Accueil
"At the time of his death in 2003, Bernard Williams was one of the most influential philosophers in Anglo-American philosophy. His contribution to philosophy was very wide-ranging, from metaphysics and epistemology to moral, social, and political philosophy. In the history of philosophy, he made contributions to ancient philosophy, to scholarship on Descartes and to a wide range of other historical subjects." (p.1)
"Williams’ early training both in classics and in the philosophical methods of Ryle and Austin inclined him to the piecemeal treatment of philosophical problems; he was not a systematic philosopher. However, over the course of his career, Williams did come to detect a broad consistency and mutual support between many of his distinctive theses in ethics. He remarked that “it is a reasonable demand that what one believes in one area of philosophy should make sense in terms of what one believes else where. One’s philosophical beliefs, or approaches, or arguments should hang together (like conspirators perhaps), but this demand falls a long way short of the unity promised by a philosophical system.”." (p.1)
"Williams brought to prominence in contemporary meta-ethics an idea suggested by Gilbert Ryle and developed by Clifford Geertz, namely, that some ethical concepts can be classified as“thick”ethical concepts as opposed to others that are by contrast “thin.” The basic idea is that some ethical concepts, when used in judgments, seem to give one more detail about their circumstances of application and also, when used, to supply defeasible reasons for action. To illustrate the contrast, the idea is that when used in a judgment by a competent user, the thick ethical concept of blasphemy gives you a more detailed grasp of its circumstances of application than a contrasting thin ethical concept like wrong ; furthermore, its users seem to supply both themselves and others with reasons for action in the course of classifying an action as blasphemous (if they do so correctly).
Given his particular interests in the philosophy of social explanation, Williams also was concerned to understand how the explanation of the use of thick concepts placed special demands on such explanations. His central idea, namely, that repertoires of thick ethical concepts represent “different ways of finding one’s way about a social world” was directly connected both to the obvious facts of the plurality of such sets of concepts in contemporary social reality and to the question of the standpoint from which one can explain thick ethical concepts. Deeply informed about social science and a noted contributor to the philosophy of social explanation, Williams’ “basic realism” afforded him a means of articulating how the mere possibility of a social scientific explanation of the ethical raises a specific challenge to one means of characterizing its objectivity. That is the argument, put forward by philosophers influenced by the later Wittgenstein, that the mere existence of“thick”ethical concepts places certain demands on how a practice using those concepts needs to be explained. They argue that such concepts demand an “internal” explanation from the perspective of a concept user who can share with those in that practice a sense of the evaluative point and purpose of those concepts.
Williams believed that this claim was simply ambiguous: “sharing” covers both participation and, crucially, enough sympathetic identification to make a social scientific perspective on such practices possible without requiring that the explainer share the practice in the sense of being completely identified with it. That seemed to him to cause problems for one neo-Wittgensteinian strategy in recent meta-ethics, namely, the objectivism of David Wiggins and John McDowell. They have argued that the use of thick concepts frustrates any attempt to isolate an empirical-cum-classificatory component within our ethical judgments from an evaluative component, where the latter represents a psychological projection of values on to a nonevaluative reality. That approach seemed to Williams merely to beg the question in assuming that there was a stable core of shared thick ethical concepts or, in what comes to the same thing, a stable core of shared agreements in judgment. Only that presupposition would sustain the corollary that to understand the shared use of a thick concept was to be come identified with those engaged in the practice." (pp.3-4)
"I suggest that Williams’ critique of objectivism makes assumptions about the structure of ethical thinking that unfairly prejudice the case for a cognitive and objectivist understanding of a central core of moral claims. Williams makes the assumption that if we are talking of belief in the case of ethical thinking, then the relevant structure of justification is, in his presentation, tacitly presumed to be foundationalist. Thecognitivist/objectivist is represented as seeing a group of thick concept users, who make claims using those concepts that are world-involving and yet also involve defeasible reasons for action, as standing entirely outside a repertoire of thick ethical concepts, comparing alternative sets and asking how to go on from this “hyper-reflective” standpoint.
A denial that this is a realistic situation for a group of such users to find themselves in is, in my view, best supported by a realistic description of an epistemology for moral cognitivism that views our ethical knowledge as devolved into particular problem solving contexts. These contexts are structured by which claims to knowledge are held fixed in that context and which are open to doubt, prompted by some specific question that has to be addressed. This kind of description, derived from the inferential contextualism sketchily presented by Wittgenstein in On Certainty, seems to me the best route to avoiding Williams’ pessimistic conclusions about the possibility of moral knowledge. I briefly set out that argument before evaluating the indirect vindication escape route explored by Moore and suggesting that it will not give the cognitivist what he or she wants. Williams’ “need to be sceptical” focused in particular on the need to avoid false consciousness and other familiar kinds of distortion to which ethical outlooks are subject. I conclude with the observation that a moral contextualism placed at the service of cognitivism can accommodate that need. (No sensible form of cognitivism is going to emerge from Williams’ critique entirely unscathed.)." (pp.5-6)
"Kant’s worldview simply did not acknowledge the kind of radical pluralism that Williams takes to be central to the ethical." (p.10)
"There is at the most abstract level a conflict between Williams’ commitment to a nonreductively naturalist style of explanation of the ethical, and Kant’s nonnaturalism, that comes out most clearly in their contrasting treatments of freedom and voluntariness." (p.12)
"Stocker basically agrees with Williams that, as Stocker puts it, “shame is like moral luck in showing that the range of the ethical and the evaluative goes well beyond guilt”; however, there are various respects in which Stocker both builds on Williams’ account while also offering several correctives to it. In particular, guilt experienced without shame can only be a mistaken or pathological form of moral emotion, involving various forms of dissociation or failure of integration; Stocker claims this is usually true of shame without guilt. There are, however, forms of shame experienced without guilt that are nonpathological, particularly those associated with the conjunction of the beautiful with the good in the Greek ideal of kalokagathia, that Stocker discusses in detail. He adds an important discussion of identificatory shame, based on those values with which a person is identified, and shame without responsibility. Stocker further argues that the criteria that Williams and other theorists have offered in order to demarcate shame and guilt cannot be understood as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions ; he suggests ways of conceptualizing the differences between shame and guilt, alongside an acknowledgment that in most actual contexts the two moral emotions are strongly interrelated. Stocker also argues against what he takes to be the inflated claim that shame involves a diminution of one’s whole being, as Williams at one point claims. Overall, however, in a penetrating discussion influenced by psychoanalytic and psychological as well as philosophical discussion of moral emotions, Stocker endorses Williams’ claim that “shame can understand guilt, but guilt cannot understand itself.”. "(p.14)
-Alan Thomas, "Introduction" in Alan Thomas (ed.), Bernard Williams, Cambridge University Press, 2007, 221 pages.
