Thomas Nagel, Moral Feelings, Moral Reality, and Moral Progress

Simon Blackburn “The Majesty of Reason” Philosophy, 85, 2020, p. 1.

So did Adam Smith. I applauded his subtle discussion in “Williams, Smith, and the Peculiarity of Piacularity”, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Volume 1, Issue 02, June 2015, pp. 217–232.

For a compelling argument that Williams would have done better by thinking not of the “relativism of distance” but of the relativism of blame, see Fricker, M., “The Relativism of Blame and Williams’s Relativism of Distance”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 84, 2010, pp. 151–177. Fricker also points out Williams himself allows moral evaluation of the agent and his doings.

The key passage is the Athenian speech: “When you speak of the favour of the gods, we may as fairly hope for that as yourselves; neither our pretensions nor our conduct being in any way contrary to what men believe of the gods, or practise among themselves. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. Thus, as far as the gods are concerned, we have no fear and no reason to fear that we shall be at a disadvantage”. The Peloponnesian War, Book 5, Chapter 17.

Human, All too Human, para 92. I owe the quotation to Matthieu Queloz, “Nietzsche’s Pragmatic Genealogy of Justice”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2017.