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Morality and Codes of Honour

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Steve Gerrard
Affiliation:
Williams College, Williamstown

Extract

There is one grand question that lies beneath most of what follows. That question is: what is morality I mean morality as it is contrasted with the non-moral, not as it is opposed to the immoral. The question does not ask, say, whether lying to a friend in a certain situation is moral or immoral, but asks what makes something, for instance lying to a friend, a moral problem. Parts of the same question ask what counts as a moral consideration, as opposed to, say, one of efficiency or aesthetics, or ask what makes a motivation moral as opposed to prudential. The question asks for the boundaries of the domain of morality.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1994

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References

1 Reprinted in Williams, Jack K., Duelling in the Old South: Vignettes of Social History, (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980), pp. 87104.Google Scholar

2 Wilson, p. 99. I can't help but wonder what J. L. Austin would have done with that principle.Google Scholar

3 Wilson, p. 99.Google Scholar

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8 See Greenberg, Kenneth S., Masters and Statesman: The Political Culture of American Slavery, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), Chapter 2: ‘The Duel as Social Drama’. See also Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, Oxford University Press, 1982, although he is less careful than Greenberg to show the ties between Southern honour and slavery.Google Scholar

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11 Frankena, W. K., ‘The Concept of Morality’, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 63(1966) p. 688. Alan Gewirth writes of this list in ‘Must One Play the Moral Language Game?’ reprinted in his Human Rights, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 82, that ‘W. K. Frankena has provided a convenient summary of recent attempts at such elucidation [of the general concept of a morality]’.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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13 Jacobs, Harriet A. shows the practical side of the theoretical problem in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Yellin, Jean Fagan (ed.), (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). Jacobs reports that her grandmother had laid up three hundred dollars, which her mistress one day begged as a loan, promising to pay her soon. The reader probably knows that no promise or writing given to a slave is legally binding; for, according to Southern laws, a slave, being property, can hold no property. When my grandmother lent her hard earnings to her mistress, she trusted solely to her honor. The honor of a slaveholder to a slave! (p. 6) The money was never repaid.Google Scholar

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15 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, originally published 1883, Ch. 46.Google Scholar

16 I am grateful to Amelie Rorty for help here.

17 Amelie, Rorty, Mind in Action, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), pp. 274–75.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., p. 284.

19 Along these lines see ‘Moral Luck’, Chapter 2 in Bernard, Williams, Moral Luck, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), especially pages 21–22.Google Scholar For a relevant comparison between Aristotle and Kant which was influenced by Williams, see Jonathan, Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), Chapter 5, especially pages 152–55.Google Scholar

20 Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, originally published 1894, Chapter 12.Google Scholar

21 Bertram, Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, (Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 289; emphasis added.Google Scholar

22 Those who hold a realist code of honour would take exception to this.

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24 p. 398.

25 In a recent book, Henry Allison notes how similar this attack on Kant is to the older Hegelian one, and summarizes Williams's point in Hegelian language: ‘[i]n short, [Williams] maintains that the requirements of an impersonal morality alienate us from others as well as from ourselves’, Kant's Theory of Freedom, p. 193. Allison goes on to defend Kant against both Williams and Hegel. (Cambridge University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

26 Reprinted in Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).Google Scholar

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28 Foot, p. 159.

29 Foot, p. 172.

30 Foot, p. 160.

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37 Foot, p. 7.

38 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Chapter I, p. 398.Google Scholar

39 I am grateful for helpful advice from Lydia Goehr, Ken Greenberg, Amelie Rorty, Sally Sedgwick, and especially Jenny Gerrard.