Involvement and Resistance: A Response to the Critical Study by Willem Lemmens

© 2018 by Tijdschrift voor Filosofie. All rights reserved. This text is a reply to the critical study by Willem Lemmens (see previous article). In my reply I first correct a misunderstanding: my answer to the modernist onslaught on commonsense ethics does not suppose or require an appeal to some form of metaphysical transcendence. My position is a straightforward Humean naturalist position. Secondly, Lemmens thinks it is hard to see how the tension highlighted in my book between modern rationality and commonsense ethics would not result in the complete erosion of commonsense ethics or at least in the production of a kind of commonly endorsed revisionist ethics. However, with Peter Strawson, I hold that although there is a tension between involvement and detachment, producing all sorts of trouble, this does not lead, and cannot lead, to the overall disappearance of common ethical intuitions and taboos (and the involvement they presuppose and require). Thirdly, according to Lemmens there seems to be a contradiction between stressing, as I do, the contingent character of commonsense ethics and the appeal to resist the influence of revisionist ethics. In my book I try to show that reflective awareness of contingency does not necessarily lead to relativism and is on the contrary quite compatible with real commitment to our ordinary ethical views and with resistance to utopianism in ethics.

Publication year:2018

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Authors from:Higher Education