Abstract

This chapter seeks to start from a disagreement between Bernard Williams and David Wiggins—a disagreement which came out in the essays they wrote on truth in ethics, for the journal Ratio. In criticizing Wiggins, Williams drew on the distinction for which he is well known, between thick and thin ethical concepts—between ethical concepts like good, right and wrong and concepts like treacherous, cruel, brutal and dishonest. Two central ideas about thick concepts play a role in Williams’s argument: the first idea is that the application of a thick ethical concept is determined by what the world is like, and the second idea is that people have different thick ethical concepts. Ethics works with ideas of temptation, ideas of there being tempting but terribly misleading paths of thought. Wiggins suggests taking Wittgenstein on the objectivity of mathematics as a model for our thinking about the objectivity of ethics.

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