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Show Chapter VIII. The Problem of Rational Final Ends 326 3.2.1. Williams' Thesis 3.2.1.1. Ground Projects What, exactly, is a "ground project"? Williams develops this notion in a series of papers that focus on particular normative moral theories rather than on their metaethical foundations. Consistent with his Humean AntiRationalist convictions, his exposition is unsystematic, as it always is with rationally consistent Humean Anti-Rationalists. My avowedly rationalist reconstruction of Williams' thesis attempts to systematize it. 18 In "A Critique of Utilitarianism," Williams reproaches Utilitarianism with treating our moral feelings "just as unpleasant experiences," [CU, 103] when in fact they are more accurately "regarded as indications of what [one] thinks is right and wrong." [CU, 103] These feelings, and the "sense of what 19 we can or cannot 'live with', "partly determine our moral relation to the world, and so cannot properly be understood as "happenings outside one's moral self." [CU, 104] Moral feelings, then, are much more complex and integral to moral agency than Utilitarianism according to Williams acknowledges. Williams accuses the Utilitarian of a similarly simplistic concept of desire, as consisting solely in "egoistic inclinations and necessities at one end, and impersonally benevolent happiness-management at the other." [CU, 112] But, he argues, one may desire things for oneself, and for "one's family, one's friends, including basic necessities of life, ... objects of taste," as well as "... pursuits and interests of an intellectual, cultural, or creative character." [CU, 110] These latter may be different because "some people's commitment to these kinds of interests just is more thoroughgoing and serious than their pursuit of various objects of taste, while it is more individual and permeated with character than the desire for the necessities of life." [CU, 111] Now I argued in Chapter VI that all such desires are a species of selfinterested motivation; and Williams' characterization of some of them as different, more thoroughgoing and serious, and more individual and permeated with character does not explicitly contradict this. However, each of these desires are what Williams calls "first-order projects," [CU, 110] as is 18 In J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973). Henceforth page references to this essay will be in the text, preceded by CU. I adopt the same convention for other essays by Williams discussed here, as follows: "Persons, Character and Morality, " in Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981) = PC; "Utilitarianism and Moral Self-Indulgence," also in Moral Luck = UM; "Morality and the Emotions," in Problems of the Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973) = ME; and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985) = EL. 19 Here we find the inchoate origins of Frankfurt's analysis of unthinkability. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
