George Eliot’s Moral Philosophy

From Literary history to the History of Philosophy

Surprisingly, there has never been a monograph devoted straightforwardly to explaining Eliot’s moral philosophy, despite longstanding recognition of the depth of Eliot’s reading in philosophy and broad agreement among moral philosophers both in the nineteenth century and now of the intellectual depth of Eliot’s insights. The cause of this lack is twofold. First, an inflated sense of the difference between literature and philosophy causes monographs in literary studies to portray Eliot’s moral thinking as primarily aesthetic material, a source for her narrative form. A second cause, one that philosophers are coming to recognize, is the traditional exclusion of women writers from the history of philosophy. What the case of Eliot’s moral thought shows is how these two assumptions interact, and how a refusal to recognize literature as philosophy contributes to a marginalization of women thinkers. Thus my book extends to Eliot the sort of rational reconstruction that has long been extended to her male contemporaries, treating her not merely as a source for interesting aphorisms or insightful parables but as a systematic thinker with interlocking accounts of the nature of practical reason and the fundamental justifications of ethics.

I opens with a comparison between the interpretive traditions on Eliot and her contemporary John Stuart Mill, noting how much more willing interpreters have been to treat Mill’s ideas as relevant and urgent than they have Eliot’s. It turns then to Eliot’s critique of utilitarian ethics: to Eliot, making moral deliberation hinge on assessing the harms and benefits of an action invariably privileged the harms and benefits experienced by oneself. Eliot grounded her critique, however, in a theory of the sources of self-deception more generally, and the two key components of her positive theory—sympathy and integrity—grow out of her view that both form effective checks against the threat of self-deception and compensate for each other’s failures. The book concludes by stepping back to consider the relationship between literary history and the history of philosophy, arguing that the kind of reading common in the history of philosophy—in which a thinker’s works are presented in a new light, one that addresses issues of current importance—is vital, but needs to be extended to writers usually included solely in the literary tradition.