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Bernard Williams (bernard + william)
Selected AbstractsMoral Incapacity and Huckleberry FinnRATIO, Issue 1 2001Craig Taylor Bernard Williams distinguishes moral incapacities , incapacities that are themselves an expression of the moral life , from mere psychological ones in terms of deliberation. Against Williams I claim there are examples of such moral incapacity where no possible deliberation is involved , that an agent's incapacity may be a primitive feature or fact about their life. However Michael Clark argues that my claim here leaves the distinction between moral and psychological incapacity unexplained, and that an adequate understanding of the kind of examples I suggest must involve at least some implicit reference to deliberation. In this paper I attempt to meet Clark's objection and further clarify my account of primitive moral incapacities by considering an example from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. What this example shows, I argue, is how our characterization of an agent's response as a moral incapacity turns not on the idea of deliberation but on the way certain primitive incapacities for action are connected to a larger pattern of response in an agent's life, a pattern of response that itself helps to constitute our conception of that agent's character and the moral life more generally. [source] Williams, Truth-Aimedness and the Voluntariness of JudgementRATIO, Issue 1 2001Mark Thomas Walker I contend that while at least one of the arguments advanced by Bernard Williams in his paper ,Deciding To Believe' does establish that beliefs, or more precisely, judgements cannot be decided upon ,at will', the notion of truth-aimedness presupposed by that argument also, ironically, provides the key to understanding why judgements are necessarily voluntary. [source] I,The Relativism of Blame and Williams's Relativism of DistanceARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY SUPPLEMENTARY VOLUME, Issue 1 2010Miranda Fricker Bernard Williams is a sceptic about the objectivity of moral value, embracing instead a qualified moral relativism,the ,relativism of distance'. His attitude to blame too is in part sceptical (he thought it often involved a certain ,fantasy'). I will argue that the relativism of distance is unconvincing, even incoherent; but also that it is detachable from the rest of Williams's moral philosophy. I will then go on to propose an entirely localized thesis I call the relativism of blame, which says that when an agent's moral shortcomings by our lights are a matter of their living according to the moral thinking of their day, judgements of blame are out of order. Finally, I will propose a form of moral judgement we may sometimes quite properly direct towards historically distant agents when blame is inappropriate,moral-epistemic disappointment. Together these two proposals may help release us from the grip of the idea that moral appraisal always involves the potential applicability of blame, and so from a key source of the relativist idea that moral appraisal is inappropriate over distance. [source] Autonomy: The Emperor's New ClothesARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY SUPPLEMENTARY VOLUME, Issue 1 2003Onora O'Neill Simon Blackburn can be seen as challenging those committed to sui generis moral facts to explain the supervenience of the moral on the descriptive. We (like perhaps Derek Parfit) hold that normative facts in general are sui generis. We also hold that the normative supervenes on the descriptive, and we here endeavour to answer the generalization of Blackburn's challenge. In the course of pursuing this answer, we suggest that Frank Jackson's descriptivism rests on a conception of properties inappropriate to discussions of normativity, and we see reason to reject descriptivism generally. We also discuss the views of David Brink, Jonathan Dancy and Bernard Williams in this area. [source] | ||||||||||