So far I have been focusing on particular moralistic judgements, on the nature of such judgements (Chapters 1 and 2) and about what such judgements suggest about the character of those who make them (Chapter 3). So my concern so far has been with certain ways in which particular moral judgements may be flawed, or suggest character flaws, in various ways. However, there is in fact a more radical position we might take according to which the focus of criticism is not particular moral judgements but rather the whole practice of moral judgement as we might understand it. According to this view, and again in some pejorative sense, what is moralistic is a certain conception (or conceptions) of morality. The focus of criticism here is not just one particular moral theory, but our idea of morality construed much more broadly. So, Bernard Williams has argued in a number of places against what he calls “the morality system”, which, with its focus on a particular notion of moral obligation, he takes as excluding other ethical considerations. For Williams there is a contrast between morality, by which he means the morality system, and ethics, which he understands much more broadly and which is inclusive of ideas that we owe to a much older ethical viewpoint that comes to us from the ancient Greeks. Williams's hope is that by pointing out what he takes to be the many mistakes in morality he might motivate a conception of the ethical that is consistent with living a fully human life, something the morality system as he sees it makes problematic.
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