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Page 1: Winch on Moral Dilemmas and Moral Modality

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Winch on Moral Dilemmas andMoral ModalityCraig Taylor aa Flinders University , AustraliaPublished online: 18 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Craig Taylor (2006) Winch on Moral Dilemmas and MoralModality, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 49:2, 148-157, DOI:10.1080/00201740600576910

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Page 2: Winch on Moral Dilemmas and Moral Modality

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Winch on Moral Dilemmas andMoral Modality

CRAIG TAYLOR

Flinders University, Australia

(Received 5 May 2005)

ABSTRACT Peter Winch’s famous argument in ‘‘The Universalizability of MoralJudgments’’ that moral judgments are not always universalizable is widely thought toinvolve an essentially sceptical claim about the limitations of moral theories and moraltheorising more generally. In this paper I argue that responses to Winch have generallymissed the central positive idea upon which Winch’s argument is founded: that what isright for a particular agent to do in a given situation may depend on what is and is notmorally possible for them. I then defend the existence of certain genuine moralnecessities and impossibilities in order to show how certain first-person moraljudgements may be essentially personal.

In his influential and much contested paper The Universalizability of Moral

Judgments1, Peter Winch claims that what is morally right for one agent to

do in a given situation is not necessarily the right thing for another (or all)

agent(s) to do in that situation. Winch claims, that is to say, that moral

judgments are not always universalizable. That Winch’s position in

Universalizability should be contested is hardly surprising: on the face of

it, this position can be seen variously to present a challenge to moral

cognitivism, the supposed impartiality of moral reasons, and to the idea that

moral theory exhaustively determines moral judgment.2 Replies to Winch

have, as one might expect, sought to defend the universalizability of moral

judgments against what has been taken to be an essentially sceptical

argument by Winch. However I argue in this paper that Winch’s critics by

and large fail seriously to address his positive thesis in Universalizability,

which is that the class of first-person moral judgements includes, alongside

Correspondence Address: Craig Taylor, Department of Philosophy, Flinders University,

GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA 5001, Australia. Email: [email protected]

Inquiry,

Vol. 49, No. 2, 148–157, April 2006

0020-174X Print/1502-3923 Online/06/020148–10 # 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/00201740600576910

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(universalizable) moral oughts, certain personal moral necessities and

impossibilities. The real, though scarcely acknowledged, issue between

Winch and his critics is: can what is right for a particular agent to do in a

given situation depend on what is and is not morally possible for them? I

defend a positive answer to this question: I suggest that there are indeed

genuine moral necessities and impossibilities such as Winch describes, and

that certain first-person moral judgements may be essentially personal.

I. The Case of Billy Budd

Winch presents his position in Universalizability by drawing on the example,

from the short story by Herman Melville, of the moral conflict faced by

Captain Vere of the H.M.S. Indomitable in the case of the court martial and

execution of Billy Budd (Melville [1924] (1967)). Winch wants to say that the

conflict Vere faces in reaching the decision to sentence Billy to death is ‘‘a

conflict between two genuinely moral ‘oughts’, a conflict, that is, within

morality’’ (pp. 158–9). On the one hand Vere, in his speech at Billy’s court

marshal, accepts that Billy is ‘‘innocent before God’’: Billy’s action in

striking and accidentally killing his superior, Claggart, was caused by

frustration born of the intolerable persecution he suffered at the hands of

that man. But, on the other hand, the enforcement of Military Law relating

to an action such as this, which took place on the high seas at a time when

the threat of mutiny was acute, was also for Vere a moral obligation.

What is controversial about Winch’s account of the example of Billy

Budd is his entertaining at the same time the following two thoughts: first,

that morally he could not in such circumstances have condemned a man

‘‘innocent before God’’, and second, that in deciding to condemn Billy,

‘‘Vere did what was, for him, the right thing to do’’ (p. 163). Winch argues

here that ‘‘in reaching this decision [that he could not condemn Billy] I do

not think that I should appeal to any considerations over and above those to

which Vere appeals’’ (p. 163). Winch argues, that is, that there is no failure

on either Vere’s or his own part to recognize some considerations relevant to

judgment that might then explain their divergence here. According to

Winch, what is right for Vere to do in this situation is not necessarily what is

right for him (i.e. Winch) to do in this situation; in this kind of case moral

judgments are not universalizable. As Winch says, there is ‘‘a certain class of

first-person moral judgments … not subject to the universalizability

principle’’ (p. 159).3

II. Assessing the First-Person Moral Judgments of Others

What exactly Winch is claiming above remains widely misunderstood.

Consider, for example, Lilian Alweiss’s recent objection to Winch:

Winch on Moral Dilemmas and Moral Modality 149

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Winch fails to see that it is one thing to argue that when it comes to

moral issues I can only appear as a person speaking for myself, and

another to argue that another person’s judgement, which differs from

my own, is equally correct and morally convincing. To acknowledge the

validity of another person’s judgement, I need to be able to transcend

my own personal point of view. Yet, as soon as I recognise the validity

or correctness of another person’s judgment, inevitably I beginquestioning the adequacy of my own (Alweiss (2003), pp. 209–10)4.

But Winch is not claiming ‘‘that another person’s judgment which differs

from my own is equally correct and morally convincing’’. That is, he is not

making the implausible claim that two conflicting moral judgments in a

given situation may both be correct and convincing simpliciter. In the kind

of case under discussion Winch’s point is that we need to ask: ‘‘Correct and

convincing for whom?’’ Winch’s claim is not that if I were to move to adifferent point of view I would find a different moral judgment to be correct.

It is true, as Alweiss notes, that Winch says that a given situation may

without error strike different agents very differently. But Winch immediately

goes on to add, and this is the crucial point, that ‘‘if we want to express, in a

given situation, how it strikes the agent, we cannot dispense with his

inclination to come to a particular moral decision’’ (p. 169). That is to say,

we cannot characterise how the situation strikes an agent, their point of view

if you will, independently of those particular inclinations or dispositions ofcharacter that determine their decision. Winch’s point is that we cannot

express how it strikes an agent here without referring to their particular

character—that character is basic in explaining moral judgment.

Winch is claiming then that in the kind of case he is considering it is not

most fundamentally my point of view that determines my moral judgment

but my character, for my character determines my point of view, and that

this fact will determine how we are to assess the first-person moral

judgments of others. According to Winch, when we assess the relevant first-person moral judgments of others we are not assessing whether the

judgments they reach are correct simpliciter but only whether they are

correct for them. Contrary to Alweiss then, it simply does not follow from

my acceptance that another person may be correct in reaching a different

moral judgment to me in a given situation that ‘‘inevitably I begin to

question… my own’’ judgment, for what in the present case may make

another person’s differing moral judgment correct (i.e., correct for them) is

their different character.

III. Agent and Spectator Moral Judgments

In order to be clear about what is really at issue between Winch and his

critics, we should consider his account of the relation between an agent’s

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own first-person moral judgments and their judgments as a spectator

concerning the actions of other people.

[W]hen I think about the moral decisions and dilemmas of others, it

seems to me that I am very often asking: ‘‘What would I think it right

to do in such a situation?’’ That is, I am making a hypothetical agent’s

judgment of my own. Thus only a man who is himself capable ofmaking moral decisions of his own, is capable of making and

understanding spectators’ moral judgments about the actions of other

people. (p. 154)

The reason, Winch wants to stress, that we need to be able to make our own

moral decisions before we can make any spectator judgements about the

actions of others is that the manner in which we reach judgments as agents

will determine the nature and scope of our spectator moral judgments. Butin order to see how this is so, we need to consider in some detail the kinds of

factor an agent’s own moral decisions may turn on. So recall now Winch’s

own judgment concerning Billy Budd.

Remember first of all that in the case of Billy Budd’s court-marshal

Winch is reflecting on what is right for him to do given that he is faced with

two conflicting moral oughts; he is reflecting on what he morally ought to

do in the face of a particular moral dilemma. Now, that Winch should ask

‘‘What ought I to do?’’ here shows that he thinks that there is a morallycorrect decision for him to make in this case. But Winch’s point is that his

decision is only correct for him and not necessarily correct for another in his

place; while Winch gives precedence to one moral consideration (Billy’s

innocence) over another (military law) he is not saying that anyone else in

the same place must weigh these considerations as he does. For this reason

reaching a moral decision in a case like this does not amount to simply

dissolving the moral dilemma. The importance of Winch’s asking ‘‘What

would I think it right to do in such a situation?’’ here is just that throughimagining himself acting in this situation—having to convict or acquit Billy

Budd—he may discover what is, as we shall see, morally possible for him in

this situation. As Winch says,

I try… to confine myself to the genuinely moral features of the

situation. Having done this I believe that I could not have acted as did

Vere; and by ‘‘could not’’, I do not mean ‘‘should not have had the

nerve to’’, but that I should have found it morally impossible tocondemn a man ‘‘innocent before God’’ under such circumstances

(p. 163).

As Winch later says, ‘‘what one finds out [in a case like this] is something

about oneself, rather than anything one can speak of as holding universally’’

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(p. 168). The crux of Winch’s argument is that a person’s moral judgment in

such cases may turn on what is personally morally possible for them. In

order to assess Winch’s argument, therefore, it is necessary to consider his

account of such moral modalities—and it is to this account that I now turn.

IV. Moral Incapacity

To begin, one might argue that if the above is a true account of Winch’s

judgment then that judgment has no moral worth. For surely the decision

here turns not on any moral consideration but merely on Winch’s

psychological capacities and incapacities. But what is crucial for Winch is

that when he says he could not convict a man innocent before God he is not

referring to a mere psychological incapacity (it is not as he says that he

‘‘lacks the nerve’’ to convict) but what we might call a genuine moral

incapacity, an incapacity that is itself expressive (in a way that merepsychological incapacities are not) of Winch’s particular moral character,

i.e. of his moral psychology. We may illustrate the difference between moral

and mere psychological incapacities as follows. If, to take the case of an

obvious psychological incapacity, I were to say that I cannot (e.g., because I

am claustrophobic) ride in elevators, then it at least makes sense for another

to encourage me to try to do this. In the case of genuine moral incapacities,

however, to encourage an agent to try to do what he says he cannot do is, as

Winch says elsewhere in this connection, not to meet the agent’s point ‘‘somuch as to make a black, tasteless joke’’.5 To suggest, for example, that

Winch should try to overcome his incapacity to convict Billy is to fail to

appreciate that this incapacity is expressive of his particular moral identity

or character.

Of course, one might accept that Winch’s incapacity is expressive of his

character in some sense, and yet deny that this incapacity is a moral

incapacity in the sense outlined above. So, one might argue that Winch’s

incapacity here is expressive merely of a certain weakness or infirmity ofcharacter—that his judgment really does indicate a failure of nerve. But this

is to discount the relevance of what it is Winch says he cannot do here to our

understanding of his judgment. What Winch says he cannot do in this kind

of circumstance is convict a man innocent before God. It is not that he is

simply incapable of performing an objectionable duty; rather, his incapacity

here is precisely an incapacity to do something that is morally objection-

able—i.e. to convict a man innocent before God. This then helps to explain

why it amounts to a kind of ‘‘black, tasteless joke’’ to suggest that Winchshould try and do here what he says he cannot do. To suggest in a situation

like this that a person should try and do what they claim they morally

cannot do is to fail to appreciate not only the significance of certain moral

ideas (e.g., concerning natural justice) in founding their particular moral

character, but also that we understand what it is to have a moral identity at

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all in terms of such incapacities and the moral ideas that are involved in

them. Winch’s objection to the universalizability principle is then of course

that our moral identities, our distinctive moral characters, may properly

differ in this sense, that moral ideas such as natural justice or the importance

of military justice need not have the same weight or significance for different

agents in the same situation, so that the moral possibilities may be different

for different agents. For Winch then, to encourage an agent in a situationlike this to do what they claim they cannot do is to try to get them to betray

their own distinctive moral character.

I cannot offer a more comprehensive account or defence of the kind of

moral incapacities outlined above in this paper.6 It is however worth noting

that Winch’s claim that there are such incapacities is not entirely unique.

Bernard Williams, though much later, similarly suggests that there are

moral incapacities of this general kind, ‘‘incapacities that are themselves an

expression of the moral life: the kind of incapacity that is in question whenwe say of someone, usually in commendation of him, that he could not act

or was not capable of acting in certain ways’’. 7 And Williams likewise sees

such incapacities as ‘‘expressive of, or grounded in, the agent’s character or

personal dispositions.’’8 But leaving aside any more detailed examination of

such incapacities, what I do think should be clear at this point is that the real

issue between Winch and his critics is whether the kinds of incapacities

Winch alludes to are genuinely moral incapacities. For if we accept that

there are indeed such moral incapacities then Winch has a point against theuniversalizability thesis.

V. Winch’s Judgment

Whether or not we are prepared to accept that there are such genuine moral

incapacities will depend in part of course on the sense they make of the

moral phenomena that they purport to explain. But here again it seems to

me that Winch’s critics have generally misunderstood Winch’s point inintroducing the example of Billy Budd. What Winch’s critics have assumed

is that the story of Billy Budd is supposed to directly provide a kind of

counter-example to the universalizability thesis; that this story shows clearly

and unambiguously that two agents in a given situation might reach

differing moral judgements and both be correct. It has then been argued that

Melville’s story does not show this at all. So, Winch’s critics argue variously:

that Vere made the wrong decision9; that Vere made the right decision,

meaning the decision that anyone in his situation should reach10; and thatwe just don’t know what it is like to be in Vere’s situation and so cannot

judge his action either way.11 But Winch does not intend this example to

show directly that the universalizability thesis is false. For Winch, it is not

what the example itself shows but what his response to the story shows

which is important here. That is, Winch is drawing our attention to the way

Winch on Moral Dilemmas and Moral Modality 153

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in which he reaches a judgment about Vere’s decision. Now the first and

most obvious difficulty here is indeed (as some have noted) that we don’t

really know what it is like to be in Vere’s situation. But Winch can hardly be

accused of failing to face this difficulty; at very start of Universalizability

Winch quotes the following passage from Melville.

Says a writer whom few know, ‘‘Forty years after the battle it is easyfor a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been

fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to direct the

fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it. Much so with

respect to other emergencies involving consideration both practical

and moral, and when it is imperative promptly to act. The greater the

fog the more it imperils the steamer and speed is put on though at

hazard of running somebody down. Little ween the snug card players

of the responsibilities of the sleepless man on the bridge’’.12

As Winch is well aware, it is difficult to imagine the ‘‘responsibilities of the

sleepless man on the bridge’’, and therefore difficult to make judgments

about his decisions. But note that the principal difficulty in imagining Vere’s

position that Melville suggests above is that Vere, unlike you or I, has to act

on his decision. Melville is not just pointing to the difficulty in such cases of

imagining oneself in another’s place, but also to what it is you have to

imagine here. Specifically, if I am to make a judgment about Vere’s decisionto convict Billy Budd, I have to imagine myself having to act. But, and here

we approach Winch’s point, I can imagine acting only as the person I am. So,

it is not that I now see the situation from Vere’s point of view, but that I see

myself in that hard place and I must decide to do one of two things: convict

or acquit. The problem is that with such moral dilemmas nothing in the

situation can show me what I am to do. Still, I have to do something and

there is now only one other place to turn to break this impasse: to myself.

Here finally I may find an answer, but not one that could be universalized.For all I will discover is whether I could convict Billy Budd.

To be clear about Winch’s argument, he is not pointing to the

metaphysical impossibility of my being someone else. That is hardly to

the point, for be that as it may I can still imagine what is involved in having

to stand by, and be accountable for, an action such as Vere’s, and so I can

imagine in some sense being, and acting as, Vere. Winch’s point is that

beyond imagining this I need to ask: could I stand by this action; could I

stand by this action? For Winch that is a question about the kind of moralcharacter that I possess; a question that can only be answered in terms of

what is, and is not, morally possible for me. To put the point another way,

Winch’s claim is that in the face of certain moral dilemmas the question of

moral accountability is really a question of moral accountability to oneself.

Winch’s argument in Universalizability, as I say, rests on his account of

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moral modality, on whether or not we are prepared to accept, for example,

that Winch’s claim that he could not convict a man innocent before God in

these circumstances expresses a genuine moral incapacity. But the question

now is not so much what we make of Melville’s story but what we make of

Winch, and specifically, of his judgment concerning Billy Budd.

VI. Conclusion

Finally, those who wish to defend the universalizability thesis may still argue

that Winch simply lacks the nerve to convict Billy. My point is just to make

it clear that this represents the real challenge for them. It is no challenge at

all to argue that the story of Billy Budd is consistent with the

universalizability thesis; this story can plausibly be interpreted in a number

of ways and, as I noted above, even those who wish to defend the

universalizability thesis disagree about exactly what lesson we should draw

from it. But that is beside the point. Whether or not we think Vere made the

right decision here is irrelevant; what is important in this case is what we

make of Winch’s response to the story and of the kind of judgment he makes

here. To be sure, if one holds that the universalizability thesis must be

correct, then one may think that the only possible conclusion for us to draw

here is that Winch lacks the nerve to convict Billy. But that just begs the

question against Winch. What the defender of the universalizability thesis

needs to provide is some other non-question-begging reason for thinking

that where an agent claims not that they ‘‘ought not to’’ but that they ‘‘could

not’’ act in some way that this could only be to indicate a kind of

psychological incapacity on their part. That is, they must give those of us

not wedded to the universalizability thesis (and the moral theories that

suppose it) reasons for thinking that contrary to the arguments presented in

this paper there are no genuine moral incapacities of the kind that Winch

proposes. On that score, and forty years after Universalizability was first

published, Winch’s argument for moral incapacity remains substantially

unanswered.

Notes

1. Peter Winch, (1972) The Universalizability of Moral Judgments. Hereafter, Universal-

izability. References to Winch are to this paper unless otherwise indicated.

2. See here respectively: David Wiggins, (1987) ‘‘Truth, and Truth as Predicated of Moral

Judgments’’; Alan Thomas, (1997) ‘‘Values Reasons and Perspectives’’; Lillian Alweiss,

(2003) ‘‘On Moral Dilemmas: Winch, Kant and Billy Budd’’. On the implications of

Winch’s position in Universalizability for moral cognitivism see my ‘‘Moral Cognitivism

and Character’’ (2005).

3. Of course, a Kantian may see the conflict here as between the requirements of the moral

law according to which Billy ought to be convicted and the promptings of inclination—

especially here sympathy—that speak in favor of acquitting him. Further, for the

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Kantian it follows from the very contingency of our inclinations that the actions they

motivate have no moral worth. Winch’s argument, then as we shall see, presents a basic

challenge to Kantian ethics.

4. Roger Montague makes a similar objection in his ‘‘Winch on Agent’s Judgements’’

(1974).

5. Peter Winch (1987) ‘‘Who is my Neighbour?’’, p. 158. Note that a psychological

incapacity need not be something like a phobia. What is crucial to distinguishing genuine

moral incapacities from mere psychological incapacities is the nature of the values that

explain the existence of the relevant incapacity: specifically, that unlike mere

psychological incapacities moral incapacities are explained in terms of certain

fundamental moral ideas. Suppose, for example, I have chosen to live a healthy

lifestyle. It may be that if I am offered a job as a travel and food writer reporting on

luxury resorts around the world that I may turn the job down claiming that I cannot

abandon my healthy lifestyle. The choice of a healthy lifestyle may be expressive of my

character in some sense, but it is hardly expressive of my moral identity or character—

and so there is no genuine moral incapacity here. Consider that in this case it really does

make sense at least for a person to try and encourage me to take the job. Perhaps the

suggestion will be that I think too much of health. But now compare with this the

suggestion that, say, Winch thinks too much of innocence; that suggestion would be as

Winch might say a kind of tasteless joke. Of course while my claim that I cannot

abandon my healthy lifestyle does not express a moral incapacity, it may not express a

psychological incapacity either. Like so many New Year’s resolutions, this commitment

may not go nearly so deep, in which case perhaps the most natural thing to say here may

be simply that I am self-deceived, that there is no incapacity here at all.

6. I have done so elsewhere. See my ‘‘Moral Incapacity’’ (1995) and ‘‘Moral Incapacity and

Huckleberry Finn’’ (2001).

7. Bernard Williams, (1993) ‘‘Moral Incapacity’’. Note though that my own view of moral

incapacity (Taylor (1995); (2001)) differs markedly from that of Williams.

8. Ibid, p. 60.

9. See Wiggins, who argues that Winch has failed to attend to Melville’s ‘‘thought that war

makes men like Captain Vere selectively but dangerously mad’’ (Wiggins (1987), p. 172).

10. See Alweiss (2003); and Kolenda (1975) ‘‘Moral Conflicts and Universalizability’’.

11. See Atwell (1967) ‘‘A Note on Decisions, Judgments, and Universalizability’’.

12. Melville [1924] (1967), p. 391. My emphasis.

References

Alweiss, L. (2003) ‘‘On moral dilemmas: Winch, Kant and Billy Budd’’, Philosophy, 78, pp.

205–18.

Atwell, J. (1967) ‘‘A note on decisions, judgments, and universalizability’’, Ethics, 77, pp. 130–4.

Kolenda, K. (1975) ‘‘Moral conflicts and universalizability’’, Philosophy, 50, pp. 460–8.

Melville, H. [1924] (1967) Billy Budd, in: Billy Budd and Other Stories (London: Penguin

Books).

Montague, R. (1974) ‘‘Winch on agent’s judgements’’, Analysis, 34, pp. 161–6.

Taylor, Craig (1995) ‘‘Moral incapacity’’, Philosophy, 70, pp. 273–85.

Taylor, Craig (2001) ‘‘Moral incapacity and Huckleberry Finn’’, Ratio, 14, pp. 56–67.

Taylor, Craig (2005) ‘‘Moral cognitivism and character’’, Philosophical Investigations, 28, pp.

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Thomas, A. (1997) ‘‘Values, reasons and perspectives’’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,

97, pp. 61–80.

Wiggins, D. (1987) ‘‘Truth, and Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments’’, in his Needs, Values,

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Winch, P. (1972) ‘‘The Universalizability of Moral Judgments’’, in his Ethics and Action, pp.

151–70 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

Winch, P. (1987) ‘‘Who is my Neighbour?’’, in his Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell).

Winch on Moral Dilemmas and Moral Modality 157

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