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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 9:49 am
Subject: Bernard Williams: Ethics & the Limits of Philosophy

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=66989

(excerpts):

In his philosophical work, he always rejected the nearly mathematical
positivism predominant when he was a student and the utilitarian
views that said morality lay in seeking the greatest good for the
greatest number.

Williams attacked Utilitarianism on a number of grounds. In one
example, a bandit chief tells you that if you kill one of his
captives, he will allow the other prisoners to go free; but that if
you don't, he will kill all of them. On Utilitarian grounds, the
right thing to do would be to do what causes the fewest deaths and
kill the captive. But Williams wanted us to see that it is not just
what happens (or the consequences) of an action that matter, but who
does it. To perform such an act would damage our integrity as a moral
agent and, incidentally, our psychological identity.

Similarly, Williams pointed out, a very quick way to stop people from
parking on double yellow lines in London would be to threaten to
shoot anyone that did (Islamic morality). If only a couple of people
were shot for this, it could be justified on a simple Utilitarian
model, since it would promote happiness for the majority of Londoners.

His essay, Moral Luck, is a critique of a priori rule-based
moralities such as Kant's. It argues that our sense of what is
justified often depends on how our life, as a whole, turns out and is
not immune to luck. The fact that Gauguin turned out to be great
painter might put the act of his leaving his family in a different
light than if he had been a failure. In Utilitarianism, he argued
that utilitarianism consistently underestimates the importance of
integrity. In his most systematic work on ethics, Ethics and the
Limits of Philosophy, he argued that ethical knowledge was a form of
knowledge, but could not be thought of as analogous with science.
Indeed, assimilating knowledge to a scientific paradigm weakens the
authority of moral concepts. He once accused a philosopher of "having
one thought too many", the point being that philosophy has to be
answerable to the complexities of life rather than the other way
round. He is a penetrating moral psychologist, an essential quality
for a great moral philosopher.

=======

An Excellent Reading List for Moral Theory

http://www.dur.ac.uk/philosophy.department/modules/readlist/readmor.ht
m

Philosophical Dictionary (excellent)

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/m7.htm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?
xml=/news/2003/06/14/db1401.xml

Professor Sir Bernard Williams
(Filed: 14/06/2003)

Professor Sir Bernard Williams, who died on Tuesday aged 73, was one
of the most influential British philosophers of the 20th century,
best known for his work on moral philosophy, questions of personal
identity and the history of philosophy.

Williams's work spanned five decades. He held numerous academic posts
on either side of the Atlantic, including stints at the universities
of London, Cambridge, Berkeley, and Oxford. His books include
comprehensive studies of Descartes and of early Greek ethical thought
as well as analyses of Utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, which
examined these liberal doctrines acutely and critically, but from his
own, essentially liberal, standpoint. He also wrote and presented the
series What is truth? on Channel 4.

His philosophical enquiries had their most visible public outcome
when he chaired the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship set up
by the government. The 13-strong committee, which included lawyers, a
film critic and a former chief constable, a psychologist, a
headmistress and a bishop, was set up during the rise of the
permissive society and took as its guiding principle the "harm
condition".

When the Williams committee reported in 1979, it unanimously found
that "given the amount of explicit sexual material in circulation and
the allegations often made about its effects, it is striking that one
can find case after case of sex crimes and murder without any hint at
all that pornography was present in the background". It concluded
that "the role of pornography in influencing society is not very
important. . . to think anything else is to get the problem of
pornography out of proportion with the many other problems that face
our society today". So long as children were protected, it suggested,
adults should be free to decide for themselves.

The Williams report was, in fact, shelved by Mrs Thatcher's
government, but its in-depth study of the matter and constant
preoccupation with the freedom of the individual ultimately provided
the basis for many of the guidelines in force today. Williams also
served on committees analysing other, similarly contentious, moral
issues, such as gambling (the Royal Commission of 1976-78), drug
abuse (an independent inquiry set up in 1971), social justice (1993-
94) and the role of public schools (1965-70).

Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was born on September 21 1929 and
educated at Chigwell School, Essex, and Balliol College, Oxford. He
did his National Service in Canada with the RAF - where he proved an
adept Spitfire pilot. On his return to England he was appointed a
Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in 1951, and then took a post at
New College, from 1954 until 1959.

Even at the early stages of his career he was recognised as a
philosopher of unusual brilliance and creative power. The elegance of
his prose, coupled with his extraordinary quick-wittedness and
intelligence, led him to rise above the confines of existing debates
to reveal wholly new ways of analysing problems. Williams's new
perspectives were very often followed by a great volume of research
from other scholars.

After a stint as a visiting lecturer in Ghana, Williams moved to
University College London, where he taught from 1959 until 1964 (the
year that his first wife Shirley, now Lady Williams of Crosby, was
elected Labour MP for Hitchin), before becoming Professor of
Philosophy at Bedford College. Williams left in 1967 to become
Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. From 1979 until
1987 he served as Provost of King's.

As a shrewd and perceptive thinker, he could often be dismissive and
even contemptuous of opposing views. But his primary gift to
contemporary philosophy was to free it, again and again, from
assumptions and standard reference points. In his first book on moral
philosophy (Morality, published in 1972) he wrote that: "whereas most
moral philosophy at most times has been empty and boring . . .
contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being
boring, which is by not discussing issues at all."

In this, he was writing against the background of the 1950s and early
1960s, in which it had become the fashion to distinguish between
questions about the nature of moral judgments and questions of more
day-to-day moral substance such as "how should I live?"

After the strictures of Russell and Ayer, it had become received
wisdom for philosophers to accept that they had no special competence
to address the substantial moral issues and should confine themselves
to conceptual analyses. Williams himself was no stranger to such
arguments, having co-edited (with A C Montefiore) British Analytical
Philosophy in 1966. Later, in Descartes: the Project of Pure Enquiry
(1978), he provided a thorough account of the beginnings of modern
Western empiricism and the theory of knowledge.

From his earliest writings on the subject of morals, Williams took a
special interest in the situations of moral conflict. He argued that
philosophers should look at moral life as it is experienced, rather
than see our decisions in relation to some abstract, all-encompassing
theory of right and wrong. He wanted a moral philosophy that was
accountable not only to psychology but also to other branches of
human enquiry, especially history.

In this, he was to become best known for his criticism of
Utilitarianism, the school of thought which holds that actions are
right in so far as they promote the greatest happiness for the
greatest number of people. Williams's contribution to the field was
Utilitarianism, For and Against, one of the most influential
critiques of the school.

Williams attacked Utilitarianism on a number of grounds. In one
example, a bandit chief tells you that if you kill one of his
captives, he will allow the other prisoners to go free; but that if
you don't, he will kill all of them. On Utilitarian grounds, the
right thing to do would be to do what causes the fewest deaths and
kill the captive. But Williams wanted us to see that it is not just
what happens (or the consequences) of an action that matter, but who
does it. To perform such an act would damage our integrity as a moral
agent and, incidentally, our psychological identity.

Similarly, Williams pointed out, a very quick way to stop people from
parking on double yellow lines in London would be to threaten to
shoot anyone that did. If only a couple of people were shot for this,
it could be justified on a simple Utilitarian model, since it would
promote happiness for the majority of Londoners.

Williams also famously attacked the philosopher Kant for his overly
theoretical view of morals. Kant proposed that we can be properly
blamed only for what we do voluntarily and intentionally and that
what we should do (in accordance with the motive of duty) is the same
for all of us and is discoverable by reason. In Moral Luck (1981)
Williams suggested that some of our evaluations on whether or not we
have done right or wrong are contingent.

For example, if you drive carefully and, through no fault of your
own, strike and kill a child, you may well feel what Williams
calls "agent-centred" regret: regret not only that the accident
happened but also for the fact that you did it. Even though it was
plainly bad luck, you may still feel a sense of guilt and the need to
make amends.

In describing this conundrum, Williams looked to the life of the
artist Paul Gauguin, who left his wife and children to go to the
South Seas and paint. The fact that he produced great paintings, for
Williams, made his life justifiable. Had Gauguin not been successful,
he would have been at fault for having left his family. The outcome
ultimately depended on luck, not - as Kant would have suggested -
merely on having the right intentions (or "maxim for action").

Williams also made an important contribution to the philosophical
debate on personal identity. The question of how and where
individuals locate themselves as individuals in time and space is a
complex problem for philosophers. Many have looked to answer it with
reference to our individual memories. Williams made an important
contribution to this debate in his paper Problems of the Self (1973),
in which he showed that memory claims are not enough to establish
personal identity.

He took an imaginary case in which two twin brothers both claim to
remember being the same historical figure. This shows that memory
claims are not sufficient to establish personal identity since the
twins, being different from each other, cannot both be the earlier
person. From this Williams argued that we need to involve bodily
identity for personal identity. His thinking in this area was to have
a great impact on the debate taken up and advanced by other
philosophers such as Derek Parfit.

His other publications included Utilitarianism and Beyond (1982);
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985); and Making Sense of
Humanity (1995). In Shame and Necessity (1993) and his account of
Plato (1998), he examined the Greek view of the moral life. His last
book, Truth and Truthfulness, published last year, analysed the
thorny issues raised by philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida and
Rorty, who have queried whether there can be such a thing as
objective truth.

Over 30 years ago Bernard Williams joked to a colleague, on returning
to the UK, that before he left to take up a post in America he had
been treated like a promising young man and that on his return he was
now treated like an elder statesman. His enormous energy, commanding
presence, insight and contribution to academic and political
philosophy over 50 years did perhaps make that true. After his
return, he was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford from
1990 until 1996, and a Fellow of Corpus Christi.

Williams served as director of English National Opera (formerly the
Sadler's Wells Opera) from 1968 until 1986, and occasionally wrote
about music, often perceptively.

He received numerous awards and many visiting professorships,
lectureships and honorary doctorates. He became a Fellow of the
British Academy in 1971, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Arts in 1993. He was knighted in 1999.

His marriage to Shirley Williams was dissolved in 1974. That year he
married, secondly, Patricia Skinner. She survives him, together with
their two sons, and a daughter from his first marriage.

=====================

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1030712/asp/opinion/story_2136428.asp

Bernard Williams, who pass- ed away on June 10, 2003, was arguably
the greatest post-war British philosopher. While Williams's
commanding intellect, penetrating arguments and thoroughly original
conception of the subject would have secured him a place in any
pantheon of important philosophers, his pre-eminence is itself a
measure of his transformative impact on philosophy. He is known
mostly as a moral philosopher, although his impact on the philosophy
of mind and on cultural criticism was immense.

In some ways, his pre-eminence is surprising. He was always a lucid
writer, but is never easy to read; the intensity and complexity of
his thought always remain something of a challenge. He is not
identified with any system, did not found any new school, and unlike
many of his contemporaries, his legacy is not easy to characterize.
While J.L. Austin is still the stuff of common-room legend, he wrote
little, and his impact has largely been on the philosophy of
language. A.J. Ayer wrote a good deal and very stylishly, but in the
end, his positivist allegiances were too arid to incite much
excitement.

Peter Strawson and Michael Dummett dominated Oxford since the
Sixties, valiantly trying to disprove the opinion that most
contemporary philosophy, at least at Oxford, was a series of extended
commentaries on Wittgenstein. Both had a wide-ranging impact:
Strawson in metaphysics and Dummett in the philosophy of language and
philosophical logic, but neither gave philosophy many resources to
address the greatest challenges it was to face as a discipline.

Bernard Williams's great impact stems from the fact that he was
squarely in the middle of this challenge. This challenge can best be
described as the assault of historicism on philosophy. This is the
view that concepts are historically embedded, and one cannot say much
meaningfully about them unless one locates them in a particular
conceptual history. One cannot therefore answer questions such
as "What is truth?" and "What is meaning?" in the abstract, as
philosophers are often prone to do. In ethics, Williams argued that
our ethical ideas are "a complex deposit of many different traditions
and social forces, and they have themselves been shaped by self-
conscious representations of that history." What history will reveal
is always the contingency of any concept, and any philosophy that
does not engage with this contingency, and comforts itself by
claiming the authority of "necessary truths" is liable to self-
delusion.

In making this argument, Williams was indebted above all to
Nietzsche. And his greatest achievement lies in the fact that he was
the sole British philosopher to take Nietzsche's exposure of
philosophy seriously and confront it. His last book, Truth and
Truthfulness, does magnificently for the concept of truth what
Nietzsche had done for morality: show its contingent origins and
functions. But unlike the flippant Nietzscheanism of a Derrida or a
Rorty, which ultimately ends in a kind of "anything goes" position,
Williams's genius was to argue that revealing the contingent nature
of these concepts strengthened their hold upon us rather than
weakening it. His book was a powerful assault on those who propounded
the fashionable belief that truth has no value, as it was an attack
on those who thought that the traditional faith in truth guarantees
itself.

Williams's second great achievement was to take moral philosophy
seriously. Almost having been banished from philosophy departments,
moral philosophy has come back with a vengeance, and its
rehabilitation has something to do with both the revival of
Kantianism under John Rawls in America, and the critique of that
revival provided by Williams. Williams was a life-long critic of
system-building and arid conceptual analysis. He began his book,
Morality, by chastising his colleagues for refusing to write anything
of importance or making it impossible to take them seriously. No one
ever levelled this charge against Williams. Indeed, his
distinctiveness stems from the fact that he philosophizes with an
enormous sense of life, raising difficult questions, resisting cheap
answers and using the most vivid examples.

His essay, Moral Luck, is a critique of a priori rule-based
moralities such as Kant's. It argues that our sense of what is
justified often depends on how our life, as a whole, turns out and is
not immune to luck. The fact that Gauguin turned out to be great
painter might put the act of his leaving his family in a different
light than if he had been a failure. In Utilitarianism, he argued
that utilitarianism consistently underestimates the importance of
integrity. In his most systematic work on ethics, Ethics and the
Limits of Philosophy, he argued that ethical knowledge was a form of
knowledge, but could not be thought of as analogous with science.
Indeed, assimilating knowledge to a scientific paradigm weakens the
authority of moral concepts. He once accused a philosopher of "having
one thought too many", the point being that philosophy has to be
answerable to the complexities of life rather than the other way
round. He is a penetrating moral psychologist, an essential quality
for a great moral philosopher.

He wrote extensively on the nature of reasoning, on personal
identity, on the character of consciousness, power, rights, equality,
bioethics, and on assorted topics such as Descartes, Greek ethics,
music and even a classic essay on the tedium of immortality. My
personal favourite is Shame and Necessity, an account of Greek ethics
which reveals much about our own.

Watching him over innumerable talks and conferences, I can say this
with confidence: with the possible exception of Alasdair McIntyre, I
don't think I have encountered anyone who was as impossible to win an
argument against as Williams used to be. He was always penetratingly
clear and would illuminate, like a search-light, the core issue,
while his interlocutors were still groping in the dark. He was never
pretentious, always probing and often witty and sardonic. He believed
that the best way of respecting your colleagues and students was to
expose their folly, and he had the extraordinary capacity to say
something original about a subject that you thought had been talked
to death.

Williams was a public intellectual in the best sense of the term.
Born in 1929, he served in the royal air force, was appointed to a
fellowship at All Souls at the age of 22, then moved, first to
London, then to Cambridge, where he was Knightsbridge Professor of
Philosophy. He went on to become provost of King's College,
Cambridge, before moving to Berkeley. He returned to Oxford as
White's Professor of Moral Philosophy. The Williams committee report
on obscenity and censorship was his handiwork, and is a tour de force
of clear reasoning on a difficult public policy issue. He was
previously married to the labour politician, Shirley Williams, and is
now survived by his wife, Patricia Skinner, and three children; he
was knighted in 1999.

He once said that there was no point being a philosopher unless you
were very good. In other disciplines, someone with modest gifts could
at least produce something others could build on. But what would a
less than excellent philosopher do? This concern reflected his
absolutely fierce intellectual standards, and he unfailingly lived up
to them. Like Nietzsche, his great hero, he "philosophized with a
hammer", puncturing great pretension and relentlessly exposing
illusions. And, like Nietzsche, he never let philosophy rest in the
aridities of conceptual analysis, the false simplicities of neat
systems and most important, never let it run away from the complexity
of life. For those who reduce philosophy simply to technical prowess,
there will always be other heroes. For those who think of philosophy
as an aid to the examined life, in the best sense of the term,
Williams will always remain an inspiration.

==========================================

http://www.iht.com/articles/99635.html

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt The New York Times Monday, June 16, 2003

Sir Bernard Williams, 73, the lightning-witted Oxford professor who
is credited with reviving the field of moral philosophy and was
considered by some to be the greatest British philosopher of his era,
died Tuesday in Oxford, where he lived at All Souls College.
.
No cause of death was announced, but he said in 1999 that he had
cancer.
.

Steering clear of monolithic system building, Williams viewed moral
codes and writings as inseparable from history and culture, and
questioned what he called the "peculiar institution" of morality,
pronouncing it a particular development of the ethical system worked
out by modern Western philosophers.
.

Indeed, in "Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy" (1985), considered
his best book, he argued that ethical concepts were so embedded in
history that they were often incapable of being shared by subsequent
cultures, although they could be understood to some extent through
study, and he held that the simple goals of truth were worth pursuing.
.

With this in mind, he argued in a later book, "Shame and Necessity"
(1993), a study of ancient Greece, that Hellenic ethics allowed for a
wider scope of praise and blame than did Christian-based morality,
concluding that the sense of shame can be more in tune with our
intuitions than moral guilt, and permits more latitude for living a
whole life well.
.

In his philosophical work, he always rejected the nearly mathematical
positivism predominant when he was a student and the utilitarian
views that said morality lay in seeking the greatest good for the
greatest number.

=================================
Truth and Truthfulness:
An Essay in Genealogy
Bernard Williams

What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our
lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is
better suited to answer these questions than Bernard Williams.
Writing with his characteristic combination of passion and elegant
simplicity, he explores the value of truth and finds it to be both
less and more than we might imagine.

Modern culture exhibits two attitudes toward truth: suspicion of
being deceived (no one wants to be fooled) and skepticism that
objective truth exists at all (no one wants to be naive). This
tension between a demand for truthfulness and the doubt that there is
any truth to be found is not an abstract paradox. It has political
consequences and signals a danger that our intellectual activities,
particularly in the humanities, may tear themselves to pieces.

Williams's approach, in the tradition of Nietzsche's genealogy,
blends philosophy, history, and a fictional account of how the human
concern with truth might have arisen. Without denying that we should
worry about the contingency of much that we take for granted, he
defends truth as an intellectual objective and a cultural value. He
identifies two basic virtues of truth, Accuracy and Sincerity, the
first of which aims at finding out the truth and the second at
telling it. He describes different psychological and social forms
that these virtues have taken and asks what ideas can make best sense
of them today.

Truth and Truthfulness presents a powerful challenge to the
fashionable belief that truth has no value, but equally to the
traditional faith that its value guarantees itself. Bernard Williams
shows us that when we lose a sense of the value of truth, we lose a
lot both politically and personally, and may well lose everything.

Bernard Williams books include Making Sense of Humanity, Morality,
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Shame and Necessity, and Moral
Luck. At the time of his death in 2003, he was Fellow of All Souls
College, University of Oxford.

Reviews:

"A model of clarity and discernment."--Library Journal

"Many colleagues consider Williams the most influential voice in
contemporary moral philosophy. . . . [This book] may well have a
noteworthy impact. It is Williams' reflection on the moral cost of
the intellectual vogue for dispensing with the concept of
truth. . . . The patient reader will enjoy the rare experience of
watching philosophical and historical scaffolding installed, or
revealed, beneath everyday expectations and practices of honesty,
trust, doubt, deceit and wishful thinking."--Kenneth Baker, The San
Francisco Chronicle

"Bernard Williams enjoys such preeminence as a moral philosopher that
it is easy to overlook his interests and achievements in other
philosophical areas, including metaphysics, epistemology and history.
These other interests are splendidly on display in Truth and
Truthfulness, although there is still a sense in which the book is
centrally a contribution to moral philosophy. It shows all Williams's
characteristic virtues. He is always a pleasure to read, and as it
has often done before, his deft, sparkling intelligence newly
illuminates an old philosophical subject, scattering light into many
surprising corners as it does so."--Simon Blackburn, Times Literary
Supplement

"[A] brilliant and disturbing book. . . . This is a fascinating and
riveting work, and it shows, in a way which no other recent work of
philosophy has done, that the subject can be both important and
comprehensible‹and that is a very considerable achievement indeed."--
Alasdair Palmer, Sunday Telegraph

"Its virtuoso blend of analytic philosophy, classical scholarship,
historical consciousness, and uninhibited curiosity marks Truth and
Truthfulness unmistakably as a work by Bernard Williams. . . . He
manages to be frequently entertaining and never a show off."--Thomas
Nagel, The New Republic

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/6079.html

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the
self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity
has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness.
Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture
of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the
Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to
a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like
the ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this
is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences
from them, such as our rejection of slavery.

The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to
writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets
and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study
is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when
its world is so far from ours.

Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not
merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. Shame and
Necessity gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and
helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the
modern world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bernard Williams (1929-2003) was White's Professor of Moral
Philosophy at Oxford University, and Monroe Deutsch Professor of
Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His previous
books include Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (1979), Moral
Luck (1981), and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985).

http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/Smith/students/reading.html

http://www.lon.ac.uk/academic/philosophy/MA_Ethics_Seminar_Mill_Readin
gs.html

http://www.logical-operator.com/ma01.html

http://books.cambridge.org/0521478685.htm

Making Sense of Humanity

This new volume of philosophical papers by Bernard Williams is
divided into three sections: the first Action, Freedom,
Responsibility, the second Philosophy, Evolution and the Human
Sciences; in which appears the essay which gives the collection its
title; and the third Ethics, which contains essays closely related to
his 1983 book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Like the two
earlier volumes of Williams's papers published by Cambridge
University Press, Problems of the Self and Moral Luck, this volume
will be welcomed by all readers with a serious interest in
philosophy. It is published alongside a volume of essays on
Williams's work, World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical
Philosophy of Bernard Williams, edited by J. E. J. Altham and Ross
Harrison, which provides a reappraisal of his work by other
distinguished thinkers in the field.

Preface;

Part I. Action, freedom, r;
1. How free does the will need to be? 2. Voluntary acts and
responsible agents; 3. Internal reasons and the obscurity of blame;
4. Moral incapacity; 5. Acts and omissions, doing and not doing; 6.
Nietzsche's minimalist moral psychology;

Part II. Philosophy, evolution and the human sciences; 7. Making
sense of humanity; 8. Evolutionary theory and epistemology; 9.
Evolution, ethics and the representation problem; 10. Formal
structures and social reality; 11. Formal and substantial
individualism; 12. Saint-Just's illusion;

Part III. Ethics; 13. The point of view of the universe; 14. Ethics
and the fabric of the world; 15. What does intuitionism imply; 16.
Professional morality and its dispositions; 17. Who needs ethical
knowledge?; 18. What slopes are slippery? 19. Resenting one's own
existence; 20. Must a concern for the environment be centred on human
beings? 21. Moral luck: a postscript.

http://www.umt.edu/phil/faculty/Borgmann/422B.html

Contemporary Ethics
and the Pursuit of Excellence

I. Goals
The first goal of the course is to sketch the standard positions of
contemporary ethics and their arguments for neutrality as regards the
pursuit of excellence and the good life. Next we need to understand
Bernard Williams's diagnosis of the narrow scope of modern ethics. We
will then consider John Dewey's proposal that anticipates and meets
many of Williams's criticisms and yet concludes that articulate
standards of moral excellence are inappropriate and even detrimental.
Finally we will evaluate George Sher's critique of neutrality and his
version of moral excellence.

As companion readings we will use Nelson Aldrich's account of a
traditional American model of excellence and David Brooks's
description of a contemporary American version of excellence.

II. Readings
Aldrich, Old Money.
Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct
Sher, Beyond Neutrality
Brooks, Bobos in Paradise

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mgreen/HumanRtsF02/reading/fRel
ativism.html

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mgreen/HumanRtsF02/reading/fRel
ativism.html

www.geocities.com/freethought_bc/ free_thought_reading_list.htm

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