Confidence: On the Possibility of Ethical Knowledge

The claim that confidence can be an alternative to ethical knowledge is widely considered to be a rare miss among many hits in Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. If we understand confidence as the psychological manifestation of conviction, Williams’s critique of ethical cognitivism leaves almost no grounds for being reasonably confident in one’s moral outlook. But it is not the only way we can understand it. The author proposes a model of practical deliberation within which confidence makes sense, suggesting that, by championing confidence rather than conviction, Williams argues implicitly for an unorthodox approach to action, one in which the agent is construed as essentially dependent, in her identity and in her capacity for continued action, on the outcomes of her own decisions. The author argues that such an agent is necessarily committed, on the one hand, to identifying strongly with the preconceptions of her own community and, on the other, to take into account the beliefs, including moral beliefs, of other people. The author suggests that the capacity to continuously enlarge one’s moral outlook in this way is what Williams means by ethical confidence. The author also examines the extent to which his position can be understood as a form of anti-intellectualist moral cognitivism.