Value, Conflict, and Order by Edward Hall;

Author:Edward Hall; [Hall, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI000000 Philosophy / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

The Morality System

Williams’s denial of the claim that philosophical reflection can conclusively determine how we should live is further buttressed by his work on reasons. Williams notes that sentences such as “A has reason to x” can be interpreted in two ways. According to the first internal reading, “A has some motive which will be served or furthered by his x-ing,” so that if this turns out not to be so, the sentence is false. According to the external reading, however, “there is no such condition, and the reason-sentence will not be falsified by the absence of appropriate motive” (ML, 101). Williams posits as a basic thesis that it only makes sense to say A has reason to x if A could conclude to x by deliberating from the motivations they already have. In other words, there are only internal reasons.

This has significant implications for philosophical views that hold that all agents have reasons to act in a particular way. Most centrally, Williams rules out labeling people unreasonable for failing to acknowledge a set of requirements that a moralist may claim are binding. While there are still many things we can say about people who lack appropriate items in their subjective motivational set—such as calling a man who really does not care about his wife “ungrateful, inconsiderate, hard, sexist, nasty, selfish, brutal” (MSH, 39)—we cannot say that he has a reason to be nicer. This has direct implications for the phenomenon of blame. As John Skorupski notes, one of the desires of the external reasons theorist is to pull all people into the domain of morality so that morality is universally binding.10 In contrast, Williams, in effect, argues that some people may not have reasons to be moral. His critique of externalist conceptions of practical reason is consequently expressive of his more general belief that ethics must work within the bounds of the contingently variable particulars of moral psychology and practical reason, rather than creating distinctive models of them that further antecedent moral aspirations.11

This has a consequent impact on his sense of the basic aims of moral philosophy. For Williams, the value of ethical reflection must lie in its ability “to sharpen perception, to make one more acutely and honestly aware of what one is saying, thinking and feeling” (M, xv). Ethical reflection, in this sense, is a way in which we might increase our self-understanding. Thus, like Berlin and Hampshire, Williams considers the main task of moral philosophy to be that of making sense of moral phenomena as they occur in lived ethical experience, rather than prescribing how human beings must live from some external vantage point.

Like Berlin and Hampshire, he also stresses that we often experience situations in which we are confronted by multiple sources of value and conflicting favorable courses of action.12 In his paper “Conflicts of Values,” written for Berlin’s Festschrift, Williams asserts that the claim that values are incommensurable can be read as making four important points (ML, 77):

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