In Good Conscience

...Here she might have spent a bit more time drawing on the good Dr...

...To say nothing of the tenderness Mothers feel for their young and of the dangers they brave in order to protect them, one daily sees the repugnance of Horses to trample a living Body underfoot...

...At the end of the film, Liszt screams at Peters that she has murdered his vitality with guilt...

...The time machines of these American filmmakers whirl and spin and hum, colored lights flicker on and off, a mighty noise is made...

...Better, I should think, to go with St...

...But whether the dials have been set for 1181, England, or 1840, Paris, the results are the same...

...Sidney Callahan, a professor of psychology at Mercy College, and a sensitive observer of the perils and possibilities of our times, seems to me more in an Augustinian or Rousseauian vein than she herself might acknowledge...

...Callahan, clearly, agrees with me on this point...

...Instead, its makers are content to goose the audience with name-dropping, deliberate but senseless use of anachronisms (Sand's children giving each other the high five, Musset wearing sunglasses), and the smirkiest possible portrayal of the sexual and social fuss with which artists live without a hint of the passions behind that fuss...

...I also think we shrink from this mordant awareness...

...In this he may be indebted to the great Augustine, though he did not acknowledge the indebtedness, for Augustine, too, spoke of a natural morality, written in human hearts, and basic to the entire sentient human race---a category he celebrated as including the Sciopodes, who shelter themselves from the sun in the shade of one foot, and the Cynocephali, who had dogs' heads and barked...

...But I wonder if her ideal of wholeness or full integration of the morally acting, feeling, and willing self may not be just a bit too grand...

...Callahan begins by noting that one of the marks in a decline of a working moral consensus in American society is more and more frantic attention to ethics, especially bioethics...

...For this reason, her commitment to the language of holism and integration may not quite serve her own supple purposes...

...But I am certain, as well, that Callahan is right to insist that children deprived of loving, nurture, and care in their earliest years are placed in the danger zone for their own sakes, and ours...

...a decent friend and neighbor in another...

...Recent psychological approaches to reason, emotion, and their interactions cast doubt on these presuppositions...

...It would seem so...

...Or: "Man's first language, the most universal, the most energetic and the only language he needed before it was necessary to persuade assembled men, is the cry of Nature...

...It is no doubt to the good, if not all to the good, that we no longer "do" or "do not" based solely upon the force of habit or tradition...

...Because the babybedecked, shrewish Peters is supposed to represent the man-dependent woman...

...That seems too much a relic of a moral or moralistic past, a world of authority and command...

...Both are lamed by a radical inability to imagine the European past as a place that is truly different from the American present...

...a virtue all the more universal and useful to man as it precedes the exercise of all reflection in him, and so Natural that the Beasts themselves sometimes show evident signs of IN GOOD CONSCIENCE Reason and Emotion in Moral Decision Making Sidney Cailahan HarperCollins, $22.95, 250 pp...

...She spends quite a bit of time cleating debris...

...Thus, Bernadette Peters, as Liszt's harridan-mistress, is directed by Lapine to carry on like some drag-queen creation of Charles Ludlam's: screaming, pouting, pursing eyes and mouth, toting her suckling babes around like so many rag dolls...

...Callahan counters an exclusively or narrowly rationalist "solution" with a more complex picture of "the self as moral agent...

...None of us knows what he will do on the morrow, said Augustine, and I fear he was right...

...RICHARD ALLEVA Love, hatred, pity, anger hen Jean-Jacques Rousseau, polemicist and provocateur of the first rank, threw down his gauntlet to challenge the Enlightenment philosophes' rather lofty opinion of themselves and the power of reason in general, his gesture was decisive and gained force through repetition: "Regardless of what the Moralists may say about it, human understanding owes much to the Passions which, as is commonly admitted, also owe much to it...

...But most ethicists refuse to utter the N-word ("No...

...My criticisms of the book are rather simply cast...

...and third, that emotions will only bias, cloud, and impede moral decision making...

...By "integration" she refers to a notion of the whole or integrated self, a self more or less at one with itself...

...As well, I am not at all certain that we can will ourselves to be good and to do right as she rather optimistically insists...

...She, with Rousseau, would start with feeling...

...New technology, especially reproductive and genetic technology, throws up problems faster than an ethicist can say, "Thou shalt not...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain it...

...Callahan's text is primarily expository...

...But she also, refreshingly, insists that love "is the great moral educator because it makes us pay attention to and value what we love...

...Callahan understands that deep moral quandaries do not yield their secrets to narrowly cognitivist or "cost-benefit" accounts...

...Make no mistake, by the way: Callahan pushes her own version of reason, a far more discursive and dialogic model than that endorsed by most of the makers of ethical systems...

...second, that only detached reasoning will be reliably objective...

...I wanted her to wallow in the muck just a bit more, to dirty her hands with some really nasty and tawdry situations and to show us how her approach would confront real life messiness in a way that those she criticizes do not or cannot...

...Her insistency is too abstractly cast...

...She is right to signal the way in which "modem moralists' suspicions of emotion are based upon a particular psychological model of human functioning that has not changed much over the past centuries...

...Wholehearted emotional commitment to the good and right" may be too much to expect from us mere mortals, particularly in this day and age, in this time and place...

...Yet there is a connection...

...Surely, however, facing the moral dilemma of abortion, the woman who proclaims full and complete ownership of her body and an at-oneness with the proprietary view of the self this proclamation endorses, would be a woman in the process of radically simplifying the moral universe...

...Callahan's concentration or moral selfcommitment is welcome in this era of talk about incessantly self-displacing selves...

...But what is the character flaw supposedly revealed or underlined by all this physical grotesquerie...

...What sort of conception do Lapine and BOOKS Kernochan have of Liszt to think that his vitality of all vitalities could be smothered by a mistress or by anyone else...

...But too much oflmpromptu is neither camp nor full-bodied drama, neither truly funny nor grippingly serious, but only the latest example of that form that is so drearily typical of our time: the cartoon that takes itself seriously, that seems to hug itself precisely because it does not probe, does not care about its own subject matter...

...I can be a selfish moral monster in one situation...

...But to give or withhold approval on the basis of whether your characters do or don't fit into current political/social movements is the mark of the propagandist, not the artist...

...Rousseau spoke, he said, of "Pity, a disposition suited to beings as weak and as subject to so many ills as we are...

...The world is wondrous indeed...

...Both films are examples of American provinciality...

...9 August 1991:487...

...then I come up with solution y or maybe z. (Modesty may forbid adumbrating a single solution, although the ambition tends in this direction...

...At that moment the willing may triumph over the nilling (to borrow some Augustinian language) but we are, I suspect, less integrated and whole than determined that, on balance, this course of action is right...

...Paul--that which I would I do not...

...While the trouser-wearing, cigar-smoking, successful novelist Sand is a progenitor of the liberated woman...

...That is, in order to preserve complete "ownership and unity" she strips the moral universe of a complexity that is simply and irrevocably there...

...But how has she done this...

...By "synthesis" she gestures toward a drawing-together of features of moral activity often isolated into what gets studied by moral philosophers, on the one hand, or psychologists, on the other...

...Callahan insists that only in "severe disorders does the ' I ' of the self lose its sense of ownership and unity...

...To say the least...

...There is an assumption, first, that reasoning can be thoroughly detached from emotion...

...is "holistic," at one and the same time "thinking, feeling, and willing...

...that which I would not, that I do----or, at least, to accept this as one prominent feature of my moral life, than to push for too strong a picture of integration and moral harmony...

...We gaze out of the machine only to find ourselves stuck in la-la land...

...I try to give a picture that takes into account new psychological understandings of self-emotion, reason, intuition, problem solving, and developmental change...

...Freud who insisted that the child's helplessness is the initiator of all moral motive...

...an animal never goes past a dead animal of its own Species without some restlessness: Some even give them a kind of burial...

...Despite his own scientizing moments, Freud is a great teacher of what the terrible human cost is when human beings are not deeply and irrevocably loved...

...can I borrow your enlightenment notes...

...and the mournful lowing of Cattle entering a SlaughterHouse conveys their impression of the horrible sight that strikes them...

...It seems to 486: Commonweal work like this: I isolate moral problem x; figure out what factors and features are at work and elaborate and f'me tune these...

...She gives the rationalists their due but not, thank goodness, the day...

...For theirs--and Callahan is more generous in her assessments than am I, perhaps--is too often a cheese-paring approach to moral problems...

...My hunch is that when we act, or whenever we act in a morally complex situation, we are always beings at odds with ourselves...

...Two big words in Callahan's vocabulary are "synthesis" and "integration...

...Love, hatred, pity, anger--this is the first vocabulary of emotions, and of moral reasoning, according to Rousseau...

...Who could ever have predicted that a film about Chopin and his friends could have anything in common with a Robin Hood movie...

...But the alternatives that beckon for our attention and allegiance are often deeply flawed...

...And why is George Sand so clearly intended by the fllmmakers to be the heroic opposite of Peters's character...

...Conscience, she insists, "I was sick yesterday...

...There are more things than are dreamt of in the works of most moral philosophers, at least those of a harshly rationalist or cognitivist bent...