The Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law is delighted to host Professor Sophie Grace Chappell for the final workshop of the 2024/25 KJuris programme.

Title

Bernard Williams’ Liberal Naturalism

Abstract

Bernard Williams counts as a naturalist because, first, he takes the basic question of metaethics to be the question how and where “the ethical” fits in with the rest of our world-view. And he counts as a naturalist because, secondly, he thinks that answering this question is, so to speak, the payment of an explanatory debt that humane understanding owes to science. For any naturalist, there is such an explanatory debt, and it runs in that direction: from humane understanding to science. It is not that the debt-relation is real but the other way around, as some philosophers have argued. (Perhaps Heidegger’s views on technology and human life, in Being and Time and elsewhere, are the clearest example.) Nor is it that there is no explanatory debt-relation in either direction, as some other philosophers have apparently thought. (Maybe the later Wittgenstein thought this; certainly some of his quietist followers have believed it.) Rather, Williams thinks that humane understanding, and specifically ethics, has a genuine explanatory debt to science, and that this cannot be paid in full without some subversion of our pre-philosophical assumptions about ethics. In this paper I explore and criticise Williams’ position.

Author Bio

Professor Sophie Grace Chappell | OU people profiles