the Mississippi I find that the problem that he is supposed to represent, the moral justification for action that he is supposed to lack, dwindles or dissolves to nothing. What seems a problem then rather is the idea that anyone should need a justification for helping another who is suffering and in need in a case like this. Now, to repeat, this is not to say that it is never appropriate to ask for such a justification, as I have said there will always be exceptional cases. But to ask not just on some occasion but in any case whatsoever why another's suffering should justify helping them is to question, present as questionable or problematic, those primitive sympathetic responses to others that makes them an object of our moral concern at all. Nothing I have said finally, and of course, provides us with any justification in the sense that Montmarquet requires for praising a person who simply, primitively, cannot when it comes to it send a man back into bondage, but on reading Huckleberry Finn we may be relieved, and grateful to Twain, that we can wonder that we ever needed one.