-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Garrett Cullity, Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 64, Issue 256, July 2014, Pages 520–523, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqu024
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
The subtitle of this book is slightly misleading. It is not devoted to examining ‘themes from the ethics of Bernard Williams’ in the sense of the guiding concerns and preoccupations around which his ethical thought was structured. Not directly, anyway. In a book discussing that, one would expect to find essays on larger questions: on how ethical philosophy can properly accommodate ethical experience; on how ethical understanding requires appreciating the cultural specificity and contingency of the ethical conceptions we possess; on how to combine a recognition of that fact with serious ethical commitment; on the kind of objectivity we can claim for ethical judgements, and the unavailability of an ‘Archimedean point’ from which to validate them; on the confusions contained in the conception of the ‘will’ as a self-directed motivator of moral action, and the doubt this casts on our practices of blame and punishment; on the nature of the philosophical enterprise, and its relation to cultural explanation. Instead of that, what we have here is a collection of eleven essays, mainly derived from a 2009 conference in Leeds, discussing particular topics on which Williams had thought-provoking things to say in pursuing those larger concerns. There are essays on moral luck, partiality, internal reasons and ‘ought’, and essays defending consequentialism, intuitionism and ethical theory against his attacks.
