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In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams criticizes the ‘morality system’ and the associated philosophical enterprise of constructing ethical theories. Williams argues that we would be better off replacing the ‘thin’ concepts favoured by the morality system and its theorists, concepts such as ‘right’ and ‘good’, with ‘thick’ concepts of the sort that were prevalent in the ethical thought of ancient Greece, such as ‘courage’ and ‘treachery’. In this critical essay, Scheffler presents several arguments against Williams's view; among them is the argument that the distinction between thick and thin concepts is not a clear one, and that the elimination of ethical theory would leave Williams without adequate conceptual resources to engage in the kind of social criticism that he himself regards as necessary.

This chapter presents an alternative to the standard view that at least some of the evaluations that the so-called “thick” terms and concepts in ethics may be used to convey belong to their sense or semantic meaning. (Thick terms are terms like “cruel,” “rude,” “courageous,” and “tactful,” in contrast with such “thin” terms as “right,” “wrong,” “good,” and “bad.”) After introducing the topic and making some methodological remarks, the chapter presents a wide variety of linguistic data that are well explained by the alternative view that at least a very wide range of thick terms and concepts are such that even the evaluations that are most closely connected to them are only a certain kind of defeasible implications of their utterances which can be given a conversational explanation. The chapter then describes some reasons to think that this explanation of the data presented is superior to the standard view, although a fuller assessment must await further work. The chapter closes by explaining the largely deflationary consequences of this account for claims that thick terms and concepts have deep and distinctive significance to evaluative thought and judgment.

In his influential discussion of thick concepts Williams argues that the facts that make judgements, which apply thick concepts correctly, true, provide reasons for action — albeit only for the members of a community who have a disposition to be guided by the concepts in question. His internalism about practical reasons may help to explain this claim: the disposition to be guided by a thick concept provides the link to existing motives that all reasons must have. Understood thus, Williams makes room for explaining and vindicating Oscar Wilde's ‘…not one of my words’-dictum about certain thick concepts. However, the chapter argues that the combination of the account of thick concepts that Williams expounds with reasons internalism leads into a dilemma: either the facts that thick concepts, correctly applied, refer to, do not provide reasons (not even for those who have a disposition to be guided by them) — except perhaps in the way in which any other, non-evaluative fact may provide a reason; or they provide reasons for everyone, independently of the disposition to be guided by the concepts. Getting out of the dilemma requires giving up on reasons internalism or, alternatively, modifying the account of thick concepts that Williams sets out.

How should we characterize the quarry of practical thought? Some hold that practical thinking must ultimately find some non‐evaluative fact to be a reason for action. Some have affirmed a ‘buck‐passing’ view of the good, according to which talk of goodness or value can be reduced to talk of the reason‐giving force of non‐evaluative facts. In this book, it has been argued that practical thinking must sometimes apprehend the intrinsic goodness or value of an activity, where this cannot be reduced to the reason‐giving force of any non‐evaluative fact. The task of this chapter is to show that this latter, recognizably Ancient understanding of value‐talk remains implicit in a great deal of our talk about value, and that we cannot consistently renounce it without incurring a steep cost in the metric of articulacy about value. Nor can we sequester off a subset of the things we care about, under the heading of the moral, and reduce our talk of values to talk of reasons in this domain. Our actual sense of the moral value of human beings cannot plausibly be characterized in terms of the reason‐giving force of non‐evaluative facts about them.

The chapter introduces the intuitive contrast between thick and thin terms and concepts. It explains why thick concepts matter by introducing a wide range of general issues in moral philosophy for which thick terms and concepts have been thought to have deep and distinctive significance: the nonevaluative shapelessness of the evaluative, the putative impossibility of “disentangling” evaluations and nonevaluative descriptions which thick concepts involve and their implications for the fact–value distinction, objectivity in ethics, the nature of evaluative thought and more. The important lesson is drawn that all these claims presuppose that thick terms and concepts are inherently evaluative in meaning. It is indicated that the book will argue that this common presupposition is false and defend an alternative pragmatic account of the relationship between thick terms and concepts and evaluation. This will undermine the claims about the deep and distinctive significance of the thick.

The discussion up to here has focused on central, or thin, normative concepts. The present chapter focuses on thick concepts and discusses how the conceptual framework introduced can be used to characterize what it is for a concept to be thick, as well as how taking thick concepts into account might problematize matters. In the discussion, the notion of an objectionable thick concept plays a central role. In connection with the discussion of thick concepts, certain related matters are discussed: the distinction between robust and formal normativity, and the question of how to understand epistemic normativity. A suggestion regarding what it is for a property to be thick is presented.

Some features of legal judgments suggest that a descriptivist characterization of them would be apt, whereas some other features invite a normativist characterization. A characterization of legal judgments as those employing thick concepts — i.e., concepts that have both descriptive and normative contents — can accommodate both sets of explananda. More particularly, this chapter proposes that legally valid be construed as a thick concept. This characterization enables us to regiment clearly some frequently discussed but still obscure issues in legal philosophy — including the distinction between internal and external legal statements, the nature of the so-called detached legal statements, and the Kelsenian presupposition of the basic norm — that have direct bearings on the debate about the nature of law. This proposal also infuses legal philosophy with some hitherto neglected questions by placing some legal philosophical concerns within the general philosophical context of the discussion about thick concepts.

The paper opens by criticizing the way the ‘problem of thick concepts’ has sometimes been formulated in the recent literature, and arguing for the need to pose it in a way that is genuinely neutral between rival accounts. It then argues for a nonreductive account, that is, an account which refuses to share out what's expressed by utterances of thick ethical expressions between distinct evaluative and non-evaluative components, and canvasses various positive models for the relations between the underlying properties. Criticisms are developed of the reductionist treatments of the thick due, inter alia, to Christine Tappolet, Daniel Elstein and Thomas Hurka, and Pekka Väyrynen.

This paper has two overall aims. First, to compare Bernard Williams's account of thick concepts with Gilbert Ryle's account of thick descriptions. Secondly, to indicate one important way of arguing for a nonseparationist understanding of thick concepts. This paper also has more specific aims. (i) It is argued that it can be misleading to capture Williams's distinction between thin and thick concepts with the slogan “thick concepts are both action-guiding and world-guided, whilst thin concepts are action-guiding alone”. (ii) It is argued that Williams's account does not cover all thick concepts anyway. (iii) When we illuminate Williams's thoughts through comparison with Ryle's, we see that the evaluative domain may spread far and wide. It may well not be as intimately tied to various sorts of approval and disapproval as some theorists think.

This chapter gives a nuanced account of the phenomena which have led moral theorists to explore so-called ‘thick concepts’. It argues that the phenomena are far more deeply embedded in linguistic practice that usually thought, and do nothing to support the idea of specific kinds of concept.

Thick terms and concepts in ethics (for example, ‘selfish’, ‘cruel’ and ‘courageous’) somehow combine evaluation and non-evaluative description. The non-evaluative aspects of thick terms and concepts underdetermine their extensions. Many writers argue that such underdetermination is best explained by supposing that thick terms and concepts are semantically evaluative in some way such that evaluation plays a role in determining their extensions. This paper argues that the extensions of thick terms and concepts are underdetermined by their meanings in toto, irrespective of whether evaluation partly determines their extensions. The underdetermination point can therefore be explained without supposing that thick terms and concepts are semantically evaluative. The argument of this paper applies general points about semantic gradability and context-sensitivity to the semantics of thick terms

This opening chapter introduces readers to many of the main controversies concerning thick and thin concepts, such as the ‘disentangling argument’, the division between thick and thin concepts, and the possibility of understanding others’ evaluative perspectives. In doing so the importance of thick concepts to metaethics and other areas of philosophy is shown. This chapter ends with brief summaries of the papers in the volume.

The chapter explains the book’s basic methodology: to rely as much as possible only on standard general methods from linguistics and philosophy of language. A wide range of linguistic data are presented regarding thick terms and concepts that are in principle open to being regarded as “objectionable”; this class covers more or less all paradigmatic thick terms and concepts. The data are used to argue against those versions of Inherently Evaluative according to which the relationship between thick terms and concepts and evaluation is semantic (the Semantic View). The data can be explained by treating the global evaluations that thick terms and concepts are typically used to convey as utterance implications which “project” and are defeasible or deniable in ways that semantic entailments are not.

This paper builds on an earlier paper, ‘In Defence of Thick Concepts’, in which it was denied that instantiations of a thick concept invoke a single attitudinal response, and always the same one. The no-priority view is that neither property nor attitude is conceptually prior; they interpenetrate each other, because the property is that of being such as to merit the response, and the attitude is to the object as meriting that response. This present paper suggests that the no-priority view will not generalise so as to cover all cases. This present paper also express doubts about the earlier appeal to Aristotelian domains. Finally, Williams's distinction between world-guided and action-guiding in examined, and it is suggested that instances of thick concepts have an intrinsic practical relevance which needs no further explanation.

The chapter lays important background by making explicit the notions of evaluation and meaning with which the book’s arguments will operate. Evaluation is taken as information to the effect that something is good (or bad) in a certain way (thus, a matter of positive or negative valence). The meaning of a term involves at least constraints on its literal uses in normal contexts. The chapter notes that any appropriately neutral characterization of what count as thick terms and concepts will inevitably cover more than paradigmatic thick terms and concepts (e.g. pejoratives and “good of a kind” predicates), raising the possibility that thick concepts may not form a theoretically uniform class. An important distinction is drawn between global and embedded evaluations. The official target of the book is identified as the view, called “Inherently Evaluative,” that the meanings of thick terms and concepts don’t contain global evaluation.

What is it for a concept to be normative? Some possible answers are explored and rejected, among them that a concept is normative if it ascribes a normative property. The positive answer defended is that a concept is normative if it is in the right way associated with a normative use. Among issues discussed along the way are the nature of analyticity, and there being a notion of analyticity—what I call semantic analyticity—such that a statement can be analytic in this sense while failing to be true. Considerations regarding thick concepts and slurs are brought to bear on the issues that come up.

In metaethics, there is a range of different views of the nature of thick concepts. At one extreme are views holding that thick concepts are irreducibly thick, and that this has important consequences. At the other, there are views that hold that thick concepts are not inherently evaluative as a matter of content, and that they are of little or no theoretical consequence. In the epistemic case there is an additional element of controversy: whether the thick–thin distinction holds for epistemic concepts at all. In this chapter it is argued that it does. First, it is characterized what thick concepts are, before an outlining of why the question of whether there are any thick epistemic concepts is important. It is then argued that the epistemic domain is the right place to look for thick concepts, and that within that domain we find examples of concepts that are sufficiently like paradigm cases of thick ethical concepts to count as thick.

This paper addresses the following two questions: (1) What it is for a linguistic expression or a concept to be evaluative (or normative)? (2) What it is for a property or a fact to be evaluative (or normative)? The most natural answers to these two questions are discussed, and serious problems with these answers are stressed. Important in the discussion is consideration of different kinds of evaluative concepts – thin concepts, thick concepts and epithets. No particular positive view is defended. Instead two rather different positive views are highlighted: a view suggested by Ralph Wedgwood's recent work, and presentationalism, according to which evaluativeness is properly seen as a feature of our representations of reality and not reality itself.