Ethical necessity and internal reasons

Philosophy

Volumn 76, Issue 298, 2001, Pages 541-560

  Cordner, Christopher ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62449120617     PISSN: 00318191     EISSN: 1469817X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0031819101000559     Document Type: Review

References (15)

1. A notable exception is Peter Winch, 'The Universalisability of Moral Judgments', in Winch, Ethics and Action (London: Routledge, 1972).
2. Pace, famously, R. M. Hare.
3. In 'Practical Necessity', B. Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 124-31
4. and in 'Moral Incapacity', B. Williams, Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
5. 'Practical Necessity', 131.
6. 'Moral Incapacity', 51.
7. Raimond Gaita also seems to exclude this possibility. The characters I mention would sincerely disavow the possibility of their 'trying to do otherwise'. Gaita seems (it is hard to be certain) to suppose that this is sufficient for their 'can't' or 'must' to express a genuinely moral incapacity or necessity. My examples challenge this supposition. See R. Gaita, Good and Evil (London: MacMillan, 1991), 110.
8. 'Internal and External Reasons', in Moral Luck op. cit. , 101
9. 'Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame', in Making Sense of Humanity, 35.
10. 'Internal and External Reasons', 104.
11. 'Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame', 39.
12. This is the territory of John McDowell's 'Might there be external reasons?', in World, Mind, and Ethics, J. E. J. Altham and R. Harrison (eds) (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 68-85.
13. E. g. Elijah Millgram, 'Williams' Argument Against External Reasons', Nous 30:2 (1996), 197-220.
14. If Botha's new conviction is the issue of conversion it would seem necessarily to be not deliberatively mediated. (That seems to be an element of the concept of conversion. ) So the example runs counter to Williams' claim that moral necessity (and impossibility) have to be understood as the conclusion of a piece of practical reasoning. In this I concur with the burden of Craig Taylor's paper 'Moral Incapacity', Philosophy 70 (1995), 273-85.
15. Or, relatedly, by what I would do under advice from my 'fully rational' self. See Michael Smith 'Internal Reasons', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55, 109-31.