Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: hat one believes in one area of philosophy should make sense in terms of what one believes elsewhere.One's philosophical beliefs, or approaches, or arguments, should hang together (like conspirators, perhaps).1 I Despite his largely deserved reputation as a dense and difficult writer, Bernard Williams displayed a knack for coining memorable and evocative phrases which in due course became broadly synonymous with his own distinct and original claims."Agent regret", "moral luck", "one thought too many", "government house utilitarianism", "internal reasons", "basic legitimation demand", "vindicatory genealogy"no matter how much such phrases have gone on to be adopted and employed in wider debates, they remain distinctively Williamsian.And to this list could easily be added another: "the relativism of distance".Mention this, and anybody familiar with Williams's work, and indeed with the wider literature in moral philosophy, will immediately recognise it as one of his ideas.It may not be too much of an exaggeration to label as canonical Williams's claim that "only when a society is sufficiently 'close' to ours, which is to say, roughly, only when it is a real option for us to adopt the ethical outlook of that society, is there any question of appraising its ethical outlook (as 'right', 'wrong', 'unjust', or whatever)". 2 But if so, it is surprising to discover that this evocative phrase, and the distinctive ideas Williams attached to it, have garnered little sustained critical attention.Furthermore, what attention they have received has tended to be negative: commentators largely find the relativism of distance perplexing, theoretically flawed, implausible, or even incoherent.3 By contrast this paper offers a defence of Williams.It does so via two interlinked strategies.First, aiming to show that the relativism of distance cannot be understood as a freestanding item, but only makes sense when related to the substantive prior argument in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (ELP) 4 , and yet which existing scholarship has so far failed adequately to do.Second, to show that commentary on this matter has been misguided insofar
Source: European Journal of Philosophy
DOI: 10.1111/ejop.13070
Author: Paul Sagar
Institution: King's College London
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,240
OpenAlex ID: W4409380236