PHILOSOPHICAL BOOKS

VOl. XXVII No. 4 October 1986 ISSN 0031 -8051 $1.00

MAKING ENDS MEET

This book ( AND THE LIMITSOF ,Fontana/Collins, 1985. vii + 230 pp. €3.95 paper) encapsulates many years of thought about the fundamental questions of ethics, and no philosopher will be surprised to find it formidably intelligent and wide-ranging. Its upshot is heralded in the title: a pessimism over what can be achieved by such thinking. If ethical theory aspires to give us “a theoretical account of what ethical thought and practice are, which account either implies a general test for the correctness of basic ethical beliefs and principles or else implies that there cannot be such a test” (p. 72), then in Williams’s view it will be disappointed. Theory cannot stretch so far, and the claims of philosophy to help it are illusory. (Although in spite of the title, it is not clear why this should be thought of as a limitation of philosophy, since in any event “ethical thought has no chance of being everything it seems” (p. 135) and one might reasonably thank philosophy for showing this, and much else, if it is true.) Many of Williams’s characteristic intellectual stances are well displayed. There is the dislike of over-simplification - the vice besetting such global theories within ethics as utilitarianism or Kantianism, as well as theories of what ethics is, such as prescriptivism or contractualism. There is a powerful plea for the replacement of ‘’ by ethics: this is replacing a view of life which finds obligation all-important with one which allows ethical considerations just one voice in the way we should live. There is mistrust of “administrative rationality” and of the planing down of the real contours of desire, interests, needs in favour of Benthamite calculation. There is an excellent attack on Kantianism, and a sensitive defence of the fundamental asymmetries between ethical thought and scientific thought. The work is woven around the impossibility of justifying “the ethical life” to each person (by appealing to his actual interests) or for each person (by appealing to his actual interests) or for each person (by appealing to some deeper, but not automatically suspect conception of his real needs). There are interesting remarks on the way about relativism, about the relation between ethics and science, and ethics and objectivity, and then the final pessimistic conclusion: “ethical thought has no chance of being everything it seems” (the same words occur on p. 199). It is this theme that I shall select for detailed discussion, but before

193 doing so I shall venture some rather more general remarks. Williams’s quite proper dislike of simplification joins with his style to make the work remorselessly full. For he is not someone to linger over his arguments. His writing illustrates a distinct of the obvious, which he finds boring, and the passage from point to point is nothing if not swift. The book is dense with thoughts - it will be hard for a critic to find an important consideration or angle which is not at some time mentioned - but the passage among them can be slightly breathtaking. There is pleasure in watching aristocrats point-to-pointing, and Williams’s flair is truly enviable. But some readers will, I think, find the position of the fences a little hard to understand, and one can start to wonder whether the resolute avoidance of simplicities, or refusal to linger at one point of the course or another, is in fact appropriate. The position of many of the fences seems to me best understood historically, in terms of the Aristotelian emphases of post-war Oxford opposition to Hare. This tradition, including Miss Anscombe, Philippa Foot, then David Wiggins and John McDowell can be seen in many places, and not only ones where these writers are mentioned. Positively, it comes in the emphasis on Aristotle, and on the importance of finding a fundamentally egoistic justification for ethics, and the anxieties which we face if we cannot. It is visible in the priority given to the ‘thick’ moral concepts, in the dislike of consequentialism and of an impersonal ‘all in’ conception of a good state of affairs, and in the associated mistrust of the all-in ‘ought’ of obligation. It is visible too in the fear of a split between an internal, participant’s perspective from which ethics is one thing, and an external theorist’s perspective, from which it is another. Negatively, this tradition is responsible for the neglect of serious projectivism: anti- realism is represented only by prescriptivism, which as Williams describes, mislocates what we require of both the descriptive and the conative elements of moral commitment. I think the same tradition lies behind the neglect of any serious non-egoistic, social, theory of morality. Both possibilities are witnessed in Hume, but in this essentially Greats culture he is merely allowed to serve up the suspect is-ought distinction (pp. 122-3), complimented on his Greek ornaments (p. W),and otherwise not mentioned. The Hume who placed our dispositions to within a fully naturalistic but genuinely social picture of the needs of mankind (so that worries about whether it is always in our interest individually to be virtuous simply lapse, as in the Treatise, 111, iii, 1) is not invited. With this door closed, of course, the conclusion that ethics cannot be what it seems (or indeed, anything worth having) indeed looms. Let me explain this last point. In spite of , or of Aristotle as Williams for the most part takes him, it is pretty silly to embark on showing that it is in each person’s interests, on each occasion, to behave well. Nor is it often in their ‘real’ interests, where these are corrected for various misapprehensions. So if you conceive the problem of grounding ethics as one of arguing an egoist into respecting other things, including the exercise of virtue, you will fail. But trying to win on that ground misrepresents the place at which ethical education should take place. It’s

194 already too late: the task of ethical education must be to ensure that the Callicles character, the character that cheats in the prisoners’ dilemma, is not formed, but that decent respect for sufficient of the is. Once This is done, of course, the pleasures of behaving well and discomforts of behaving badly work to generate a better harmony between interest and virtue. And if we ask why society should want this education, the answer is much clearer - if we turn to the co-ordination problems societies face, everything looks different, and the needs and necessities of mankind force us into respect for promises, , , and the rest. This is the story Hume tells. Modern work on convention, prisoners’ dilemmas, and so on all confirms it. Of course the story does not force us to unique solutions to all practical problems, but it is not clear that any such thing is needed (Socrates’ question was how one should live, and an answer to that need not supply an answer to what one should do on each actual and possible occasion.) Now Williams is aware of this kind of story: he presents it as a criticism of Greek thought that it is “incurably egoistic”, and mentions (p. 48) a social version of the attempt to find a grounding for ethics. But he does so only to shy away (pp. 49ff. are back to egoism). His ostensible problem is the absence of a teleology selecting one amongst many possible educational, social, and personal possibilities as that to which mankind is best fitted. This is the absence of a determinate, authoritative conception of human well being, which is lost since Aristotle. (Nostalgia for it is something which the book shares with Alastair MacIntyre’s Afrer Virtue.) But it is quite unclear, at least to me, how that loss marks such an obstacle to the Humean direction. We could at least get the core straight - the qualities of character which must obtain and must be respected and transmitted if the needs of men are to be met in a social co-operation - and then talk about options consistent with that core. Many of these will not even seem to be ‘ethical’ options, but rather questions of style and choice, and a plurality here is not relevant. The core story needs not so much a determinate concept of wcll-being as a determinate concept of ill- being, which social cultivation of the virtues helps us away from. But this we have. Why is Williams so pessimistic about this apparently satisfying way of placing ethics (a way which is probably close to that of the real Aristotle, at least in not conceiving of the problem as one of arguing with the scoundrel, but in placing virtue in a way that at least the virtuous can understand)? In one place he dismisses it as “keeping up the spirits of those within the system” (p. 40) by comparison with which some version of the egoistic approach is much more interesting. But the phrase is doubly misleading: the story to be told is not exhortatory, but theoretical, and the image of those within the systmiI as somehow beleaguered, under threat, is quite unwarranted. It shows that the egoistic cast is still present. But there is a deeper reitson for his mistrust of the approach. Suppose I am broadly honest, and, perhaps going against my own grain, start to wonder why I am and why I should be. The social story tells me why I should have been educated to feel the pressure towards

195 honesty, and how things would go worse for people in general if we were not. Williams stresses the need for a “harmony” meaning that when the agent thus reflects, “from the outside” on his own ethical dispositions, he finds nothing that “conflicts with the view of things he takes from the inside” (p. 52). The implication is that lacking an Aristotelian teleology, this harmony cannot be had. Now in passing, I am highly suspicious of this inside/outside dichotomy, and so is Williams in other passages. Let us at least separate two things it might mean. Going ‘outside’ might be taking up a theoretical, naturalistic stance from which the problem is to give a naturalistic explanation of our moral natures. Or, it might be taking up a slightly wider deliberative position, in which the question is not ‘why am I (or why are people) altruistic, disposed to tit-for-tat propensities (and so on)?’but rather why should I be? This is a deliberative question posed whilst standing back from one element of a morality, and not an ‘outside’ perspective which is or needs to be quite free of all values. Standing back from a particular virtue, in this case honesty, is quite consistent with standing on others, as the image of Neurath‘s boat, which Williams himself recommends, reminds us. In either case, what kind of conflict threatens? If we consider the explanatory stance first, does the naturalistic story, placing the virtue of honesty in the solution of our common needs, threaten to undermine it? I can imagine a psychology in which this would happen, but only if it contains other flaws. I certainly cannot see that it ought to happen. If the ‘standing back‘ takes us to a point where we jump out of the moral boat entirely, then it may have us thinking that nothing, including honesty, ‘really matters’, but although there are other things to say about the state of which finds everything meaningless, at least the first is that it is not the state of mind which you need in order to think about how you should live. And the second is that it is not a state of mind engendered by purely explanatory interests. Of course whilst you are explaining, you are not at the same time moralizing. You could explain a virtue in the same spirit as one might explain, say, the rise of puritanism, whilst quite refraining from commenting on the value of the psychology you are attempting to place. But this does not mean that you have temporarily lost any sense of the meaning of things. If on the other hand ‘standing back’ means reflecting on the virtue of honesty in a mode which allows one to invoke other values, then, providing honesty stands up, no conflict threatens either, Some alleged virtues (patriotism, frugality) may not stand up so well, but then we have a moral problem. It is not exacerbated by the absence of an ‘Aristotelian’ teleology. This kind of reflection can be done by standing on a broadly consequential or utilitarian plank of the boat, but it does not have to be. Neither of these standings back require Aristotelian assumptions to “fit together the ngent’s perspective and the outside view”, and I suspect it is their conflation that explains some of Williams’s anxiety. This conflation means trying to keep enough value ‘present’ in the world which serves the explanatory naturalistic enterprise to serve the deliberative purposes, and that of course will not happen without some kind of ethical ‘realism’.

196 For Williams, trouble arises because the standing back sufficient to appreciate the social story takes us to an impersonal point of view. It is the needs of mankind which fuel the explanations. And he real tension, instability, in a psychology which both keeps the immediate, personal, ‘phenomenological’ commitment to the virtue, and can take up the stood-back perspective explaining this commitment on impersonal grounds. If the standing back is explanatory, however, this tension seems easily dissipated. Consider for instance an umpire in a game. Suppose he reads a social, functional, explanation of games playing amongst human beings (defusing aggressions, providing enjoyments, simulating wars. . . ). Should this discovery rot his capacities by attacking his ability to signal a player out in a situation where the rules require it, either without reflecting on whether it would defuse more aggression or provide more enjoyment to leave him in, or even in the belief that it would do more of these things to leave him in? I cannot see that it should: our roles take on a life of their own, and any incipient discomfort can be quelled by the thought (given the functional story and a commitment to the human needs being met) that it is a good thing that they do. If the explanation properly engendered this disquiet, then those who know why the game is played will have to ensure that the players do not, and this is a ‘government house’ attitude which Williams rightly condemns. Another way in which Williams signals his discomfort with this approach is through the problem of moral truth, to which I now turn. For although I have mentioned the influence of an Aristotelian tradition Williams dissents from its contemporary attempt to preserve a notion of moral truth. I do so too: the attempts seem to me either to place undue weight on such things as the rule following considerations, or to draw ultimately unfortunate analogies with other perspectival (such as those arrived at in judging secondary properties), or to place trust in other analogies with perception. Its main defence is to insist on not separating the type of explanation given within a deliberative context (‘you must do that because it is reasonable’) with an explanation which would suggest a genuine realism, or parallel with our of science. This tradition, represented most notahly by McDowell, ends up saying the right things: that many ethical judgements are true, and known to be so, and that their truth is irreducible to other terms, for example. It is just that it leaves the question of our right to them completely obscure. Fortunately, there is a better way of earning it, albeit one which Williams does not engage. What Williams does think is this: “even if ethical thought had a foundation in determinate conceptions of well-being, the consequences of that could lie only in justifying a disposition to accept certain ethical statements, rather than in showing, directly, the truth of those statements: but this is not how it would naturally appear to those who accepted them” (p. 199; the same contrast is in play earlier, on p. 154). But what is the contrast between justifying the disposition to accept (say) that honesty is a virtue, and a ‘direct showing’ of its truth? What kind of revelation are we missing? The justification talked of will be obtained from the

197 deliberative standing back which places honesty in connexion with other things - well-being, co-operation, avoidance of mistrust. What more do we require - the proof that bowls over the egoist who is concerned with none of those things? But that is respecting the wrong problem, again. A direct showing to someone who, say, can see things in space and hear sounds, but nothing else? Of course not, and neither does it appear to those who think honesty a virtue that its truth consists in some such concrete presence. The move made by McDowell, and, if I understand him, Wiggins, is to say that this is, in effect, enough to license us to think of ourselves as directly responsive to the virtue of honesty, which impresses itself upon us via our sensitivity to (perception of) the moral aspects of things. The sensitivity is not causal but is simply moral sensitivity, and the air of bootstrapping is no more dangerous than in the case of science. (See, for example, McDowell in Mind, 1986.)This is not finally satisfying, because it insists on collapsing the explanatory stance into a version of the deliberative one. In other words, when our aim is to place moralizing as a natural activity, we need to do more than help ourselves to the things we would say to remind ourselves of why (say) it is true that honesty is a virtue. We will find these things within morality, and we can end up talking of ourselves as sensitive to the virtue, appreciating the it gives for action, and we can express our commitment in any forcible way we wish (‘there is nothing else to think’). The neo-Wittgensteinian move is to insist that this settles the only theoretical questions that can properly be asked. I share with Williams (and Wittgenstein) the view that this is not so. The explanatory demand to see how ethics can be an area of commitment in which we can talk without blushing of truth, knowledge, and error, is not met by the insistences generated by good moralizing even when gilded with the honorific, truth-tracking, properties of words like ‘perception’ and ‘sensitivity’. The more illuminating account which I would urge admits that at bottom, in the philosophy of mind, we do best to think of ethical commitments as indicative of attitude, desire, or conative pressure, and not as essentially representative of anything. The contrast with science comes in just this: it is not so much that we must see science as taking us to an ‘absolute conception’ of things, but that there is no getting behind science to give any other explanation of the emergence of our scientific beliefs, than ones starting with the facts to which we respond. In ethics this is not so. To earn the concept of truth whilst realizing that states of moral commitment are non-representational then needs a different move: that of showing why a justified attitude deserves propositional expression - which includes expressing commitment in terms of truth. The true position shares with Williams (and Wittgenstein) the belief that we cannot rest content with the refusal to hear the explanatory demand as it is intended. But it mistrusts trying moral truth at a ‘scientific’ bar at which it is unfitted to plead. Thus there is an external question of what moralizing is, and what it is for, and which mental attitudes it involves, and why, given all this, propositional forms and talk of truth

198 are legitimate. Admitting this is coming out of the neo-Wittgensteinian closet. But when that task is done, it delivers nothing less than we originally wanted, and that which the phenomenology of ethics makes us expect: a genuine account of why insistence that it is a fact, true, not to be disputed, that honesty is a virtue can be had. Williams sees no space for such a theory, or at any rate gives no space to it, and this leaves him no option but to think that ethics conceafs its real, shaky, credentials, in the same way that John Mackie thought. This is disappointing. Looking again for an historical explanation, it is telling that the only anti-realist theory which Williams sees room for is that of R. M. Hare. Now Hare made two proposals, each of which has been forcibly challenged in ways Williams accepts. The first was that any ‘thick moral term - ‘cowardly’, ‘treacherous’, ‘brutal’, or ‘generous’, ‘kind, ‘temperate’ - has a descriptive as well as a prescriptive meaning (a world-guided part and an action-guiding part); the second is that the action guiding part can be identified in terms of prescriptions, so that sincere assent becomes in part acceptance of a self addressed prescription. Williams accepts the objections to both parts: there is no ‘descriptive meaning’ and there is no reason to construe the action-guiding part always on the model of prescription, or in some versions, of choice. But anti-realism (badly called non-cognitivism) in ethics can be flexible on both scores. There is no reason to suppose that the world-based features are always elevated to the status of a conventionally fixed, semantic, rules - indeed, as the case of ‘funny’ shows, there is no reason for it to be generally known by the subjects which features of the world do the guiding. And the conative or active part can be construed in many ways. As many ways, in fact, as we can discriminate attitudes, or varieties of pressure towards varieties of feeling and action. Bernard Shaw thought that when an Englishman wanted a thing he had first to go through a mysterious process whereby he became convinced that he had a right to it, and there is no reason why a Humean should close the space for that process. It can include many changes, including closing off of acceptance of criticism, opening of avenues of aggression to others for non-cooperation, willingness to operate on emotional levels inappropriate for mere wants, and so on. Moralizing a desire involves a syndrome of changes (and not all of them are always lovely). Thick concepts became centre stage because it was thought that if they cannot be ‘split’ into a world-guided extension, and an action-guiding force, they afford some bulwark against the is-ought distinction. Unless that distinction is drawn in a purely semantic way, isolating components of meaning, it is hard to see why. The main obstacle to finding a neutral extension for a term like ‘courageous’ or ‘treacherous’ is, of course, that the evaluative force feeds back to complicate or cloud identification of the extension, particularly at the borders; one doesn’t call it treachery unless one disapproves of it, but then there is limitless scope to worry whether one should in a particular case, in the light of this or that. There is simply no argument from this complexity to refusal to separate the world-guided bits - features to which, in principle, a different attitude

199 might be held - from the action-guiding consequences. Williams does not really sympathize with the refusal either, but he remains sufficiently impressed by the failure of prescriptivist ‘splitting’ not to consider what else can be said by the Humean. Thick concepts dominate a marvellously abstract discussion (pp. 140- 147), after which it turns out that we should allow a sufficiently unreflective society to be expressing knowledge when they deploy a thick term in accordance with their criteria, although if they began to reflect this knowledge would be destroyed (not consequentially, as when thinking how to ride a bicycle interferes with doing it, but somehow intrinsically). Williams is too intelligent to go in for a full scale, MacIntyreian nostalg’e de la boue, but here it seemed he was bending over to sympathize with it. For a better way of describing it (conforming to usual standards governing attributions of knowledge) would be that they know. . . if no improved perspective exists which rightly undermines the commitment; reflection does not necessarily import such a perspective (they could know that someone was treacherous, for example), but moral improvement does. If we find their practices regrettable, we should not say that they knew that. . . where a thick term goes into the content, for we cannot say that without endorsing the world-practice connexion, which we would not want to do. A group could not know that someone was what we might interpret as ‘ripe for sacrifice’ or ‘due for clitoridectomy’, however unreflective they are and however carefully they deploy their criteria. Of course we may have trouble identifying not only the world-guided features which they apparently respond to, but also the ethical stance which these appear to engender (p. 146), but the selection of the concepts as ‘thick‘ in the first place shows that this is not a final obstacle to acceptance or rejection. In other words, whether or not there are further fine-grained attitudes in play, it must be visible that they are taking one thing as justifying another (making it all risht, or impermissible or compulsory, in an unpretentious sense). And if the features do not make the behaviour all right, then they knew nothing thick at all. Williams in effect dismisses this as the prescriptivist’s answer (p. 145) but it is an answer that is also available on many different bases from that. Naturally an allowance of knowledge can be made after confrontation with an alien practice: learning how to see someone as, for instance, pure in heart, might be real learning: people who have achieved it would know that someone was pure and people who had not would not. It is a question of endorsement, and it is not being alien that earns it, but being better. Being worse blocks it. This approach refuses involvement with the problem of ‘relativism’, which troubles Williams. In his view, if taking up an alien way of life is simply not an option, the confrontation between them and us becomes “notional”, and this blocks at least much ethical judgement of them. Again, this rings a little off-key to me (a way of life which practises clitoridectomy is not, I , an option for me or us, but I am quite willing to enter into judgement on it). A well equipped moral boat will contain instructions for what to do when faced with boats

200 of slightly different construction: sometimes friendship; sometimes reconstruction of ours in conformity to theirs; sometimes indifference; sometimes war. Respect for the egocentric cast of thought again leads Williams to give prominence to the other view: ethical judgement of the other is to be suspended, because if a judgement on someone cannot appeal to wants or interests which its subject actually has, then it is somehow out of place. This view has of course been advocated by Gilbert Harman, and is visible in the idea that if morality is ‘grounded in dispositions’, then it must stop with ‘hypothetical impefatives’, or judgements which appeal to peoples’ actual wants. Again, I dissent. If their stock of wants leaves out any foothold from which they can appreciate just criticism, that simply registers as another appalling fact about them: it would be better if they were not like that, if they improved, and that is what they ought to do. Of course, getting them to appreciate this may be impossible, or cost time, subtlety, and sympathy: barging in with moral hostility is often unlikely to do much good. But this is not because they are outside the sphere of the ethical. Can I say all this in full confidence whilst rerembering that all the time it is (merely)my dispositions, attitudes, and mental cast that I am voicing? Yes. The problem of moral truth seems so pressing to people confronting my quasi-realistic dismissal of relativism because they take up a scientific, sideways perspective, from which there exist two moralities, conflicting, and each claiming the other to be wrong - and where is the truth in either? But this is the wrong perspective. This is the one point that can properly be taken from the later Wittgenstein. To find the truth in an area where the facts can seem fugitive - mathematics, psychology, morals - you do not put on physicalist spectacles, but learn to place the practice properly, so that its commitments become comfortable, even in a physical world. The sideways, scientific view would only be right if moral truth were scientific truth, which it is not. To find the truth that honesty is a virtue you must do what is required, which is to walk around your boat once more, ensuring that it hangs together. And if you are in the business of rejecting a different morality, making sure that the other boat does deserve your reaction. But the upshot may be that it does. Williams voices a characteristically modern faltering of confidence in finding this difficult, and perhaps that faltering is, given the modern world, to be admired. But it is not more than that: it is not an attitude made compulsory by the metaphysics of ethics. Thus far I have concentrated on the treatment of truth and related matters. I would like to close by saying something about the sensitive, and at times moving, display of the difficulty Williams finds with ethical thought itself. It seems to me that this difficulty is really caused, not by loss of a golden age of teleology, but by the increased opportunities that the modern world offers for behaving better. Most of us know that we could give more blood, give money to charities, adopt orphans; the week-end supplements put pictures of luxurious tat with pictures of sufferings that I could do something about in dreadful juxtaposition. Most of us feel uncomfortable, and a few of us do a little, and very few

201 blaze out morally. None of us honestly retain the consolations of religion or teleology - that it is the fault of the poor, or that they will get their reward later (it is because the golden ages of the past needed liberal doses of these deceptions that I talked above of nostalgie de la boue). The attack on utilitarianism and the attack on ‘morality’ that Williams gives serve in the first instance to make Sunday more comfortable: I have no utilitarian duty to concern myself with the of mankind, or to become a ‘servant of the world; even if I did have such an obligation other things can properly be more important to me than my duty or obligations: I have a life to lead (p. 186) and my lawnmower or desire to possess the latest in luggage may take deliberative priority. Do I not only get what I want, but release from discomfort, or space to think well of myself in addition? Bernard Shaw’s jibe sticks with a vengeance! This is not Williams’s expressed view of the matter. He knows we can criticize people for having trivial desires, or finding to be important things which are not so really; and he substitutes for utilitarianism and obligation the propriety of Goncern for the wants of those immediately related to us and a programme of considering “what for us, in the modern world, should properly count as immediacy, and what place we have in our lives for such concerns when they are not obligations” (p. 186). So far as I can see, with the tools Williams leaves us, the defensible answer to this last question might be ‘precious little’, and I think if I heard his words from the position of the starving and exploited, unwanted and ignored, I would doubt if a moral improvement over utilitarianism and its uncomfortable, demanding, obligations had taken place. We all know that unto him that hath shall be given, but is it really better that he should be given a spotless conscience as well? I do not think for a minute that Williams intends to make life easier for those already comfortable. My point is simply that the destruction of ethical truth, of utilitarian goals, and of obligation, leaves too little positive to set against that ease. Williams’s intention is to confine the notion of obligation to those areas where we need to rely on each other (p. 187); other ethical ideas are to be available when it comes, for instance, to concern for mankind. The question will be how those other ideas gain sufficient impact. Might it be enough that we admire those who can muster concern for others, and feel some pressure towards being like them? This will fall short of feeling that we have any obligation so to be, most notably because it need not generate any feeling of guilt if we are not. I think Williams would see this as a gain. But guilt is at least a useful co-ordinating emotion (functionally, it centres on willingness to accept the hostility of others in the face of some lapse); its loss is going to be intertwined with a diminution of care. From my perspective the modern world has not loosened our grasp on the ethical: it has simply made it burdensome to retain it. There are moral truths, and amongst them is the truth that we ought to concern ourselves more for those whose miseries we can alleviate; worse than that they may have the right that we should so concern ourselves, meaning that if we do not do so, we should feel no defence against their resentment

202 (so the obligation is not just one of charity). The world would be worse if people ceased to feel that obligation, meaning, again, that they feel the pressure towards concern, unease at their own indifference, admiration for those who do more, and even guilt at the smallness of their own natures. It is uncomfortable that these things are so, but they are. PEMBROKE COLLEGE, OXFORD SIMON BLACKBURN

REPLY TO SIMON BLACKBURN

I am grateful to Simon Blackburn for the attention he has paid to my book, particularly since he evidently found it a tiring business to extract the thought from the style. He is not the only critic to have mentioned this difficulty, and I must accept that the writing is excessively compressed. I do not think that I have, exactly, “a fear of the obvious” (that unterrifying thing), but I do have a dislike of labouring it. One motive for not doing so is mere politeness; if the pursuit of politeness issues in the inconsiderateness of requiring the reader to work unnecessarily, then all the more there has been a failure, and I very much regret it. There are some more questions here, however, of the way in which a philosophical writer conceives his or her relations to the reader. In his own recent book,’ Blackburn quotes with approval Quintilian’s injunction to write “so that you cannot be misunderstood’. Up to a point, this is good advice, but taken too literally it represents fantasy; indeed, it is not determinate advice at all. By whom must one guard against being misunderstood? Who is Quintilian’s reader? Anyone who has marked an examination paper will know that anything can be misunderstood by someone. Quintilian’s reader, then, will have to satisfy some minimum conditions of attention, intelligence, seriousness, shared perception, and knowledge. But that reader will also have thoughts of his own, ways of understanding which will make something out of the writing different from anything the writer thought of putting into it. As it used to say on packets of cake mix, he will add his own egg. The arrogance of compression - and I concede that there is such a thing, as there is of irony - lies in its aspect of wilful concealment. But compression can also acknowledge a necessary incompleteness, an acceptance that the reader’s thought cannot simply be dominated, and that his work in making something of this writing is also that of making something for himself. Blackburn has helpfully offered an historical location for the set of problems in moral philosophy that particularly concern me, but I do not think that he has brought out what, for me, is an important line to them. The main reason for which I have emphasized ‘thick‘ ethical concepts and, at the same time, problems variously associated with relativism, is a concern for what may be called the ‘ethnographic stance’, the situation of an observer who has an imaginative understanding of a society’s ethical concepts and can understand its life from the inside, but does not share

203 those concepts. This concern does not come primarily from philosophy itself, but the fact that the ethnographic stance is possible seems to me very important for moral philosc?L,. That stance combines two things. First, it understands from the inside s conceptual system in which ethical concepts are integrally related to modes of explanation and description. Second, it is conscious that there are alternatives to any such system, that there is a great deal of ethical variety. Moral philosophy has not been particularly good at holding on to both these things at once. Wittgensteinian writers say a lot about the first, the matter of ethical concepts as part of a way of life. But they are extremely weak on the second matter, to the extent that they can equate the ‘form of life’ that is represented by some particular set of ethical conceptions with the ‘form of life’ outside which we no longer understand other beings.2 Prescriptivism, on the other hand, (at least in its earlier forms) and its anti-realist relatives were well adjusted to describing ethical diversity, but very bad at giving any account of the substance of ethical life. The need to do justice to the ethnographic stance, and so to take on both these things, was my principal reason for discussing the alternatives that I chose to discuss. It may be that so far as the semantics of ethical terms are concerned I have, under the influence of these motives, neglected possibilities that I should have considered. I am certainly conscious that I have not adequately explored the relations between thick and thin concepts, and questions of what their respective application conditions are. In particular, I have barely touched on a central question, namely how the use of thin concepts by a reflective society is related to their use of such thick concepts as they may retain or cultivate (the possibility that they should have some thick concepts is one that I explicitly allow). To that extent my treatment is incomplete and also obscure. However, I am not convinced that there is some other existing semantic option that would have helped to take things further; or that it lies, in par@cular, in “serious projectivism”. Projectivism, of any sort, requires a world onto which the projections are projected; Blackburn’s own version of such a view is no exception. As he has put it elsewhere,3 “Values are the children of our sentiments in the sense that the full explanation of what we do when we moralize cites only the natural properties of things and natural reactions to them”. This leaves open the question whether members of the linguistic community that employs a given value expression could in principle learn and apply another term that was explicitly guided simply by the ‘natural properties’ in question, and in his present remarks he seems to leave that question open himself. If they could always in principle use such a term, then the situation is much as it was with prescriptivism, so far as these matters are concerned (of course, the position does not have to share the other features of prescriptivism, which Blackburn rightly distinguishes). If, on the other hand, members of this community could not necessarily pick up the non-projective analogue of their value term, then we seem to arrive at the situation I have described in the book with regard to thick concepts, and we are still left with the question of how an

204 observer who rejects the concept is to describe its correct application by the locals. Do they, for instance, make true statements? I am not sure that, by the time we have reached this point, we are very much helped in answering this question by the model of projection itself, or by Blackburn’s approach of ‘quasi-realism’,which is the project of explaining how those who use a projective concept can properly come to treat its application as though it were not projective. The distinction between thick and thin concepts, and the account of their application, are philosophical matters. I also associate with the distinction, however, an historical claim, that it is a characteristic of modern society to rely on thick concepts less than traditional societies did. This historical claim is made also by Alasdair MacIntyre, as by others who have an interest in sociology and cultural anthropology. Some who have used this idea have indeed expressed a nostalgia for traditional society, but it is a misreading on Blackburn’s part to suggest that I belong with them. I hoped that I had made this clear.4 Like Charles Taylor among those who use such notions, and unlike MacIntyre, I do not see the Enlightenment as an historical disaster we should try to overcome. We should try to understand better the situation it has left us in. One demand of that situation is, I believe, that we must conduct ourselves without kinds of ethical knowledge that traditional societies provided. That does not mean that we want to go back to them. There is one other matter on which I seem, to my regret, not to have succeeded in making my view clear. This is the question, admittedly complex, of egoism and deliberative reflection. At no point do I suggest that there is any presumption in favour of egoism with respect to the content of practical rationality, nor do I suppose that morality will be rational just in case it serves some antecedently defined notion of well- being. I explicitly reject those ideas at many places, but in particular in the chapter on Aristotle, where the question is the different one, whether a full and proper understanding of individual well-being must involve the ethical life: as some people prefer to put it, whether the good life has to be the moral life.5 What is true is that the Aristotelian reflections are, in a sense, formally egoistic, because they offer an answer to a first personal question: that which I called Socrates’ question, ‘How should I live?’. Such a formal egoism is inevitable if the enquiry starts from a deliberative question, since a deliberative question is in its most basic form a question about actions to be done by the person who asks it.a If the search is for apractical justification of the ethical life, from the ground up, the answer will necessarily give to the agent who asked for them. That is why an account of the ethical life which is an explanation and only an explanation - one that represents morality as a socially evolved answer to a coordination problem, for instance - cannot, whatever its other merits or interest, answer this question; for the agent can always ask, ‘And why does that give me a reason?’. Of course, many agents who consider these things already accept ethical reasons. Not only do I admit that, but it is central to my account.

205 “At this level”, as I put it (p. 48), “the question will simply be whether society should be ethically reproduced, and to that question, merely from within society, we have an answer.” But I claim that we need to go beyond that level. One reason is that we are concerned not only with the question of some ethical life rather than none, but with the claims of different kinds of ethical life. Moreover, moral philosophy has been concerned with the justification of the ethical life from theground up: and I discuss this concern in the deliberative mode, starting from Socrates’ question, because I think that it is the most interesting and also historically the most significant way to consider it. I conclude that we cannot so justify it, and that we must inevitably treat ethical life as a going concern, but that is the conclusion and not the starting point. The supposed preoccupation with egoism is in fact simply a concern with that question of deliberative or practical justification. One might indeed discuss social explanations of morality instead, but that would be to talk about something else, something which - in my view - comes later rather than earlier. In this connection, Blackburn rightly remarks that Hume is absent from the discussion. In many respects, Hume’s work in moral philosophy is manifestly important, and indeed it matters a great deal to some of my concerns: in his treatment of free-will, for instance, and in his resolute rejection of the assumptions of what I call ‘morality’, in particular of the idea that there is some deep difference between virtues and other forms of admirable human quality. But for the particular interests that are central to this book, I find him less helpful, both for the reason that Blackburn mentions, that he is principally concerned with explanation, and also because I do not believe many of his explanations. If you are impressed by the problems raised by moral diversity, you do not look first to a theorist who says: “In what sense we can talk either of a rtght or a wrong taste in morals, eloquence, or beauty, shall be consider’d afterwards. In the mean time, it may be observ’d, that there is such a uniformity in the general sentiments of mankind, as to render such questions of but small importance” (Treatise, 1115.8). Relatedly, while Hume is excellent on personal vices and failings, he lacks adequate notions with which to discuss cultural or ideological enemies of benevolence and justice: as in his writings on religion, the favourite categories of fanaticism and barbarism are simply inadequate to what we now need to understand. In these respects, my problem with Hume is not (as Blackburn seems quaintly to suggest at one point) that he fails to be an ancient thinker, but that he is not a modern one. One thing that worries modern readers of Hume on these matters is that he seems too comfortable, and while this impression partly lies in a misunderstanding of his irony, it is not altogether a mistake. Blackburn certainly does not want us to be morally comfortable, and at the end of his remarks he makes a point which is extremely well taken, that if a moral outlook makes the well-off uncomfortably guilty, this is scarcely an objection to it. So he does not think that we should be (so to speak) coxpfortablefrom our moral ideas. But he does think, and explicitly says,

206 that as a result of our theoretical enquiries the conduct of moral practice, as of other practices, should become comfortable; so we should be comfortable with our moral ideas. This distinction corresponds, I take it, to one that he often makes between deliberative and explanatoy reflection. He suggests that the notion of reflection that I use does not clearly separate these things. It does not, and I do not want it to. There is, no doubt, explanatory reflection that is not at all deliberative: but there is no thorough-going and adequate deliberative reflection that does not involve itself in explanation. Good deliberative reflection is guided by a good under- standing of how things are, and very general deliberative reflection - on Socrates’ question, for instance - will be good only if it is responsive to an understanding at a very general level of who we are and what we are doing. Blackburn’s distinction between explanatory and deliberative reflection runs the risk of obscuring this fact. It may be significant that the word he chooses for very general ethical reflection is moralizing, hardly a happy term in several respects, but in particular one that does not help to remind us that those reflections should be guided by explanatory understanding. It may be that Blackburn thinks that no distinctively philosophical understanding of what ethical life and ethical thinking are will make any difference to them. It is hard to see why this should be so, and all the more so if, like Blackburn and Hume, you are inclined to see philosophical understanding of our practices as rather like a form of natural explanation. Surely some natural explanations - some psycho- logical explanations, for instance - might affect our ethical conceptions and thc degree to which we feel comfortable with them? I doubt whether there is any ‘purely philosophical’ understanding of these matters, unaffected by , psychology and the social sciences. If there were such a thing, but it were somehow guaranteed not to upset our ethical ideas and our deliberative practices - presumably by its being a criterion of correctness in that subject that it left everything where it was - I do not see why we should have any reason to be interested in it.

NOTES

1. Spreading fhe Word (Oxford, 1984),p. v. 2. See in particular Susan Hiirley, “Objectivity and Disagreement”, in Ted Honderich, ed., Morali!y and Objediui!y (London, 1985). 3. Spreading Ihe Word, p. 219, note 21. For the aims of qiiasi-realism, nientioncd below, see in particular pp. 171 and 180. 4. At page 198, for instance, about the Enlightenment; and at page 168, where I emphasize that to say that traditional societies had more ethical knowledge than we do is not necessarily to say that they were better off. 5. It is just a mistake to say that when Mrs Foot was concerned with the justification of niorality to pre-moral self-interest, she was concerned with an Aristotelian question. She was concerned with a sophistic question, represented for instance by Thrasymachus in the Republic. (I believe that she has now gone on to the Aristotelian question.)

207 6. In the hook, and clsewhere. I have said that practical questions are “necessarily first personal“. Donald Davidson has now persuaded me this is not the right way to put it: but the reasons for this do not affect the point of the present argument.

KING’S COILEGE. CAMBRIDGE BERNARD WILLIAMS

Tractatus de universalibus By JOHN WYCLIF (ed. Ivan J. Mueller) Clarendon Press, 1985. xciii + 403 pp. €35.00

On Universals By JOHN WYCLIF (tr. Anthony Kenny) Clarendon Press, 1985. 1 + 185 pp. €25.00

The six-hundredth anniversary of Wyclifs death in 1384 has been accompanied by a flurry of Wyclif scholarship. Mueller’s edition of Wyclif s Tractatus de universalibus with Kenny’s translation is perhaps the most important of several major publications. Other major recent ones include a general biography: Louis Brewer Hall, The Perilous Vision of John Wyclif (Chicago, 1983): a general introduction to Wyclif and his thought: Anthony Kenny, Wyclif( Oxford, 1985): two collections of papers investigating Wyclifs philosophical and theological views and his influence on later speculation, ecclesiastical reform, and the development of the English language: Wyclifin His Times, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, forthcoming), and the proceedings of the Queen’s College Conference on Fourteenth-century Thought from Ockham to Wyclif, forthcoming; and an important bibliographical work: Willie1 R. Thomson, The Latin Writings ofJohn Wyclif(Toront0, 1983). The edition under review makes available for the first time an important treatise (the fifth treatise of Book I of Wyclifs Summa de ente) which appears to be the cornerstone of Wyclifs mature philosophical views. The process (still in the very early stages) of evaluating Wyclif as a philosopher, determining the relation between his philosophical and theological views, and placing him in the context of fourteenth-century thought generally will be greatly aided by Mueller’s work. Volume one of the two-volume set contains the text of De universalibus (DU) together with Mueller’s introduction and an index fontium. The introduction contains a useful discussion of DU and its relation to Wyclifs other works, an important argument for revising the accepted dating of many of Wyclifs works (Mueller dates DU to 1373-74, later than is usually supposed), and a complete description of the twenty-three manuscripts of DU. The index fontium is fairly complete - except for some fourteenth-century figures such as Bradwardine and Burley and Wyclif s references to his own works (Mueller promises to identify these latter references in a work now in preparation) - but references are often to pre-critical editions even where critical editions are available. Volume two contains Paul Spade’s helpful essay introducing some of the views Wyclif presents in DU, and Kenny’s English translation and

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