Sympathy, vocation, and moral deliberation in George Eliot

Abstract

Critics have tended to portray sympathy in George Eliot as an alternative to moral judgments based on principles. But this account overlooks Eliot's emphasis on the way principles can be morally transformative: in particular, agents' vocations create in them the capacity to work for something other than mere self-satisfaction and thus serve as a resistance to egoism. Read against this background, sympathy appears not as an alternative to moral principles but rather as a vital check upon them. Sympathy for Eliot thus functions like the categorical imperative test in Immanuel Kant's ethics, as a form of practical reasoning that ensures selflessness in action.