What Can We Expect From Ethics?

Abstract

From time to time, in the history of ethics, it has been claimed that we can establish reasons for moral conduct in such a way that anyone who is not persuaded by these reasons is thereby convicted of a failure in understanding. This was thought to be the task of ethical theory. Recently, the very conception of an ethical theory has come under attack once again. But while critics reject the answers ethical theories have offered, they have not rejected the task they set themselves. They simply argue that philosophy cannot achieve this task unaided. For example, Bernard Williams suggests that we ask, ‘Must any reflection on the good life require that a reflective intellectualism be part of the answer?’¹ What we need to reject, however, is not the answers intellectuals have provided, but their conception of the task they are engaged in. This suggestion will disappoint those philosophers and intellectuals who see themselves as a new priesthood, or as prophets of history, but that makes the rejection of their misconceived task no less urgent. I shall argue for its rejection by reference to the work of J. L. Stocks, Annette Baier and Bernard Williams.