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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
In the last chapter of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams brings to a conclusion a sustained attack on the pretensions of moral theory by arguing against the allegedly objective reality of moral obligation. It had been a theme of the book that, while there can be answers to the questions of how one should live and order one's social relationships—answers which, in a given culture, go to make up its ethics—there is no place for a morality or a moral theory which would claim to give externally binding answers to such questions. We will be explaining the notion of an ‘externally binding answer’ later in this paper, but for the moment we can take such an answer to be one that applies to people irrespective of their beliefs or desires. Williams considers Kant to have been the main proponent of the notion of morality in this sense, with the latter's stress on obligation as central to the institution of morality.
1 Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Collins, 1985) (hereinafter referred to as ELP).Google Scholar
2 ELP, 174–175.Google Scholar
3 Williams calls this ‘the obligation-out, obligation-in principle’ (ELP, 181).Google Scholar
4 ELP, 179.Google Scholar
5 As Williams puts it, ‘Morality encourages the idea, only an obligation can beat an obligation’ (ELP, 180).Google Scholar
6 Williams first discussed this matter under the name of ‘the principle of agglomeration’ in ‘Ethical Consistency’, reprinted in his Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1973), 180Google Scholar (henceforth referred to as PS).
7 The matter of regret was discussed in ‘Ethical Consistency’, op. cit., and in ‘Moral Luck’, reprinted in his Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar (hereinafter referred to as ML).
8 A principle which Williams argues (PS, 121) does admit of some exemp tions. See also ‘Moral Luck’ where he argues that what we can or cannot do may be subject to luck and still be the subject of moral requirement.
9 ELP, 182.Google Scholar
10 ELP, 183.Google Scholar
11 ELP, 183.Google Scholar
12 ELP, 185.Google Scholar
13 ELP, 187–188.Google Scholar
14 ELP, 185.Google Scholar
15 ELP, 185.Google Scholar
16 Williams himself seems to accept this when he says that ‘consciousness of a moral principle … is rather of something that has to be acknowledged’ in the course of his ‘defusing’ of subjectivism in his Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1972). 50.Google Scholar
17 ELP, 188.Google Scholar
18 ELP, 189.Google Scholar
19 ELP, 223.Google Scholar
20 ‘Morality and the Emotions’ in PS, 207–229, 222.Google Scholar
21 ‘Persons, Character and Morality’ in ML, 1–19.Google Scholar
22 ‘Practical Necessity’ in ML, 124–131.Google Scholar
23 ML, 130.
24 ‘Internal and External Reasons’ in ML, 101–113.Google Scholar
25 ML, 102, the italics are Williams's own.
26 ML, 104.
27 ML, 105.
28 ML, 110.
29 For an example, see Cohon, Rachel, ‘Are External Reasons Impossible?’, Ethics 96, No. 3 (04 1986), 545–556.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
30 PS, 229.
31 ELP, 182Google Scholar
32 ELP, 188.Google Scholar
33 ‘Moral Luck’ in ML, 20–39.Google Scholar
34 This brings to mind something Mary Midgley has said: ‘Calling something important means that it concerns us deeply, that it means or imports something essential to us, is linked with a central part of our nature’ (Midgley, Mary, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978) 193)Google Scholar. For Midgley, this reference to our nature is to be cashed in terms of our biology so that what is important for us all is the meeting of our various biological needs.
35 This point has been elaborately argued by Ricoeur, Paul in his Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary translated by Kohak, Erazim V. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 88–122.Google Scholar
36 Williams recognizes this problem and the puzzles that it raises for practical rationality without discussing them further in his ‘Additional Note (1972)’ appended to ‘Consistency and Realism’ in PS, 205–206.Google Scholar
37 ‘Conflicts of Values’ in ML, 71–82.Google Scholar
38 Sartre, J.-P., ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, in Kaufmann, Walter (ed.), Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: World Publishing Company, 1965).Google Scholar
39 This example and that of Sartre's student are discussed in Frankfurt, Harry, ‘The Importance of What We Care About’, Synthese 53, No. 2 (1982), 257–272CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Frankfurt also argues that caring (which I see as connected to holding something to be important, and hence, to commitment) is a state which necessarily has a significant temporal duration.