{"agent_id":"williams","agent_name":"Bernard Williams","slug":"the-morality-system","label":"The morality system: is the modern moral philosophy of categorical obligation, the moral ought, and the blame system 'morality, the peculiar institution' rather than ethics?","topic":"The morality system","question":"Is the modern moral philosophy of categorical obligation, the moral ought, and the blame system 'morality, the peculiar institution' rather than ethics?","position":"Modern moral philosophy has been dominated by what I call \"morality, the peculiar institution\" — a culturally specific doctrine of categorical obligation, the special \"moral ought,\" the blame system, and the demand for impartial justification from a standpoint that abstracts from the agent's actual life. The morality system is not coextensive with ethics. Ethics is the wider field — how to live, what to value, what concerns one human being can have for another, what the good life consists in. Morality is the thinned-down modern version, in which only certain kinds of obligation count, only certain kinds of justification are accepted, and the rich texture of ethical thought is reduced to a few thin concepts (good, right, ought, duty) detached from the descriptive contexts that gave them their hold. The thick concepts — cruel, courageous, treacherous, just, kind, generous — embed evaluation in description in ways the thin concepts cannot recover. They are not analyzable into a descriptive component plus an evaluative attitude; the evaluation is internal to the description. The reduction of ethics to thin concepts is what loses the substance. \"Reflection can destroy knowledge\": critical reflection on the thick concepts of an ethical community can undermine the unreflective use that gave them their hold, and the resulting thin concepts cannot do the same work. The morality system has been treated as the natural endpoint of ethical reflection; it is in fact a culturally contingent institution that has crowded out richer alternatives.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Modern moral philosophy has been dominated by what I call \"morality, the peculiar institution\" — a culturally specific doctrine of categorical obligation, the special \"moral ought,\" the blame system, and the demand for impartial justification from a standpoint that abstracts from the agent's actual life.","n":[1]},{"t":"The morality system is not coextensive with ethics.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Ethics is the wider field — how to live, what to value, what concerns one human being can have for another, what the good life consists in.","n":[]},{"t":"Morality is the thinned-down modern version, in which only certain kinds of obligation count, only certain kinds of justification are accepted, and the rich texture of ethical thought is reduced to a few thin concepts (good, right, ought, duty) detached from the descriptive contexts that gave them their hold.","n":[2]}],[{"t":"The thick concepts — cruel, courageous, treacherous, just, kind, generous — embed evaluation in description in ways the thin concepts cannot recover.","n":[]},{"t":"They are not analyzable into a descriptive component plus an evaluative attitude; the evaluation is internal to the description.","n":[]},{"t":"The reduction of ethics to thin concepts is what loses the substance.","n":[]}],[{"t":"\"Reflection can destroy knowledge\": critical reflection on the thick concepts of an ethical community can undermine the unreflective use that gave them their hold, and the resulting thin concepts cannot do the same work.","n":[]},{"t":"The morality system has been treated as the natural endpoint of ethical reflection; it is in fact a culturally contingent institution that has crowded out richer alternatives.","n":[3]}]],"texts":"Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Harvard 1985), Chapters 1-2 on the difference between ethics and morality, Chapters 7-8 on the morality system, Chapter 10 on 'morality, the peculiar institution'; Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Pelican 1972); 'Internal and External Reasons' (1980, in Moral Luck); Making Sense of Humanity (1995) on thick concepts. Reception: Christine Korsgaard The Sources of Normativity (1996) and Self-Constitution (2009) for the major Kantian reply; Onora O'Neill Constructions of Reason (1989) and Towards Justice and Virtue (1996); Thomas Scanlon What We Owe to Each Other (1998) for the major contractualist alternative; Simon Blackburn 'The Absolute Conception: Putnam vs Williams' (in Reading Bernard Williams 2008); John Cottingham 'The Good Life and the Radical Contingency of the Ethical' (in Reading Bernard Williams 2008).","works":["Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Harvard 1985), Chapters 1-2 on the difference between ethics and morality, Chapters 7-8 on the morality system, Chapter 10 on 'morality, the peculiar institution'","Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Pelican 1972)","'Internal and External Reasons' (1980, in Moral Luck)","Making Sense of Humanity (1995) on thick concepts"],"reception":"Christine Korsgaard The Sources of Normativity (1996) and Self-Constitution (2009) for the major Kantian reply; Onora O'Neill Constructions of Reason (1989) and Towards Justice and Virtue (1996); Thomas Scanlon What We Owe to Each Other (1998) for the major contractualist alternative; Simon Blackburn 'The Absolute Conception: Putnam vs Williams' (in Reading Bernard Williams 2008); John Cottingham 'The Good Life and the Radical Contingency of the Ethical' (in Reading Bernard Williams 2008).","status":"Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) is widely regarded as the major late-twentieth-century critique of modern moral philosophy as a whole, with a polemical reach matched only by Anscombe's MMP (1958) and MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981). Korsgaard's Sources of Normativity (1996) is the most sophisticated Kantian reply; Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other (1998) the most sophisticated contractualist reply; both try to recover what the morality system was supposed to do while acknowledging some of the Williams critique. The thick concepts argument has been taken up by John McDowell, David Wiggins, and the Pittsburgh school as the basis for a neo-Aristotelian moral realism. The radical-contingency thesis and \"reflection can destroy knowledge\" remain among the most pessimistically polemical positions in late-twentieth-century meta-ethics; Simon Blackburn and John Cottingham have engaged both extensively in Reading Bernard Williams (2008).","era":"1929-2003","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy","page":"pp. 174–175","canonical":"","quote":"E Morality, the Peculiar Institution E arlier I referred to morality as a special system, a particular variety of ethical thought. I must now explain what I take it to be, and why we would be better off without it. The important thing about morality is its spirit, its underlying aims, and the general picture of ethical life it implies.","label":"Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, pp. 174–175"},{"n":2,"work":"In the Beginning Was the Deed","page":"p. 48","canonical":"","quote":"Various ethical theories have differing ambitions in this respect, as in others; the differences show up both in how much they seek to control, and in how direct their control is meant Four to be. Thus some ethical theories may try to lay down only restrictive principles of right, while others, such as Utilitarianism, have ambitions to dictate an entire system of value. These are differences of ethical scope.","label":"In the Beginning Was the Deed, p. 48"},{"n":3,"work":"Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy","page":"pp. 192–193","canonical":"","quote":"It is as if every member of the notional republic were empowered to make a citizen's arrest. Within all this there is a range, quite a wide one, of particular deviations that we treat with the machinery of everyday blame. They include many violations of obligations, but not all of them: some of the most monstrous proceedings, which lie beyond ordinary blame, involve violations of basic human rights.","label":"Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, pp. 192–193"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"critique-of-utilitarianism","label":"Critique of utilitarianism: does the integrity objection refute utilitarianism, or can sophisticated consequentialism accommodate the agent's projects?"},{"slug":"internal-vs-external-reasons","label":"Internal vs external reasons: are all reasons for action internal to the agent's motivational set, with no 'external' reasons binding regardless of motivation?"},{"slug":"moral-luck-and-one-thought-too-many","label":"Moral luck and 'one thought too many': can morality be insulated from luck, and does Kantian impartialism reason wrongly when it justifies saving one's wife by appeal to a universal principle?"},{"slug":"truth-truthfulness-and-genealogy","label":"Truth, truthfulness, and genealogy: can truthfulness be vindicated as a virtue without grounding it in metaphysical correspondence-truth?"},{"slug":"political-realism-vs-moralism","label":"Political realism vs moralism: should political legitimacy be derived from prior moral theory, or from the Basic Legitimation Demand internal to politics itself?"}]}