Luck, Value, and Commitment comprises eleven new
essays which engage with, or take their point of
departure from, the influential work in moral and
political philosophy of Bernard Williams (1[zasłonięte]929-20).
Various themes of Williams's work are explored and taken
in new directions. In their essays, Brad Hooker, Philip
Pettit, and Susan Wolf are all concerned with Williams's
work on the viability or wisdom of systematic moral
theory, and his criticism, in particular, of moral
theory's preoccupation with impartiality. David Enoch,
Joseph Raz, and R. Jay Wallace address Williams's work
on moral luck, and his insistence that moral appraisals
bear a disquieting sensitivity to various kinds of luck.
Wallace makes further connections between moral luck and
the 'non-identity problem' in reproductive ethics.
Michael Smith and Ulrike Heuer investigate Williams's
defence of 'internalism' about reasons for action, which
makes our reasons for action a function of our desires,
projects, and psychological dispositions. Smith attempts
to plug a gap in Williams's theory which is created by
Williams's deference to imagination, while Heuer
connects these issues to Williams's accommodation of
'thick' ethical concepts as a source of knowledge and
action-guidingness. John Broome examines Williams's
less-known work on the other central normative concept,
'ought'. Jonathan Dancy takes a look at Williams's work
on moral epistemology and intuitionism, comparing and
contrasting his work with that of John McDowell, and
Gerald Lang explores Williams's work on equality,
discrimination, and interspecies relations in order to
reach the conclusion, similar to Williams's, that
'speciesism' is very unlike racism or sexism.
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