Abstract
Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science1 and his paper ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’2 received widespread critical attention, but this has not been the case with his papers in moral philosophy reprinted in Ethics and Action. Why not? In all three contexts, Winch attacks the presumption of theory; theory which claims that it possesses the criteria of what is rational or worthwhile in human life. That presumption is so deeply engrained in contemporary moral philosophy that its practitioners have virtually ignored Winch’s challenge to it. It is not surprising, therefore, on the rare occasions the challenge is recognised, to find it, as we shall see in the second part of the paper, misunderstood.
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Notes
Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).
Reprinted in Winch, Ethics and Action (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).
The necessity of such connections if the word ‘moral’ is to mean anything is excellently brought out by Philippa Foot in ‘When is a principle a moral principle?’, Proc. Arist. Soc., Supp, Vol. 1954.
Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 148.
For related criticisms of MacIntyre’s later work, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981), see Chapter 5 above.
Onora O’Neill, ‘The Power of Example’, Philosophy, Vol. 61, Jan. 1986.
Her footnote referring to the tradition she detects reads as follows: ‘A basic source for this writing is Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics”, which was published together with reports of conversations Wittgenstein later had with F. Waismann and Rush Rhees, Philosophical Review, Vol. LXXIV, 1965, pp. 3–12; 12–36.
In addition to the papers in Winch, op. cit., Wittgensteinian approaches to ethics include: Rush Rhees, Without Answers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969);
D. Z. Phillips and H. O. Mounce, Moral Practices (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970);
R. W. Beardsmore, Moral Reasoning (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969);
Rodger Beehler, Moral Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978);
some papers in R. F. Holland, Against Empiricism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980);
and some in D. Z. Phillips, Through a Darkening Glass (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982).
Alice Munro, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
See J. P. Sartre, ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. W. Kaufmann (Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing, 1956).
See G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy, 1958, reprinted in Ethics, Religion and Politics, Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. III (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).
R. W. Beardsmore, ‘Consequences and Moral Worth’, Analysis, June 1969, p. 183, n.
Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1961), A 132–133/B 171–172. Quoted by O’Neill on p. 8.
Kant, Logic, trans. Robert Hartmann and Wolfgang Schwartz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), p. 48.
Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 293.
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Phillips, D.Z. (1992). The Presumption of Theory. In: Interventions in Ethics. Swansea Studies in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11539-6_6
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