The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot on the Sources of Normativity

In a notebook of 1877, George Eliot at one point muses on moral philosophy, asking “Of what stuff is virtue made?” and ending with the dramatic “What is the scourge of the unwilling?” Such questions show Eliot engaging one of the great questions of nineteenth-century moral philosophy: where does the obligatoriness of moral obligations come from? Or, more simply, why should one care about morality? Henry Sidgwick’s magisterial 1874 treatise The Methods of Ethics ultimately conceded defeat on this issue, concluding that there was no way to show the rational egoist that altruistic behavior was more rational than self-interested action. Eliot’s own attempts to answer this question, reflected in the narratives of Esther Lyon, Fred Vincy, and ultimately Gwendolen Harleth, depend on the role of shame in moral psychology, and in particular on the conditions necessary for maintaining the self-approval necessary for internal coherence and autonomy.