Self-effacement

In recent years, several philosophers - including Joshua Gert, Douglas Portmore, and Elizabeth Harman - have argued that there is a sense in which morality itself does not treat moral reasons as consistently overriding.  In the present essay I develop and extend this idea from a somewhat different perspective.  In doing so, I offer an alternative way of formalizing the idea that morality is modest about the weight of moral reasons, thereby making more explicit the connections between this thesis and similar issues in the epistemic sphere.  In addition, I discuss how these ideas affect our thinking about the nature of self-effacement, the significance of reflective endorsement, the weight that moral reasons ought to be given in all things consideration, and the plausibility of “indirect” moral theories.  Finally, I stress that it is possible to see morality as modest about the weight of specifically moral reasons, while also seeing all practical reasons as grounded in morality more indirectly – namely, by seeing morality as determining the weight that both moral and non-moral considerations deserve to have in all things considered deliberation.

This chapter examines two exponents of satiric literature written under the politically fraught conditions of the Roman Principate, Phaedrus and Juvenal. It is unclear who (or what) both were; their names, shorthands for de-authored texts rather than stand-ins for historical individuals. The literal self-effacement at work here creates a paradoxical authority: the words on the page, loosened from a definite first-person speaker identity, slip and slide easily from person to person, yet the concealment wreaks havoc with the readerly desire to know the source behind the words, generating an energetic ‘erotics’ of the weaker voice. This chapter analyses their shared yet distinctive strategies of authorial self-erasure, arguing that both not only render key markers of Roman elite male identity—name, body, and autobiography—ineffective, but that, in doing so, they also foreground and relish the particular potential of literature as the written word in its supposed inferiority to author-bound speech.