Recent discussions of moral testimony have focused on the acceptability of forming beliefs on the basis of moral testimony, but there has been little acknowledgement of the limits to testimony's capacity to convey moral knowledge. In this paper I outline one such limit, drawing on Iris Murdoch's conception of private moral concepts. Such concepts, I suggest, plausibly play an important role in moral thought, and yet moral knowledge expressed in them cannot be testimonially acquired.

I offer a reading of Murdoch's conception of concrete universality as it appears in 'The Idea of Perfection', the first essay in the Sovereignty of Good. I show that it has British Idealist overtones that are inflected by Wittgenstein, a thought I try to illuminate by drawing an analogy with Wittgenstein's discussion of the metre stick in Paris in Philosophical Investigations §50. In the last part of the paper, I appeal to the work of Murdoch's erstwhile tutor Donald MacKinnon to (...) respond to an objection to my strategy, which I draw from Murdoch's later work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. (shrink)

In the past few years, we have seen emerging new work that brings into focus the role of historical change and its moral implications in Iris Murdoch's philosophy. This paper strengthens this reading of her work and investigates the implications of this aspect of Murdoch's thinking for education in general and for moral education in particular. It resituates the Platonic imagery of the individual's ascent towards the true and the good in a framework where our conceptions of the true and (...) the good are in a process of historical reconfiguration. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with Stanley Cavell’s reading of the notion of privacy as it appears in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s private language argument (PLA). Defined as a fantasy or fear either of inexpressiveness or excessive expressiveness (cf. Cavell 1979: 254), I argue that such an account is partial, in that it does not represent those individuals that are exposed to epistemic injustice. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s seminal work Epistemic Injustice (2007) and on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), I trace (...) some similarities between the conditions of marginalized subjectivities and the private language speaker. This comparison suggests a correction of Cavell’s words and discloses an understanding of the clarificatory import that Wittgenstein’s PLA conveys, rendering it a way to resist marginalization and alienation due to the logical impossibility of a private language. In the second part of the paper (section 3), I consider two other Cavellian notions, namely the “claim to community” and ‘the turn to the ordinary’. Following the line of criticism developed in section 2, which revolves around the need of considering the situatedness of marginalized subjectivities and the oppressive character of the dimension of the ordinary, I try to implement Cavell’s concepts. I do so by taking into account (i) the Wittgenstein-inspired wider conception of rationality Alice Crary (2015) purports and (ii) the practices of some feminist consciousness-raising groups that were active in Milan (Italy) during the Seventies and some ideas developed by feminist and art critic Carla Lonzi. These contributions show that it is possible to maintain the general asset purported by Cavell, but they also call for criteria for better defining on which principles a community can form and which role the collectivity plays in revising the structure of the ordinary. (shrink)