The Interchanges to Which Our Moral Utterances Belong

Abstract

Lars Hertzberg suggests that it is obvious that “getting clear about the sense of our moral utterances is a matter of getting clear about the nature of the interchanges to which they belong”. The paper explores the significance of this through illustrations, drawn from Hertzberg’s work, of the importance of paying proper attention to two ranges of variation in such interchanges: first, to the distinctions between first, second and third person contexts of discussion and, second, to those between tenses, between, for example, discussions of what she should do and of what she should have done. Hertzberg brings out the importance of these distinctions through critical discussion of themes in Williams, Winch and Anscombe. In an extended discussion of an example of his own, Hertzberg speaks of the temptation “to think that we could, in some sense, take part in the very same discussion that Horthy may have carried out with his advisers, or with his family, or with himself, in wrestling with the issue” of what he should have done. A parallel is drawn with philosophical treatments of fatalism, where differences in the practical relations in which individuals stand to particular actions tend to be overlooked.