"According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication"
About this Quote
Babbitt is trying to rescue virtue from the cliché that morality is just a set of brakes. The jab is aimed at what he saw as the modern habit of treating ethical limits as repression and freedom as pure self-expression. By calling virtue “expansive,” he flips the expected metaphor: restraint, properly understood, doesn’t shrink a life; it enlarges it by giving desire a shape that can actually be lived with. The line is polemical, but it’s also a strategic seduction.
The slyest move is the last phrase: “a sentiment and even an intoxication.” Babbitt isn’t endorsing moral drunkenness so much as conceding a psychological fact his opponents claimed for themselves. If the avant-garde and the romantic temper promised ecstasy through transgression, Babbitt insists ethical discipline can generate its own kind of thrill. Virtue, for him, isn’t merely duty performed with clenched teeth; it can feel like release, even rapture. That’s the subtext: the moral life must compete on the terrain of desire, not just argument.
Context matters. Writing in an early 20th-century atmosphere of rapid industrial change, mass culture, and post-Victorian backlash, Babbitt (a leading voice of “New Humanism”) distrusted both sentimental humanitarianism and romantic self-authorization. “New ethics” is a pointed phrase: he’s diagnosing a cultural rebranding where morality is repackaged as feeling, authenticity, vibe. His counterclaim is rhetorical jujitsu: if modernity wants expansion, he’ll offer it - but only through inner restraint, not permission.
The slyest move is the last phrase: “a sentiment and even an intoxication.” Babbitt isn’t endorsing moral drunkenness so much as conceding a psychological fact his opponents claimed for themselves. If the avant-garde and the romantic temper promised ecstasy through transgression, Babbitt insists ethical discipline can generate its own kind of thrill. Virtue, for him, isn’t merely duty performed with clenched teeth; it can feel like release, even rapture. That’s the subtext: the moral life must compete on the terrain of desire, not just argument.
Context matters. Writing in an early 20th-century atmosphere of rapid industrial change, mass culture, and post-Victorian backlash, Babbitt (a leading voice of “New Humanism”) distrusted both sentimental humanitarianism and romantic self-authorization. “New ethics” is a pointed phrase: he’s diagnosing a cultural rebranding where morality is repackaged as feeling, authenticity, vibe. His counterclaim is rhetorical jujitsu: if modernity wants expansion, he’ll offer it - but only through inner restraint, not permission.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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