Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
Bernard Williams
Language: English
Pages: 244
ISBN: 067426858X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this book Bernard Williams delivers a sustained indictment of moral theory from Kant onward. His goal is nothing less than to reorient ethics toward the individual. He deals with the most thorny questions in contemporary philosophy and offers new ideas about issues such as relativism, objectivity, and the possibility of ethical knowledge.
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Other hand, linguistic competence. The ability to give ethical answers does indeed require some explanation. The presented cases are not exactly like previous 107 108 ETHICS AND THE LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHY cases, and the respondent must have internalized something that enables him or her to respond to the new cases. But it is not obvious what that may be. In particular, it is not obvious that it must be a principle, in the sense of a summary and discursively stateable description that does not.
With comparative secrecy, what it would be wrong to do in the face of the world. He recognizes that these are likely to be seen as shocking conclusions; but then it is for the best that most people should continue to see them as shocking. “The Utilitarian conclusion would seem to be this,” Sidgwick concludes with a certain dry relish, “that the opinion that secrecy may render an action right which would not otherwise be so should itself be kept comparatively secret; and similarly it seems.
Encourage the simplification principle I mentioned before: if having an unrationalized principle is irrational, it is good to have as little irrationality as possible. Others of a different temper will wonder why, if we are bound to end up with some unjustified reason-giving practice, we should not end up with several. Once we see that it is impossible to rationalize everything, the project of rationalizing as much as possible need not be understood as doing the next best thing. We may conclude.
Creatures who are not human beings, are all engaged. We shall then see their judgments as having these general implications, rather as we see primitive statements about the stars as having implications that can be contradicted by more sophisticated statements about the stars. On the other model we shall see their judgments as part of their way of living, a cultural artifact they have come to inhabit (though they have not consciously built it). On this, nonobjectivist, model, we shall take a.
Theory might even, in a weak sense, provide some explanations. It might rationalize some cultural differences, showing why one local concept rather than others was ethically appropriate in particular circumstances (we can recall here the possibilities and perils of indirect utilitarianism). But while it might explain why it was reasonable for people to have these various ethical beliefs, it would not be the sort of theory that could explain why they did or did not have them. It could not do.