In this article I contribute to the recent retooling of the philosophical understanding of ethics prompted by the ethics of care. In particular, I shall draw from the way in which the rich tradition of ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell) understood and put to work the key notions of vulnerability and expressivity, and show its convergence with the ethics of care on the centrality of responsibility and coexistence for the fashioning of a moral life which is at the same time truly autonomous and richly aware of our connectedness with, and dependence on, others. The immediate outcomes of an ethics so reformed are a renewed trust in the capacity to connect with others through our common ordinary need for attention, and the affirmation of the moral primacy of expressivity and affection over intellectuality and rationalizations.

The paper aims to present and defend Cavell’s reading of moral perfectionism as an alternative political approach. For several decades, Stanley Cavell has been working to make Emerson’s voice reheard in the core of American philosophy. This activity, though, is not simply historical rehabilitation. What appears very clearly in, e.g., his 2003 collection Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, but as early as in the 1990 work Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, is that Cavell also wants to make heard the present-day political pertinence of Emerson’s thinking and conception of democracy. Cavell wants to criticize either the interpretation of Emerson’s tonality which would make him a precursor of liberal individualism, or a precursor of progressive rhetoric, à la Dewey. Cavell has given himself the task of clearly differentiating Emerson from these trends. The author wants to show, however, that transcendentalism and pragmatism together as inheritors of Emerson’s voice allow us to rediscover something essential to democracy: possession of one’s voice – a question equally at the heart of Emerson’s philosophy, under the form of our capacity to speak, to stand up and speak, for oneself or for others as the very demand to trust oneself, which Cavell later calls the “arrogation of voice”.