Oakeshott as a Moralist

Oakeshott as a Moralist Terry Nardin Presented as the Inaugural Michael Oakeshott Lecture at the University of Hull on 17 September 2015, in connection with the 2015 conference of the Michael Oakeshott Association, and forthcoming in Noël O’Sullivan, ed., Oakeshott's Place in Contemporary Western and Non-Western Thought (Imprint Academic, 2016).

First and last paragraphs in place of an abstract: To interpret Oakeshott as a moralist might seem strange for someone who has long argued that he should be read not as a conservative thinker or a liberal one but as a philosopher. Oakeshott distinguished theorising from practical engagement and was careful to observe that distinction even when he seems to flout it. When commentators criticise his moral or political views it is sometimes to expose what they see as prejudice or hypocrisy. As someone interested in his contribution to philosophy, I’ve paid more attention to his arguments than to their political implications. I’ve not used the tools of critical theory or Cambridge School historicism to uncover political intentions or ideological biases in his writings. The effect of reading a thinker in that way is often to foreground the ordinary or conventional in his thought, which undercuts an important reason for studying him. But even if we avoid doing that, the question is how much we learn by treating Oakeshott as a practical moralist rather than as a theorist of morality. Oakeshott did not think that that it was the philosopher’s business to make moral judgements, and the judgements he does make are not especially astute. They are, I think, consistent with the broad outlines of his Christian moral heritage and with an understanding of morality and its relationship to law that he found in Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, and other theorists of the modern state. To read Oakeshott as a theorist of morality is not to deny that he sometimes judges people or policies, trading the role of a spectator for that of an actor. Nor is it to ignore the interplay between these different roles. As he once observed, ‘what one needs to explain in trying to understand a writer is the tensions in his thought’. We should, then, consider his judgements in relation to his efforts to understand the distinctive character of moral judgement. By doing that, we can focus on what is most interesting in his contribution to understanding morality and moral conduct. *** If I am right, the common objections to Oakeshott’s performance as a moralist, whether as a maker of moral judgements or as a theorist of moral conduct, are mostly beside the point. The recurrent charge that his concern with the non-instrumental was not only mistaken but frivolous would have struck him as ungenerous, narrow-minded, and, as he used the term, barbaric. It seems to miss the point of morality, which is to make room for conversation by silencing boors, to enable individuality by resisting domination, and to make coexistence possible by resisting enslavement and extermination. If Oakeshott is more interesting as a theorist of morality than as a practical moralist it is because his morality is conventional. He recognises the distinction between mores and morality but in the end does not want to make too much of it. He leans towards Sittlichkeit but is never free of Moralität, as can be seen in his definition of a moral practice as ‘the ars artium of agency’ – ‘agents related to one another in terms of conditional proprieties which are expressly or tacitly recognised in the conditions of all other special prudential relationships and manners of being associated in conduct’. On a suitably broad definition of the term he can be read as a moralist but he does not betray his character as a theorist in making moral judgments: there is no reason not to do both provided one does not confuse theorising a moral practice with making judgements according to the practice one is theorising. His contribution lies not in judging or prescribing conduct but in clarifying the presuppositions of the judgments and precepts we call moral. It is a philosophical contribution which we can also read, if we wish, as a moral one.