The difficulty of moral perfectionism

Cavell and Diamond on self-understanding, disagreement and nonsense in ethics

Stefano Di Brisco

in: Perfectionism and Pragmatism, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 2 (2), 2010.

Abstract

In this paper I want to consider a kind of inexpressiveness that can characterize our moral experience. The acknowledgement of the possibility of failure in trying to word the world – to find adequate means of expression for our condition – deeply informs Cora Diamond’s conception of language and moral thought as well as her philosophical method. In particular, in her paper The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy Diamond is concerned with a resistance by reality to one’s ordinary modes of thinking and talking, the feeling of a mismatch between concepts and experience in which it is the nature of experience itself that deprives one of the words suitable to contain it.