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    The relativism of blame and Williams’ relativism of distance

    Fricker, Miranda (2010) The relativism of blame and Williams’ relativism of distance. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 84 (1), pp. 151-177. ISSN 1467-9264.

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    Abstract

    Bernard Williams is a sceptic about the objectivity of moral value, embracing instead a qualified moral relativism—the 'relativism of distance'. His attitude to blame too is in part sceptical (he thought it often involved a certain 'fantasy'). I will argue that the relativism of distance is unconvincing, even incoherent; but also that it is detachable from the rest of Williams's moral philosophy. I will then go on to propose an entirely localized thesis I call the relativism of blame, which says that when an agent's moral shortcomings by our lights are a matter of their living according to the moral thinking of their day, judgements of blame are out of order. Finally, I will propose a form of moral judgement we may sometimes quite properly direct towards historically distant agents when blame is inappropriate—moral-epistemic disappointment. Together these two proposals may help release us from the grip of the idea that moral appraisal always involves the potential applicability of blame, and so from a key source of the relativist idea that moral appraisal is inappropriate over distance.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Historical Studies
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 17 Dec 2010 11:29
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 16:53
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/2699

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