References
- I am grateful for comments on this paper to Guy Axtell, Roger Crisp, Sylvia Berryman, Duncan Pritchard and to the editors of, and an anonymous referee for, this journal. Special thanks, as ever, to Kathryn Brown.
- Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, (London: Faber, 1985). (Cited below as ELP.)
- Ethical cognitivism is the composite view that a core set of ethical utterances (specific evaluations) are truth-apt, in their primary dimension of assessment express cognitive states and, when successful, can be knowledge and frequently are, in fact, known. See John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, Monist, vol. 62, no. 3, 1979, pp. 331–350; David Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Alan Thomas, Value and Context: the Nature of Moral and Political Knowledge, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).
- Williams, ELP, p. 147.
- Williams, ELP, p. 170. For an important critique of this idea see J.E.J. Altham, ‘Reflection and Confidence’ in J.E.J. Altham and T.R. Harrison (eds) World, Mind and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 156–169.
- Williams, ELP, p. 154; A.W. Moore, ‘Realism and the Absolute Conception’ in Alan Thomas, (ed.) Bernard Williams, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) pp. 24–46.
- These are, in my view, more aptly characterized as the virtues involved in our use of personal propositional knowledge. This personal knowledge contrasts with such common impersonal forms exemplified by questions like as ‘what is the current state of knowledge of the history of the Roman Empire?’.
- Williams explicitly describes his account is an extension of Edward Craig's project of providing a reflective synthesis for the concept of knowledge extended to the virtues of truthfulness. Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 21, (cited below as T&T); Edward Craig, Knowledge and the State of Nature: An Essay in Conceptual Synthesis, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
- Williams capitalizes these words, and I will follow him in this, as a recognition that ‘These are terms of art’, T&T, p. 44.
- Williams, ELP, pp. 217–218, fn. 7.
- Activities to which there corresponds a range of speech acts but not, in my view, any distinctive notion of the content that is embedded in the force of such speech acts.
- I adopt the convention of referring to concepts in bold text.
- The dialectical point of this argument is to place an explanatory burden on the prescriptivist or expressivist. He or she must reconstruct the surface appearance of our thought and talk in such a way as to substantiate the underlying metaphysical distinction between fact and value. (The aim is not a knock down argument, but to force recognition of the burden of proof.)
- Susan Hurley, Natural Reasons: Personality and Polity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 15–16.
- Bernard Williams, ‘What Does Intuitionism Imply?’, Making Sense of Humanity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 182–191 at p. 187.
- Williams, ELP, pp. 147–155; see also A.W. Moore, ‘Can Reflection Destroy Knowledge?’, Ratio, no. 4, (1991), pp. 97–107; ‘Williams on Ethics, Knowledge and Reflection’, Philosophy, vol. 78, no. 3, (2003), pp 337–354; Alan Thomas, Value and Context. Chapter 6.
- See the very helpful discussion in Moore, ‘Realism and the Absolute Conception’, p. 33, ff.
- McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’.
- Michael Brady and Duncan Pritchard, ‘Introduction’ to Moral and Epistemic Virtues, (Oxford: Blackwells, 2003), pp. 1–12 at p. 3; Bernard Williams, ‘Deciding to Believe’ in Problems of the Self, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 136–151; T&T, p. 135.
- Williams, T&T, p.45.
- Williams, T&T, p. 87.
- Williams, T&T, p. 88.
- Williams, ELP, pp. 10–11; Alan Thomas ‘Reasonable Partiality and the Agent's Personal Point of View’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, (2005), pp. vol. 8. nos. 1–2, pp. 28–43.
- Brad Hooker and Michael Slote have independently put to me the counter-example of a person who, in ethical deliberation, asks him or herself what a sincere person, or a person of integrity, would do. Such a person thinks about what to do, first personally, using the virtue concept itself. In my view the best response is to argue that such cases are ones of ethical perplexity that, in the relevant respects, re-capitulate the process of learning to be good. See Alan Thomas, ‘Consequentialism, Integrity and Demandingness’ in Tim Chappell, (ed.) Ethical Demandingness, (Palgrave-Macmillan, forthcoming).
- It is also worth noting that, on the most plausible model of responsible belief (one that, regrettably, I cannot defend in any detail here and which is also mentioned by Axtell in the quoted passage) a great deal of one's epistemic standing consists in a combination of an epistemic status and a range of default entitlements. See Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1994), p. 177; Michael Williams, Problems of Knowledge, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 153–7. Most of my responsibly held beliefs are not the objects of theoretical deliberation. By contrast, thick concepts typically do occur in explicit epistemic evaluation from a first personal and engaged perspective. Anyone committed to the default/challenge model will see any account of thick concepts as restricted to these explicitly deliberative contexts.
- Guy Axtell, ‘Expanding Epistemology: A Responsibilist Approach’, Philosophical Papers, vol. 37, no. 1, March, (2008) pp. 51–87 at p. 72.
- Axtell, ibid, pp. 72–75.
- Axtell, ibid, p. 72; Christopher Hookway, ‘Regulating Inquiry’ in Guy Axtell, (ed) Knowledge, Belief and Character: Readings in Virtue Epistemology, (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), pp. 149–160; ‘How to be a Virtue Epistemologist’ in Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski (eds) Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 183–202; ‘Epistemology and Inquiry: the Primacy of Practice’ in Stephen Heatherington, (ed.) Epistemology Futures, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 95–110.
- As insightfully discussed in the rich paper (complementary in many respects to this paper) by Catherine Z. Elgin in this volume. The difference between our two accounts is that in the view defended here presupposed trust works to constitute different communities of epistemic appraisal whose epistemic standards can vary. Add the kind of overall telos to co-operative enquiry that is exemplified by groups who are self-consciously in the business of acquiring and transmitting truth and, I will argue, they will conceptualise the object of belief using thick concepts. This is a particular explanation of Elgin's interpretation of trust, to use her apt metaphor, as a ‘thickening agent’.
- Although not under that description as the term ‘thick concept’ only appears in T&T briefly in a footnote.
- T&T, p. 7.
- In this characterization of the state of nature and the people within it Craig includes features of people to make them recognizably like us that one sense of ‘virtue epistemology’—that of Sosa's—would render his subsequent genealogy redundant. We need to understand Craig's subjects as seeking to co-operate on the basis of the pooling of information. That already brings in such basic faculties as perception, memory and the ability to report. Craig's aim is to presuppose these very general faculties and on their basis explain both knowledge and (in Williams's extension to the genealogy) very general epistemological virtues. But all of this is downstream, as it were, from Sosa's faculty or function based ‘virtue epistemology’ where the term virtue is understood very broadly in terms of basic human capacities. See, now, Sosa, A Virtue Epistemology, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
- Craig, op. cit. p. 35
- Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 31, fn. 3.
- ‘[A] genealogy gives no way of translating language that mentions the resultant item into terms that mention only the original items, nor does it claim that ‘justice’ or ‘property’ or ‘knowledge’ introduces nothing over and above the original items—on the contrary it shows what new thing is introduced, and why it is new. Genealogical explanation makes such things intelligible without getting involved in reduction.’ Williams, T&T, p. 36. Colin McGinn, ‘Isn't It the Truth?’, New York Review of Books, vol. 50, no. 6, April 10, (2003).
- That is a generalization, but some of Zagzebski's formulations of the ‘value problem’ in epistemology seem more Platonic than Aristotelian and do seem to treat knowledge as both a higher value and one resistant to explanation. See, for example, Linda Zagzebski, ‘Intellectual Motivation and the Good of Truth’, in DePaul and Zagzebski, (eds) Intellectual Virtue, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) pp. 135–54.
- Williams, T&T, pp. 36–37.
- McGinn, op. cit.
- As I understand these terms, influenced by Korsgaard (and unconvinced by her critics) in giving a constitutive account of a value one explains its intrinsic nature. Extrinsic values are objects whose value depends on a constitutive relation to another valuable thing, in the way that Rae Langton's wedding ring possesses extrinsic value because of its relation to her marriage. See Christine Korsgaard, ‘Two Distinctions in Goodness’, in Creating the Kingdom of Ends, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Rae Langton, ‘Objective and Unconditioned Value’, Philosophical Review, vol. 116, no. 2, (2007) pp. 157–185. And, following Ross, instrumental value is simply a category mistake: instrumental value is not value at all. The parallel distinction in the theory of valuing (a project undertaken by agents) is to value something for its own sake as a final end or for the sake of something else. In the latter case, one might speak of instrumental reasons but this does not resurrect the category of instrumental values.
- This weak and broad sense of the ethical is that of ‘the capacity shown … by humans in all cultures to live under rules and values and to shape their behaviour in some degree to social expectations, in ways that are not under surveillance and not directly controlled by threats and rewards’, Williams, T&T, p. 24.
- Williams, T&T, p. 59.
- ‘It is a sufficient condition for something … to have an intrinsic value that, first it is necessary (or nearly necessary) for basic human purposes and needs that human beings should treat it as an intrinsic good; and, second, that they can coherently treat it as an intrinsic good …. What is essential for this to be so is that the agent has some materials in terms of which he can understand this value in relations to other values that he holds.’ Williams, T&T, p. 92 and, more generally, pp. 88–93.
- Williams, T&T, p. 89.
- Williams, T&T, p. 120; Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Truthfulness, Lies and Moral Philosophers: What Can We Learn from Mill and Kant?’, in Petersen, Grethe B., (ed.) The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 16, (1995).
- Williams, T&T, p. 125, p. 127.
- Williams, T&T, p. 141.
- As I have already explained, instrumental values are not values at all, as Ross argued. See footnote 40 above.
- ‘Theorising’ goes in scare quotes as we do not find anything out about the state of nature; it is our stipulation.
- Williams, T&T, p. 90.
- MacIntyre, op. cit. p. 358.
- Williams, T&T, p. 114.
- Hookway, ‘How to be a Virtue Epistemologist’, p. 194.
- See also the convergent conclusions of the very fine paper by Adam Morton, ‘Epistemic Virtues, Metavirtues, and Computational Complexity’, Nous, no. 38, (2002), pp. 481–502(22).
- Hookway, ibid, pp. 190–191, 194.
- Hookway, ibid, p. 189, fn. 14.
- See, paradigmatically, Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Science and Civility in Seventeenth Century England, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
- Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), p. 21.
- Of the kind represented, for example, by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's Objectivity, (New York: Zone Books, 2007)
- Adrian Moore, ‘Realism and the Absolute Conception’, in Alan Thomas, (ed.) Bernard Williams, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 24–46.
- An option explored by Moore in his own work in ethics. See A.W. Moore, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty, (London: Routledge, 2005).
- Hurley, op. cit.
- Bernard Williams, ‘Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology’ in Making Sense of Humanity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 65–77 at p. 76.
- Williams, T&T, p. pp. 92–3, p. 150. In fact that work contains two representative discussions of the extension and the elaboration of the fictional component of the genealogy. Chapter Seven describes the development of the local conception of temporality into the modern notion of objective historical time. Chapter Eight describes the autonomous cultural elaboration of Sincerity in the more determinate form of authenticity.
- As Simon Blackburn notes ‘on some accounts of ethics, all moral faults are at bottom not only analogous to cognitive faults but are actually identical to them. If to know the good is to love it, then moral defect becomes a species of cognitive defect.’, from ‘Reason, Virtue and Knowledge’, in Abrol Fairweather and Linda Zagzebski, Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 15–29 at p. 15.
- Those stringent assumptions are relaxed and ethical cognitivism defended from Williams's critique in, for example, Alan Thomas, Value and Context and ‘The Non-objectivist Critique of Moral Knowledge’.