Moral Reason and the Authoring Function

Philip Lewin
865 Shalar Court
Eugene, Oregon 97405

In this paper, I argue that modern ideas of selfhood and the postmodern critique of those ideas undermine our ability to think coherently about moral reason. They do this by obfuscating our understanding of the relation of persons to their social milieu and by isolating reflection from the ongoing flow of lived, social experience. They thus render impossible the Aristotelian project whereby a culture could sustain a form of moral reasoning that each person within that culture could affirm as such, without being coerced to do so or doing so only because of hegemonic pressures. Such a way of thinking presupposes a situatedness of reason within community, a situatedness that modern notions of the self largely deny. In response, I offer an alternative approach to thinking about the self's relation to morality. This approach, which I call the "authoring function," is grounded in a narrative construal of experience. While I believe this approach cogently redeems our intuitions about moral reason and advances our thinking, it is not a panacea, and I also will note its limitations.