The title is an outright lie: this book is in no way an introduction to anything. It's a fix-up of random essays on technical topics. The preface is a well-written promise that the book fails to deliver: writing on moral philosophy that is isn't boring. ('Boring' is the author's term, not mine.) The quality of the writing at the beginning just serves to make the rest even more disappointing.

Primeira metade é ótima, segunda me perdi em vários momentos. Admito que preciso ler novamente quando a minha bagagem de leituras filosóficas aumentar.

read chapter on Utilitarianism blz 82-98 for the Chemical Engineering course Ethics & Risk

Sketch of morality with special emphasis on Utilitarinism with which the author does not hold.
Relativism and subjectivism discussed. God pronounces preexisting morality in which no need for
God. God pronouncements are moral by what standard.

probably the best introduction to moral philosophy one could read, if a bit thin on the ground.

This was drier than I thought it was going to be.

In the intro, Williams remarks that the book is a tortuous tour of the moral landscape -- his own peculiar making. This is, I think, supposed to be endearing: an idiosyncratic genius condensing a complicated subject.

But it's just an excuse. The book is a mess. It reads as if Williams sat down and had it all out in one go.

The chapter on good isn't good and his conception and subsequent take down of utilitarianism in the last chapter struck me as not so compelling. Really, when was the last time you met a Bentham-style, hedonistic utilitarian? (Hint: never.) And the whole bit about utilitarianism being too convenient... !

The prose is pretty good, though.

De fapt e o introducere în etică și metaetică. Ingenios!

it would feel weird to give this one a star rating since it's nothing like what I usually read, but it was interesting and I enjoyed it!

What is morality?

The main puzzle I was interested in figuring out was whether there is anything like morality at all. Why are moral positions something more than personal opinions or “attitudes”, as Williams calls them? I try to summarize in my own words. What makes certain opinions moral is that they are normative, intersubjective. They are not simply attitudes that we are ready to admit to be merely personal, like preferences in matters of food. Rather, they demand universality, making relativist statements logically inconsistent as they reside in a “mid-air position” that they purportedly banish (e.g., “who am I to say that this custom is immoral? Each culture has its own set of values.”). Curiously, it is in the attempt to banish such mid-air position that the relativist reveals its existence. But is this contrast – banishing a mid-air position while comfortably sitting in it – really a contradiction? I was reminded of one of Husserl’s arguments against logical psychologism (in the Logical Investigations): that truth cannot be relative because if someone else believed truth to not be relative, one would be forced to shut the other down, proving her point. With truth, the argument is inescapable, because one cannot renounce logic and non-contradition as those are necessary for making an argument in the first place. Instead, a subjectivist could deny the mid-air position not because its “wrong” – ascribing a moral quality to it or from it deriving unwarranted conclusions, and thus contradicting herself – but because she believes it does not exist. Making a metaphysical claim about morality does not require of one to “be” in morality or to “use” morality. Granted this possibility, what a subjectivist must do, then, is to refrain from normative claims, or from drawing any moral conclusions about the lack of morality. In short, she must become an amoralist – if not in practice, at least in theory. Therefore, there is no logical argument that can argue someone out of this position: the existence of morality must simply be acknowledged. Acknowledging it does not mean believing in a "shared" mid-air position, a place like our would but made out of moral facts so solid that, like science, one could ultimately falsify rival moral theories. What’s the nature of this mid-air position, then? Williams writes: “If subjectivism, however, defused, is true, things are with morality not quite as they seemed; but the fraud, we might say, justifies at most resentment rather than panic. We shall not however lose sight of the idea of constraints on moral thought, the limitations on the creation of values.” I take the passage to mean that one might resent the loss of a moral landscape only if “landscape” was taken literally, that is, a place of moral facts, where morality can proceed like science. However, even if this place turns out to be illusory, “panic” should not ensue as this doesn’t imply that moral statements are meaningless. Why? While moral thought does not mirror the world and so its truths are not determined by the world as scientific facts are, it nonetheless _feels_ as if they mirror something, and this _feels as if_ is sufficient for morality to work, because morality is not about objective truth, but about (some specific kind of) feelings. So, these feelings can still operate with rules (they can be consistent or inconsistent) and this is not only by virtue of logic, but of the content of moral thought (that is, the fact that it does not simply express a personal preference, an attitude, but has ambitions of universality). In this sense one might say: moral reasoning is a qualitatively distinct type of personal preference which, by virtue of its normative character, makes morality subject to logic, which grants it the leverage of reasoning. So, the normative ambition of one’s beliefs must be acknowledged first (and cannot be “deduced”), and then it’s perfectly fine not to have a literal moral landscape: if my moral claim is unfalsifiable and unprovable, it does in no way make it wrong, unlikely to be true or not permissible.

I thought it was a bit tough to read as an introduction to the subject, but it really does teach a lot.

"Writing about moral philosophy should be a hazardous business..."

but pwning utilitarians shouldn't!

seriously, though, back up off Kant.

After half a century, this little book is still the best dialectical introduction to moral philosophy available in English. Williams is so perceptive and so articulate that even seasoned philosophers will benefit from revisiting this gem of a text.