Written over the last two decades, John McDowell's papers, as a whole, deal with issues of philosophy. Specifically, separate groups of essays look at the ethical writings of Aristotle and Plato; moral questions regarding the Greek tradition; interpretations of Wittgenstein's work; and, finally, questions about personal identity and the character of first-person thought and speech.

Ruling Passions is about human nature. It is an invitation to see human nature a certain way. It defends this way of looking at ourselves against competitors, including rational choice theory, modern Kantianism, various applications of evolutionary psychology, views that enchant our natures, and those that disenchant them in the direction of relativism or nihilism. It is a story centred upon a view of human ethical nature, which it places amongst other facets of human nature, as just one of the (...) elements which give us the manifold objects of our concerns and cares. (shrink)

Williams’s arguments against the morality system are given canonical form in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, chapter 10, where he undertakes to describe this particular form of ethical thinking and explain “why we would be better off without it”.

A dissertation in the tradition of logical positivism includes a discussion of the functions and methods of philosophy and a critique of ethics and theology.

In this book, one of the world's preeminent philosophers takes issue with an idea that has found an all-too-prominent place in popular culture and philosophical ...

Hare has written a clear, brief, and readable introduction to ethics which looks at all the fundamental problems of the subject.

Part I Describing and Prescribing He to whom thou was sent for ease, being by name Legality, is the son of the Bond-woman . . . how canst thou expect by ...

Choices can be wise or foolish, and feelings can be apt or off the mark. So we judge, and it would be good to know what content these normative judgements carry. Gibbard offers an answer, and elaborates it. His theory explores what is at issue in narrowly moral questions, and in questions of rational thought and conduct in general.

By the time of his death in 2003, Bernard Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of his generation. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is not only widely acknowledged to be his most important book, but also hailed a contemporary classic of moral philosophy. Presenting a sustained critique of moral theory from Kant onwards, Williams reorients ethical theory towards ‘truth, truthfulness and the meaning of an individual life’. He explores and reflects upon the most difficult problems in contemporary philosophy (...) and identifies new ideas about central issues such as relativism, objectivity and the possibility of ethical knowledge. This edition also includes a new commentary on the text by A.W.Moore and a foreword by Jonathan Lear. (shrink)

Expressivist analyses of evaluative discourse characterize unembedded moral claims as functioning primarily to express noncognitive attitudes. The most thorny problem for this project has been explaining the logical relations between such evaluative judgements and other judgements expressed using evaluative terms in unasserted contexts, such as when moral judgements are embedded in conditionals. One strategy for solving the problem derives logical relations among moral judgements from relations of "consistency" and "inconsistency" which hold between the attitudes they express. This approach has been (...) accused of conflating inconsistency with mere pragmatic incoherence. In reaction such criticisms several recent theorists have attempted to use alternative resources. The most sophisticated noncognitivists have often propounded theories with secondary descriptive components in addition to their primary expressive meanings. Recent independent suggestions by Frank Jackson and Stephen Barker attempt to solve the embedding problem by utilizing such descriptive components of moral utterances. Unfortunately, this strategy fails to handle a certain sort of example using just the descriptive resources available to noncognitivists. For it must rule valid arguments invalid in virtue of equivocation in the secondary descriptive meanings. The present paper explains the problem and suggests a moral for expressivist theories. (shrink)

Presents a good mapping of Williams’s argument in the larger context, relative to other thinkers, especially McDowell. With a short conclusion that there is something transcendent about ethical value that ecumenical projects reconciling the naturalist and the realist tend to miss.

What is the Moral Problem? NORMATIVE ETHICS VS. META-ETHICS It is a common fact of everyday life that we appraise each others' behaviour and attitudes from ...

1. Presumably the point of, say, inculcating a moral outlook lies in a concern with how people live. It may seem that the very idea of a moral outlook makes room for, and requires, the existence of moral theory, conceived as a discipline which seeks to formulate acceptable principles of conduct. It is then natural to think of ethics as a branch of philosophy related to moral theory, so conceived, rather as the philosophy of science is related to science. On (...) this view, the primary topic of ethics is the concept of right conduct, and the nature and justification of principles of behaviour. If there is a place for an interest in the concept of virtue, it is a secondary place. Virtue is a disposition to behave rightly; the nature of virtue is explained, as it were, from the outside in. (shrink)

John Mackie's stimulating book is a complete and clear treatise on moral theory. His writings on normative ethics-the moral principles he recommends-offer a fresh approach on a much neglected subject, and the work as a whole is undoubtedly a major contribution to modern philosophy.The author deals first with the status of ethics, arguing that there are not objective values, that morality cannot be discovered but must be made. He examines next the content of ethics, seeing morality as a functional device, (...) basically the same at all times but changing significantly in response to changes in the human condition. He sketches a practical moral system, criticizing but also borrowing from both utilitarian and absolutist views. Thirdly, the frontiers of ethics, areas of contact with psychology, metaphysics, theology, law and politcs, are explored.Throughout, his aim is to discuss a wide range of questions that are both philosophical and practical, working within a distinctive version of subjectivism-an "error" theory of the apparent objectivity of values. John Mackie has drawn on the contributions of such classic thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Kant and Sidgwick, and on more recent discussions, to produce a thought-provoking account that will inspire both the general reader and the student of philosophy. (shrink)

In a series of influential papers, John McDowell has argued that the rule‐following considerations explored in Wittgenstein’s later work provide support for a particularist form of moral objectivity. The article distinguishes three such arguments in McDowell’s writings, labelled the Anthropocentricism Argument, the Shapelessness Argument, and the Anti‐Humean Argument, respectively, and the author disputes the effectiveness of each of them. As far as these metaethical debates are concerned, the article concludes that the rule‐following considerations leave everything in their place.

Many authors have argued that emotions serve an epistemic role in our moral practice. Some argue that this epistemic connection is so strong that creatures who do not share our affective nature will be unable to grasp our moral concepts. I argue that even if this sort of incommensurability does result from the role of affect in morality, incommensurability does not in itself entail relativism. In any case, there is no reason to suppose that one must share our emotions and (...) concerns to be able to apply our moral concept successfully. Finally, I briefly investigate whether the moral realist can seek aid and comfort from Davidsonian arguments to the effect that incommensurability in ethics is in principle impossible, and decide that these arguments are not successful. I conclude that the epistemic role our emotions play in moral discourse does not relativize morality. (shrink)

This book examines some of the deepest questions in philosophy: What is involved in judging a belief, action, or feeling to be rational?

By the time of his death in 2003, Bernard Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of his generation. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is not only widely acknowledged to be his most important book, but also hailed a contemporary classic of moral philosophy. Presenting a sustained critique of moral theory from Kant onwards, Williams reorients ethical theory towards ‘truth, truthfulness and the meaning of an individual life’. He explores and reflects upon the most difficult problems in contemporary philosophy (...) and identifies new ideas about central issues such as relativism, objectivity and the possibility of ethical knowledge. (shrink)

This introduction provides a highly readable critical overview of the main arguments and themes in twentieth-century and contemporary metaethics. It traces the development of contemporary debates in metaethics from their beginnings in the work of G. E. Moore up to the most recent arguments between naturalism and non-naturalism, cognitivism and non-cognitivism. A highly readable critical overview of the main arguments and themes in twentieth century and contemporary metaethics. Asks: Are there moral facts? Is there such a thing as moral truth? (...) Is moral knowledge possible? Traces the development of contemporary debates in metaethics from their beginnings in the work of G. E. Moore up to the most recent debates between naturalism and non-naturalism, cognitivism and noncognitivism. Provides for the first time a critical survey of famous figures in twentieth century metaethics such as Moore, Ayer and Mackie together with in-depth discussions of contemporary philosophers such as Blackburn, Gibbard, Wright, Harman, Railton, Sturgeon, McDowell and Wiggins. (shrink)

This book is divided into three parts: in Part I, R. M. Hare offers a justification for the use of philosophy of language in the treatment of moral questions, together with an overview of his moral philosophy of ‘universal prescriptivism’. The second part, and the core of the book, consists of five chapters originally presented as a lecture series under the title ‘A Taxonomy of Ethical Theories’. Hare identifies descriptivism and non‐descriptivism as the two main positions in modern moral philosophy. (...) The former he divides into Naturalism and Intuitionism, and the latter into Emotivism and Rationalism. Hare argues that all forms of descriptivism tend to lead to Relativism because the truth conditions of moral statements are culturally variant. Of the positions discussed, only Hare's own position, a form of Rationalism, which he calls Universal Prescriptivism, meets all of the requirements that an adequate ethical theory should meet. Part III consists of Hare's previously published essay ‘Could Kant have been a Utilitarian?’ (Utilitas 5, 1993). Here, Hare puts forward the controversial thesis that Kant's moral philosophy is, in its basic principles, compatible with utilitarianism. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to answer the charge that extreme moral particularism is unable to explain the possibility of moral concepts and our ability to acquire them. This charge is based on the claim that we acquire moral concepts from experience of instances, and that the sorts of similarities that there must be between the instances are ones that only a generalist can countenance. I argue that this inference is unsound.