When I use the phrase
“practice of moral authority” there are three important words involved, and all
of them require some explaining. First,
practices. Practices have two important
meanings I want to describe. First, in a
larger sense, practices refer to a particular category of actions, maintained
within particular physical spaces and through time within a tradition. In this sense, medicine is a practice, and so
are science, gender, and race, among other things. Social scientists and
philosophers have already done a lot of important work to show how these
categories are not only practiced in
real life, but they are also broader practices,
in the expansive sense I am here using the term. Boundaries are an
important part of this expansive sense of practices: practitioners within a
particular category generally look for ways to indicate how their practice are
different from similar categories. Astronomers and astrologists both study
stars, and astronomers want to show how the two groups are different, primarily
by showing how the practices themselves are different: in doing so, their
“boundary-work” is both about a broad and abstract category rooted in explicit
action (what I’m calling a practice) and about the explicit identity of a
community (astronomers) and individuals (specific astronomers making these
distinctions).
Practices can also have a
smaller and much more specific meaning.
By this term, I refer not to the expansive sense of the word practice I
used earlier but to the much more specific instantiations of those broad
categories. If medicine is a practice in
the first sense, then a physical exam is a practice in the sense I mean it
here. While there are important elements
of these smaller practices that are conscious (e.g. how the doctor thinks about
the patient’s specific symptoms), much of the routine is subconscious and
habituated (e.g. how the doctor holds the stethoscope). Also, while practices
in the first sense are broad, conceptual, and rooted in time, practices in the
second sense are specific, habituated, and rooted in space (specifically, the
human body). I will alternate between
both of these meanings in this book.
By moral, I do not
necessarily mean the explicit study of what is right and wrong, and neither do
I mean my own description of the best action an any given moment. Instead, I refer to a much broader and more
diffuse sensibility, a vague and hard to articulate feeling that someone is
living life the way it ought to be lived.
This sense of morality is rooted not in explicit rules and careful
deliberations but in subconscious habits and the maintenance of everyday
emotional expectations. To be clear, the
sense of how one ought to live, at least as I refer to it, is socially
constructed: I am not interested in how people come to know God’s law or the
moral truth that exists outside of human consciousness (though I am quite
interested in the people who claim they are doing exactly that). My project is descriptive, not normative. Moral,
for my purposes, is not so much instantiating God’s law or the moral truth as
it is living out the taken-for-granted rules that a community has established
within its tradition. Morality is
therefore less important as a series of discrete questions about particular
actions and more relevant as a way to frame what a good life resembles.
A good life is ultimately
a series of moments of course, but morality rarely takes its shape in those
moments through careful deliberations about whether particular actions are
right or wrong. It is instead either a
set of resonant experiences through which unconscious moral expectations align
with everyday interactions with people, objects, and events or an experience of
dissonance in which someone feels an emotional struggle, generally through a
sense of disgust, fear, annoyance, or regret. People might not be able to
articulate precisely why they feel these emotions, or their explanations might
be inconsistent with some of their other commitments or claims. This inarticulacy and inconsistency is the
result of a few factors. First, morality as I’m describing it here is a
repertoire of various visions of what a good life might resemble, with various,
often incommensurable virtues idealized at once (for example, a courageous
person, in enacting their courage, might be insufficiently generous). Second, and perhaps most important, morality
is as socially necessary and constitutive as language and culture. Like
languages, moralities are localized to a particular community and only make sense
socially and historically; they are largely subconscious, with rules that are
not necessarily explicable by their users; they are finite and limited, even as
they are also expansive with multiple, often-conflicting ways to either
communicate a good idea or live a good life.
Finally, the word
authority. By authority I mean a kind of
power that is socially accepted. If
power is simply the ability to do something or to make someone do something,
then authority, at its most simple, is the general social acceptance of that
power. For example, a parent has
authority over a child when that child accepts a parent’s power. Authority can be a rationally determined
decision, and it can also be an unconscious commitment rooted in
tradition. For example, Americans grow
up respecting the authority of science, rarely even consciously choosing to
permit that power (in contrast, someone might grudgingly acknowledge the
authority of a meeting’s chairperson).
For my purposes, authority is important as a source of social power,
that is, a power over others and a power in how one relates to others in
everyday interactions. Even when
authority is only the power over one’s own life, it is necessarily social in
that it implies the permission of others in a community to do so.
To say someone has a
certain authority means that they have implicit permission from the rest of
their community to do what they do. Yet
it also means more than this, because authority is generally rooted not only in
permission but also in expertise. To say
a doctor has authority does not only mean that doctor has permission to act; it
also is to say that there is a good
reason that doctor has permission to act.
It is to say that a tradition has established certain implicit and
explicit metrics through which permission is granted and people deem other
people capable of and free to perform particular actions. This authority is often subconscious and
implicitly provided, but it can also be denied or challenged. When I call
something a “moral authority” I mean a combination of the two last terms listed
above: a generally implicit permission and consent from other members of a
community that someone has acquired sufficient standing or experience to
perform particular actions related to making of a good life. After all, all actions and all authorities
are not necessarily moral: one might have developed an authority to prepare
coffee, but in most communities, this would not relate to one’s capacity to
live a good life.
We are now ready for my
definition of “practices of moral authority,” by which I refer to practices, in
either the broad or the specific sense, with which individuals and communities
both practice and confirm their capacity to live life as it ought to be
lived. These moral practices gain their
authority via the observation, permission, and encouragement of fellow members
of their community (even if, as is often the case, the observation, permission,
and encouragement are all performed without conscious deliberation). Because
both morality and the first sense of practices are expansive terms, these
practices of moral authority can be leveraged as tools through which to
reconcile a community’s commitments and ongoing tradition with the goals,
expectations, and challenges posed by those outside of the community. However, because these are practices of moral
authority, the accomplishment of this
reconciliation must be earned via experience or gaining a position of trust,
and the reconciliation can not be any one individual’s idiosyncratic decision:
it must be done with the permission-whether explicit and conscious or implicit
and not, of the community and its tradition. The practices of moral authority I describe
here—gender, scripture, prayer, and science—are all simply entry points to more
specific bodily performances of the category. For example, the big practice is
gender, and the smaller practice is wearing the hijab. Both are moral, and both are rooted in
authority.
The split between two
understandings of the word practice is important. In the smaller sense of
practices, practices of moral authority are specific actions people perform
that root their lives in an ongoing tradition, helping them habituate certain
implicit understandings of what a good life entails. In the bigger sense of the word practice,
practices of moral authority are less specific instantiations of a broader
concept than they are concepts with their own particular authority over how one
ought to live. In this broader sense,
gender, scripture, science, and prayer all function as categories with an
authority that has been accorded them either from within their tradition (for
prayer and scripture) or from within and without (for science and gender). I am distinguishing between these by calling
them internal and external practices.
But the most important point for these larger practices of moral
authority is that while they can be leveraged to accomplish moral tasks, they
are also authorities in their own right: in each of the schools I studied,
science, gender, scripture, and prayer were understood to have accomplished
things and to have a moral weight that had to be respected and
accommodated.