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Allegiance and Change in Morality: A Study in Contrasts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

D. Z. Phillips
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Extract

It has been said that the tendency to make use of examples drawn from literature in discussing problems in moral philosophy is not only dangerous, but needless. Dangers there certainly are, but these have little to do with the reasons offered for the needlessness of such examples. Examples drawn from literature, it is said, introduce an unnecessary complexity into one's philosophising. Indeed, as Peter Winch has pointed out, according to ‘a fairly well-established … tradition in recent Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy … it is not merely permissible, but desirable, to take trivial examples. The rationale of this view is that such examples do not generate the emotion which is liable to surround more serious cases and thus enable us to look more coolly at the logical issues involved’, and it carries the implication that ‘moral concerns can be examined quite apart from any consideration of what it is about these concerns which makes them important to us’.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 6: Philosophy and The Arts , March 1972 , pp. 47 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1972

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References

page 47 note 1 Winch, Peter, ‘The Universalizability of Moral Judgements’, The Monist, vol. 49, 1965, pp. 199–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 47 note 2 p. 200.

page 48 note 1 ‘Some Limits to Moral Endeavour’, an Inaugural Lecture published by the University College of Swansea, 1971.

page 48 note 2 I am grateful to Mr D. L. Sims for emphasising this point in a discussion of this paper at the University College of Swansea English Society.

page 51 note 1 Op. cit., p. 200.

page 52 note 1 ‘On The Age of Innocence’ in Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Howe, Irving (Prentice-Hall, 1962) p. 166.Google Scholar

page 53 note 1 Ibid., pp. 168–9.

page 53 note 2 Wilson, Edmund, ‘Justice to Edith Wharton’Google Scholar, ibid., p. 26.

page 54 note 1 Ibid., p. 29.

page 54 note 2 Trilling, Lionel, ‘The Morality of Inertia’Google Scholar, ibid., p. 145.

page 55 note 1 Auchincloss, Louis, ‘Edith Wharton and Her New Yorks’Google Scholar, ibid., p. 38.

page 56 note 1 Ibid., p. 38.

page 57 note 1 Coxe, Louis O., ‘What Edith Wharton Saw in Innocence,’Google Scholar ibid., p. 159.

page 60 note 1 Coxe, Louis O., ‘What Edith Wharton Saw in Innocence’Google Scholar, ibid., pp. 157–8.

page 61 note 1 Howe, Irving, ‘A Reading of The House of Mirth’Google Scholar, ibid., p. 122.

page 62 note 1 Op. cit., p. 160.

page 63 note 1 These points were made by Mr H. O. Mounce in the discussion referred to on p. 48 footnote 2.

page 63 note 2 I have examined one example of such narrowness in ‘Moral Presuppositions and Literary Judgement’, The Human World, No. 6, 1972.Google Scholar

page 63 note 3 Mundle, C. W. K., A Critique of Linguistic Philosophy (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970) p. 14.Google Scholar

page 64 note 1 Kamenka, E., Marxism and Ethics (Macmillan 1969) p. 35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar