In this wide-ranging interview Alan Norrie discusses how he became involved with Critical Realism, his work on Dialectical Critical Realism, and responses to it amongst the Critical Realist communi...

This article critiques conspicuous displays of morality within public discourse, recently framed as ‘moral grandstanding’, from the perspective of an intersubjective Critical Realist theory of ethics. Drawing on Honneth’s recognition theory as the basis of a ‘qualified explanatory critique’, I argue that these practices are not mere aberrations within moral discourse, but a necessary consequence of the neoliberal imperative to turn all aspects of the self into market assets. Neoliberal commodity fetishism also and especially involves the commodification of moral character (...) as a means of economic competition, as exemplified in recent discussions of ‘ethical capital’. This objectification categorically precludes intersubjectivity as the basis of ethical life, and produces a cognitive structure resembling narcissistic pathology, characterized by the pervasive objectification of self and other. Critical Realists should therefore reject moral grandstanding not only for its detrimental effects on public discourse, but because in subordinating morality to the market, it is fundamentally anti-ethical. (shrink)

William Outhwaite is well-known as an early proponent of critical realism and for his work on European politics, critical theory and on Jürgen Habermas. In this wide-ranging interview, he discusses his life and career, including how he came to write on subjects that intersected with and developed themes Roy Bhaskar was also working on at the time. This work resulted in three early books, Understanding Social Life, Concept Formation in Social Science and New Philosophies of Social Science, the last of (...) which makes the case for the incorporation of critical theory and hermeneutics into critical realism. He goes on to discuss various issues, including, briefly, his involvement in an early discussion group with Bhaskar, his participation in the Realism and the Human Sciences conferences and how he and Margaret Archer came to edit Andrew Collier’s Festschrift. (shrink)

This essay considers how we talk in moral terms about crime and punishment using a framework that comes from psychoanalysis. The idea of the human as a metaphysical animal, an animal that thinks and loves, is given a naturalistic explanation in Freudian metapsychology as it was developed by Melanie Klein and Hans Loewald. While the former helps us understand the desire to punish as the enjoyable return of pain for pain, the latter indicates how mature human beings seek to pursue (...) a sense of wholeness. This understanding of moral psychology is applied to thinking about criminal justice where three ethical stances are identified, the vindictive, the vindicative and the validatory. The vindictive and the vindicative represent a compromise formation in law which excludes a broader validatory process aimed at truthful human reconciliation. (shrink)