Overweening morality

TL;DRAbstract

So far I have been focusing on particular moralistic judgements, on the nature of such judgements (Chapters 1 and 2) and about what such judgements suggest about the character of those who make them (Chapter 3). So my concern so far has been with certain ways in which particular moral judgements may be flawed, or suggest character flaws, in various ways. However, there is in fact a more radical position we might take according to which the focus of criticism is not particular moral judgements but rather the whole practice of moral judgement as we might understand it. According to this view, and again in some pejorative sense, what is moralistic is a certain conception (or conceptions) of morality. The focus of criticism here is not just one particular moral theory, but our idea of morality construed much more broadly. So, Bernard Williams has argued in a number of places against what he calls “the morality system”, which, with its focus on a particular notion of moral obligation, he ta

Chat with Paper

AI Agents for this Paper