Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

A sustained critique of systematic moral theory. Williams starts from Socrates' question, "how should one live?", and asks whether philosophy can answer it. He examines attempts to ground ethics in well-being, in the Aristotelian manner, and in the demands of practical reason, as in Kant, and finds that neither gives an Archimedean point from which to convince anyone. He then criticises ethical theories, chiefly utilitarian and contractualist, for trying to replace ethical experience with a decision procedure. A central distinction is between "thick" ethical concepts, such as cruelty or courage, which combine description and evaluation, and "thin" ones such as good and right. Williams argues that reflection can destroy ethical knowledge held through thick concepts, discusses whether ethics can converge as science does, and proposes a "relativism of distance". The final chapter attacks "morality, the peculiar institution": a system built around obligation and blame.

It is one of the most searching modern arguments that ethics is not a science of right action, and it supplies concepts, such as thick and thin, that are now standard.