Socrates asks "How should one live?" Plato thought the answer lay in following a life of philosophical understanding.
Williams looks at the work of Socrates and Plato, who attempt to justify morality to amoral people. Williams asks why philosophers should even bother, as they are dealing with people who will be unmoved by their arguments. Williams believes that the reason we try to convince these people is because they might influence individuals to give up morality and live an unethical life. Williams says "to be skeptical about ethics is to be skeptical about the force of ethical considerations." These people must not be assumed to live lives that lack ethical considerations, but rather question what the force of these ethical considerations are. Skeptics interact with the world and must find actions they approve of or do cheerfully, removing skepticism away as the skeptic has just made an ethical decision. By removing oneself from all ethics, one has nothing to do.
Williams feels that we should not ask what to say to the amoral person but what we can say about them, as that message will reach the rest of the population who has morals - providing support and reinforcement of morals to the people who will actually listen, those with morals, instead of the amoral who won't listen. When it comes to force, Williams explains that Plato thought, "the power of the ethical was the power of reason", and that the power of the ethical was made into a force by the power of reason. The aim then should be to focus on reinforcing the ethical rather than attacking the unethical.
Williams asks if there is a Archimedean Point, and notes that both Aristotle and Kant have philosophical "ventures" that follow his own definition: something to which even the amoralist or the skeptic is committed but which, properly thought through, will show us that he is irrational, or unreasonable, or at any rate mistaken." Kant follows rational action (agency) and Aristotle thought that it is "the idea of a specifically human life." Williams says that there is no such Archimedean Point and says that he hopes people will adopt three things to help prompt ethics: truth, truthfulness, and the meaning of an individual life.
Williams proclaims that the scientific truth does not provide us with anything normative - possessing facts does not change people's behavior (smokers still smoke despite its known harm). This knowledge can have an impact though when we look at the social understanding we have.
The reason Williams says we should seek truthfulness is because our ethical thought should "stand up to reflection, with the goal of its institutions and practices should be capable of becoming transparent." If our ethics can't be transparent, then what are we hiding? We need to be truthful about our ethics so that people can know how ethical they really are.
Williams needs for "individuals of dispositions of characters" and "a life of their own to lead" for his hopes to be reached. As for the "meaning of an individual life", he looks for "one that does not reject society, and indeed shares its perceptions with other people to a considerable depth, but is enough unlike others, in its opacities and disorder as well as in its reasoned intentions, to make it somebody's." He wants people to understand each other, maintain that truthfulness, and to make the principle of general goodness someone else's principle so that they too can add to the world happiness.
Discussion Questions/Comments
Could you explain what Mill means by "One has nothing to do" in #5? Does he mean there is no meaning to an amoral person's life?
What does Aristotle mean by a "specifically human life?"
Key Terms/Definitions
Philosophical: general and abstract, rationally reflective, and concerned with what can be known through different kinds of inquiry
Amoral: lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness and wrongness of something
Archimedean Point: a point where the viewer can objectively perceive the subject of inquiry, with a view of totality
Normative: establishing, relating to, or deriving from a standard of a norm, especially of behavior.
Phrenology: the detailed study of the size and shape of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities
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