I—Miranda Fricker: The Relativism of Blame and Williams's Relativism of Distance
Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84 (1):151-177 (2010)
Abstract
Bernard Williams is a sceptic about the objectivity of moral value, embracing instead a qualified moral relativism—the ‘relativism of distance’. His attitude to blame too is in part sceptical. I will argue that the relativism of distance is unconvincing, even incoherent; but also that it is detachable from the rest of Williams's moral philosophy. I will then go on to propose an entirely localized thesis I call the relativism of blame, which says that when an agent's moral shortcomings by our lights are a matter of their living according to the moral thinking of their day, judgements of blame are out of order. Finally, I will propose a form of moral judgement we may sometimes quite properly direct towards historically distant agents when blame is inappropriate—moral-epistemic disappointment. Together these two proposals may help release us from the grip of the idea that moral appraisal always involves the potential applicability of blame, and so from a key source of the relativist idea that moral appraisal is inappropriate over distance.Author's Profile
DOI
10.1111/j.1467-8349.2010.00190.x
My notes
Similar books and articles
Relativism, realism, and reflection.John Tasioulas - 1998 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 41 (4):377 – 410.
Styles of moral relativism : a critical family tree.Miranda Fricker - 2013 - In Roger Crisp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics. Oxford University Press.
Autoriteit, contingentee en geschiedenis in de ethiek: Bernard Williams en het relativisme Van de afstand.Tim Heysse - 2005 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 67 (2):273 - 306.
Précis.Miranda Fricker - 2008 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 23 (1):69-71.
Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing.Miranda Fricker - 2007 - Oxford University Press.
After the Kantian analytic/synthetic contrast: social epistemology from Hegel to Derrida and Fricker.Victoria I. Burke - 2017 - Social Epistemology 31 (5):484-496.
Testimonial injustice and prescriptive credibility deficits.Wade Munroe - 2016 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (6):924-947.
What's the Point of Blame? A Paradigm Based Explanation.Miranda Fricker - 2016 - Noûs 50 (1):165-183.
Perfectioning trust, reinforcing testimony.Francisco Javier Gil - 2008 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 23 (1):73-76.
Analytics
Added to PP
2010-05-27
Downloads
342 (#34,427)
6 months
12 (#78,077)
2010-05-27
Downloads
342 (#34,427)
6 months
12 (#78,077)
Historical graph of downloads
Author's Profile
Citations of this work
Explaining away epistemic skepticism about culpability.Gunnar Björnsson - 2017 - In Shoemaker David (ed.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. Oxford University Press. pp. 141–164.
The epistemic condition for moral responsibility.Fernando Rudy-Hiller - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility.Alex Madva - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (S1):53-78.
Implicit bias, awareness and imperfect cognitions.Jules Holroyd - 2015 - Consciousness and Cognition 33:511-523.
References found in this work
Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame.Thomas Scanlon - 2008 - Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
The Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability.Stephen Darwall - 1996 - Harvard University Press.