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Justice and hope: Essays, lectures and other writings By RaimondGaita, ScottStephens (Ed.), Melbourne, Vic.: Melbourne University Press. 2023. xvii +582 pp. £30. ISBN 9780522880236

2024; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/phin.12432

1467-9205

Steven Tudor,

Violence, Religion, and Philosophy

This book brings together a wide range of Raimond Gaita's writings from 1990 to 2022. The pieces include book reviews, columns from newspapers and magazines, chapters in edited collections, public lectures, a graduation oration and even a personal letter. There is a brief but illuminating preface by the author and a helpful introduction by the editor. The chapters have been grouped into six parts: 'An Unconditional Love of the World', 'Truth and Judgment', 'Dispossession and Justice', 'War, Terror and Ethical Tragedy', 'Love and Teaching' and 'Affirming an Embodied Humanity'. But, otherwise, the chapters stand on their own, without further commentary. The particular topics covered vary widely, but, to give some sense of their range, they include: writers such as Primo Levi and Albert Camus; the injustices suffered by Indigenous Australians; truth and truthfulness in the Age of Trump; terrorism and torture; multiculturalism; the decline of the concept of the university; same-sex marriage; our relationship to the environment; the moral crises posed by Israel's treatment of the Palestinians; hope in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic; and the insufferable complacency of a Buddhist monk. With 33 different pieces and multiple genres on offer in this book, any neat summation will distort far more than it reveals. But there are some recurring moral themes and ideas that inform what we might regard as the moral vision at the core of Gaita's thinking. Among these recurring themes are the ethical significance of saintly love and what it reveals, namely the inalienable preciousness of every human being; our common humanity and our embodied creatureliness; the Socratic view that it is better to suffer evil than to do it; the difference between guilt and shame; and the importance of remorse as 'the fullest and most authentic realisation of the meaning of what it is to wrong someone' (p. 234). These ideas do not form a set of general moral principles, which Gaita duly applies to particular problems, and Gaita does not present (or rely on) a moral theory to justify and defend these as 'foundational principles'. Rather, these ideas help illuminate the many and various aspects of morality, politics, law, history and culture that Gaita engages with in this collection. We gain a sense of what these ideas mean by seeing how Gaita sees the world when it is illuminated by them. Gaita can be hard to place philosophically because he is not the kind of philosopher who is chiefly concerned with advancing and defending a particular philosophical theory or set of philosophical theses. He is more akin to the philosophers who have an animating vision of how things are, and whose work is mainly in the service of articulating, exploring and interpreting that vision. The essays, lectures and reviews in Justice and Hope can be seen as particular occasions on which Gaita is bringing that broader vision to bear. Gaita certainly does make and refute claims and present and rebut arguments. But in doing so, he is less seeking to defend or capture intellectual ground from an opposed theorist and more trying to turn the reader towards a way of seeing the world and the human beings in it. How does one engage critically with this sort of visionary philosophising? Because much of contemporary philosophy is heavily theory-focussed, critical engagement with another philosopher is often a matter of isolating out theses to dispute, finding fault with arguments and advancing counter-propositions. That sort of approach is not readily applicable to Gaita's writings—a sympathetic reader will generally find the broader vision resonating with them, while an unsympathetic reader will likely be left cold or even irritated to varying degrees. But does this mean a sympathetic reader (such as myself) never disagrees with particular things Gaita says? Not at all, but part of the challenge is to conceptualise what it means to disagree with Gaita on some issue. As citizens we can hope that criminals are remorseful. We may even believe that it is intrinsic to some of our duties as citizens to require our judicial system to establish conditions of sentencing and punishment that would enable them to be remorseful, for their sake and for the sake of their victims, rather than because their remorse would give us reason to hope that they would not reoffend. But usually remorse should play little, if any, role in sentencing criminals or in the conditions of their release. In most circumstances, it is sufficient for them to have "paid their dues", for them to beaccepted back into the civitas. (pp. 235–6.) I agree with much in this passage—except that I think that genuine remorse should usually be a significant mitigating factor in sentencing. It is in fact required by the law in many jurisdictions (certainly in England and Australia), and, I think, that is indeed what the law should require. This, of course, reflects a certain way of understanding the relationship between morality and law. Gaita here expresses a widely held view that, on this point at least, morality and law should be kept at arm's length, while I think that, fraught though the relationship will be, morality and law properly intertwine when it comes to the law's response to offender remorse. But, at a deeper level, what is involved or even at stake in this sort of disagreement with Gaita? Part of the challenge in disagreeing with Gaita is that he raises the stakes involved in philosophical disagreement about moral issues. This is partly because Gaita locates moral understanding in what he calls 'the realm of meaning', which he describes as 'a way of thinking about the meanings of things in our lives — about what it means to love or grieve truthfully and why it matters, about what it means to suffer wrong and what it means to do it' (p. 339). Essential to the realm of meaning, thinks Gaita, is that the critical concepts that help constitute what it is to think well or badly about moral meanings are concepts such as sentimentality, bathos, kitsch and lack of sobriety. These, he says, are actual forms of thinking badly within the realm of meaning, not habits of mind that might contingently lead one to mistaken beliefs or faulty logic (as if these were the real problems in moral understanding that one must avoid). For Gaita, in the realm of meaning, 'thought and feeling, style and content, are inseparable' (p. 340). This means that in disagreements within the realm of meaning, the moral character of what we say, and indeed the moral character of ourselves, are deeply engaged. In contrast, to disagree about facts or to dispute what follows logically from what in the realm of the factual does not engage our moral character in any fundamental way. This means, then, that to say that one disagrees with Gaita on a morally important issue seems to risk becoming a critique of his character or an admission of flaws in one's own. So, when I dispute Gaita's point about the relevance of remorse in sentencing, am I implicitly saying he is being too high-minded, or perhaps simply exposing myself as shallow and gullible? Such raised stakes can make engagement with Gaita's writings a much more personally challenging experience than one usually finds when reading academic philosophy. It is not just that Gaita's thinking is deep but also that you yourself are much more deeply implicated in how you read and respond to him. That is not always comforting. One can also gain something of a sense of where Gaita is 'coming from' by noting that, while he is often at pains to say that he is not religious, there is nonetheless a strong sense that his way of thinking and writing has an affinity with religious modes of thinking and language. There is a distinctive sensibility in his work that many religious people will find congenial. He speaks of us as 'heirs of traditions that taught that every human life is a miracle, inalienably precious, or as we now more commonly say, possesses inalienable dignity' (p. 235). So, he clearly sees a continuity of sorts between his thinking and religious traditions, presumably most particularly Christianity, though it is not always clear how we who are not religious can claim that inheritance or just what is and what is not plausibly bequeathed to us by those traditions. Part of what is so interesting about Gaita's writings, especially in this volume, is that he is implicitly exploring (rather than explicitly arguing for) what can be retrieved and sustained from a tradition that we cannot fully share. One has the sense that it is as if Gaita, while agreeing intellectually that the tide of religious faith should indeed have receded, nonetheless believes that important ethical values and ideas have been lost or, at least, have become much more vulnerable, and that we struggle in a post-Christian world to find and sustain the ethical language and concepts needed to express thoughts of the necessary quality and depth. Rowlands seems to be one of many people who believe that because we are animals, evolutionary theory must have important things to teach about what matters to us, especially about the many forms of morality. But when I read some evolutionary accounts of "altruism" and then recall the centuries of reflection on what it means to love one's neighbour, or on what it really means to do something for the sake of someone else, or on how we developed the idea that every human being possesses inalienable dignity to which is owed unconditional respect, distinguished from esteem, or on the affirmation that every life is a miracle, then it strikes me that there is no "must" about it. (pp. 495–6.) Those 'centuries of reflection' on these things were almost always within or informed by a religious outlook and the attempt to sustain such reflection, and such values outside such an outlook is still something of a cultural experiment-in-progress. Gaita, I suggest, is seeking to sustain those values, not by presenting an alternative, non-religious theoretical undergirding for them, but by keeping such a language of love alive and in use in the lived engagement with real issues in life, morality, law, politics and art. That will probably not satisfy those philosophers who require their ethics to have a theoretical grounding, perhaps in some salient universal facts about human nature. But it is also true that, in order to live, such a language needs to speak to, and enable us to speak to each other about, our lived concerns in the midst of things. Gaita's Justice and Hope makes a distinctive and profound contribution to sustaining such a language by giving it a real voice and by showing what is at stake if we were, ultimately, to lose such a language.