Exciting, challenging, and innovative thinking is found in recent feminist and critical race theory, and Ami Harbin’s new book, Disorientation and Moral Life is an example. Harbin explores a common experience in people’s lives—that of feeling disoriented and ungrounded. Not only does she set out various causes for such experiences, but she asks us to think through its moral and political repercussions. In doing so, she also presents a challenge to a dominant assumption in moral theory: the idea that the best and most successful motives for moral action come from what she calls moral resolve. Moral resolve is a sense of confidence that one knows what to do, how to do it, why to do it, and then acts on that resolve. Harbin’s claim is that many of us do not actually face moral life feeling certain, confident, and grounded and yet must act, must live, anyway. Her attention to the fact of disorientation brings home to readers a way that people are moral agents even in the face of severe life strains. In fact, Harbin argues, experiences of disorientation may enrich moral life and help attune us to the ways that oppressions must be addressed in order ultimately to lessen our own and others’ vulnerability to disorientation.  

Harbin’s treatise is not just one on moral theory and moral life. To be disoriented is to be in a temporally extended condition of feeling that everyday life is unfamiliar, unsettling and uncertain. When one is disoriented, one feels that one doesn’t know how to go on. Disorientation thus is embodied, psychological, moral and, often, material. Experiences such as illness, trauma, racism, heterosexism, migration, and other situations of not fitting or being uncomfortable in one’s own life are sources of disorientations.

According to Harbin, disorienting experiences are ubiquitous but not evenly distributed. Yet orientedness is taken for granted. Philosophy has neglected (or even denigrated) disorientations, and so moral life as a whole, and the relation between motivation and action, are incompletely analyzed and understood. We can also see the consequences of not grasping the realities of disorientation in psychological domains. People who are disoriented can be viewed as damaged or untrustworthy and thus both reduced and discredited instead of supported.

Harbin argues that we have a moral responsibility to respond in supportive ways to one another through experiences of disorientation. Psychologists and psychiatrists may particularly be interested in this line of argument, as Harbin urges readers to resist the tendency (supported by both institutional structures and dominant ideologies) to treat people who are disoriented as in need of medical/psychological treatment. Sometimes, for instance in some kinds of trauma, therapies might be useful. But additionally (and more the point that Harbin stresses), moral life requires that we address the injustices that may make disorientations more likely, or more long-lasting, or more unevenly distributed across society. Acting in ways that make life more livable for those who are disoriented does not require that we be morally resolute about what actions we should take or what the best route would be—acting irresolutely is not only reasonable but, sometimes, a move toward positive and constructive change both interpersonally and structurally. Even in the face of uncertainty.

This is an accessible and readable book. While at times I wished for more development of some of the examples, and at times I wanted clarification on a claim or two, this book is enlightening and would be a good textbook in both philosophy and psychology courses. Clearly, it makes an invaluable contribution to the interdisciplinary fields of philosophy and psychology.

© 2016 Nancy Nyquist Potter

Nancy Nyquist Potter, Department of Philosophy, Associate with the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Louisville, nancy.potter@louisville.edu