Abstract
AbstractFar from being indiscriminately critical of the morality system, Bernard Williams offered vindicatory explanations of its crucial building blocks: the moral/nonmoral distinction, the idea of obligation, the voluntary/involuntary distinction, and the practice of blame. The rationale for these concessions, the author argues, is that understanding what these ideas do for us when they are not in the service of the system is as important to leading us out of the system as the critique of that system. The author then shows how regarding the aspiration to shelter life from luck as the system’s organizing ambition explains why the system elaborates and combines these building blocks in the way it does. Finally, he argues that the ultimate problem with this construction is its frictionless purity. It robs valuable concepts of their grip on the world and, by insisting on purity from contingency, threatens to engender nihilism about value and skepticism about agency.
Publisher
Oxford University PressNew York
Reference60 articles.
1. C8.P74Candlish, Stewart, and Nic Damnjanovic. 2013. “Reason, Action and the Will: The Fall and Rise of Causalism.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, edited by Michael Beaney, 689–708. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2. C8.P75Clark, Maudemarie. 2015. “On the Rejection of Morality: Bernard Williams’s Debt to Nietzsche.” In Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics, 41–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Whence the demand for ethical theory?;American Philosophical Quarterly,2021
4. What’s the point of blame? A paradigm based explanation.;Noûs,2016
Cited by
3 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献，注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献，订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献
1. Moral psychology as soul-picture;The Philosophical Quarterly;2024-07-04
2. Responsibility After ‘Morality’;P. F. Strawson and his Philosophical Legacy;2023-12-14
3. The Dworkin–Williams debate: Liberty, conceptual integrity, and tragic conflict in politics;Philosophy and Phenomenological Research;2023-08-12