Antigone in Hertfordshire: Moral Conflict and Moral Pluralism in Forster’s Howards End

• Published in: Res publica (Liverpool, England) England), 2020-11, Vol.26 (4), p.489-504
• Main Author: Yack, Bernard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Conflict; Education; Ethics; Heroism & heroes; Legal History; Multiculturalism & pluralism; Philosophy; Philosophy of Law; Political Philosophy; Political Theory; Sophocles (496?-406 BC); Theories of Law; Values
• ISSN: 1356-4765; 1572-8692
• DOI: 10.1007/s11158-020-09484-y

This paper uses E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End to help articulate what I describe as a moral pluralist approach to moral conflict. Moral pluralism, I argue here, represents a way of responding to the moral conflicts we encounter in our lives, rather than the mere acknowledgment of their inevitability, as suggested by value pluralists like Isaiah Berlin. The tragic view of moral conflict epitomized by Sophocles’ Antigone and endorsed by most theories of value pluralism, tells us that we must choose between moral commitments and reconcile ourselves to the moral regrets that inevitably follow from moral choice. The moral pluralist view, in contrast, suggests that we should seek means, however imperfect, of satisfying conflicting moral commitments and minimizing causes for moral regret. That view, I argue, drives the words and actions of Forster’s heroine in Howards End , Margaret Schlegel. Confronted with a battle between a willful patriarch and a self-righteous sister, a conflict that maps neatly onto the central conflict in Sophocles’ tragedy, Margaret refuses to take sides without refusing to make moral choices. And in doing so, she comes to exemplify an unexpected kind of moral heroism.