A Shelter from Luck

Abstract

Abstract Far from being indiscriminately critical of the morality system, Bernard Williams offered vindicatory explanations of its crucial building blocks: the moral/nonmoral distinction, the idea of obligation, the voluntary/involuntary distinction, and the practice of blame. The rationale for these concessions, the author argues, is that understanding what these ideas do for us when they are not in the service of the system is as important to leading us out of the system as the critique of that system. The author then shows how regarding the aspiration to shelter life from luck as the system’s organizing ambition explains why the system elaborates and combines these building blocks in the way it does. Finally, he argues that the ultimate problem with this construction is its frictionless purity. It robs valuable concepts of their grip on the world and, by insisting on purity from contingency, threatens to engender nihilism about value and skepticism about agency.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.